[OOC POST β EXPLAINING MY TAKE ON WEREWOLF!GARY]
In my interpretation, Gary's first transformation happened when he was around nine or ten years old, before his father was incarcerated.
For several weeks beforehand, his father had begun noticing the signs. Gary had become more irritable than usual, struggled with restless sleep, complained about sounds and smells that nobody else seemed to notice, and showed an almost instinctive pull toward the woodland surrounding the family estate.
His father recognized those signs immediately.
Rather than explaining the truth to Gary or his mother, he told her he was taking their son on an overnight camping trip. Given the family's wealth and the large stretch of secluded woodland bordering their property, it was an excuse that seemed perfectly reasonable. Nobody questioned it, and so nobody except his father knew the trip was never actually about camping.
As night fell, Gary became violently ill. A fever took hold of him so suddenly that he thought something was seriously wrong. His muscles cramped, his body ached, and every sense seemed painfully heightened. He was frightened and confused, but his father offered little reassurance beyond telling him to stay where he was and endure it.
When the moon reached its peak, the transformation began.
Gary remembers that night in fragments rather than a complete memory. The terror of not understanding what was happening, the sound of his own voice becoming unfamiliar, the feeling of his body changing into something he could not control, the scent of pine and wet earth, and waking sometime after sunrise exhausted, covered in mud, with torn clothes and no memory of what had happened.
His father never apologized for keeping him in the dark. Instead, once Gary had recovered, he simply explained that this would happen every month, that it had happened to the men in their family for generations and that most importantly, losing control was not an excuse for weakness.
From then on, every full moon meant disappearing into the woods under one excuse or another. His father taught him the practical side of surviving the curse, even if he never offered much comfort along the way. After his father's incarceration, Gary was left to handle his lycanthropy almost entirely alone.
By the time he arrived at Bullworth Academy, he had become exceptionally good at hiding it. Most students would never suspect a thing unless they happened to catch him during or immediately after a full moon, though his roommate would probably have questions about why the dorm suddenly smells like wet dog once a month.
