Amanda is Louise’s governess. She looks like pillows. She takes care of Louise because Louise’s mother is always someplace more important.

Louise and Amanda live in these big rooms at the very top of the Plaza Hotel. Louise has millions of toys and is bored a lot. She asked me what I wanted to play and I said dolls because I can’t remember the last time I had a doll to play with, for Lord’s sake, but the absolute instant I touched one of her dolls she snatched it right out of my hands and smashed its head against the wall and said dolls were stupid and we were going to play something good.

We played Davy Crockett and she shot me. Then we played cowboys and Indians and she stuck an arrow in me. Then we played that she was the queen of everything in the whole world and I had to fetch her a cup of tea on a silver tray or else she was going to cut off my head and hang me up by my tongue and push me off a cliff and utterly squonk me. I had to act like I didn’t mind about any of those stupid games she made me play because I wanted another chance to talk to the frog dog that bit me. I told Louise we should play with the frog dog but she said she was the queen of everything and I was a mere slave and how dare I speak up like that to her majesty and that is when she hit me right over the head with that silver tray.

I am a werewolf. I hate silver. Silver hates me.

I started to cry and Amanda came in and took the silver tray away from Louise and said, “Louise, what what what have you done to your little playmate, and with the silver tray that my dear grandmamma gave me? It is of great sentimental value to me and completely irreplaceable. Look, you have bent it. It will cost a lot of money to have fixed.”

That was when Louise grabbed the silver tray back and ran to the window and just flung it open and threw that tray right out into the air like it was a paper airplane. Then she said, “Look! I just saved you a lot of money. I want some chocolate ice cream now. Call Room Service and charge it, buzzard-face.”

Here is what Amanda said: “They don’t pay me enough to put up with this sort of crap.”

Here is what Louise said: “What did you just say?”

Here is what else Amanda said: nothing.

Louise smiled. “That’s what I thought.” And we had chocolate ice cream.

While we were eating, the frog dog came over and bit me on the arm. He didn’t do it hard enough to make me bleed, like when he turned me into a werewolf. He did it just enough so I would look at him. Then he rolled his googly eyes at me and at the door to the bathroom.

I got up and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Louise said, “Who cares?” She grabbed my chocolate ice cream before I could take even one half of a step away from it and gobbled it down as I was walking away, but I didn’t care because the frog dog was walking right beside me all the way into that bathroom.

I shut the door behind us and sat down on the toilet lid. The frog dog sat down on a big pink fluffy bath mat and looked at me tilty. “It’s a good thing you found me,” he said. “You never should’ve run away after I bit you. Something could’ve happened to you, and you’re the One!”

“I am not one,” I said. “I am six.”

He said, “Spare me the cute stuff. I have been around this town since before Peter Stuyvesant learned how to pee without getting any on his wooden leg and I know my stuff. I am the Vessel of Lycanthropy, which makes me like the Holy Grail for werewolves everywhere in the greater New York metropolitan area, except for Staten Island. I am the immortal blood descendant of the great she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, and the Fenris wolf who will bring the doom of Ragnarok upon the gods themselves, savvy?”

I said I savvied. I didn’t know what that meant but Louise wasn’t going to be eating my chocolate ice cream forever and I wanted to find out more before she came and banged on that bathroom door at us.

The frog dog said I was the Chosen One because he did not just go around biting every Tom, Dick, and Harry unless the Spirit of Lycanthropy told him to. So far he had been around for twenty million hundred and two years and bitten an awful lot of people but nothing much came of it because someone always shot them with a silver bullet and he was losing hope. He said that when I got older I would be able to turn into a wolf without having to wait for the full moon because rank has its frilly edge. He made me promise not to get shot with a silver bullet and I did because right then I would have promised anything just to get him to stop yapping at me.

That made him happy. He said I was going to bring about the Kingdom of the Werewolves through the spawn of my loins, and that we were all going to lay waste to New York City, including Staten Island, and roam the streets in wolf form by day as well as by night and every single day, too, for Lord’s sakes, and devour the human beings and crunch them and absolutely skrink their bones.

Here’s what he said: “Your coming is Foretold and Inevitable.”

Here’s what I said: “Like the Revolution.”

Then he asked me if I had even been paying any attention whatsoever to everything he’d been telling me and I said maybe and he snorted so hard that big glops of wet spray came out his nose and spackled all over me and the shower curtains. That was when Louise started banging on the door.

The frog dog said, “You will be the Chosen One and you will like it.” Then he peed on the bath mat.

Louise’s governess got all mad about that, but Louise just got on that telephone and called Housekeeping and told them, “Get one of your lazy maids from Refugeeland right up here pronto, cleaning up dog pee is all they are good for, I bet they are all Communists. My mother knows Senator Joseph McCarthy and he will get their fat bottoms shipped right back to Commieville before you can blink, same to you, and move it, Stupid.” Then she told me to come back next day to play more.

That night in the park I told Lily Packmother about what the frog dog told me, including about how rank has its frilly edge. She said, “Emmeline, I think you must mean rank has its privilege,” and I said that was all right by me as long as I got to be a wolf whenever I wanted to. Then she said, “I am so proud of you for being the Chosen One. I always knew you were special. You will be the salvation of all werewolfkind someday through your progeny.”

I said, “Is that the same thing as the spawn of my loins?” and she said that, yes, it was and that I would understand when I was older and went into heat. So I guess that means next summer unless we get to live somewhere that has air-conditioning. Then she gave me a nice haunch of mounted policeman for my dinner and scolded me when I left the bone marrow because that chocolate ice cream at the Plaza Hotel had spoiled my appetite and werewolves were still starving all over the place in China. That is all they seem to do over there, for Lord’s sake.

The next day I wanted to go back to the Plaza Hotel and play with Louise some more. She has all kinds of toys, even if she is a pill. Lily Packmother said it would be all right if I went but that I would have to come right straight home to Central Park before it got dark or she would like to know the reason why. She said that now it was known that I was the Vessel of Lycanthropy, it was very important for me to come to the big pack meeting that night and receive homage.

I think homage is all very well and good but I like chocolate ice cream better, mostly because I know what that is.

So that morning I went right in through those big doors and straight across that lobby and right into that elevator and all the way up to the top and down that hall and knocked on that door until Louise’s governess opened it and said, “Oh, it’s you. I thought you knew better than to come back for more of the same with that little bastard.”