Page 112 of Feral Werewolves
“No, I got it,” I said, smiling at him. “Stalin.”
He raised his eyebrows at me.
“The reason the Russian communist revolution failed isthat it stopped being communism—well, if it ever was—and became a dictatorship under Stalin. And the same thing happened with the French revolution and also in China. It happens on a small scale, too. Like, um, the Manson family.”
He furrowed his brow. “Huh. So, if you have a loose collective without a leader, then a leader just takes it over.”
“Usually under the guise of peace and love and togetherness,” I said. “And people are so tired of having to take care of all the minutia of whatever government is that they let him do it.”
“People like a leader,” he muttered. “Of course. It’s that way in all of nature, isn’t it? Most animals organize themselves into hierarchical social structures. So, we can’t just be a loose anarchical collective who all get along, can we?” He took the paper back and circled the women thing again, thoughtfully. “Canwe?”
“Why’d you decide to give the tithes the houses?” I said. “Why me as the leader?”
“I was thinking about bonobos,” he said. “I mean, sort of. Like, there are some animals who organize themselves in matriarchal societies, like whales and stuff, and some people think bonobos do, but it’s not really like that. The bonobo structure is as patriarchal as the chimpanzee structure, but the females have a certain social status that is different.”
“Bonobos are… monkeys?”
“Primates,” he said. “Us, bonobos, and chimps, we all descend from a common ancestor. You can see us in both of them. We’re less ruthless than chimps, but we’re less peace-and-love than bonobos. With bonobos, the females protect the younger females from unwanted attacks from males and they socially shame and ostracize males who behave badly. They also solve all conflicts with group sex, essentially.”
I laughed. “Um…”
“Yeah, well, that’s probably not what we’re going to do out here.” He snorted, rubbing his forehead.
“Well, that was what I wanted to do this evening,” I said, gesturing at the ceiling.
He looked up at me. “Did you really?”
I bit down hard on my lip.
He reached out and covered my hand with his own. “Clementine, I need to apologize to you for what—”
I pulled my hand back. “I’ve had it with all of you being guilty. Stop it. That’s not helping. None ofyoudid anything to me. It was Red. It was those wolves. And the hell of it is that no one did it because of me. It happened to me, and I was just a pawn in big power scheme that was all about personal issues between Red and Griff.” I thought about it. “Really, that’s kind of all you need to know about history, though, anyway. You don’t need to have paid attention in class. That’s history. Powerful people do things for personal reasons. People without power get screwed.”
He chuckled.
“I mean, I feel like that’s why it might work,” I said. “We—tithes—we can never shift into wolves and we can never have whatever power it is that the werewolves have. That power isn’t your choice, I get that it’s as much of a burden as it is an advantage, but if we made some sort of concession to it, it would do a lot to making us all feel more equal out here.”
He nodded. “Yeah, exactly.”
“Is this when you tell me your theory about menstruation and evolution?”
He laughed, scratching the back of his head. “Clementine, we need to focus on this.” He pointed at the resource list. “One thing I’m not good at is focus, at least not on the thing Iwantto focus on.”
“Executive function damage,” I said briskly. “I probably could have gotten ADHD meds as a kid, but my stepmother wouldn’t let me have them, because she said that medication was terrible and awful and convinced my dad that it would warp me. Really, she just didn’t like it whenever I got any attention at all.”
He tilted his head. “You never talk about your family.”
“Neither do you,” I said. “Anyway, I figured out ways around the meds. Maybe she did me a favor, because I found ways to accommodate myself and still be functional. Idon’t know. One thing I never did get was attention. Until…” I lifted a shoulder. “You guys.”
“How could anyone look atanythingbesides you?” he breathed, reaching out to brush his thumb over my cheekbone.
I smiled at him, awash in a feeling of warmth and wondrousness. I leaned in to kiss him.
But he shuttered, ducking down his head, pulling his hand in. “Except I didn’t look at you. They took you, and Ilet themtake you.”
“And then you saved me,” I said.
“No, I did not,” he said fiercely. “No, I didn’t go there to save you. I went there for recon. I was so into my little strategy game that I had reduced everyone to pieces on a chess board. It’s what I do. It’s why Ican’tbe a leader, because I go all ruthless like that. It’s the thing about myself I hate the most. I hid from it for years. I buried it, pretended it wasn’t there. Now, I don’t think I know how to stuff it back in, but I also don’t know how to accept it about myself.”
