“Not that part, no.” I fell silent as our food arrived, then busied myself twirling spaghetti around my fork. “Two months later, Mom found herself pregnant. She dropped out of college to have me. Grandma and Grandpa weren’t happy about it, but they stood by her. Pretty much everyone else tried to convince her it wasn’t a good idea to carry the baby to term.” I glanced at him. “Either because they believed her, or because they didn’t and they thought she was mentally ill and that the pregnancy would totally unhinge her.”

“I’m sorry,” Cody said quietly.

“It’s okay.” I gave him a wry smile. “I’m here, right? Mom refused to listen to any of them. She decided I was her baby, dammit, and she was going to love me no matter what. And that that was all that mattered, no matter who or what my father was. And if part of that was naming her little black-eyed hell-spawn after her favorite character in her favorite book, no matter how silly or inappropriate it sounds . . .” I stuck a forkful of spaghetti into my mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “You know what? I’m okay with it.”

Cody picked up his ribs. “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Exactly.” I pointed my fork at him. “What about you, Officer? I know what made you turn your life around the second time and become a cop. But in eighth grade, you were a JV all-star. A year later, you were a burnout. What happened?”

He tore a hunk of meat from the bone with his teeth. “Puberty.”

I waited for more. “That’s it?”

Cody didn’t elaborate. “Yep.”

Okay, then.

I thought about it while we ate our meals. I didn’t know a lot about werewolves. They were too clannish, too secretive. But I knew adolescence was hell on wheels for me, trying to control my temper, trying to cope with unexpected desires. There had been a few . . . incidents. A few things had spontaneously combusted or burst in my presence, most memorably the hot-water pipes in the girls’ locker room.

I got suspended for that one. So did Jen, for defending me from the girls who’d been taunting me. Well, actually for threatening to cut off Stacey Brooks’s hair in her sleep if she didn’t shut up.

The memory drew a reluctant smile from me, accompanied by a pang of guilt.

Anyway . . .

If it was at all the same for werewolves, no wonder Cody had sort of dropped out. Real life isn’t like the movies. If he’d gone all Teen Wolf on the basketball court, parents on the opposing team’s side would have been screaming for an animal control unit, and the entire Fairfax clan could have been outed against their will.