There are five of us that live in Granny's foster home. Five. I've heard rumors said that my brothers and I are what drove poor old Granny crazy like she is today. After all, even one teenager can be a handful, but there are exactly five of us, making it five times the trouble. or maybe ten times, because we're all males...?
Oh, and did I mention that we're wolves? Yah, that's right. wolves. Five teenage wolves. That's a hell of a load to take care of, making us twenty times the trouble. Naturally, Wolf A. came first- Albert (we like to call him Al). He's 19 years old and the oldest, and by far the best looking of us all with his white fur and blue eyes. Then came Wolf B., Benjamin, a.k.a. Benji. Benji's 18 and has brown fur and green eyes, and he plays basketball, making him very popular at school. Wolves C. and D. are 17 year old twins named Collin and Dakota. Al jokingly calls them Chip and Dale because they're always together and because the initals fit. They both have grey fur, but you can tell them apart by their eyes. Collin's eyes are grey and Dakota's are brown.
Me, I'm the youngest (not quite 16 yet), Wolf E. My name is Edward, and I have black fur and yellow eyes. I'm a lot smaller than my brothers (in more ways than one, if you catch my drift) and not as fit. But what separates me from them more than my age and size is my creative spirit. I love to rap, and my brothers hate it.
Them, they're all the body-builder types that play athletic sports and practically worship cars. In my whole life I have never liked sports. I got hit in the face by a dodge-ball in gym class once, and it broke my nose. Since then, I've never played willingly again. (That doesn't mean the coaches didn't force me. *sulks*) As for the cars, I'm the only one out of us five that doesn't have a driver's license. They say I was "daydreaming" in class and didn't pass my driver's test. Truth is, I wasn't daydreaming, I was rapping in my head. There's a difference.
Daydreaming is when you sit around thinking about something that's never going to benefit you in your whole life. It has no purpose. What I do is art. An art that I hope to make a career of some day. But, back on subject, who needs a car anyway? I actually prefer to ride my bike to school and around town. Of course, if we ever go somewhere out of town, Al can always drive us in that fancy car of his. It's actually Granny's car, but since she's too old to drive anymore, Al just kinda took it over and fixed it up all pretty and such. Sometimes, I'd kinda like to take a bat to that car, but then I feel guilty for thinking that. Granny raised us boys to be good Christian kids (Yeah, I know, Christian wolves? right?) and so I usually try to be as good as possible. It's not always easy, but somehow I make it... most of the time.
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7:00 a.m. the alarm rings. Wolf E. rises and rubs the sleep from his tired eyes. He glances at the calendar on his right. Still another week 'til my birthday, he thinks to himself. He quickly showers and dresses in a pair of faded jeans and a baggy red t-shirt.
When he got downstairs to the kitchen, his four older brothers were already there eating their breakfasts. E. cheerily plopped his bottom down in his favourite chair and made his request to Granny.
"Bacon, please," he said with a smile.
"Good morning, Edward," Granny crooned at him as if he were a child. "How many slices, dear?" E. thought for only a moment before replying,
"Seven, please."
Al looked up from his newspaper reading and glared at E.
"You wanna get fat, little bro?" demanded Al, accusingly. Dakota tried and failed to surpress an amused chuckle. "Look at you. You're hardly ever physically active, and you're eating all that fatty bacon for breakfast! Look at your tummy, you flabby little brat!"
Thankfully, Granny interrupted him there. "That's quite enough of that, Albert. Leave your brother alone. He's just fine the way he is." And she scooped him out the seven bacon slices and placed the maple syrup bottle in front of his plate. "Don't forget to say grace, dear."
E. bowed his head and closed his eyes to pray before his meal, then said "Amen" and dug into the bacon. His brothers started to discuss boring junk like cars and sports that E. was totally and completely uninterested in so he just ignored them and focused on the taste of his bacon. First, he poured maple syrup all over the pile of meat and then shoved it in his mouth, savouring the sugar, and then finishing with a delightfully salty flavour. sugar and salt... That had a nice ring to it. He thought about it a bit. Sugar and Salt! His eyes suddenly opened wide and his ears pricked up. Wolf E. rushed to grab his spiral notebook out of his backpack and scribbled down the first things that came to his mind.
it all starts with sugar it all ends in salt
and all that seems to matter is its not your fault...
He stopped there. stuck. again. He let out a sigh of disappointment. He'd really thought he had something there for a second, but it was gone now. He could feel someone looking over his shoulder.
"Whatcha got there, E.?" asked Collin, by far the nicest of his four brothers.
"Umm... nothing," he lied. "Just something I remembered I had to write down for English class." Collin snorted. He didn't buy into that lie for one second.
"C'mon, bro. It's another one of your silly rap songs isn't it?" Edward sighed and lowered his face.
"Yah, Collin. It is... it's a rap." He tried to ignore Albert's sneer. Collin may have been nicer than the others, but he didn't like rap any more than they did, and he really didn't have that much common sense. He didn't mean to call Albert's attention to it; he just wasn't thinking about what he said.
"Whatever," said Benji. "Let's leave the rap star to his fatty bacon and smudgy notebook. Anybody wanna shoot some hoops before school?" His suggestion was greeted with cheerful agreements from the twins. Albert ignored them and went back to reading the news. E. said nothing. He knew the invitation wasn't meant for him. And anyway, he hated basketball. So while three out of four of his brothers piled into the car, poor, pathetic loser, Wolf E. was left to his fatty, salty, sugary bacon and a notebook, smudged from being erased so many times, head filled with unfinished rap lyrics that he felt would never get any better... because Wolf E. felt that he wasn't good enough.
He finished breakfast at 7:45 and didn't have a ride to school. That was fine with him. E. loved riding his bike. He thought it was somewhat ironic that his brothers scorned him for not playing sports, and yet they drove that dang car everywhere, whereas E. always preferred to ride his bike.
Pedaling down the highway, he could relax and let his mind wander. There were no critical brothers here to tell him what to do or say or think. E. could just be himself. He began to rap in his head again.
it all starts with sugar it all ends in salt
and all that seems to matter is its not your fault
and nobody really blames you but they just cant blame themselves
and thats why...
He tried to think of some phrase ending with the word "Hell," but nothing seemed to come at that time. He pulled up into the schoolyard just as the bell rang and had to hurry to class, but not before stopping a moment to write down in his notebook what he had come up with on the way there.
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gym class...
Out of all the classes that his school required, to E., gym was the very worst. Sports were the thing he was worst at. Sure, algebra II had its fair share of bad times, but at least the worst you could get from that was a bad grade, and maybe have to take an extra hour of tutoring every day. But gym was worse, because math can not bodily harm you. Flying tennis rackets, on the other hand, can.
It all started like this: E. goes into the boys' locker room, fiddles with the combination on his lock, finally gets dressed. Then when he walks out into the gym and takes his usual seat at the very far end of the topmost bleacher, the bad news is announced...
"Today, we're going to play tennis," announced the coach. "Everybody pick a partner." He blew the whistle and suddenly everyone was rushing to grab their best friend or the best athlete they knew. Knowing how bad E. was at sports, no one wanted to pick him, which would have been okay, if only there had been an odd number of students. Unfortunately, there wasn't. And there was only one student in E.'s class that was as terrible at tennis as he was- Ralf Jones. No one but his best friend Mike ever chose Ralf as a partner, but Mike had transferred classes, which meant now E. was stuck as Ralf's gym partner, and worse, he couldn't sit out anymore. E. reluctantly dragged his feet over to where Ralf was standing.
"So I guess we're stuck together, then," he said. Ralf just sighed. He hated sports about as much as E. did, and without his friend to make it halfway bearable, they were both doomed to lose, and worse.
"Let's just hope nothing goes too terribly wrong today," prayed Ralf. E. cradled his face in his paws. I'm doomed to die a terrible death today, he thought despairingly.
And, sadly, he was right. The next minute passed by E. in a blur. He seemed to be aware that he was suddenly standing on the tennis court holding a racket, and that there was a loud noise behind him (the coach's whistle). And he could faintly hear Ralf yell something, but he wasn't sure what because the next thing he knew, the ball was flying toward him and he didn't want to get hit so he went to block it with his racket, but then there was another racket that he wasn't so sure who was controlling. And that's when he realized no one was. The wide-eyed, shocked expression on Ralf's face was all it took. Somehow or another, Ralf had meant to swing the racket to hit the ball before it hit E. in the face, but had ended up letting go by accident. So instead of helping, what he had really done was just make the situation worse.
The flying tennis racket hit E. right on the left side of his face, making him lose his train of thought (or any thought at all, for that matter) and knocking him to the ground.
The next thing he remembered seeing was the ceiling and then the coach's face.
"Wolf, you okay?"
"I can't feel my face," he said. Then the ladies' coach called out,
"Someone please accompany Edward Wolf to the nurse's office now!" Ralf volunteered.
"I need some ice," E. said, holding the side of his head. His left eye was slightly swollen.
"Man, I'm real sorry. I didn't mean to hit you," Ralf was saying. E. didn't really care.
"It's alright Ralf. It's not your fault." He just couldn't wait to get out of that darn gym.
English class...
This class was much better for E. It was quieter, there was no way for a person to get injured while doing this work, and, best of all, it involved words. and words could be turned into rap. There was only one problem- his English teacher, Mrs. Bee, didn't like rap any more than his brothers did. So in order to avoid humiliation in class, he'd have to be very discreet about writing anything that came into his head. He always kept his rap notebook underneath the worksheets he was working on in class, in case he suddenly came up with any lyrics he needed to write down. Today was one of those days. He was sitting in the back of the classroom, supposed to be answering questions about the story they had just read in class, when the next line to his sugar and salt rap suddenly came to him. He uncovered the notebook and began frantically writing, trying not to lose his place in his head. As he wrote, more and more lyrics came to him:
it all starts with sugar it all ends in salt
and all that really matters is its not your fault
and nobody really blames you but they just cant blame themselves
and thats what makes this world such a sea of endless hell
and we poke it with a stick and we prod it til it bites
then we blame whatever it may be for drowning out the light
cuz were blinded by the tunnel that distracts us from our goal
and we stop when were just halfway gone from weary and alone
I wish...
He was suddenly interrupted by Mrs. Bee. She hovered over him, like an ominous storm cloud, reading over his shoulder. He stopped writing, and the teacher picked up the notebook.
"And what might this be, Edward?" she asked accusingly. E. stared down into his lap, but he could still feel the curious stares from the other students on him. The teacher tapped her foot, waiting for a response.
"It's umm... it's a rap, ma'am," he admitted, head still hung low.
"Rap." She said it as if it were a dirty word. "This is not the place nor the time for that, and I will not have any of that disrespectful garbage in my classroom!" She tore the page out of the notebook and, without even reading it, crumpled the paper and threw it in the trash can. A few of the students murmured hushed "Oooh!"'s and stifled giggles at his humiliation, but he couldn't hear them. He just stared at his desk, mind blank. Not daydreaming. not even rapping. Then, pretty soon, all the others had forgotten about him and turned back to their own papers. All but one.
A pretty girl in the front row with shoulder-length auburn hair got up and walked over to the pencil sharpener hangin on the wall- the one that just happened to be hung over the very trash can that E.'s rap was in. She started to sharpen her pencil, but a slip of her hand caused her to "accidentally" drop the pencil in the trash can. When she went to retrieve it, she came back with an extra piece, a crumpled piece of paper which she quickly shoved into the long sleeve of her red hoodie. No one noticed as she walked quickly back to her desk and unfolded the paper to read it and scribbled a note at the bottom of the paper. She then refolded it (neatly, this time) and stuck it in her hoodie pocket.
When the bell rang, E. was the first out the door. He walked quietly down the hall, keeping to himself as he did whenever he felt bad.
He heard a female voice behind him calling, "Hey, Wolf! Wait up!" He turned to see who it was and was greeted by the friendly face of the auburn-haired girl, who skipped right up to him. She held out a folded piece of paper to him.
"Here," she said. "I rescued it from the trash." He took the paper, unfolded it, and read his sugar and salt rap, words slightly distorted from the crumpling. Then, at the bottom of the page, there was the girl's note, in the neat, curving style of most girls' handwriting:
She shouldn't have been so quick to judge. I read these lyrics, and I see something beautiful. no teacher has any right to trash this. :)
~Anastasia
E. felt a warm cozy feeling in his chest, knowing that someone actually cared about his work.
"Umm... thanks," he said.
"Well, it's your rap," replied the girl. "You wrote it, and she had no right to trash it." E. smiled. "But you liked it, right? I didn't know white girls liked rap." He smirked to show her he was only joking.
"Well, I don't really," she admitted. "But I do like poetry. If you just take out the background music and smoothe out the beat, that's all rap really is. And you write some really pretty lyrics."
"Oh," he said. "I guess I never really thought of it like that."
"It's cool," she said. He smiled back.
"Well, thanks again for getting it. I really, really appreciate that."
"You're welcome," she replied. "But anyway, I think the bell's about to ring. We'd best be getting to the next classes." She waved at him and turned to go.
"Alright," he said. "Bye." He watched her walk away and then had to hurry again to his next class.
I think my luck may have just turned around for the better, thought E. And it all happened in less than five minutes. He smiled and hummed to himself as he walked to his next class.
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