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“You can keep working, though. I—I’d just appreciate the company.”

“I’ll help,” I told him. “Unless you don’t want me to.”

“I do.” The answer came fast, so I knew he meant it.

“Brunch first?” I asked him.

“I’m really not—”

“You need to eat something,” I interrupted him.

“I’ll eat a muffin.” Someone had brought a whole tray of muffins yesterday to the reception.

“Muffins it is,” I replied, and got up to grab the tray out of the garage—where my mother had stowed several marginally-less-perishable food items because the fridge was full.

I got him to eat two of them by warming them up and slathering them in butter before we went upstairs to go through Gregory’s clothes.

* * *

Elliot was lyingon his side, his head on my thigh, staring at the TV even though the football game was over and it was late enough that both of us should have been in bed.

“El.” I nudged him.

He let out a sigh. “I’m not going to sleep anyway,” he grumbled as the TV played the intro for the local news.

“Tonight’s leading story—Shawano School Board member Janice Butcher has been ousted from the board following her exposure as a fox shifter. Parents are concerned that Butcher was pushing an anti-human agenda as a part of her proposed curricular reforms in recent weeks and are calling for the whole proposal to be scrapped.”

Elliot sat up sharply. “Shit.”

I agreed. “Do you know her?”

“Not—not really? If it’s who I think it is, her mom used to work with mine sometimes at the casino. We went to school with her.”

I frowned. “She’s Mamaceqtaw? I don’t remember a Janice Butcher from school.”

“Her mom was half. Marcy Talltree, married Jason Schwartz. So she’d have been Janice Schwartz when we were kids. I was in Advanced Algebra with her, I think.”

I did vaguely remember Janice Schwartz. Not well, as Elliot said. Just another kid in school—a couple years ahead of us. One of those kids you saw in the hallway. Elliot had been in advanced math, so he’d sometimes taken classes with older kids.

The picture the news popped up as they provided quotes from other members of the board—some of them in support of Janice, some who expressed surprise or outrage that she hadn’t revealed she was a shifter—looked vaguely familiar in the way that people do when you knew them as kids and hadn’t seen them for multiple decades. A hint of something you remembered, something that prods at the recognition part of your lizard brain, but it’s a struggle. Some people might not change that much, but Janice looked older than I’d have expected. Maybe being a shifter aged her. God knows nobody from high school was going to recognize me.

“What the fuck kind of anti-human agenda do they think we have, anyway?” I asked the room—not really expecting Elliot to answer.

He did, anyway. “They want to get rid of us, why wouldn’t they assume we also want to get rid of them?”

It was weird that I hadn’t ever thought of it that way.

“But… why?” I asked again.

“Fuck if I know, Val,” he replied, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “Sucks for Janice, though.”

“Sucks for the kids who’re going to have to keep learning some outdated bullshit because now anybody who proposes any sort of update is going to be called anti-human,” I replied. “Fucking dumbasses.”

Elliot sighed again. “It’s everywhere, you know. Not just here.”

I echoed his sigh. “I know. Trust me.”

We sat in silence for a good ten minutes, long past when the news stopped talking about Janice and the School Board, had moved through a recap of the game, and on to a prediction of snow over the weekend.