She stared in the mirror every morning wishing away the scar and the symptoms of it. She was different now. Utterly and completely different, she would never fit in again. It wasn't like she could control it. It wasn't her fault that she was who she became. Her pale finger inched its way up and traced the bit under her left collarbone. From now on she'd be an outcast, she wouldn't fit in, and she'd be regulated.

She'd be regulated, as if she was a disease that they wished to eradicate. Chuckling morosely at the irony, she realized they did want to eradicate her. They made it sound as if she were a snarling monster all of the time. She would give it up in a heartbeat if she could. She didn't want to be like this. She didn't want to be cursed.

She was a werewolf. She was the dregs of society.

They said it was her fault. That if she hadn't been walking outside, alone during a full moon, she wouldn't have been bitten. If she just had been smarter than maybe she'd be normal and successful, instead of one of the approved werewolf jobs. She was dirty now. Now that she was infected she couldn't be normal. No one even tried to catch the werewolf that did this to her. They tested on her; they gave her a large pile of official looking papers, and then sent her home to pack up her home. She didn't live in a werewolf approved area.

The large pile of papers ended up being regulations. You couldn't socialize with anyone from your old life. You wouldn't want them to become infected by default. Frankly, she wasn't even sure if that was possible. Can you pass “werewolf-itis” to someone through the air? She doubted it; why else would the creature that attacked her leave a five inch long scar on her shoulder?

She didn't understand why everyone was so against the werewolf population. They only made up two tenths of a percent of the total United States population, which meant that there were only about six hundred thousand of them. In her small Montana town, there were maybe three of them. They weren't allowed to meet of course. You wouldn't want to be seen with a known werewolf. You could go berserk and kill innocent children. She scoffed as she read that information.

Besides a weird craving for rawer meat, nothing had really changed. She wasn't irrationally angry; she wasn't any more violent than before. If anything she was less violent. She didn't want anyone to get hurt. Why would she? Why would she want to make someone else go through the terror she was going through? How cruel would that be?

As if the silvery scar on her shoulder wasn't enough, she had to be catalogued. The last time a government had catalogued a group of people, they called it the Holocaust. Now they just called it safety. They needed to know where all the dangerous people were. “People” was such a misleading term, too. They weren't considered people. They were considered animals. They were the first suspects of any crimes, whether or not there was probable cause. They were slighted because they had a condition they couldn't control.

It was a small line of numbers on her wrist. There were just three numbers. In the state of Montana there were no more than two hundred werewolves. Her numbers were 142. Everyone she came into contact with saw her serial number. Everyone she met knew she had an irreversible condition. They didn't see the fact that she graduated valedictorian of her high school. They didn't see that she was not only accepted into Harvard and Yale, but Brown, Georgetown, and even Oxford! She woke up every morning wishing that she had taken Oxford up on their offer.

She was only nineteen when she was attacked. She didn't know that there was a large population of werewolves in Connecticut. It was Connecticut. She wasn't old enough to understand how dangerous the full moon was around that area. No one had told her anything.

That was the problem. Ignorance.

Whoever said ignorance was bliss obviously hadn't lived through any kind of discrimination or problem because of the lack of warning and information. Really the only reason they thought ignorance was bliss is that it was for them. They didn't have to deal with the difficulties ignorance caused. It was meadows and sunshine for them. They must've had it easy, because ignorance was not bliss. Ignorance was as far from bliss as you could get.

Ignorance said that all werewolves wanted to tear out the throats of children. Reality said they didn't. She loved children. Ignorance said that it was her fault that she was bitten. Reality said no one would be able to fight out a five hundred pound dog-human hybrid. Ignorance said that she was unstable and dangerous. Reality would agree during the full moon, but she always took precautions. She would go down to the basement and change there. The door was triple dead-bolted. Nothing could get in and nothing could get out. On any other day of the month, she was kind and compliant.

Ignorance said it was her fault. Reality said it was theirs.