Ira Glass

I had just begun to describe, to myself and to the ants, the complicated rites sacred to the god whose worship I was imposing on them when I heard the first screams from the playground.

The girls screamed at Timothy the same way every time he came after them, in unison and with a trill that sounded almost like delight, as if they were watching the family cat trot past with something bloody in its jaws.

I scrambled up the side of the ravine and emerged as Timothy, shoulders hunched, arms outstretched, growled realistically, and declared that he was hungry for the throats of puny humans.

Timothy said this or something like it every time he turned into a werewolf, and I would not have been too concerned if, in the course of his last transformation, he hadn't actually gone and bitten Virginia Pease on the neck.

It was common knowledge around school that Virginia's parents had since written a letter to the principal

that the next time Timothy Stokes hurt somebody, he was going to be expelled.

Timothy was, in our teacher Mrs. Gladfelter's words, one strike away from an out.

And there was a widespread, if unarticulated, hope among his classmates, their parents, and all of the teachers at Copeland Fork Elementary that one day soon he would provide the authorities with the excuse they needed to pack him off to special school.

I stood there a while above my little city, watching Timothy pursue a snarling lupine course along the hopscotch crosses.

I knew that someone ought to do something to calm him down, but I was the only one in our school who could have any reason to want to save Timothy Stokes from expulsion.

And I hated him with all my heart.

I've been cursed for 300 years, he declaimed.

He was wearing his standard uniform of white dungarees and a plain white undershirt, even though it was a chilly afternoon in October and all the rest of us had long since been bundled up for autumn in corduroy and down.

I've been cursed to stalk the night through all eternity, he went on.

I've been searching for prey as lovely as you.

He lunged toward the nearest wall of the cage of girls around him.

The girls peeled away from him as though sprayed with a hose, bumped shoulders, clung shrieking to each other's sleeves.

Some of them were singing the song we sang about Timothy Stokes.

Timothy Stokes, Timothy Stokes, you're going to the home for crazy folks.

And the one singing the loudest was Virginia Pease herself in her furry black coat and her bright red tights.