“Next week,” says Amanda, “I’m going to become a mosquito.”

I twist myself between the swing seat’s chains and stare up into the muggy sky of mid-July. There were so many other things I’d rather shift into, personally. An albatross, maybe. We’d reached Coleridge in our English prep course, and the bird’s wings glowed white and huge in the textbook’s illustration, so much more ferocious than the frightened men on the decks below.

“I’m going to fly through Jason’s bedroom window and bite him so hard he’ll go crazy itching and won’t study for the algebra test. Then, I’ll get a top grade and win one of Mr. Lee’s gold stars,” Amanda goes on.

“Would you still love me if I were a mosquito?” I quote the meme, wondering how she’d hold a #2 pencil in those spindly little legs.

Amanda chucks a crumpled soda can at my head, and I dodge. “Who should I ask, Jason or Mr. Lee?” she laughs.

I love Amanda’s laugh. It makes her sound so cool and mature, even though she doesn’t understand that I was the one asking whether she would still love me, even if I became something she didn’t recognize.

Jason is playing soccer nearby with some sixth-graders. His side looks like it’s losing. Mr. Lee leans against one of the oaks at the edge of the field, his hair a dark halo around his chiseled face as he yells foul. Our classmates from last year called him Mr. Vampire. They didn’t like Mr. Lee, so it isn’t a compliment. Amanda and I call him Vampy. We do, so it is.

“Oh, both,” I lie. I let go of the chains and spin back to stasis, the flat overcast sky whirling above me as though I’m a shot bird, tumbling to earth.

We started shifting in sixth grade. It wasn’t hard, just a simple slither sideways into another skin, more invisible beneath pelts and exoskeletons than in running shorts and t-shirts getting too tight in the wrong places. Easier to bark in a circle, run up trees after squirrels, scuttle beneath a tilted horizon. I had a rodent phase early on and guiltily gorged on scraps of mac-and-cheese. That’s how Mom found out. She’d been trying to sweep me out the front door with a broom when I shifted back.

Of course, she had a meltdown and demanded I tell her who I picked up this bad habit from. That led to a lot of crying phone calls with Amanda’s mom. They sent each other posts from alternative blogs advising a clean diet and reducing harmful electromagnetic exposure to make it go away. That made everything less fun. And when Mom found a mouse’s tail in the fruit bowl, she freaked out until I came downstairs and proved I wasn’t dead. That meant the end of critters, or anything else small enough to become roadkill. But I couldn’t try anything big and noticeable either. What would the neighbors think?

So, stuck in our suburban purgatory, Amanda and I dream of our ideal shift. It gets us through family dinners while our moms tell us to eat more quietly, eat neatly, eat less, and our dads talk varsity sports with our brothers because of course they’re shoe-ins for Big 10 schools, even though our grades are better. Amanda’s choice is a cassowary, with long nails and blue-tinged eyelids sharper than any Sephora makeup. I prefer a tiger—a huge, nightmare tiger, powerful enough to break through any cage that wants to hold me. So I find Amanda’s choice of mosquito today unusually dull, but I’ve always been the more imaginative one of us. If I wanted to remove Jason as a threat, I’d be a king cobra, with fangs primed to take him down on the soccer field. Luckily for him, I’m very good at algebra.

At the bell, we troop inside, the summer heat raising a sleepy old-wood smell from the hallway’s paneling. The prep courses were Vampy’s idea so that we could go straight into 9^th Grade Honors in the fall. Our moms lapped it up when he smiled his toothpaste-ad smile at them. Neck deep in homework, when would we find time to shift into something even more unknowable to them?

“Hey, Amanda!” Jason calls, jogging up in a miasma of cut grass and sweat. He slips between us, and I want to shove him away, but Amanda smiles like she’s glad he’s here. “Did you see that last goal I scored? Thirty feet from the corner of the field, Messi is crying…”

I want to put my incisors in his leg, my claws in his shoulders; everything smells too strong; the light is too bright. My skin itches and crawls, too tight to hold in the anger beating through my blood, and I feel myself slipping, right now with everyone watching—

“Erin!”

Mr. Lee hurried to catch up with us and claps my shoulder. I lean a little into the gesture and grin up at him. There’s a reason I studied so hard to earn four gold stars. “I’ve been hearing from Louise Hicks about your great progress in lit.”

“I really like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It’s all so tragic. ‘I shot the albatross!’” I peek out of the corner of my eye to see if Amanda heard me, but she’s giggling as Jason makes raspy roars from an imaginary crowd. He’d be a pathetic lion.

“Fantastic. Let’s see if you’re as fluent in polynomials,” says Mr. Lee. He keeps close as we go into the classroom, and the dead weight of dormant summer dreams overpowers us.

“Jason was so cute talking about the soccer game,” Amanda says as we bike home. “His side should have won. Mr. Lee made an unfair call.”

I snort. “Vampy likes the sixth graders. They’re smaller.” I don’t know why she’s still talking about Jason. The whole afternoon itches at me, like a mosquito bite in a place you thought they couldn’t get to. But then her plan to tank Jason’s algebra grade suddenly makes sense: the attack that wasn’t an attack but a reason to get close to him. She hadn’t been unimaginative at all.

“Don’t you think we’re a little old to keep calling him Vampy?” she snaps.

I’m so busy following my own train of thought that I don’t register her question, and so I cut over her, demanding, “Do you like him?”

The echo of my own words reaches me a moment later, when I see Amanda’s stare.

“Ew, no, Erin, he’s our teacher.”

I had meant Jason and his stupid bragging, but I hate that Amanda assumed I meant Mr. Lee. I hate that she’s looking at me as though I were disgusting, even though she had snickered as much as I did last year when we gave him the name Vampy since he looks like Oscar Isaac. It had been safe then, a joke behind the giddiness of being thirteen. But it isn’t fun anymore, not the way Amanda curls her lip, as if she’s suddenly so much more mature than me, so far beyond having silly little crushes. My back starts bunching, the skin of my arms prickling; a shift is due any second, right here on the highway with cars streaking by.

“You wanted the gold star, didn’t you?” I ask. It’s the wrong thing to say.

“That’s because I don’t want to fail,” Amanda hisses, and her eyes gleam. She must be close to a shift, too—unless that’s just my wishful thinking so I won’t be the only dumb beast between us. “I need to get through this summer so I’m ahead when I start high school, so when I graduate, I can get the hell out of here. I thought that was our plan!”

Our plan. Linked together in those three letters, my frustration drains away, even though for me, getting out had been a dream, just as misty as my tiger. I didn’t know when, for Amanda, it became something so tangible as a plan. “Fine,” I mumble. “You know, I can help you if you want. With algebra. So you get a good grade.”

“Forget it.” Amanda kicks off and rolls ahead of me, still scowling. “Maybe I’ll ask Jason.”

Watching her pedal away, her curly hair flaring like crackling flames beneath the late-afternoon sun, I decide to take matters into my own hands. I’ve lingered in dreams too long. In the wake of a passing eighteen-wheeler, I judder all down my spine and fall to my hands and knees, my palms barely feeling the bite of the stones. No one else notices as a tiger slinks from an abandoned bike toward Jason’s house.

Night falls as I trot along King Street, sticking to the inky pools between light posts. When the shadows slide across me, they slip off my back in long stripes like fear. My paws are huge, velveteen. Tyger, tyger, burning bright. Bright as the spark of daring excitement that quickens my pace. Bright as the gold star I’m going to get for Amanda.

Jason’s house sits at the end of the road among dense trees that give me cover. As I prowl between the boles, my night-keen eyes peer through the foolishly open windows on the ground floor. Eventually, I find Jason in the dining room, hunched over the table and surrounded by homework. Algebra, probably. Perfect. I pad closer across the grass, press my nose to the windowsill, and growl.

He doesn’t notice at first, tapping at his calculator. I growl again, and this time, when the entire wall trembles with the vibration, he glances over. His face turns the color of spoiled milk, and he shrieks for help, nearly falling flat on his face as he scrambles to flee the room. I probably don’t have much time. With a running leap, I crash through the window, skimming my shoulders on the frame, and crack the dining table on impact. Papers whirl through the air and skitter over the tile. I catch them on my claws and my teeth, shredding the equations to a pulp. For good measure, I chew through a few problems already answered in Jason’s childish scrawl. Amanda will be so happy with me for sabotaging him, I think as I prance on the last muddied pages.

That’s when I hear the click. In another window’s reflection, I see Jason hiding behind his dad, and his dad, hiding behind a gun.

“Shoot it,” Jason rasps, and I spring.

The gun goes off in a blur of heat and sound as I hurtle outside and hit the ground behind the house—back in my own body, though my tailbone aches in memory of the bullet on a tail I no longer have.

“Did you kill it? Did you kill it?” Jason screeches, but his dad only swears from farther back in the room. The recoil must have thrown the gun barrel straight into his chest. Adrenaline pushes me to my feet, and in another instant, I’m running toward home, the tiger inside me giving me speed.

I’ve done it, I’ve done it. For the first time, I've accomplished something I’ve wanted to without fear. All my life, I’ve been so afraid of wanting, of doing. I’ve always been so good. But now, none of that matters. I put on this skin, this ideal form of myself, and it has filled me with triumph. This is what shifting is for—to feel this glee that, for once in my life, I can grab hold of my own life and get whatever I want.

We have prep again the next day. I spot Amanda on a bench in front of the school, which isn’t one of our usual places, but then I see why she chose it. Jason’s sitting next to her, and I can hear his whiny voice carrying through the humid air. “And it was huge, like the size of an SUV, but I got Dad’s gun out of the cabinet and said, ‘Come on, you ugly cat, just try me.’”

“That’s awful!” Amanda gasps.

That’s bullshit, I think.

“So I shot it! But then it got away. I looked it up, but the zoo didn’t say anything about losing a tiger.”

“It came from the zoo?”

“Must have. Where else do you get gigantic nightmare tigers?”

I wish he hadn’t said nightmare. I wish he hadn’t said nightmare right as Amanda looks up and sees me approach. I wish I didn’t have to see the flash in her eyes as she connects our midnight talks of perfect shifts with a freak big cat showing up at Jason’s house.

“Oh, I dunno,” says Amanda, a little louder to make sure I’m listening. “Lots of places. I hear they’re super popular these days. Anyway, let’s study algebra together tomorrow.”

I stop in my tracks, but Jason’s not going to say the tiger ate his homework and punch a hole right through his lie. “Sure,” he says, and Amanda laughs—the laugh I love. I’ve never heard her give it to anyone other than me before.

I used to wonder about what happened to girls like us—if we might ever outgrow shifting. The thought filled me with terror—at being reduced to this body I had been born in, seen only as the prim girl my mom raised, and never able to express all the possibilities that lived under my skin. The alternative blogs sure don’t say. Right now, though, I think that won’t ever happen. Even if she hasn’t changed into an animal, I just watched Amanda shift into a stranger, a person I don’t understand. I feel as though I’m collapsing into myself, like Coleridge’s ship breaking up mid-sea, but somehow I’m still standing, the hot pavement pressing up through the worn soles of my sneakers.

I wait there until Amanda and Jason go in. I wait until Vampy jogs around the corner of the building, waving to me on his way to class but not stopping to walk me in. I guess I was never that special to him after all. When the bell finally rings itself into silence, I might be the only person left alive, like the Ancient Mariner on the rotted, drowning deck. He was so stupid. So am I.

An hour later, Amanda reappears, mercifully alone. “Have you shifted into a pillar of salt now?” she jeers. I don’t respond. Her eyes glow a cassowary blue in the late afternoon. “We need to talk.”

She takes my arm and pulls me into the shade of the nearest building. All sensation fizzes around where her hand meets my wrist, her anger holding my dead shame. She pushes me up against the dank corner by the art supply room. My heel lands in stagnant water, and little bugs buzz in the air around us, almost louder than the noise of my thoughts.

“What were you doing?” she demands. “Were you trying to kill him?”

I consider what that would have felt like: the hot gush of his blood like biting deeply into a ripe nectarine. The easy subtraction of Jason from the world. “No,” I say. “I was doing what you said you wanted: hurt his chances on the algebra exam. I did it for you.”

Amanda laughs, but it’s not her real laugh. She gave that away to Jason. Instead, I get this high-pitched and sarcastic huff in my face. I smell mint gum and cherry soda on her breath. Something cracks in the middle of my chest.

“You thought I was serious? That was a joke, Erin. Something stupid. I can’t make stupid jokes anymore without you going off the rails?”

“His dad shot me,” I cry, the words forcing their way through the crack and making it wider.

“That was your fault for even being there in the first place,” she says, and it lands like a slap. “We’re too old for this, all of it. I don’t want to be some creature for the rest of my life. Life is hard enough. I want a boyfriend and a college degree and friends who have normal hobbies like going to amusement parks and concerts and posting cute selfies on Instagram. What am I supposed to do, take a picture of you as a lizard with a caption like, hanging out with my weirdo bestie?”

“Shut up,” I mumble, hugging myself, trying to keep from crumbling apart.

“You’re such a baby. I wish it were that easy. I want it to be that easy, Erin, I do. But shifting isn’t going to solve our problems. Don’t you get that now?”

But it’s gotta be Amanda who doesn’t understand—and maybe she never understood. Can’t she see? Her choice is too easy, too: writing off what we are and what we can be, as though cutting away this part of ourselves will let us fit more easily into the world we’re told we might inherit. But I don’t want that world if it means giving up the tiger that’s still burning inside me. Its claws tore me away from Amanda, but she’s the one choosing to shed me like evidence of a crime. I want to shake her, tear her apart, to make her feel a sliver of what I felt last night. But I can’t get any closer to her. It’s not just Jason between us now—it’s Amanda herself, and for a bright moment, I hate her for doing this to us, my blood buzzing in my ears.

But it’s not just my anger making so much noise. I glance up.

“Look, Amanda,” I say quietly, pointing at the shadowy eaves of the art building. “The mosquitoes are here for you. They heard your wish. They want you to be one of them.”

Hundreds of bloodsuckers cling to the cobwebbed roof. Amanda flings her jacket at them with a birdlike screech, but the motion only sends them fluttering down in a cloud to swirl around our heads, caressing us gently with their feelers. They won’t hurt me, and for a moment, blinded by the white snow of their immensity, I want to join them. I turn to Amanda, knowing the mosquitos she almost claimed kinship with will help bridge the gulf between us, prove to her the rightness of her own desire.

Except she’s gone.

I can’t see her running away across the parking lot. She must have shifted after all into the crowd, must have become something small and harmless to save herself, abandoning me. But isn’t that just what she had told me she was going to do? I no longer know her anymore; I can’t guess what she’s decided. I try to shift into a mosquito myself, but the doubt of Amanda’s whereabouts imprisons me. I give a snarl of frustration and push my way through the art room door, slamming it behind me. Through the sidelight, I can still see the mosquitoes beating and beating the glass in beautiful harmony, separated from me by this horrible cold window.

But there’s one mosquito that has come inside with me, clinging to the wall at eye level. My breath comes in great heaves as I stare at it.

“Shift back,” I order. “If you’re Amanda, shift back.”

I want it to be Amanda so badly, sticking close to me even after everything she said. But the mosquito only waves its feelers aimlessly in the air. It isn’t Amanda. Whatever Amanda chose, she’s flown far away, and the realization carves the cracks inside me wider than caverns, large enough to swallow me whole.

I strike out in agony, wanting to hit something, to hurt something, and realize I’ve smacked the bug off the molding. It plummets to the floor.

“No, no, no,” I whisper, instantly dropping to pick it back up. I shouldn’t have killed it. If I’ve killed it, then I’ve killed whatever could have existed between me and Amanda. “Please. Please. Shift.”

It doesn’t move. I choke on an awful heaviness in my throat, but then I force my hands to steady. It’s okay, I can save it, I tell myself. I can transform it into something greater than it could ever have been otherwise, just like we were supposed to be.

I use a piece of drawing paper to pick up the mosquito—weightless, its broken legs splaying out on the page—and carry it over to one of the work tables, where paintbrushes are drying next to some tubes of paint. I find the gold and squeeze a dollop out onto a palette, but the shade is too dark, so I water it down until it’s just right—until it’s just the color of Amanda’s hair. I dip in the bristles of a brush, and the paint bleeds off in little dots that pin each leg, the whole flimsy, irrelevant body, to the paper until it lies still at last.

Look, Amanda. I made it for you: the gold star you always wanted.

© 2026 Cressida Roe