This Is Not a Werewolf Story by Sandra Evans

alive that’s not you . I looked behind me and saw a flash of white fur. Maybe it was just a ray of sunlight streaming down through the cedars. I stuck my chin out. I squinted. Eyes stared back at me through the low, bending branches of the cedar.
    Animal eyes. I was so scared, my stomach tumbled and my mind lost every thought.
    I stood very still. When I looked again, the eyes were gone but the branches were swaying. I started to step away. I sensed it watching me. I walked more quickly. I didn’t know which direction to go to get out of the woods. I couldn’t think.
    I heard a snuffle and a hard crack.
    I ran. I ran so hard my lungs burned. I ran so hard I didn’t see where I was going.
    Branches slapped my face, and blackberry brambles scraped my arms. Whatever it was, it was running on the other side of the trees beside me. I couldn’t tell if there was one or more than one. I couldn’t tell if it was chasing me or running with me. Was I part of a hunting pack or was I being hunted?
    I ran until I ran out of island. One minute I was in the middle of cedars as tall as a mountain, and the next I wasn’t. I was in a narrow meadow twenty feet from the cliff’s edge.
    I looked back a hundred times. Nothing followed me out from the cedars. My breath was so ragged and jagged, it scraped my throat and I tasted blood.
    At the end of the little meadow the cliff dropped straight down to a pile of driftwood and then a strip of sand and then the blue, blue water of Puget Sound.
    I started to shiver. It was almost dark. Sometimes all your choices seem bad. Was I going to spend the night on the edge of a cliff with a pack of animals watching from the trees, or run back into the forest and try to get home before whatever chased me here caught me?
    If I went left, I was pretty sure I’d end up in sight of the school, but not within reach, because of the ravine.
    I looked right. Farther down, the trees circled the meadow and came up to the cliff. I stared into the trees. There was a building nestled among them. I walked closer.
    It was a lighthouse.
    Nobody had been near it for years. Animals maybe, but no humans. The tower was as tall as the tallest trees around it, and its white paint was dappled with a pale green lichen on the landward side that helped hide it in the cedar fronds. At its base was a small cabinwith a red roof. Blackberry and huckleberry and ferns and waist-high fir trees surrounded it. I pushed back the ivy covering the door.
    I heard the click of little paws scamper across the stone floor as I stepped inside. It was cold and dark and musty. The first thing I thought was how I’d show it to my dad next time he came. The next thing I thought was how stupid can a kid be.
    I shut the door behind me and shoved an old wooden chest in front of it.
    Something out there was watching me. I could feel its eyes.
    As soon as I saw the stairs, I ran up them. The lighthouse light was gone. The windows were cracked and broken and missing, and the edge of the ceiling was packed with the mud nests of swallows. The wind smelled like cedar and salt and wet wood. It was the most magical place I had ever seen.
    I spent the night up there, with the moon coming in through the paneless windows. Before I fell asleep, I made a sling from an old leather belt I found in a chest, and gathered up as many rocks as I could.
    In the morning I walked back through the woods, my sling in one hand and a rock in the other. No eyes watched me from behind the shaggy trunks of cedar.
    There was a big surprise when I got back to the school: Bobo. I wasn’t the only one who had beenforgotten. Whichever kid was supposed to take her home for the weekend hadn’t.
    Boy, was she glad to see me. She charged out the door to pee and then charged right back to knock me down and lick me. She was very thorough. I never knew how happy it’d make me to have slimy sandpaper rubbed over my face.
    The rest of that weekend went