When he was a block away, he turned to yell over his shoulder at Erin and Esme.
"You two had best learn to keep your mouth shut!"
"Just as soon as you learn how to tie your shoes by yourself," Esme yelled after him.
They turned the corner and Esme quickly opened the driver's side door of her car and climbed in. She had an appointment to keep.
"Do you ever wish you looked like her?" Erin sighed getting into the passenger seat.
"God, no," Esme said, backing out of their parking space and heading towards their house. "Remember in high school when we were in the bathroom and we'd hear her in the stall making herself vomit up the salad she had for lunch?"
Erin laughed. "And then she'd come out with her breath smelling of vomit and her eyes all red and teary and she'd yell 'what are you looking at, losers?'
Esme eyed the memories rolling across her mind. "Good times, good times. No, we were born with this body type we have, we enjoy eating, and we don't make ourselves ill five times a day. Plus she's mean, nasty, spiteful bully who does nothing but tear people down so she can feel better about herself. I'd prefer to be me than her."
She was not as blasé about freya's teasing as she tried to let on, but she did a decent job of keeping it inside. Of course, she felt a bit self-conscious about her size, and freya's incessant barbs stung, but as her mother always told her and Erin, happiness was the best revenge.
Their mother used to say stuff like "pretty is as pretty does", which was a nice sentiment, but did nothing for all those friday nights she spent dateless. She suppressed a sigh.
"Anyway," she said with a cheerful note, "let's forget those a-holes and talk about the good news. Our farmhouse is safe."
"It's nice when the good guys win for a change," Erin said with a satisfied smile.
"Isn't it though?"
"I cannot believe this job fell into your lap when we needed it most," Erin exclaimed. Esme pretended to smile, and nodded. She hated being dishonest with her sister, and she had not told her the entire truth regarding the nature of the job.
She'd even gotten a job offer from the koala college, with a massive signing bonus – which she'd applied to the back payments on their mortgage that morning. But she wasn't allowed to tell Erin or anyone else what she'd agreed to do in return for taking the job, or why it had been offered to her in the first place.
Some person, somewhere, had unearthed the family secret – that the albies could cross over into therianthia, and live to tell the tale.
The koala college wished Esme to cross over into the other realm and observe werewolf society up close. They desired her to bring back photographs, and magic talismans, to prove she'd been there. The talismans would go on a display in the university that the entire world would flock to see. Esme would take her discoveries and write a paper on this strange new world, and every prestigious academic journal on the planet would be competing for the honor of publishing it.
She'd put the world in big way by noticing the university.
Of course, what she was doing was illegal – a few days after the shard had opened, the werewolves had sent out an enigmatic decree commanding that no one was to go into their universe. The federal government had responded by sending soldiers along the hundred and fifty mile length of the shard – much of which sliced through the archie's property. There had been almost no communication between the two universes since.
Her hope, however, was that she might be able to demonstrate that the werewolves were a peaceful people, and that she'd even be able to facilitate relations between the two worlds. She knew she was risking a lot by doing what she was about to do and landing in deep trouble, but she had a legal contract sitting on her desk at home that promised the university would take full responsibility, would represent her in court if necessary, and best of all, would continue to pay her full salary even if she were jailed – which meant that she would be able to continue making payments on the farm.
"Our luck's changing," she said to Erin.
"I wish I could say the same for everybody else." Erin breathed a sigh. "I don't think elk vale is ever gonna be the same, do you?"
As they drove, they noticed huge piles of sticks and bricks and garbage along the road. Those piles had been businesses and homes.
People were still living in tent cities, in the auditorium of the high school, in their cars, in fema trailors…insurance companies were overwhelmed, and in most cases, dragging their feet to issue the payments they were committed to. The albie family had invited several dozen families to move onto their property and they were feeding them food from their fields and orchards, and milk and butter and cheese from their cows, so they would not have to apply for food stamps. There were no jobs available, no way for the albies to get their products to their suppliers anymore…prospects of elk vale recovering from the earthquake were becoming less and less likely.
"It's difficult to envision," Esme admitted.
Six army vehicles passed them on the road, and Esme gave them a half-hearted wave. People had been afraid that armies of werewolves would pour through the shard and kill them all – despite the fact that all of the shifters who'd fallen through the shard had been just like them. Peaceful, good people in contemporary clothes with brand name labels on them.
Then the werewolves had attempted to return home, as had the humans who were in the world of the werewolves. They all had believed, then, that it was the start of a new era, that humans and werewolves would travel between each other's worlds and learn about each other's cultures.
Tragically, after they'd strolled back through the shard, they'd found out that crossing over was a one-way ticket. Both the werewolves and humans who went back to their own worlds had died within the hour.
The edict from the werewolves' world had come through the next day, on a letter that was tossed through the shard. Stay on your side, and we'll stay on ours, it had said.