Men of the Otherworld

Kids who don't eavesdrop on adult conversations are doomed to a childhood of ignorance.

At school, our classroom had a small rodent zoo consisting of two rabbits, three hamsters, a litter of baby gerbils and a guinea pig. At first, I’d thought the teacher was raising snack food, which impressed me, being the first sign of intelligence she’d shown. Soon, though, I’d figured out the animals’ true purpose and left them alone, though I would never understand the appeal of petting and coddling perfectly good food.

He obviously needed more practice, but no matter how often I abandoned him out there, his sense of direction never seemed to improve.

At the time, it seemed to me that Jeremy was spending a lot of time with a piece of plastic pressed against his ear, talking to himself. Which was fine by me. We all have our eccentricities. Jeremy liked talking to plastic; I liked hunting and eating the rats that ventured into the motel room. Or, at least I did like hunting and eating the rats, until Jeremy caught me and promptly kiboshed that hobby. Some of us are less tolerant of eccentricities than others.

I spend four years chasing the guy of my dreams, finally get him, and now I have to compete with a gorgeous, twenty-year-old supernatural sex fiend. ~Jaime Vegas

In the end, like any stray, I was conquered by the promise of continued food and shelter. Trust would take longer.

We did as we were told, staying outdoors, and not bothering Jeremy and Peter. Yet that could be done while sitting outside the study window, where we could listen to the conversation within. Kids who don’t eavesdrop on adult conversations are doomed to a childhood of ignorance. Of what I heard that afternoon, I understood only one key point: that Peter was leaving the Pack. Why he was leaving, what that meant for his life, how difficult that decision was for him to make, all that I wouldn’t fully understand for years to come. From the tone of the conversation, though, I knew that this decision marked the end of a long personal struggle with the issue of Pack-hood. I knew too that this was a decision Jeremy had both known and feared was coming. Roughly half of all Pack youth left the group in their early twenties. It was like membership in any regimented segment of human society—children stay with the group because they have to, then when they hit adulthood, they realize that they have a choice. Some, like Antonio, chafe at the rules, but not enough to consider leaving. Some, like Jeremy, disagree with many of the principles, but believe in the institution itself enough to stay and try to effect change from within. Others look around and say ‘”I don’t belong here”, and this was the case with Peter.