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clementine

I WASN'T SURE exactly when I was sure that I was a tithe, because I knew better than to make too much of signs and symptoms. Women were often paranoid about whether or not they had symptoms, and there were often public service announcements that would show up as ads in social media feeds or on the TV, saying that a tithe wasn't formally recognized until she was evaluated by the Council of Tithes.

Some of the possible symptoms were pretty common. Irregular menstrual periods. Genital and breast swelling, especially around the moon cycle.

Some of the other symptoms were nearly impossible to determine. There was the "roaming" symptom, where tithes would shift their routines, restless. A girl who'd typically spent all her time studying would start to go out and visit the parties on her college campus, stay out late at night drinking, behave more promiscuously. Or the "aggression to other females" symptom, which was self-explanatory, I supposed. But these symptoms were difficult to spot, because who could say what lead to a change in behavior in a woman? (I'd seen about twenty thousand memes about how spot-a-tithe behavior was a crime against feminism, and I agreed. Thing about feminism is that it's about equality, and ideals like equality go out the window in post-apocalyptic societies. Not that… well, if it was an apocalypse wh en the werewolves appeared, it was a pretty ho-hum one, all things considered. Everything was fine now. Everything was mostly back to normal now.)

So, anyway, I wasn't sure.

My stepmother, Angela, was a tithe, or she had been. Tithes typically lost the urge for the gatherings after six or so full moons in a row, and then they would settle into their post-tithe lives, which were never the same as other women's lives, not really.

Before I knew I was one, I used to feel sorry for tithes in general, even my stepmother, even though we never got along very well. Even though, I mean, in fairness, she was kind of mean to me.

When I was seven years old, I had a plan to go to a fairy-tale tea party for my friend's birthday, and it was a really big deal to me. I'd been allowed to get a set of toy wings and a plastic tiara for the occasion. All of us girls were going to get dressed up and sip juice cocktail or hot chocolate out of fancy-looking china cups, and I was excited as all hell for it.

But then my stepmother, out of the blue, decided I shouldn't go. She told my dad that she was worried that if I was exposed to something like this, I'd start getting the message that the only worth women had was in wearing pretty dresses and dolling themselves up for men, that kind of thing. She started talking about how damaging things like those little-girl pageants are, and she said this was the same thing. She said that it was low-key grooming, really, and my dad really responded to that, full-on dad protective mode.

When they told me I couldn't go, I burst into tears, and she said I was being manipulative and somehow convinced my dad I should be grounded to my room for a week so that I would learn to accept the boundaries he set for me, since he was just looking out for my best interests.

My dad came into my room to comfort me later, I remember. I was still crying into my pillow, feeling all alone and sad. He rubbed my back and told me I was the most important thing in his world and it was his job to protect me.

And then, from the depths of the house, we heard Angela, sobbing loudly and the sound of something smashing. My dad had to go and console her and stop her from breaking all the plates in the house.

Somehow, no matter what happened, Angela always made it about her.

On my own birthdays, she often had "emergencies." Once, she never showed up to the restaurant where we were all supposed to eat dinner together. My dad and I sat there, waiting for her, him out of his mind with worry, calling her every five seconds, until she eventually texted back and said that she'd been in a car accident, and we had to leave and go help her. The car… like, it seems paranoid to think that my stepmother ran her car into a telephone pole on purpose just to get out of my birthday dinner. But…

Another year, she walked out when I was opening presents, shaking visibly, all over, and when my father went after her, I could hear her out in the other room saying that she knew she was being ridiculous, but that she couldn't help but think that she'd never be as important to him as I was, or as my dead mother had been. "It's because I can't give you kids, Phil," she wailed. "I know, deep down, you resent that about me."

Another year, I swear to God she purposefully spilled punch all down my party dress.

The upshot of this was that I began to dread my own birthdays and to dread any time that anything special was planned for me by my father, because she would reliably do something to ruin it.

When I was fifteen, I was planning on going to the prom, and she took me out to buy dresses, and she insisted on trying on every single one of them too, which I thought was really weird, and so did the lady at the store who let us into the dressing room.

Then, two weeks before the prom, she asked if she could borrow my prom dress to wear to some event for her job, and I tried to say no, and she went to my dad, and I don't know what she said to him, but he came in and basically begged me to just give in to her, because "she was hurting so badly."

So, of course, she ruined the dress. It got ripped.

She promised she was going to get it repaired.

She didn't.

I ended up trying to sew the zipper back in myself, and I mostly managed it, but it didn't lay right against my skin, and there was this awful bulge in the back. Not that it really mattered, because I was going to prom alone. I spent the whole evening sitting in the corner of the dark gym, watching the disco ball spin around all over the poster-paper-plastered surfaces, with my friend Ninnia, and neither of us got asked to dance once.

When I was seventeen, I began to spend all my time using the internet to diagnose my stepmother with various psychological ailments.

Narcissism.

Borderline personality disorder.

But when I talked to my dad about this, he would say, "It's complex PTSD, for God's sake, Clementine. You can't forget she was a tithe. God only knows what she went through out there with those animals. And let's not forget the miscarriage she had."

Right, the miscarriage that was so violent and bloody and horrifying that she nearly bled to death, and that—when they went in to surgically repair everything—meant that she would never be able to get pregnant again.

The werewolf miscarriage.

My friend Ninnia's younger sister was actually a werewolf child, though, and she seemed totally normal. Everyone knew that women didn't shift, even if they carried the werewolf gene, such as it was. Only boy babies born from the gatherings would grow up to be werewolves, and we didn't know yet if those babies would turn. The oldest children were only thirteen now. There were reports of some of them turning that young, but most were making it unscathed through the full moon. Whether they would turn when they were older, we simply didn't know.

Furthermore, whenever the werewolves all shifted for that first time, when I was six years old, none of those men'd had any recognizable werewolf gene. And there were still men, even now, shifting for the first time for no reason anyone could determine. It was a theory that there was a werewolf gene, but whatever it was, kind of like the autism gene, no one had isolated it.

Ninnia and I were probably friends because of that—her mother was a former tithe and my stepmother was one.

Tithes, well, no question. Tithes were all fucked up.

So, when I started showing signs, I didn't really want to notice them, which was pretty common.

Women were always freaking out that they were showing tithe signs. There were about seven thousand forums on the internet, and a huge part of Reddit, all devoted to people trying to analyze their tithe signs, and if it meant they were a tithe and what they were going to do if it was true and all of that.

In the end, it usually ended up being no more than six months of your life. Less if you got knocked up.

And women who had been tithes were sometimes very sought out by non-werewolf men afterwards. Maybe it was some kind of fetish.

Not in my father's case, though. While I was psychoanalyzing my stepmother, I couldn't help but try to figure him out, too. It probably had something to do with my mom. My mom died that night, the first night, the First Full Moon, as people called it. She was raped to death by werewolves and my father tried to save her, but she made him save me . Which. Turned out, as we later discovered, they wouldn't have done anything to me. They never went after children, just women. Of course, the wolves seemed to think that meant people with uteruses who had gone through puberty, so there were children of twelve or fourteen who were attacked at the beginning. But I was only six. I would have been fine.

I didn't think my father had ever forgiven himself for not saving my mother.

And I thought he probably married my stepmother because of some twisted way to do his penance for not saving my mom. His whole life would be devoted to taking care of some woman who'd been ravaged by wild, clawed, hairy beastmen.

Never mind that the tithes liked it.

The werewolves would go after any woman at all, but a tithe's body had changed and morphed to be able to handle it. Sometimes, tithes even stayed with them. They called it "bonding." The internet said it was some kind of out-of-control Stockholm syndrome. But whatever the case, sometimes the tithes went out beyond the fences and the walls and they lived out there, with the wolves.

When I knew I was a tithe, I began to wonder if that was going to happen to me.

It horrified me, but I felt it in another way too, a undercurrent, a strange pull, like the call of the void, where you feel like something in the universe wants you to fall from a tall height, like you're supposed to throw yourself to your death?