I've been meaning to blow up a stick of dynamite for awhile.

So on our summer camping trip, I take one of Dad's military-grade sticks and shove it between two burls on a redwood. Then I light her up.

I know I should've expected the tree to fall over, but I thought, I'll just make a big boom, get my blood pumping, and go on my merry way, like riding Space Mountain or the Greatest Rollercoaster on Earth.

That's how it worked out when my brothers lit Dad's dynamite. My brothers were the ones who told me it's so strong, it'll glitch reality.

Unfortunately, when little sis' dynamites a tree, not only does it burst from its roots, it manages to dodge the outstretched arms of all the trees surrounding it, so when it hits the floor, it alerts a park ranger half a mile away. The only silver lining of the tree falling in the woods is the glitch in the air, the violet-magenta blip in my environment.

I may or may not have had a rough sophomore year.

This spectacle may or may not be how I feel about that.

The glitch was cool. I like knowing this sad world is a little buggy.

♦

Less than ten minutes later, I stand before my parents and the park ranger, a delinquent teen up for old-people trial. Strangely, they want to drag me right up to the toes of the tree's corpse before they scold me, like I don't know a couple binary codes can fix the disturbance.

I can literally do nothing to the world that can't be fixed. It's fine.

"You see this," Dad sneers, standing a few feet in front of my distraught mother and the peeved park ranger.

"Yeah, I see it," I tell him. "I saw it when it fell."

His green eyes widen.

My eyes are brown, like Mom.

"You clearly don't want to camp here," he says, his voice eerily calm, quiet. Low-toned. "You want a different kind of camp."

♦

Honestly, I think he meant boot camp. Like, I'm almost positive he thought the brochure my brothers gave him was titled, Kick Your Kid's Butt in Boot Camp, or something to that effect.

But the rickety, barbed-wired grounds the bus pulls into looks more like a concentration camp, like a crater leftover from the throes of a war.

As I step out of the old yellow bus, I balk at the three thatched-roof huts surrounding a bonfire. Three clusters of three huts, around three bonfires of different colors, and none of them have a clique that looks like me. Not that there are any cliques that look like me, even at school.

So do I head over to the red bonfire with the werewolves, where the flames at least look normal?

Or do I dare the blue-flamed bonfire surrounded by fairies?—like actual, two-foot tall fairy wings with fluorescent wings, crystal slippers, and rainbow-spotted tutus?

Of course, if I'm feeling lucky, I could head over to the green-flamed bonfire with the shell-white vampires snuggled inside those mermaid-fin crochet blankets, red candy apples and s'mores wedged in their fanged mouths.

Seems like a fairy kind of day.

I flip off a kid who bumps shoulders with me on his way out of the bus, not thinking he'll see my middle finger. Then he turns around, and not wanting to look like a chicken, I lift my other hand to give him the double-bird. Secretly, on the inside, I'm hoping he isn't going to snap open his mouth and bite my neck.

"Why're you even here?" he asks. "You a shapechanger?"

"I'm not some freak designer baby," I retort. "I'm human."

"Gross," he says.

Could his voice sound a little less disgusted? I may not be injected with everyday superpowers, but I'm not that unattractive a person, either. Sure, I'm short, and I chew my nails to nubs, but can't he see the overwhelmingly fake confidence of my middle fingers? Isn't that worth anything to boys these days?

"Why're you here?" I echo. "You a shapechanger?"

"This is where my parents send me every year," he replies coolly. "And yeah. I am."

I curl my lip. "Your parents send you to vampire camp every year?"

He snorts before he heads over to the red bonfire.

When he's halfway there, I get the courage to shout, "So you're a wolf-man, I see!"

"Nah," he calls back, uninterested.

A few other of my fellow, disgruntled teens shuffle off the magic school bus. Then the bus vanishes into the dark woods. Lovely.

Forget the fairies. I need to show this wolf-kid what he missed out on. There are half a dozen hunks around his wily red bonfire; one of them will let me sit on his lap eventually. Then I'll tap into the sweet, sweet power of jealousy.

♦

As I head hesitantly towards the fire, the thickest of the wolf-men, a bipedal white wolf with a heavy-snouted face, shifts like an octopus taking on the colors of the landscape, until his upper torso is more like a human. His flat face and dark eyes pull me in like nectar.

The boy I flipped off looks up from the other side of the bonfire, frowning.

"Hello there," the white wolf-man says. "You plan on staying with us?"

There are no women among the werewolves, although in the thatched tent furthest from the bonfire, a group of werecats eye me coyly. And they're long-haired, long-nailed, and long-eyelashed. Two of the three of them look like girls; the other one of them is probably nonbinary, although never good to assume.

I don't think I'll bother going over there to ask. They're too cheerleadery for me.

"Don't mind them," the white wolf-man says.

"Hey," my bus-boy pipes up. "Didn't you ever read Red Riding Hood?"

♦

Later that night, I'm in the lap of the white wolf-man, whose name is Aden. And the boy, Kithun, is watching us irritably, so my plans to charge him with jealousy?—an overwhelming success.

Except, when the bonfire dies down, and the moon rises high, Aden wants to know if I'll come to his tent with him. I didn't mean to get that knee-deep into it.

Aden rubs my back, growling, "We can get to know each other better—talk all night, if you'd like."

"He's no interest in talking to you," Kithun says.

Aden glares at the smaller man across the campfire while the other wolf-men, in various half-human and wolf-like forms, howl and holler.

Then one of the catwomen hisses so loud, I think I see her spittle behind the sparks of dying firelight. "Can you pipe it down," she calls.

"Why don't you ladies sit over here with us?" Aden shouts. "Like this human girl."

"We're not stupid," the catwoman replies.

Did she just call me stupid? That's just rude. I'm a bloody genius. I wanted to get under Kithun's nails, and by hell, I did it with spades. I succeed at whatever I set my heart on, whether it's a boy or a stick of dynamite.

I'm so entranced at the conversation hurdled over the distance of our camp, between Aden and the catwomen, and the nonbinary who looks a whole lot like a leopard, I'm spooked when I turn my head and see Kithun right next to us.

After I gasp out my surprise, Aden turns, his rough eyes pinning to points.

"Come with me," Kithun says.

Aden wraps his hands around my shoulders. "I like her here."

"Where will we go?" I ask.

"Away from here," Kithun says.

I start to stand, except Aden holds me tight. Then Kithun bares his teeth, and for the first time, I see the thin points of his incisors, glittering in the fading firelight. His eyes glow a bright blue, like the moon of a late-summer night.

Aden, reluctantly, lifts his hands from my shoulders.

So I follow Kithun as he wanders away from the three bonfires and the three thatched tents surrounding them. I keep looking around for adults who are posted to stop teenagers from leaving camp, yet I see no chaperones, no park rangers or fathers.

I'm not sure if anyone cares what happens to us.

♦

Kithun takes me to a brook, which we follow to a wider streambed that's alive with the singsong of birds and the croaks of frogs.

I crouch near the water, searching for tadpoles, but the forest is thick here, letting little moonlight in; so I have to get my nose inches from the water before I can make out anything other than granite boulders and river stones.

Kithun picks up a stone and skips it.

I tease, "Every person, at every camp ever, throws skipping stones."

"And every human girl," he retorts, "in every dark wood, gets hunted by wolves."

"Why hang out with them, if you think they're bad?" I ask.

He throws another stone, then faces me. The stone plunks, silencing most of the frogs.

Crouched just above the water, looking up at him, I think I catch the glimmer of a tail behind the silhouette of his tight-jean hips, but then shadows move on the other side of him, too; so it must just be the wind, shuddering plants in the night.

"I'm the only one of my kind," he says. "Here, anyway. Don't really belong with the wolves, the fairies, or the vampires."

"And what's your 'kind'?" I ask.

As his face wrinkles with concern, he sighs and closes his eyes. Then he draws in a deep breath. "Why aren't you terrified of this place?"

"I go to a hybrid school," I tell him. "We've got designer babies everywhere."

"We aren't designer babies."

"You prefer genetically altered?"

"Try chimera," he says.

He crouches at my side, so he's also near the water.

We sit there in silence, an awkward stillness passing between us. Every time I glance over at him, he's staring into the depths of the stream, like his soul's lost somewhere at the bottom.

"I wish my parents left me alone," he whispers. "That I grew up normal. Like you."

"Being a shapechanger is pretty rad," I tell him. "Also, my life is hardly normal."

He snorts as he laughs. "Rad? That's what you call it?" Then he finally looks to me, a smile playing on his lips. His hair is just long enough to hang in his glowing eyes, but only barely. "I think it's reckless to 'upgrade' your children with technology you don't even understand. I think it's cruel." He purses his lips. "Not rad."

Ever since artificial intelligence was applied to stem cell and genetics research, we've been modifying children from the womb to the first year of age, sending CRISPR through their bodies with algorithms unfamiliar to us. Scientists say artificially intelligent design is the way of the future, so we accept their technological magic as the next age of things. No one really knows where technology's limits are located anymore, though.

Kithun stands. "Want to see how 'rad' shapechanging is?"

I nod. I don't know whether to feel giddy or scared.

I just know this is probably going to be better than the dynamite.

He strips.

He doesn't tell me not to watch.

His arms lengthen first, so they are as long as him, hands to the ground. For a moment, it's as if he's shapes and pixels, rather than flesh and bone. Parts of him wink in and out, like light shining momentarily into my eyes, blinding bits of him. Bytes of him, shifting from zeroes to ones. He's cute, then he's grotesque, before he's simply fascinating.

It's different when you know you live in a simulated world—versus, when you see you live in a simulation—like how it's different when you're in space, looking at the little blue dot, feeling how small you are, rather than merely thinking it.

In these strange anomalies in our landscape, glitches and great distances away, we reframe our perception, opening our mind's eye.

It freaked me out, the first time I watched my brother glitch through a teleporter. But since then, I've seen glitches in high school, in the virtual landscape of my living room; shapeshifting, at this point, is just another numbing and acceptable oddity.

As Kithun leans into his long arms—or perhaps, capsizes from his short legs—part of me wants to reach out, to check on him, yet instead I scoot back, my neck throbbing.

He is a quadruped with his back arched, his spine high.

Silky, golden hair grows from him, as a timelapse of saplings in spring.

His ears catlike, his paws wolflike, and his snout longer than Aden's ever was, his nine tails whip out behind him in a fan as he stands before me, now a kitsune god.

"You're a fox," I stammer. "A nine-tailed fox."

"And a clever one," he says, "who remembers the way back to the road."

I ride on Kithun's back, deep into the dark wood, up the asphalt with the potholes no one fixes anymore. At the top of the hill, he asks, "Which one," and though I doubt he can tell from this far away, I point at my house and whisper, "There."

Then he takes me from the woods where my parents left me, to the hollow house of my semi-functional human life, unless I can convince him to take me further, as I convinced him to save me from the clutches of the white-wolf at the bonfire.

♦

First draft: September 18
Second draft: October 18, when I didn't touch the text but added the winner sticker for the Summer Adventure contest!
🚀 Off I go to be happy now! 🚀

Inspiration: Summer Adventures Contest from adventure, prompt #2: When you are 16 years old, everyone expects you to do something stupid, make bad decisions and most probably ignore everything your parents say. But what happens when you go too far, and they decide it's time to teach you a lesson, and you end up being sent to a summer school full of mythical creatures?
Word count: 2388