Listen to Me Now // Wenclair

Four

Prior to transferring to Nevermore, Enid had found it unbearably hard to make friends with the people of San Fransisco. Despite it being a horribly large, overpopulated, and people-infested city, there were little to no outcasts openly wandering the rambunctious streets, werewolves being in the lower populous (they were more abundant in the east coast, after all), but the few that did seemed to want to avoid her at all costs. Why?

Because her mother was Esther fucking Sinclair.

Her mother had made quite the name for herself over the years—being head of one of the most cold-hearted packs in the states was no easy feat after all—which meant that other outcasts would tend to avoid her no matter what. So, when Enid realized that befriending other outcasts was out of the question, she instead opted to mingle with the normies. They were far more abundant in numbers compared to that of her own kind and, on a few rare occasions, a lot more accepting of her so-called "quirks" (meaning her more wolf-like attitude compared to that of the average child) than Enid had ever expected.

She had grown up in a household where the mindset "different = bad" was practically carved in her brain; an outcast could never really trust a normie. But Enid had been reckless; too young to realize the risk of showing off her heritage so openly.

It was safe to say that, after an accident that left two kids on stretchers, she would no longer be accepted by her normie pack.

It was almost an endless cycle; year after year, Enid would do something rash and get in dangerous amounts of trouble, to the point that humans had declared her too dangerous to be around. She was too young to truly understand right from wrong; her mother too self-righteous to admit that her "perfect little Lycan" was too good—too perfect—to cause harm.

It was stupid really; a part of Enid had been so certain that, if her mother had just taken accountability and told Enid that roughhousing with her normie classmates wasn't safe, she wouldn't have gotten ousted so early in her life.

So, at eleven years old, Enid had gotten her first expulsion. Enid's mother had been furious; rage and disappointment becoming standard now more than ever in the young werewolf's life. It was at this point that Enid gave up hope for herself (she wondered now if that impact in her life had been one of the many factors to delay her transformation process); so much so that Enid had locked herself away, resorting to homeschooling until she was old enough to go to a boarding school for outcasts.

Her brothers, much to her mother's distaste ("she's a bad influence," Enid had once heard her mother tell them), had stuck close to her, however; they would practically attach themselves to her and defend her from any insults her mother would shoot at her, and make sure no petty normies so much as looked at the young blonde the wrong way whenever they went out.

"Don't go out without us," her eldest brother had told her, a soft smile on his face. "We can't let you have all the fun, after all."

Enid knew better. She knew that they just didn't want her to get hurt; they were protecting her from the harsh reality that, because she was an outcast, people would see her as a threat and potentially hurt her. But Enid was young—careless; enough so that she had snuck out time and time again just to escape the bitter and toxic environment her mother had set in the house.

It was one of these many outings that Enid had met Yoko—an outcast just like her, but far more hostile than the few that Enid had met. Much like Enid, Yoko didn't seem to know the boundaries that humans had compared to that of their own kind (if the blood—human blood, Enid noted by the scent—was anything to go by), and after a myriad of threats and empty promises of disembowelment, the two had quickly gone off and away from their equally tense homes and wandered San Fransisco as newly discovered friends. Enid's first real friend.