It was late afternoon when I woke. Jules was already up. As soon as I got out of bed, he dragged me to the bathroom. The room was tiny and timber-clad. It felt like a low-budget sauna. I had to shuffle in sideways to get to the basin. Jules crammed himself in there with me.

“What the fuck, Jules?” I complained. “I can’t even fit in here on my own.”

“I told you. I need to show you something. Look in the mirror.”

I crouched down until my face came into view in the tiny mirror that hung over the handbasin.

“What the fuck?” I said again, this time to my reflection. My hair, which was shoulder length and jet black, looked fucking weird. It was still black, but there were two streaks of white at my temples. And I don’t mean a gray hair or two. I mean two entire locks of my hair were solid white. “What the fuck is this?”

“There’s another one here,” he said, lifting a thick lock that grew from the whorl on the crown of my head. “This one was the first one. I noticed it yesterday after the first time we shifted.”

“Do you think shifting is causing it?”

“I dunno, but you’ve shifted three times and you’ve got three of these.”

“D’you think this is what happened to my mom? She always said she went gray early. Do you think that’s what this is?”

“I’m not sure. This isn’t gray, Sully. It’s white. Like, really white.”

I looked in the mirror again. I was stunned and unhappy.

“Don’t worry about it. It looks kinda cool.

“I was wrong about your hair,” he said as we sat by the fire that night. “It’s not kind of cool. It’s fucking cool. When the moonlight hits it, it’s opalescent.”

“Opalescent?” There was a word I never thought I’d hear coming out of Jules’s mouth.

“Yeah, it’s not just white in this light. It shines purple and pink and blue when you move. It’s pretty rad.”

“Great,” I said, patting my hair down viciously and tucking it behind my ears. “‘Pretty rad’ will be super easy to hide when I’m around humans.”

He made a yikes face and then said, “I don’t know, maybe they won’t be able to see it. Maybe it will just look white to them. I mean, that’s possible, right?”

I sighed. I was feeling tired and overwhelmed and for the first time since we’d come to the cabin, I was feeling antsy. Grumpy. I wished there was someone other than Jules around and that they’d pick a fight with me. I wanted to fight. I wanted to yell. I wanted to scream. I wanted to rake my claws across something mushy and soft. I wanted to make something writhe and I wanted to make it scream.