You 'Were' It Well

“Miss.” I stuck up my right hand for attention from the teacher, clutching at my stomach with my left hand. “Miss!”

Miss Manimal stopped cleaning the chalkboard and turned towards me. I felt the eyes of all the other students in the classroom focus on me, as well. A nightmare scenario for a shy nerd with social anxiety.

“May I please be excused?” I asked the teacher, involuntarily adding a mild whimpering sound as pain ripped through my abdomen. “I’m becoming… at least I think I’m becoming. The pain -”

“Of course you’re excused,” Miss Manimal banged two erasers together to clear the chalk and motioned towards the door, her tail wagging quickly. “Go. Quickly.”

I rose to my feet and took a step as another stabbing pain travelled across my ribcage. My mind splintered into a few simultaneous thought processes. What was I becoming? Why was everyone looking at me? And will I make it to the Nurse’s Lounge without causing a scene?

Steadying myself on my desk, I took a few deep breaths and paid careful attention to my surroundings. The sun, streaming in the floor-to-ceiling windows, cast bright sunbeams across the row of desks closest to the windows and highlighted a cloud of chalk dust from Miss Manimal’s erasers. Draper’s leonine tail lay across my path, on the floor in front of me. It had a tuft of orange fur on the end, which occasionally twitched and spasmed. Draper saw me looking at his tail and recoiled it under his chair, his large orange predator eyes looking apologetic.

I nodded my appreciation at Draper and took another step, then gasped as more pain threatened to rip my body apart. This time in my mouth. I probed my teeth with my tongue and found two new bumps, one on either side of my two front teeth. I added this detail to the image of what I’m becoming.

All the other kids in my class had become their were-animal. I was a late bloomer. To their credit, none of them had ever mocked or bullied me. That minor detail, however, did not prevent me from being on constant alert for bullying. Kids are cruel.

Often we become a were-animal that reflects our human traits. Macy’s rat face stared at me, curious. Macy was a well-known rat. If you needed the teachers to know anything, you told her… and told her to keep it to herself. You definitely don’t break any school rules in her presence. Clyde’s legs, all six of them, waved at the air with what I suspected was actual empathy and encouragement. Clyde had already survived childhood cancer and two major car accidents, so his cockroach form seemed appropriate. All the other students in my class have been through this, so I tried my hardest not to fear any negative reactions from my classmates.

At this time of day, and at this time of lunar cycle, were-humans are in partial form. We all have one or two animal features that always stay with us, such as Macy’s protruding teeth, or Clyde’s three sets of legs running down his torso, or Miss Manimal’s canine tail. We only fully become our were-animal form on full moons, which is two weeks away. I have fourteen days to adjust to my new were-form before my first full transformation.

“Do you need a hand?” The voice came from behind me. CJ, the only person I considered a friend. I heard him rise from his seat, then felt his feline paw take hold of my hand. “Nice and slowly. One step at a time.”

Grateful, I leaned into CJ and took a few steps. I felt a palpable sense of empathy from the entire class, which didn’t gel with my perpetual fear of mockery and bullying from my peers. Maybe I was wrong? Maybe the only reason I felt like an outcast was because I was a late bloomer? I now realised I had done this to myself. I had no reason to fear my classmates. A classic case of pre-Becoming anxiety.

More pain ripped across my torso as CJ and I kept up our slow pace. We made our way through the cloud of chalk dust from Miss Manimal’s erasers and worked our way towards the door. The smell of chalk clogged my nostrils, a flash of normalcy in a sea of strange sensations. Then the fiercest pain so far brought me to my knees. CJ stood back, the look on his face showing his helplessness. He didn’t know what to do. I could no longer hold back the screams as I felt something - a limb, I suspect - unwrap from my torso and expand outwards, ripping through my school uniform.

CJ stood with Miss Manimal. All they, along with the other students, could do for me at this point was watch as several more appendages unfurled from my body. Eventually, the pain ebbed, and I knew what I’d become. Everybody knew.

“I’m OK,” I said. My words were thick, my tongue not used to working around the two poison fangs that had descended from the roof of my mouth. “I’ve got it from here.”

I reached out with my human hand and opened the door to the hallway, then - to shouts of encouragement from my classmates - I scurried off to the Nurse’s Lounge on my eight furry, arachnid legs.