The Extraordinary World, people like my dad claim, is what our world would have been like too, if it had turned out—once the great explorers did their great exploring in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—that dragons and mermaids and things like that didn’t exist. Without the beasts and monsters and wilderness that populate so much of our planet, they claim, life would be easier, more orderly . . . safe. Also it’s supposedly full of all sorts of amazing technology: things floating around space called satellites, all sorts of flying machines, highways and travel networks all over the world, and cities without number.
My dad’s outspokenness on the subject means we get heckled pretty often. People call him La La Land Lockwood. I’ve seen the way people look at us when we’re out shopping or at one of Millie’s piano recitals, and I can’t say I blame them. Not that Dad ever notices.
His hero is an astronomer named Prospero, who lives somewhere out west. People are constantly quoting him and citing his studies in their scientific papers. His newest book, An Atlas of the Cosmos, is a bestseller, and sometimes (rarely, because he’s a bit of a hermit) he gets interviewed on 60 Minutes. My dad reads everything he publishes. Apparently they went to college together, and while Prospero soared to the top of their class and became wildly popular, Dad worked diligently and got okay grades and graduated unnoticed by anyone but my mom, who was studying music theory, whatever that is.
Mostly Dad just contents himself with studying the weather and appearing on the local weather station every morning. I don’t think it’s so great to study something that always changes and always disappears, and then to spend your free time studying something that doesn’t exist. It’s like he’s spent his life concentrating on thin air. I wish he worked on something more permanent and interesting. Anything would be better: rocks, bugs, volcanoes . . . anything.
* * *
I’m watching a bird swoop in the distance over Bear Mountain. Then again it may be a dragon and farther away than I think. I just put this journal down and squinted to see, but I still couldn’t tell.
Mom and Sam just got home, but I ducked behind the church stone so they wouldn’t see me. I’m sure Mom’s in the kitchen putting groceries away. Usually she sings at the top of her lungs while she does it, but today it’s quiet in there. I hope everything went okay at Sam’s appointment.
Now the bird across the valley is doing something weird. I’m going to stand at the edge of the lawn to look.
September 8th
(After Midnight)
We just got home from the hospital and my arm is in a cast. I’ve survived a near death experience!
Millie says I’m being dramatic, but I can tell she’s dying of envy because I’m the center of attention for once. Apparently she and Mouse made potato candy for me (my favorite) while we were at the hospital, but it turns out they ate most of it while they were waiting for us to get back. I hate Millie more than ever. No one ever hates Sam the Mouse.
Anyway, I’ll try to get down what happened, as realistically as I can.
I was up on my hill just finishing my last entry, when I saw the baby dragon flying across the valley. At first, like I wrote earlier, I thought he was a bird, but then when I stood to get a closer look I noticed the little puffs of smoke wafting behind him and the blue glint of his scales. I know that blue scales mean it’s a male dragon and orange scales mean it’s a female, but the strange thing was, he wasn’t behaving like a bird or a dragon at all—he flew crookedly, as if he didn’t quite know how to keep himself in the air. With every few strokes of his wings, he dipped farther and farther toward the valley and the busy streets below.
I figured he might be the smallest of his litter and maybe not strong enough to migrate so early; Mom says that happens sometimes. From this distance he looked to be the size of a miniature pony, but I couldn’t be sure. Then, very faintly, I heard him let out a desperate howl, and then another. With each howl he sunk a little farther toward land and a little puff of smoke floated up and away from him.
Just as I was making sense of it all there was a horrible screech behind me. I must have been too distracted to hear him coming until he was too close. As it was, I barely had time to turn around before something eclipsed the sun above me, and in a rush of horrible stench and a thud of giant wings, the father dragon was overhead.
He was about the size of a large city bus, and his blue reptilian wings stretched out twice as long in either direction. He looked down at me only once, craning his neck to glare at me, his eyes green, speckled, and bright as limes. For a moment we were gazing at each other, and it sent a chill right through me. He smelled horribly of caves and moss and rocks and dead, burned animals. If he’d so much as let out a heavy breath, he would have melted me. But he gave me only a momentary glance before he turned his attention back toward the valley, swooping over me with a sound like sails catching wind. He was so close I could see the pearly scales along the bottom of his tail as he glided past.
I don’t know what came over me, but instead of rolling into a ball—which is one of the first things they teach you in kindergarten about surviving dragon attacks—I stretched my hand toward that pearly blue tail, mesmerized by his glistening scales. That was a bad idea.
The impact threw me back against the church stone. There was a horrible crunch, but at first I thought I’d broken the stone instead of myself. Then for some reason I had the thought (it makes no sense now) that my arm was a carrot wedged in the refrigerator door.
The dragon kept going—I could see him soaring into the wide open space over the valley like an enormous blue kite, casting a dark shadow over a line of cars on Route 1 and then hovering just above the baby, flapping his wings, his screeches echoing off the mountains. The baby called back to him with a weak screech, then seemed to gain courage. Soon he was flapping harder and straighter, and lifting instead of sinking. I think that’s when I first suspected it was me that was broken instead of the church stone. I guess it was the scalding pain that suddenly shot out of my right elbow. Then the pain was everywhere.
* * *
Now my right arm will be in a cast for weeks. Well, at least I’m left-handed.
In the hour since I’ve been home, I’ve revoked my membership in the Orphan Dragon Rescue group online that Millie signed me up for, though I’m staying in the group that helps the endangered unicorns that live in the Sierra Madres. Arin Roland says her dad says that only “bleeding-heart crazies” sign up for dragon rescue groups anyway, though Arin Roland is the most annoying girl in my sixth-grade class.
PS: Mostly the rescue groups buy large rural pieces of land in England and Scotland so the dragons can have somewhere to live where they won’t wreak too much havoc. It actually helps people, too, because in the sixties about half of London was occupied by dragons and nobody could do anything about it. Real estate prices for the safer side of the city skyrocketed. So take that, Arin’s dad.
* * *
I just went down to the kitchen to see if maybe Millie lied and actually did hide some leftover potato candy somewhere, but instead I ran into Dad, sitting at the kitchen table and studying a big paper chart. Tilted the other way and lying half across the chart was a map.
“Hey, honey,” he said, glancing up at me distractedly. “What are you up to?” Dad always forgets we have a bedtime, which isn’t surprising since he sometimes forgets we exist at all (or at least it seems that way). Even at the hospital tonight he kept asking the doctor to give him the details of how they were resetting my bone, as if I wasn’t sitting right there wincing and trying not to cry. (“Dragons breaking arms in Cliffden in September!” he kept saying. “And migrations didn’t even used to start till mid-October. That’s what the world is coming to!”)