Nina’s hand clenched on the pencil. She forced her grip to loosen before she snapped it accidentally.
I met a guy today. That never happens. And I met someone I think would be a great friend. I wish I could stay here, and have friends, and see what might happen with the guy, but I can’t. I can never stay anywhere. It sucks.
Nina stared at the page. She was never going to be a writer, that was for sure. But she couldn’t think of any more elegant way to say it. She could never stay anywhere, not for the rest of her life. And it sucked.
I wish I could see you again, she wrote in a sudden, furious scrawl. I wish things were different. Your daughter, Nina.
She set down the pen and read it over. She’d written a lot of these letters to her mom, over the years. Sometimes they made her feel better.
She never sent them. The last memory of her parents was too much. The way her mother had sobbed in fear, her father’s rage and disgust: “Get out of here! You’re some kind of monster! Stay away from me and my wife!”
Her mother’s tearful whisper: “Nina, what are you? What are you?”
In seven years, she’d never sent a letter to her mother. Because what if she wrote back: Stay away, you’re a monster?
Or what if she didn’t write back at all?
She read the letter over again. I wish things were different.
There were envelopes and stamps on the desk.
Nothing was ever going to be different for Nina. She was always going to be who she was. She would always have the terrible secret of her leopard.
Her leopard, who had been her only friend for seven years. Her snarling, purring, protective leopard. Nina had hated her at first, but slowly, she’d grown to love her. Slowly, she’d decided that if she was a monster, she would just be a monster, and if no one could love her for it, she’d be alone.
She didn’t wish her leopard away. She couldn’t.
That was never going to change. But...she wished other things would.
Her mother, at least. Her father—her father had always been strict and uncompromising. He wasn’t the sort of man to change his mind, and he definitely wasn’t the sort of man to accept differences. He’d always been the one who made the decisions, and her mother went along with him every time.
But who knew what might have happened in seven years?
Slowly, she folded the letter. She picked up an envelope. In careful, precise script, she wrote the address of her childhood home on the front of it. She gave the diner as the return address. She took a stamp from the desk—and then, feeling guilty, left fifty cents of her tip money in its place.
She put the stamp on the envelope, put the letter inside without thinking about what it said, or what her mom might think when she read it, if she ever got it. Then she licked the envelope and sealed it.
Nina left the diner with the envelope starting to crumple in her hand with how hard she was clenching it. There was a public mailbox just down the street, and she stood in front of it for a full minute before opening it, throwing the letter inside, and letting it bang shut. The sound seemed to echo in her ears.
She didn’t know what had made today so different. What had made today, instead of any other day, the day that she finally sent a letter.
Nothing’s going to change, she told herself. They’d probably moved. It had been seven years, after all. They probably wouldn’t get it, and if they did, her father would probably take it, shred it, throw it away before her mother even saw it.
And even if she read it, she might not care at all. And even if she cared...
What would she do? Probably nothing.
Nina shivered in the cool night air. She stared up at the black shapes of the mountains, reaching out into the distance.
“Hey there, honey,” said a voice.
Nina jumped a mile and spun around, her leopard growling. She was halfway to shifting before she caught herself—she couldn’t shift in public. The consequences would much worse than whatever might have happened otherwise.
Although...she was staring at the group of rowdy drunks from the diner. And they were looking at her with interest.
Oh, no.
***