They say that day is day and night is night, but I’ve seen the moon come out with the sun. When the sky is pale blue, the moon’s shadows are the same color, which feels sneaky, like, are you trying to blend in so I don’t see you? I always have to be on my guard. Fortunately for everyone, I’m clever, and I already have a plan. 

The playground at this new school has a platform hidden below the tallest slide, a platform with bars all around it and just one pole going up to it. I spotted it when Mom dropped me off, and I kept my eye on it through the classroom window all the way to recess. It’s the perfect spot! If the moon comes out, the bars will be strong enough to hold me and the pole will keep other kids from following me up. 

That’s what I was thinking, but when I get there a bunch of boys are climbing all over it. When I try to explain, standing below them, they lean over the bars and call me “stinky girl.” 

“You’re lucky there’s no moon right now,” I tell them. “Or else I’d rip out all your guts with my claws!”

They laugh, but I mean it. I’m hungry. The cafeteria lunch was so bad. Nobody ate the meatballs, just bounced them on the floor. And they really bounced back up. I just ate one watery carrot and that’s it. The danger is lost on the playground boys. They pretend to cry at me, twisting their fists in the corners of their eyes. I decide to spare them. I have no time to waste on imbeciles. 

There’s a sweetgum tree in the field beyond the blacktop. With no bars to hold me, a canopy of leaves should at least block the sky, and I can pretend I’m back in the Virginia woods where I belong. I go to sit under the branches, but on the other side of the trunk there’s a girl rolling in the grass, one of those skinny girls with a stomach that folds in when she curls up. She’s huffing and making a high-pitched e-e-e-e-e noise like she’s going to bust out of her skin. I lean over, one hand on the bark, and ask if she’s changing because she saw the moon. 

“I’m a mare,” she says, and rolls onto her stomach to look up at me, blinking against the strands of hair that fall into her eyes. “I mated, and now I’m with foal.”

She’s wearing a butterfly mood necklace. While I watch, she puts it into her mouth. I heard mood necklaces don’t actually read your mood, just your temperature. Hers must be high because when she spits it out and smiles, the wings are dark blue for joy. 

“Want to play?” she asks. “You can fight off the mountain lions while I gather hay for us to eat.”

I didn’t know horses fought mountain lions. My pack instincts kick in. I patrol around the tree, guarding her. As she picks grass and lays it in a pile in the sun to dry, I realize she’s actually really pretty. She has a sorrel coat and a long mane. My coat’s brown. But I have a white spot on my forehead shaped like a star. 

“The lion’s here!” she whinnies, pointing her nose at the field. “It’s gonna eat us!”

I gallop after it, stomping my hooves like crazy. I throw in a few donkey kicks for good measure. I’m really good at fighting. The lion runs away, yowling like a coward. But when I look back at her, she’s sprawled beside our hay, clutching her side. 

“It scratched me,” she says. “With poison claws.”

I neigh in rage. She reaches for me, and I fall to my knees beside her.

“I’ll get the medicine grass!” I say.

“It’s too late for that,” she whispers. “I’m dying.”

I don’t accept her death gallantly. I was all alone in this school before her. Every time Mom moves us somewhere, I feel like I’m stuck in an elevator, and it takes months for the doors to open, if they ever open at all. “No!” I cry, and bite her arm with my whole mouth. I bite down and down and down. When I let go, there’s a mark exactly like my teeth, even the v-shaped spot where the bottom front two bend in. 

Her eyebrows crinkle, and her eyes are glittering. We stare at each other, confused. 

Mom picks me up from the principal’s office after school. On the way to the car, she holds my hand too tight.

“What were you thinking?” she asks, as I climb into my seat.

“I dunno.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? How can you not know?”

I just don’t. Mom rubs her face with her hand. 

“You should know not to bite people!” she yells, her eyes hidden beneath her fingers, as if that helps her keep her voice down. “Listen to me. You are a little girl!”

But I wasn’t even transformed when I bit her. I was just me. I slump down in my seat, pressing my cheek into the seatbelt. On the ride home, I watch the roads pass, these Ohio roads, this big flat nowhere. Mom says we moved because of her job, but I know the truth. It’s my fault for not learning how to pretend to be a person better while we lived so close to the forest. 

I’m going to have to write an apology note. And tomorrow, the girl with the sorrel coat is going to take it in her hoof, look at me from beneath the curtain of her soft mane, and forgive me. I’ll think the same thing that I’m thinking now. Which is that there’s a solution for everything. And I probably can’t be fixed, so someone is just gonna have to kill me.