An old man told hes grandson:” My son, theres a battle between two wolfes inside us all. One is evil. It’s anger, jelousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies and ego.
The other wolf is good.It’s joy, peace, love, hope. humility, kindness and truth.”
The boy thought about it and asked: “Grandfater, which wolf wins?”
The old man quietly replied:
“The one you feed”

Aaaaaand ill just leave this here for you guys

1. What if Zach didn’t die? At the end of the day, all we have is Micah’s word for it. Which, as we know, isn’t much. Linking back to a comment i read earlier – what if the things that she reiterates and stresses the most aren’t true? this would link back to the mental institution theory, with the abusive parents and her being the murderer.

2. For some reason i have difficulty believing any of the werewolf stuff could ever be true, only because it just doesn’t seem right. She tells us herself the best lies have details – which is exactly what she does, dropping hints about her ‘illness’ literally dozens of times in the first part.

3. Another theory i find convincing is that she fantasized her and Zach’s relationship from the start. and that she may be the only character in the book.

4. I think that some of the minor details could be true though. They aren’t really important, but they are a start to building her true character.

a) her dad’s father was a black local in america, who is dead now.
b) micah is a girl. i think
c) she harbors strong feelings for zach. what they are though, is another question.
d) she has some issues. no scratch that. she has a LOT of issues.
e) her mother is white and french (although, truth be told the phrases she uses are extremely stereotypical french words like cherie and mon dieu)
f) she liked yayeko.
g) micah is a liar.

5) i think this quote could really relate to micah –
“be careful what you pretend to be because that is what you become”
as in her lying about
-being a boy
-werewolf (metaphorically speaking of course)

Things I want to know:
why did zach hide is DNA test? what did that mean? was the body not his?
is her name really micah?

When I put downthe book, I immediately thought, “Whoop, that’s it! Another book into the finish pile!” I was most fortunate to come across this thread though. It has really made me think so much more than when I was reading the book.

I have several theories, and I will list them in order of which one I think is likeliest to least (please note that I have a liking towards ‘dark’ stories. Creepy, I know):

1: The mental institution theory is by far the most believable one – for me– that I have read so far. If I were to re-read the book, which I will, I would probably be able to see for myself that plenty of evidence points towards this. I mean, think about it. If someone loner was rattling on about being a werewolf and dating a popular jock and being locked up in a cage in their bedroom, would you believe them? I hope not. Besides, the sudden introduction of Pete seemed fishy as well. As already stated many times before, Pete would be a convenient way of pushing the blame onto someone.

2: Micah killed Jordan. It’s not that impossible, you know. Every time she describes him, she calls him a brat, or an idiot, or a little sh*t. And she fantasizes in killing him. She *almost* killed him on purpose. So what if she just made one little slip and squeezed his throat, or gave him one too many Panadol? You never know, and you’ll never know. Also, if Jordan was killed, then Micah could be imagining Pete as a ‘twin’ of Jordan’s. Which makes one of them dead, the other one non-existent. Then, looping back to Theory #1, Micah blames Pete, a.k.a. Jordan, for Zach’s death.

3: Has it crossed anyone’s mind that Micah might be a wolf imagining it’s a human teenager girl? Uh-uh. I think it’s possible. A human cannot be a wolf. A wolf cannot be a human. So what if we just introduce a werewolf, the missing link between these two species? Then switched around the creatures? Micah, a ‘human’, who is actually a werewolf, could be a ‘wolf’, who is actually a werewolf. Yes, I know, werewolves are actually humans transforming into wolves, but in this crazy world of Micah’s anything can happen.

4: Micah has been telling the truth the whole entire time.

I’ll leave it to you to ponder on what could’ve happened, but as far as I can say, I’m dead set on Micah being Zach’s (and possibly the Shoji family’s) murderer.

Notes:
• what role does Erin Moncaster play in this?
• how about Zach’s ‘punishing inconstant heart’?
• what was with Micah’s father’s lie of her leg broken in ten places, and her face in a mess?

I had the same reaction you had when I started reading the comments here. Every theory has its merits and just muddles your mind up more.

1. The interpretation of this book depends on the age of the reader. For instance, I’m fourteen, and if someone older than me (Micah was 17) tells me something, I’m probabaly more apt to believe it than someone who’s above 17 and calling Micah a crazy kid. I think that if you are 14, your interpretation will vary from someone who’s 17, who’s 30, and so on. It really depends on if you’d tend to look up to Micah for being older, or down upon her for just being a mental teenager. For me, it’s hard to think that this girl who is older and maybe wiser was lying to me this whole time.

2. What if Micah was the only character in the book? Think about it… Sarah was almost like Micah’s opposite. Rich, pretty, popular: what Micah might have wanted to be. Maybe she’s trying to tell the reader that being Sarah was a secret desire, and maybe it showed that she did have a feminine side that Zach would have dated with no question. Tayshawn was the only boy who was ever nice to her. If she was really confused about her gender, or really insane, than maybe creating Tayshawn was a part of her that really was masculine, but a good masculine. Or maybe Tayshawn just made her feel better about herself so she tweaked how someone she’d known had actually treated her. Zach was Micah’s love. To me, Zach is the part of Micah that Micah liked. The athletic side. She said running made her feel free. And she referred to Zach as making her feel free. As far as the murder goes, I agree with a previous comment about how Pete is creeated to tie together the deaths of Zach and Jordan. Back to Zach: Micah could have made him up easily. Think about it: he was Sarah’s boyfriend, and Micah admitted an attraction towards Sarah. Maybe the inconsistent heart thing was about how Micah was mad at herself (the Sarah part) for loving Zach in two different personas… I don’t know. I’m not going to continue because my comment already has me confused. Let me know if you want to hear the rest of my theory.

I think there must be a reading where the werewolf thing doesn’t matter. Maybe if her father killed Zach and probably Jordan, too. Hard to know when her mother talks to her about this stuff. People often blame the victim; “You made dad mad and the chair he threw at you hit Jordan in the head” as the underlying accusation wouldn’t be too hard to believe in a family seriously scared of a violent man. Let’s say she’s not a wolf and Pete is real. Maybe she’s a neglected child that has had to spend far too much time fending for herself, and her wolf side is her selfish running away side. She may well fit in better in the country with her strange relatives.

She says she takes pills and has a cage at home. I think it’s obvious that she has had some kind of psychiatric treatment in the past, anyway, but that could be for any number of reasons. The pills that stop her from turning into a wolf could be anti-psychotics rather than birth control.

If Jordan is a figment, perhaps she killed him off in her mind. Or she’s transgender and killed off her maleness. Or introduced herself as Jordan at her last school. If she isn’t a wolf, she could be telling the truth about her motivations and feelings through that lens.

Somehow, I’m inclined to believe that she’s in college at the end and that her teacher visits her. I really need to re-read the thing carefully like I’m doing a college English paper, writing down notes and page numbers. There isn’t any reason to believe that events actually occurred in the same order as they did in the book, and I’d like to re-read and see what I think about that. If I were teaching English, I’d pick this book to illustrate what post-structuralist literature is, since it requires a certain amount of interpretation from the reader to make sense of it.

So many ideas I’ve read here never occurred to me while I was reading the book, though. I wonder if Justine ever peeks in here to see what theories people come up with. I doubt I’d be able to resist. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.

And this is a great discussion. I especially liked comments from Ariel (38), Jenny (42), Kate Marshall (43), Caitlin (44), Darcy (46), Tricia Sullivan (60), and Linda Frasier (63). Especially-especially Darcy’s suggestion that Micah was actually Jordan; I really like that. I had wondered whether Micah was actually biologically male, but I like the Jordan theory better.

I’m in the “wasn’t surprised by the werewolf thing” camp. I guessed maybe a quarter of the way through that that’s where it was headed: Micah’s sense of hearing and smell and her running ability pointed that way, and then I remembered the fur bit from the beginning and became convinced. But I loved the reveal anyway. (There were half a dozen places where Micah says “You’re probably wondering about x” and I was delighted because I had indeed been wondering about exactly that.) pAnd I think various people’s comments about genre expectations are really good points; part of why I guessed the werewolf bit was because everything I’ve read of Justine’s so far has been fantasy.

Regarding interpretations:

I very much want to interpret this book in the surface reading: Micah’s a werewolf, Pete killed Zach, Jordan died in an accident, age 10. And most of the book works in that interpretation. But I can’t figure out a way to make the prison-and-pills line (that several of y’all mentioned) fit into that reading.

“Bars surround me. Prison guards bind my arms, bring me pills several times a day.” At first I assumed it was metaphorical (because it’s immediately preceded by “I’ve been kept hostage by lies all my life. Imprisoned by them”). But I don’t see a way to read the “bring me pills several times a day” bit as metaphorical.

It could, of course, just be an outright lie. But there isn’t enough detail to support it as a lie, and I don’t see a reason for her to throw that particular lie in at that particular place.

So I’m wondering: those of you who do believe in the werewolf reading (or even see it as one among multiple plausible readings), how do you interpret that bars-and-pills line?

read the whole book translate by google.
I really have not formed a theory.I think that’s what Micah wanted from the beginning.

sorry me the bad english

Kawinkydink, much?

Anyway, I believe that Micah’s lycanthropy was a metaphor for her mind. Still not sure if she had a brother though.

Micah accidentally killed her brother, but not as a werewolf. She takes the pill and keeps her hair short and tries to pass as a boy at the beginning of high school to make up for what she did to her parents, to give them the son that they lost. She grew delusional as the result of this trauma, and the whole werewolf identity is in her head.

The “white boy” (who supposedly killed Zach) is her shadow: he’s white, she’s biracial; he’s a boy, she’s a girl; he’s uneducated and homeless, she’s college-bound and has a big family. He probably only exists in her head, as a way for her psyche to “re-integrate” with a disowned part of herself, to become whole.

She is writing the story from a mental institution, hence the reference to prison bars fairly early in the book.

I had a lot more written by it came out more like a rambling so I deleted. I’ll try to come back and post more when I can figure out what it is I’m trying to say.

i think her parents did abandon her. and her teacher did take her in. but i think micah killed all 3 of them.
micah states at some point ‘you think i killed both of them, maybe five’… so i think that’s the extra 3.

found herself in zach but since he kept asking

her about why she lied about being a boy she

killed him and pete is just one of her

personalties that she made up so she is

schizophrenic and in a mental institution and

the whole wolf thing is a lie i also think that

jordan her brother was real and she killed him

which is why the parents are so quick to

accuse her of killing zach and by her claiming

that pete is a wolf shes just using her other

personality as an excuse, the cage can also be

taken as a symbol of the parents trying to get

her to figure out who she is like literally

trapped by their way of thinking how

everything should be. i think the family is all a

figment of her imagination and that they are

just the doctors and patients in the institution.

and lily the cousin that was like flirting with

pete shows how she is kind of a little kid at

heart that is still confused about who she is

gender wise. does she like boys or girls is

micah a boy or a girl? the teacher could also

be made up and just be how she views her

mother since the dad is the one that is very

abusive towards her. sarah and tayshawn are

troubling because i do believe they are real as

is zack; i feel that they just add to the gender

confused part of the story and nothing else

and so that zack felt more real. zach might not

have paid attention to her nd she probably

was like stalking him which is why she knew

he was running at 4isham in the morning nd

killed him. the dogs were mentioned for a

reason maybe they’re scared of her cuz they

sense her inner demon so maybe she sneaked

in that night grabbed one and let it lose on

zack? so many different scenarios!

I myself would not like to think of Micah as a killer, she is the relatable girl bullied in school without seeming like a victim. I find myself in her, even the lying aspect. But when you take out the syfy aspect of the book you’re left with:

Abusive parents
Pills
Gender disorder
Dead brother (very much hated)
Dead boyfriend (after school boyfriend)
a liar

I think that adds up to a murderer.

I still suspect her father is the killer. Don’t ask me why.

Do you mean where she says, “this is my life, the beginning and the end of it?” You could interpret that as from now on, she will be someone else, I suppose. She obviously isn’t going to contact her parents, so it’s a new life.

One nagging suspicion: once she says, “promise fulfilled,” is she allowed to lie?