The Wolves are Waiting

When fifteen-year-old Nora Melchionda wakes up, dizzy and disoriented, half-naked on the town’s golf course, with her underwear hanging from a flagstick, she doesn’t remember a thing. She was drinking a root beer, enjoying the Frat Fair, an annual fundraiser held by the local school fraternities, and the next thing Nora remembers is waking up next to her best friend, Cam, on the putting green. During the time that Nora doesn’t remember, “anything could have happened. Anything.”

Before that night, Nora’s life seemed perfect. She had good grades, she was a star player on the field hockey team, and she had a great circle of friends and a supportive family. Most importantly, Nora always had her father, Rhett Melchionda. Nora’s father was her personal hero and the athletic director of Faber University. He always said his job was to protect her. 

But after that night, Nora’s world comes crashing down. What Nora thought was true about the town she grew up in, the university, her father, and her family is all turned upside down. Through searching for the truth of what happened, her friends Cam and Adam Xu and her older brother Asher, uncover the larger truth about the town and university. The teens realize the attempted sexual assault of Nora was not an isolated incident, but part of a decades-long rampage of sexual violence tied to fraternities. To make matters worse, the violence has been swept under the rug.

While this story deals with the difficult topics of sexual assault and harassment, The Wolves are Waiting beautifully tackles this theme from different angles, from examining the prevalence of rape culture to highlighting the experience of survivors of sexual assault and harassment. This book raises important questions about societal beliefs surrounding sexual assault, including the trivialization of sexual assault. It questions why those in power often implicitly trust the word of assailants over victims. For example, when Nora confronts her dad about stories of college athletes sexually assaulting women, he dismisses her, saying “Events can be misinterpreted in the light of day.” 

The Wolves are Waiting also raises questions about the culture of victim blaming. Nora and others are continuously asked what they were wearing or what they were drinking or what they said, rather than simply being believed. When repeatedly asked if she had been drinking the night she was assaulted, Nora “flare[s] up with anger.” Nora explains “What difference did it make if she was drunk, or high, or roofied, or sober, or wearing a prairie dress, or a thong, or if she knew the guys, or if she’d never seen them before in her life? . . . Why should she thank [Adam] for believing her? She was telling the truth.” While some of this questioning is highly pointed in the attempt to discredit victims like Nora, The Wolves are Waiting shows how seemingly innocent questions or comments with good intent can actually help perpetuate these problematic social issues. As these questions are raised throughout the novel, it asks both the characters and the audience to reexamine their beliefs surrounding sexual assault and the harmful, yet prevalent stereotypes in society about sexual assault and survivors.

In The Wolves are Waiting, Natasha Friend examines the experience of survivors of sexual assault and their process of healing after trauma. At first, Nora is in disbelief and doesn’t want to talk about what happened that night. “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine,” she keeps telling herself, hoping for it to be true. She also begins to push away her family and her friend Cam, who is hell-bent on finding the perpetrators of Nora’s attack and bringing them to justice. In reality, Nora feels alone, scared, and traumatized by her experience. But with the support of friends and family, she realizes she is not alone in her experience. After realizing her own silence will only perpetuate the problems in her town, Nora speaks out ferociously, “tell[ing] her story . . . own[ing] every word of it . . . set[ting] herself free.”

The Wolves are Waiting is a must-read because it tackles serious societal issues and misconceptions surrounding sexual assault. It considers not only the perspective of survivors of assault but also bystanders, showing how not speaking up makes one complicit in larger systems of abuse. Nora is an incredibly compelling character. She is strong and independent, yet also flawed. She is forced to re-evaluate the world around her. The Wolves are Waiting breaks down harmful stereotypes and misconceptions about sexual assault while also teaching readers the importance of questioning societal beliefs, even ones you hold to be the truth.

Sexual Content 

• At a party, Cam sees Nora’s brother, Asher. Cam and Asher begin to talk. She tells him that he is not wasting his time pursuing art. “He looked so quintessentially Asher that Cam was overwhelmed by a sudden desire to hug him . . . It was a little awkward. Her nose rammed into his shoulder. She stepped away almost as quickly as she’d stepped toward him. But then. Then. Cam felt something warm on her face. It was . . . Asher’s hand, cupping her cheek . . . He bent down and pressed his lips to hers. Cam was 100 percent sober, but Asher’s kiss was like three slugs of Manischewitz straight from the bottle. When she came up for air, she felt warm and dizzy. ‘Was that okay?’ he said. And she said, ‘Definitely.’ They kissed again. And again.”
• Cam and Nora promised “each other, back in sixth grade . . . They had vowed to share every boy-related detail, which was how Cam knew that Nora had tongue-kissed a Jersey boy named Evan Fendelbaum at Becca Bomberg’s bat mitzvah, and Nora knew that Cam had seen Kyle Tenhope’s erection through his swim trunks at the track team’s end-of-season pool party freshman year.”
• Nora compares herself to other girls her age. “Nora knew there were girls her age . . . who were already having sex – not just making out with someone in the back row of the movie theater – legit sex. Nora also knew how guys talked. . . Nora never wanted guys to talk about her that way, which was why she never let Adam get very far. There had been kissing, yes. There had been up-the-shirt action, yes. But Nora always drew the line there.”
• When Nora’s dad comes home from a game, he grabs Nora’s mother “around the waist and dipped her so low, her hair touched the floor.” Her father and mother kiss. “Nora didn’t love watching her parents make out in the middle of the kitchen, either. It was awkward.”
• Outside the gym one day, Adam, Nora’s “kind-of boyfriend,” and Nora see each other. Adam “kissed her, for the first time, by the flagpole in front of the school – and another twenty times after that.” That morning, the two sit together. Adam “leaned in, kissing her lightly on the lips. She pulled away,” feeling uncomfortable. Normally, Adam was irresistible to Nora. “Every time he kissed her, he made her feel all melty inside. But now . . . how to explain? Thinking about his tongue darting inside her mouth made Nora think about other tongues darting inside her mouth, other hands touching her body.”
• At school, Adam walks by and “whistle[s] through his teeth” at Nora. Nora explains the boys “made jokes behind her back about what kind of sauce she would taste like . . . and how they’d like to spread her on a sandwich.”
• A few days after her assault, a picture of Nora circulates on the internet. “Her back was to the camera, and her head was resting on someone’s shoulder – a big blond guy in a gray hoodie. His arm was wrapped around her waist. A dark-haired guy in a red shirt was on the other side of her, laughing. His hand was on her butt, lifting her skirt.”
• Standing outside Nora’s room, Cam and Asher look at each other. Cam imagines what could happen: “One step closer, and his breath would be on her face. One tip of the chin, and his mouth would be on hers. His hands, gripping the back of her head. His lips, his tongue. It took Cam a few seconds to come to her senses.”
• After gym class, a group of guys were in the locker room when, “Kevin stood on a bench, held up his phone, and said, ‘Who wants to see some prime FU titties?’ . . . because Kevin had the newest iPhone with the biggest, brightest screen, the photo was right there in HD for everyone to gawk at. A pair of breasts barely contained by a lace white bra, with something black scrawled between them.”
• When Cam goes to a fraternity party to do recognizance for Nora’s case, she meets a frat boy. He asks to kiss her. Cam “thought for a moment. She was sober. And he was asking. And maybe kissing him was the way to extract the information she needed. Also, if she was being completely honest with herself, she was curious. She’d only made out with high school guys. There wasn’t anything wrong with a little experiment, was there? A little compare and contrast in the name of science? It’s not like she was planning to have sex with him. The next thing Cam knew, they were kissing . . . Intellectually, she wanted to stop – she did – but her hormones had suddenly taken the wheel, and Malik was a great kisser . . . Malik had definitely more experience. The circles he was making with his tongue. The way his hands were holding her hips, lifting her up to meet him . . . And then he pulled away, breathless.”
• After going out for ice cream, Cam and Asher talk outside of Asher’s house about everything that has conspired in the last few days including her going to a frat party and kissing a college boy. While upset, Asher agrees to move past the incident and asks her to the homecoming dance. The two kiss. As Cam walked home “her face was raw from kissing, but she didn’t care. The fact of the matter was, she could have kissed Asher all night.”  

Violence 

• This story surrounds Nora’s attempted sexual assault and rape by three fraternity boys. Adam Xu stumbled across the assault, “one of the figures was holding something in the air. A phone? Another was bent over on the ground.” He heard one of them say, “Dude, she’s completely out” and another was “taking off his pants.” When he scared the three boys off, he found Nora passed out on the ground and texted her best friend Cam to come help her. 
• Cam found Nora “lying on the ground, spread eagle.” Nora’s underwear was hanging off the flagstick on the golf course. Later at Cam’s house, Cam encourages Nora to inspect her pubic area for “bruises or scratches.” Nora is hesitant, but when she does eventually look, she sees something. “What she had seen up in Cam’s bathroom was a mark, maybe half an inch long, on the skin of her bikini area. Not purple like a bruise. Not red like a cut. Black. . . Up close it was pretty obvious. The black mark wasn’t a birthmark or a scab or an engorged dog tick clinging to her skin. It was the number 9.” The number marked that Nora was the ninth girl to be targeted by her assaulters; as part of the initiation into one of the local frats, new members have to sleep with 18 girls. 
• Nora and her friends had always heard stories about sexual assault on campus and sayings like “don’t walk by Greek Row alone at night.” There “was a story about a girl who’d graduated from FCS years ago . . . One night after an orchestra concert, she had been walking past the frats on her way home. Some of her brothers from Alpha Psi had been sitting outside on lawn chairs. They’d called her over. The next thing she knew, she woke up on the quad in a Faber football jersey with a Blue Devil tattoo on her boob.” There were other versions of this story, whether it was a toga or a football jersey, or what type of tattoo it was. But nevertheless, it was heavily insinuated she was drugged, assaulted, and branded.
• Asher tells Nora and Cam about other instances of sexual violence from frat members and her father’s involvement in the cases. There was a quarterback: “A girl said he raped her behind the Iron Jug. He said it was consensual. Dad helped get him off.” A hockey player, Peyton Mallory, “sexually assaulted a sorority girl at a frat party . . . She filed a report with the university saying he did . . . The guy got off. He was never expelled. He was never even suspended from the team.”
• After Nora’s mother finds out about the attempted assault, Nora’s mother tells her about her first college roommate, who had been raped at a frat party. The theme of the party was “King Tuts and Egyptian Sluts . . . They were handing out shots of Goldschlager, with ‘flecks of real gold,’ they told us. Amy and I had one drink. That was our rule: one drink . . . Our other rule was to stick together . . . but at some point I had to go to the bathroom, and Amy was talking to one of the frat brothers about books.” 
• When Nora’s mother got back from the bathroom, she “looked and looked,” but explained, “I couldn’t find [my roommate] . . . I figured she and the guy she’d been talking to had hit it off. So I went back to the dorm. . . she’d been raped at the party by two of the frat’s brothers. She had no idea who they were because they looked like every other King Tut.” 
• When they told someone from the sorority, they were dismissed and told “Don’t worry about it.” Nora’s mother took her roommate to the dean. “She told him she had been raped, and he said that was a serious accusation. He asked if she had made a police report. He asked how many drinks she’d had. What was she wearing? Who entered the room first? Did she say no? He asked if she could identify the two guys. When she said she wasn’t sure, all the King Tuts looked the same, he said, ‘Well, if you don’t know who they are, I can’t help you.’”

Drugs and Alcohol 

• After Cam finds Nora on the night she is assaulted, Cam asks Nora, “What did you drink? Rum? Vodka? . . . Tequila?” Nora replies adamantly, “‘No, Camille.’ Cam knew she didn’t drink alcohol. Ever since that sleepover at Becca Bomberg’s house the last day of ninth grade, when the three of them drank an entire bottle of Manischewitz and Nora projectile-vomited into a potted plant on Becca’s porch.”
• Since Nora was found passed out, Cam believes something was put in Nora’s drink. While originally the two think it’s roofies or Rohypnol, Cam has Nora’s hair sample tested and it shows that Nora was in fact drugged with “GHA. Gamma hydroxybutyric acid, otherwise known as liquid ecstasy.”
• At a party, “one of the guys would bring out a bottle – whatever they could find in their parent’s liquor cabinets – pass it around. To avoid drawing attention to himself, Adam would take a few sips. Fifteen minutes later- bam. His face would heat up and start to tingle. His eyes would go bloodshot . . . He hated when that happened. . . . The reaction in Adam’s body was the result of an accumulation of acetaldehyde, a metabolic by-product of the catabolic metabolism of alcohol.”
• The night Nora was assaulted, Cam was at Kyle Tenhope’s party, “on the Tenhopes’ front stoop, holding a beer and scrolling through her phone . . . everyone inside the house had been well on their way, but Cam had only had two sips of warm keg beer.” 
• At the party a boy was wearing a yellow construction hat attached to two beer cans and was drinking through a tube. . . They found Kyle in the far corner of the kitchen, pumping beer from a keg.”
• After a game one night, Nora’s father comes home after a few “victory beers.”
• At a soccer game, the stands are “packed. Nora was aware of all the bodies pressed in around her. At one point, a guy tried to push past her to get to an empty spot. Nora could smell him. Beer. Sweat. For a second, she panicked.”
• When Cam goes to a fraternity party to do recognizance, everyone is drunk. She is approached by some guy, who “lifted the cup in his hand, taking a sip of neon green – what? Toxic waste? Battery acid?”
• As Adam tries to get access to a private Instagram account, he messages a fraternity member. After a while the fraternity member messages, “I am just drunk enough to give you 10 min” and he allows Adam access.

Language                                         

• Profanity is used often. This profanity includes shit, fucking, slut, bitch, and bullshit.
• Some of the profanity in the book is only implied, such as the use of “eff’s” or “effing.”

Supernatural 

• None

Spiritual Content 

• None