Perigee - Chapter 1: Chapter 1

This time, Tisper had come prepared.
And she wasn't leaving without Jaylin in the back of that wrangler. Whether they had to tie him down with rope or entomb him beneath their luggage. Goddammit, he was coming with.
The element of surprise was her key; Jaylin was lightfooted and stealthy, and on their last attempt, he'd vanished through a kitchen window .  But she'd been too obvious. He knew she was coming. This time she had a plan, and Jaylin wasn't in on it.
Her only mistake was allowing Felix to come in with her.
The fraternity they stood in was far too old to house so many people—the wood pulsed beneath her feet as the crowd that wreathed her danced, jouncing the floorboards in each large collective bounce. The ceilings were low, and as they parted their way through people, she heard Felix curse as he knocked his head against a glass chandelier. He shouldn't have come in; Felix stuck out like a sore thumb, and the vibrant red of his hair would be the dead giveaway—an open-and-shut spoil to their hunt.
"Stay out of the way," she shouted to him, swatting at the air. "You're too tall."
Felix rolled his eyes but he slacked back by the refreshments. The last sight of him Tisper caught was his brief investigation of the drinks table. He gave an empty cup a sniff and swaggered over to a fat keg of beer. He was making a drink now? For god's sake, Felix.
"Come on," Tisper shouted to the others, Matt on her left and Sadie on her right. Alex had opted to stay in the car. Too many people, he said.
They'd turned the corner into the den, where lights from strobing machines flared up the walls and bodies knocked against her like they were starting a mosh. She was beginning to envy Alex's intellectual decision-making.
She grazed over the faces in the crowd, and it wasn't until Matt shouted, "There!" and pointed towards a table at the far end of the room that Tisper caught sight of him. Grinning and belligerent and for some reason shirtless, dumping shots back like they were tap water.
He wasn't the same Jaylin she'd helped into his dorm seven months ago. It was almost as if muscle had grown in place of all the empty calories he tossed back every night. Biceps no larger than an orange, but still so much more prominent than they'd been before. Abdominals where she'd used to poke at his small pooched stomach on nights when they'd eaten an entire pizza between themselves. She hated the muscles; partly because she missed the old Jaylin. And partly because it meant carrying him out over her shoulder wasn't an option now.
She panned over the layout of the house. There were three routes to the escape—right, left or straight into her arms. "Matt you go through the kitchen and sneak to the left of him. Sadie, get as far right as you can."
They both frayed from her and Tisper surged through the crowds, ready to flank him at the first flash of recognition in those cornflower eyes. She was nearly to the table when she called his name. "Jaylin Maxwell, get your ass over here right this second!" She could hardly hear her own voice over the music, but Jaylin's head shot up like the sound was a ricocheting gunshot.
His eyes riveted to her for a heartbeat in time. A deer in glaring headlights. Then he scrambled off of the table, and just as Tisper expected, he ran. He was gone so quickly, she wasn't sure which direction he'd gone. She shoved her way through bodies until she caught sight of Matt, standing in the kitchen entrance with his empty hands splayed frantically in the air.
From so far, she couldn't hear him, but she could read his lips: "Did you get him?"
Tisper shook her head and looked to her right, where Sadie was still peering over bodies, in search of Jaylin. Tisper felt a frustrated cry building in her throat.
Ever since the bad moon, he'd gained not only muscle, but agility, dexterity. And a frustrating sense of rebellion that made every moment dealing with him just a little more difficult than it needed to be. Ever since the bad moon, Jaylin wasn't a simple boy. He was something a bit stranger.
She gestured for the others to follow, an theoretical white flag waved above her head. They'd try next time, she supposed. But Quentin had been adamant. He needed to be in California within a week or they were all completely screwed.
But to her surprise, waiting by the drinks table was Felix, one arm holding a cup of beer—and Jaylin cinched in a chokehold under the other. He was thrashing and squirming, but if anything, Felix's grip tightened and Jaylin only turned a shade more red. "They always leave through the front," Felix said, tossing back a swig.  "Scrub."
"I think we've got it," Tisper said, taking Jaylin by one arm while Matt wrangled the other. It wasn't so much of a struggle to get him outside once he was physically lifted off of his feet. They set him on the grass outside in front of the Wrangler, where Tisper extracted a t-shirt from her purse and tossed it at his face.
"Put it on," she said. "I've already got your shit packed. We're leaving."
Jaylin didn't ask where. He didn't say a word in fact. He shoved his head through his shirt, drunkenly missing the sleeves a few time before the garb was on properly. He didn't ask where they were going, because he knew. They'd all known for a month now. It was time to meet with Qamar and her counsel.
His new-found were-beast abilities didn't stop the pink flush of alcohol from hitting Jaylin's cheeks and Tisper felt herself warm a bit once that angry expression drifted from his face and he was nothing but a fuzzy-headed, pink-faced boy again. Jaylin climbed into the Jeep beside Matt like a dog on a leash. Sadie closed in on the other side of him and gave his knee a pat for good measure.
"Told you third time was a charm," she said. "I thought we were going to have to lasso you in like a baby cow. What was so different this time?"
"Too drunk." Jaylin said, his head tilted back and his eyes fluttered shut. "So drunk."
"Hah!" Tisper hooted as she clamored into the passenger seat. Alex sat in the middle and Felix demanded the wheel if he was going to be any help at all. "Told you. We just had to wait until he was super shitfaced, then it's all smooth sailing from there."
"Maybe he should be by a window," Matt said. "I don't want him pukin' in here."
"Why not?" Felix said, jerking the jeep into reverse and weeding his way through the sloppy park-jobs and half-drunk idiots, stumbling down the street with drinks in their hands. "It'd give the lass some class."
"Hey, shutup," Matt barked back. "She's a great car."
Jaylin groaned from the back seat.
"Don't worry," Sadie said. "I've got puke bags."
Tisper glanced back at Jaylin, his head rolling over limp on Sadie's shoulder. The bags under his eyes were darker than they were days ago, and the queasy look on his face made Tisper ache to reach out and brush his hair until he felt better. But lately, Jaylin hadn't wanted hands on him at all. She was surprised he'd even opted to use Sadie as a pillow.
"How long is the ride?" Tisper asked Alex, who was already poking around at the GPS coordinates on his phone.
"We're looking at around sixteen hours. Think you can handle that, Felix?"
"Have to," Felix grumbled. "Hell is an airplane."
"He's afraid of flying," Alex explained.
Felix looked from the rode for half a second. "Oi," he sniped. "If men were meant to fly, we'd have wings on our ass cheeks. Don't though, do we?"
"I wouldn't know," Alex said. "I've never seen your ass."
"I'll show ye' sometime."
"Stop," Matt groaned from the back seat. "We really talk about Felix's ass too much."
"It's a hot topic," said Felix with a shrug.
"We definitely should have flown." Sadie quibbled, cheek in her palm.
Felix clicked his tongue to his teeth. "I'll pull over right here, aye? Ye' can walk your hippy ass back to SeaTac."
"Do you know the chances of dying on an airplane?" Alex asked him—or more like all of them as he twisted around to look at the others. They all gave a unified groan. He'd been spitting facts at them all day. "They're the safest form of transportation out there, y'know. You're like four-hundred times more likely to be struck by lightning."
Felix cracked the kind of grin that bared a glaring white canine and nothing more. "I think your facts are a little fucked there, laddie."
"No, it's true. I think. Hold on." And as Alex brought his phone to his face and googled the matter, Tisper took another glance at Jaylin in the back seat. His eyes were shut, his fingers barely gripping the water bottle Matt had given him. A cut split the corner of his lips, and two different shades of lipstick sprinkled kiss marks on his neck. She didn't care to know what either were from.
"He's not answering my calls," Quentin had told her, a month ago, when Qamar had put out a request to meet everyone involved in the incident with Ziya. "Find some time to come," he'd said. "Jaylin needs to be there. Everyone does."
It wasn't long after that Felix resurfaced. He'd just shown up at her apartment one day with Alex beside him, asked "where's the short guy?" and let himself right in to rummage through her fridge for deli cuts and liquor.
But she'd seen more of Felix in the passing weeks than she had Jaylin. In fact, she'd hardly seen him much at all since March. In three months, he'd become someone else.
"Still bull we gotta go all the way to California," Matt groaned. "My dad's pissed I had to reschedule my training classes."
"It's probably for the better," Sadie said, voice light as air. "Don't they taser you guys? Like... for educational purposes."
"Only if we decide to carry a taser," Matt said. "They do pepper spray us though. Shit, I can't wait. It's gonna hurt so bad."
"Something is wrong with you," Sadie dissected.
Alex squirmed a bit in his seat and Tisper felt bad for making him take the middle—both Felix and herself being long-legged space-consumers.
"We should at least stop for a hotel at some point, right?" he asked.
"Nah," said Felix.
"Yes," said Tisper. "You drive like a James Bond villain. I'd hate to see what it's like when you're sleep deprived."
"Do James Bond villains drive?" Matt asked.
Tisper crossed her arms and pressed her back to the seat. "All I know is they usually die in the end and I'm not about it."
It was three hours before Jaylin woke up. Sadie had fallen asleep with her sweater as a pillow. Matt was drifting in and out. Alex was searching up directions to the hotel they'd chosen on his phone, and Tisper—Tisper was watching her best friend slowly stir from his sleep.
He looked pale, a redness on his eyelids. His throat swallowed like it was capping down a slosh of sickness. "Pull over," he said.
Felix shot a glance in the rear-view mirror. "Fuck ye' mean pullover? Do you see rest-stop anywhere near us, kid? We're on the interstate."
"Can't you wait, Jay?" Tisper asked.
Jaylin was clutching his stomach and shaking his head. "No. Pull over," he said, louder this time.
Felix sped up a bit, until the side of the interstate smoothed into an embankment of grass and stray, scattered garbage. Then he pulled over onto the shoulder and Jaylin clamored over Matt, who wailed out as he was awakened by a knee to the crotch.
Jaylin stumbled down the knoll and into the grassy embankment and the sound of his vomiting was somehow louder than the passing semi trucks.
"Six months in school and ye've got the tolerance of a chipmunk, Felix commented, cutting around the front of the car to take a gander.
Tisper wedged past him to retrieve some napkins from the glovebox, and headed down hill, where Jaylin was teetering on the slanted roadside.
"Jay, what'd you take?" she asked, wiping his mouth with the napkin.
"Nothing." He turned his head away and Tisper wrenched it back to wipe the last bit of vomit from his cheek.
"You took something, Jay. I can tell."
"I'm fine." And as she expected of him, Jaylin wrenched her wrist away and stalked back up towards the Jeep.
Jaylin Maxwell had never been the most innocent angel in the flock. He'd popped more pills and smoked more pot than any of the rest of them combined. But it wasn't the drugs leaving his system that concerned Tisper.
It was the fact that for the last three months, Jaylin had turned to ice. He was cruel and brash. He stopped answering his phone, stopped asking for rides, stopped coming to movie nights. He had stopped wanting anything to do with anyone who knew a single sincere thing about him.
Ever since March, it had become impossible to love Jaylin Maxwell.
He just wouldn't allow it.