He looked at me doubtfully, and I reached up to touch his stubbly chin.
“You should get a razor, too,” I said.
“I don’t want you getting in trouble for stealing,” he said.
“I won’t.” I shrugged. “I don’t want to do it. I don’t feel good about doing it, but I’ll do what’s necessary to sustain us.” I glanced at Brook, feeling almost angry with her. “Ask me questions when you want to know things. Tell me whatever you believe I should know. Complain whenever you want to complain. But don’t talk to other people when you mean your words for me, and speak the truth.”
She shrugged. “All right.”
My anger ebbed away. “Let’s go buy what we need,” I said.
“Hang on a minute,” Wright said. He wrote something else in the wire-bound notebook. Then he tore out the page and handed it to Celia. “Those are my sizes. If you can, get me a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt.”
She looked at the sizes, smiled, and said, “Okay.”
We left them. Celia and I took her car—one of Iosif’s cars, she said—and drove to the clothing store. She found it easily, following Wright’s directions, and that seemed to surprise her.
“I usually get lost at least once and have to stop and ask somebody for directions,” she said. And then, “Listen, you’re my sister, okay? I refuse to believe I look old enough to be your mother.”
I laughed. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three. Stefan found me when I was nineteen, right after I’d moved out of my mother’s house.”
“Twenty-three, same as Wright.”
“Yeah. And he’s your first. You did very well for yourself. He’s a decent-looking big bear of a guy, and he’s nice. That jacket of his looks like a way-too-big coat on you.”
“When he found me, when he stopped to pick me up, I couldn’t believe how good he smelled. My memory was so destroyed that I didn’t even know what I wanted from him, but his scent pulled me into the car with him.”
Celia laughed, then looked sad and stared at nothing for a moment. “Stefan would say things like that. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be one of you, so tuned in to smells and sounds, living so long and being so strong. It doesn’t seem fair that you can’t convert us like all the stories say.”
“That would be very strange,” I said. “If a dog bit a man, no one would expect the man to become a dog. He might get an infection and die, but that’s the worst.”
“You haven’t found out about werewolves yet, then.”
“I’ve read about them on Wright’s computer. A lot of the people who write about vampires seem to be interested in werewolves, too.” I shook my head. “Ina are probably responsible for most vampire legends. I wonder what started the werewolf legends.”
“I’ve thought about that,” Celia said. “It was probably rabies. People get bitten, go crazy, froth at the mouth, run around like animals, attacking other people who then come down with the same problems … That would probably be enough to make ancient people come up with the idea of werewolves. Shori, what did you get mad at Brook about a few minutes ago?”
I looked at her and, after a moment, decided that she had asked a real question. “She touched my pride, I think. She worries that I can’t take care of the three of you. I worry that I won’t always know how to take care of you. I hate my ignorance. I need to learn from you since there is no adult Ina to ask.”
“Before I saw what you did today, I figured we’d be the ones taking care of you.”
“You will. Iosif called it ‘mutualistic symbiosis.’ I think it’s also called just ‘mutualism.’”
“Yeah, those were his words for it. Before Stefan brought me to meet him, I’d never even heard those words used that way before. I thought he had made them up until I found them in a science dictionary. So you want us to be straight with you even if you don’t always like what we say?”
“Yes.”
“Works for me. Let’s get you some clothes.”
I wound up with two pairs of boy’s blue jeans that actually fit, two long-sleeved shirts, one red and one black, a pair of gloves, a jacket with a hood, sunglasses, and some underwear. Then Celia used the last of her own money as well as the last of what Wright had given her to get him a pair of jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. Then we headed back to the supermarket to meet Wright and Brook.