What's Next

“Hey Jaz. So what do you think?” My twin brother joins me on the deck while we watch a few of the pups play in our back yard. 

            “I don’t know yet. What about you?”

            “Oh. I already told you. I’m staying here. Nothing for me out there.” I sigh. This is most definitely the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make.

            “This is the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make,” I tell him.

            “Well, I’ll support you whatever you decide but I’m not going to decide for you.”

“And why not! Make me stay here. Tell me you don’t want us to split up.”

            “Well, I don’t want us to split up, but I know we’ll both be fine if we do. So it’s fine for you to choose whether to stay here or leave for college.” He smiles real big at me, knowing he’s not helping anything. I glare at him then leave him on the porch. I join the pups in the yard and they climb all over me while I think.

We live in a small community of about a hundred wolf shifters. Pack protects pack so we’re all pretty close. It’s not that I wantto leave, which is the problem. I love it here. I love the relationship we have with each other, I love that everyone lives within walking distance of each other, and I love our forest. The forest is beautiful no matter the time of year. It’s amazing to run through the trees, as a human or a wolf, feeling the wind whip my clothes and hair or fur, and smelling all the different scents of the forest. It’s the best.

I do want to go to college though. Ever since I was little I’ve wanted to be a doctor. Knowing how the body works and how one part of it effects another part is all so fascinating to me. People thought I was weird when I was younger because I would always get so excited when someone got hurt. They thought I liked people getting hurt but actually I liked to see people get healed. It’s kind of a thin line that took a while for the pack to understand. I often got reprimanded for it at first, but I got the chance to explain myself after I saved my brother Kai when we were alone in the forest and he broke his leg and lost a lot of blood. 

I’d stopped the blood and made a splint for his leg, but Kai had passed out so I had to drag him back to the village. At the time everyone thought I liked when people got hurt so I guess they were either confused or jealous when I appeared out of the forest dragging a badly hurt Kai while bawling my eyes out. After our healer got to him and Kai was all better, several people asked if I was only crying because it was my brother since I seemed to like it when other people got hurt. I indignantly told them that I hated when people got hurt but that it was a good opportunity for me to see how to heal people. 

I want to be our pack’s next healer. Kai and I will finish high school in a month, so now we’ve got to decide what we’re doing next. Kai wants to be a pack enforcer. That’s basically a soldier/police officer for the pack. They protect the pack from outsiders and enforce the rules to protect us from each other when emotions run high. So he’ll start training next semester. I know what I want to do but just not how to go about it. I could stay in the village- I would love to stay in the village with the pack- and just learn from our healer. Or I could leave the pack and go to college to get modern training to be a doctor- it’s been four healers since one has gone out to get modern training. Our kind heals faster than humans and, for whatever reason, we don’t get many of the diseases humans get either so we’ve done fine with our current medical knowledge. I just feel like we could still benefit a lot from bringing some modern learning into the mix.

I think about this a lot. All day, every day, this is what’s on my mind. All the other seniors know exactly what they’re doing next year so I feel pressured to hurry and figure it out. I think about the pros and cons as we play with the pups and as we walk them back home to their parents. I think about it as we walk back home and help Mom with dinner. I think about it halfway through dinner, not hearing a word anyone else has said up to that point, when my brother shakes me hard.

“What Kai?”

“Mom’s talking to you and you’re just ignoring her,” he says.

“Sorry!” I say, my eyes widening in surprise. “I didn’t hear you. I wasn’t ignoring you. What did you say?” My mother sighs and smiles a soft knowing smile.

“Jaz, you’re thinking too hard. You realize you still have a month to figure things out, right?”

“Not if I’m going to college,” I tell her. “If I’m going to college there’s things I needed to have done already so I really need to make up my mind like weeks ago! And I still haven’t. And the more time I take to make a decision the more the decision can’t be college because-”

“Hun,” my mom cuts me off. “Stop worrying about all that. If you decide you want to go to college, we’ll make it happen. Any time before the semester starts and you’re fine.”

“Really you can decide to go to college even after that,” my dad adds. “There’s no rule that says if you’re going to go that you have to go the first semester after you graduate high school.”

“Exactly. So stop worrying so much and eat your food,” Mom says. I do eat, but it’s not so easy to just stop worrying.

~

A couple hours later I’m lying on my bed in my pajamas with the lights off just staring at the ceiling still thinking and worrying about it- almost at panic level. My window is open and the sounds and smells from the forest filter in along with the light from the moon. It soothes my stress a little bit but also just emphasizes why I want to stay. There’s none of my forest at college.

As I lay there thinking, my door creaking open draws my attention. I watch the door and see Kai poke his head in.

“Sis? You asleep?” He whispers.

“Nope,” I say, “I’m wide awake.” 

“I figured. Come run with me,” he says. “It’ll probably help you relax.” I think for just a moment before agreeing.

“’Kay.” 

We walk quietly downstairs and out the back door. We strip on the back porch and shift to our wolves. We both give ourselves a good shake before taking off at a run towards the forest a few feet away. We run for a while allowing ourselves to enjoy the simpler mind of the wolf. My wolf doesn’t worry about all the complex thoughts and decisions that my human mind does. Running in my wolf form gives my mind a break and a fresh perspective. After a few hours running together we return to the house, shift to human, and get dressed. We both go to my room and lay on my bed.

“Feel any better?” He asks.

“I feel more relaxed, yeah, but not any closer to making a decision,” I say. He sighs.

“What do you want, Jasmine? What do you want to do?”

“I want to be a doctor; the pack’s next healer.”

“That’s what I thought. So you know what you want to do so where’s the hesitation?”

“I don’t want to leave here.”

“Why?”

“Because… it’s home. I don’t want to leave.” There’s a pause as if he’s waiting for something else.

“That’s it?” He sits up and looks at me with wide eyes. “Are you kidding me, Jaz! This being home has nothing to do with whether to go to college or not! Yes, this is home. That just means it doesn’t matter where you go, this place and these people will be waiting for your return.” He flops down. “Goodness gracious! I thought you were trying to decide between being Healer or doing something else.”

“No. If I go to college I’ll study to be a doctor. I just don’t know if it’s really worth leaving home. We’ve been doing fine without modern medical knowledge or technologies. Maybe going is a big waste of time when I don’t really want to go anyway.”

“Whose idea was it for you to go to college to be a doctor?”

“Mine. But now I’m kind of regretting it.”

“Have you talked to Healer about it?”

“I mentioned that I was thinking about it.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said it was a nice idea; that the pack could benefit from it depending on what there’s been advances in.”

“I don’t want to tell you what to do, Jaz, but it sounds like you want to go to college and that it’s a good idea that you go,” he says. I sigh.

“Yeah. I guess. I just don’t want to leave.” There’s a pause and I hear him sniffle. I sit up and look at him to see he’s crying. Before I can say anything he responds.

“Good.” Sniffle. “Then I know you’ll come back.” He sniffles some more.

“Kai?”

“I’m going to miss you, Jaz.” He coughs, choking to get the words out and starts full on crying.

“Kai!” I lay on his chest and hug him tight. Now I’m crying, too. His arms come around me and we hold each other as we both cry. The thing about life in the pack is we’ve never been forced apart by classes or extracurricular activities or anything else. In recent years we’ve separated for three or four hours every few days for my healer’s apprenticeship and his enforcer equivalent to ROTC. We even shared a room for most of our lives. When we turned 14 we got separate rooms but even with that, we share a thin wall that we put our beds against so we could talk to each other through the wall. I’m not sure we’ll be able to handle being apart long enough for me to go to college.

~

The next morning at breakfast Kai is more quiet than usual and our parents pick up on it.

“Kai? Now what’s wrong with you?” Mom asks. He heaves a big, heavy sigh.

“Jaz is going to college. I’m happy she’s doing what she wants. I’m just really going to miss her.” My parents gasp at his words and their eyes get huge. The excitement in their eyes is obvious.

“You’ve decided?” They ask simultaneously, hopeful. I hate to ruin that but…

“Well… I don’t want to leave Kai. So I still can’t make up my mind.”