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my
body. I felt them all break as my body wrapped itself around the one
on the right and then my head impacted with the one on the left.
    I
woke up with my heart pounding, positive that I was about to die.
Some of the other dreams I'd had, dreams that had seemed more vivid
when I'd been asleep, were already fading away from my memory, but
the dream with the two wolf-men was still as strong as when it had
happened.
    I
still couldn't explain it, but somehow I knew that what had happened
was in its own way as real as anything else I'd ever experienced. My
dreams were real, and despite the fact that trying to find Kaleb
might get me killed, I still had an almost unstoppable urge to go
back to the unfinished building and see if I could talk to him.
     
     

Chapter 3
    I'd
lost track of how many days it had been since my fight with Janessa,
but it seemed like it shouldn't still be such a big deal among the
rest of the student body. I'd spent so many years trying to stay
safely anonymous only to have it ruined in the course of five
minutes.
    There
was probably a life lesson in there somewhere, but I was having a
hard time getting past the fact that everyone in the school seemed to
know me and they'd split themselves firmly into two camps. On the one
hand there were the rich and popular kids, all of whom seemed united
in their hatred of me. For the most part they didn't seem to like
Janessa any more than I did, but as nearly as I could tell they were
all weighing in on her side because I'd upset the natural order of
things. Nerds and loners like me were supposed to bow down to their
kind of people, not get into fights with them, especially not fights
in which the nerd came out more or less on top.
    The
other camp consisted of all of the nerds, drama geeks, loners and
anyone else who didn't either fit in with the popular crowd or
regularly abase themselves in the hopes of being able to work their
way into the A-list kids.
    I
wasn't particularly liked by most of these kids either, but they were
just super excited that somebody had finally stood up to Janessa.
Apparently she was a monster to just about everyone in the school who
wasn't at least as rich and cool as she was. I'd known she was bad,
but I hadn't realized she was that bad.
    It
was all kind of dizzying, especially given that I'd never managed to
learn the names of most of the people who were now either shooting me
nasty looks or patting me on the back and giving me high-fives as I
walked through the hall.
    I
kept hoping that it would all die down. I'd wanted to just serve out
my detention and then go back to being anonymous, but a day or two
after I got in trouble the administration finally got around to
investigating my accusation that Janessa had been cheating on her
history exam. From what I'd been able to gather secondhand, it
sounded like Richard Parsons pretty much cracked as soon as they got
him in a room by himself. He backed up everything I'd said, which had
caused the principal to check Janessa's locker.
    She
probably would have gotten away with a mere slap on the wrist except
they found hundreds of dollars' worth of drugs in her locker. She'd
been suspended within hours of that little discovery and her parents
had shoved her into rehab so fast that nobody had even known what
happened to her until some of the cheerleaders had gone over to her
house to find out why she'd been missing practice.
    News
that Janessa was out for at least the next six weeks had rushed
through the school like wildfire and had further sealed my infamy.
For all that I hadn't anticipated any of the events that had occurred
as a result of Janessa and I trying to rip each other's heads off,
the thing that really took me by surprise was how hard it all was on
Cindi.
    Although
we'd never been rich, Cindi's looks and status as a cheerleader put
her firmly in the popular camp at school. Her friends were exactly
the people who'd once largely ignored me but who now hated me.
    I
expected her to just go