Fox Blood
College: there isn’t anything like it: The dorm social life. Eating Ramen noodles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Casual drinking parties (not the parties where you black out and can’t remember anything the next morning). And seeing someone transform into a dangerous animal. Literally.
The animal in question is Juno. It is her second year at Ignatius University. She also turns twenty-one that year. And her birthday fell in line with the harvest moon.
Lucky her.
The iPhone on her nacho bag-littered desk read 11:58. She had just finished up with her term, and yet, she was still a neurotic nut job, since her big project was only halfway done. God played his booming drum set. The hammering rain was the wind chime that He ran his drumstick through. He banged one of the crash symbols to strike lightning. His bass drum reverberated throughout the sky. The thunder temporarily took Juno’s eyes off of her computer science work on her laptop. Her Boston terrier, dubbed bit, was loudly grinding up his nightly bowl of dog food, with some cheese puffs mixed in, of course. She looked down at the slobbering monstrosity that looked like it came out of a science-fiction/horror movie. Bit was her monstrosity, though. That was good enough for her.
She clicked on the vibrant orange Firefox logo on her desktop, and typed in “AOL Weather in the search bar.” “Tonight and tomorrow,” read the status, “highs in the upper--50’s. Lows in the upper 40’s. Rain and thunderstorms persistent throughout the next several days.”
Good. So no harvest moon for the next couple days. It made her stomach twist, though, to know that it was only delaying the inevitable.
She sat around, looking at all the brightly-colored, Japanese cartoon posters on her wall. Robots, samurai, and scantily clad cat girls. Oh my! One of them was a poster of Naruto, a spiky-haired kid ninja who is possessed by a demon known as the nine-tailed fox. She inspected the bright orange uniform, the wide, confident blue eyes, and the mischievous smile. She then spotted the translucent, orange silhouette of the beast that loomed large behind him. It was the spirit of the nine-tailed fox, the beast that lurked inside of him. Juno wrapped her arms around herself, as goosebumps peaked up over the surface of her skin. She prayed to God that, the moment she started undergoing her, uh, changes, that she wouldn’t turn out that ugly.
Or dangerous.
Then the alarm on her iPhone went off! BEEP-BEEP! BEEP-BEEP!! 12:01 A.M. She was officially twenty-one. She reached into her minifridge, grabbed a Bud Light, and cracked it open, raised it to the Naruto poster, and said, “Cheers looking at you, brother.”
She slugged it down, not even bothering to taste it, just letting the cold liquid run down her throat. Her iPhone sounded off with an 8-bit chip tune. She checked the screen of the phone. Her Dad was calling. Juno tapped the “pick up call” button.
“Juno?”
“Crunch time at Sushi Video Games?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Don’t think the insane deadlines end after you graduate from college.”
Juno stared at the screen of code. The typing cursor on the screen kept blinking at her, mocking her. Juno chuckled a little bit. “At the very least, I’m well-prepared.” Juno made a gagging noise. “That’s the sound of me dying from excessive coding disorder.”
“Juno, it’s your twenty-first birthday! Chin up a little!”
“Excuse me,” Juno replied, rising up from her chair and pacing around the room. “Did you not forget what today is also supposed to be?
“I trust that you read the weather report. The harvest moon isn’t going to show its face for another couple of nights.”
“Yeah but when it does—“ Juno accidentally raised her voice a little bit. Her bad.
“Juno, there isn’t any reason to worry just yet. When you do start going through these changes, I’ll be there for you to get you through it. And I’ll have a giant, juicy steak for you, just in case you start craving red meat.”
Juno leaned back up against her wall, sucking up a lungful of air, then letting it out, and smirking a little bit. He always did know the right thing to say.
“Thanks, Dad.”
