Anyway, she always seems to know when I’m being honest or when I’m just being dramatic, which is annoying.
Today was my first day back at school since the dragon incident. Millie, Sam, and I walked down the long green hill into town, then descended into the tunnels that we use during migration season. Sometimes students from other schools heckle us because of our dad, but not today; today I was on top of the world.
I held my cast up high as we passed people so that they’d be able to see it in all its arm-length glory. “It’s not a trophy,” Millie said. (She’s refused to sign it because she says she can’t bring herself to “celebrate stupidity.”) Then she just waved a hand to billow her long, perfectly coifed hair, as if 90 percent of what goes through her head is, My hair, ahh my hair.
We crisscrossed through the tunnels, past the entrance to the bank that’s guarded inside by one of the few vampires in Maine. (They prefer darker, rainier regions—though I guess if you’re a vampire and you can get a job in a dim cave, you’re pretty happy.) He always gives me the creeps, but Millie says she thinks he’s kind of cute. I think she’s just trying to shock me—he looks completely bloodless and his fangs are always sticking out, especially when he smiles and tries to be polite. Because of a law passed in 1965, vampires are only allowed to feed on animals (never people), but they give me the creeps all the same.
After the bank the tunnels widen into a series of connected, well-lit caverns, where most of the stores are. We walked past the 7-11, where I usually buy M&M’s with money I’m supposed to spend on lunch, and past the little museum sponsored by the Ladies’ Historical Society of Cliffden. It gives a miniature but ambitious history of the events leading up to our town: from a diorama of the ancient Romans taming the Pegasus, to the signing of the Declaration of Independence by fifty-six men and one well-respected ghost, to the founding of our town by a fur trapper on the run from a ding-ball, which is a kind of cougar.
In the aboveground foyer we parted ways: Millie sashaying off to her building and Sam coughing and trying to make himself invisible as he scurried toward the primary wing. I cut out through the door onto the grassy inner courtyard and made my way to my homeroom. I entered it bellowing, “WHO WANTS TO SIGN THE ARM THAT TOUCHED THE DRAGON?” There was a collective gasp, a room full of faces with mouths in the shapes of surprised and admiring Os, and then I was surrounded.
* * *
All through geography and Monsters of the Sea II, I played with a penny on my desk (tracing the giant on the back and Abe Lincoln on the front, and flipping it to see if it landed heads or giants over and over), and contemplated swallowing it to see how it would taste. My gaze kept drifting to the window, where the occasional dark silhouette of a dragon drifted across the horizon. Twice Mr. Morrigan, our teacher, scolded me for kicking my feet too loudly against Arin Roland’s desk, once for not having done the homework, and then finally for swallowing the penny after all.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know what came over me at recess. Arin and I were foraging along the edge of the school building for a stick to use as a vaulting pole for the Lunch Olympics (which I invented on the spot, even though I’m not supposed to participate with only one good arm). I found one that would work perfectly, only suddenly I didn’t want to use it as a vaulting pole at all, I just wanted to keep it for myself and maybe use it as a curtain rod in my room. Even now I can’t imagine why I wanted to keep it so badly. I guess it was because I knew everyone else wanted me to hand it over. And then when Arin stepped forward to grab it from me, it was as if I were possessed, because the stick rose so quickly and hit her across the head before I even thought about it. And then she was grabbing her ear, and Mrs. Corsiglia was standing in front of me, yelling at me so loudly I couldn’t even make out the words.
I know I’m too old to hit people with sticks. Once I stop being annoyed, I’m 80 percent sure I’ll feel truly sorry.
Anyway, now I’m grounded. It would be a lot more interesting being stuck in here if my imagination worked halfway as well as it used to.
* * *
Oh, something else interesting happened, between math and Flying Reptiles. Today we got Oliver. He’s skinny and has a fish face and his whole body seems to want to disappear, as if he thinks that if he hunches his shoulders down far enough no one will see him. He’s got bright green eyes and hair that looks like it’s never met a hairbrush and a long scar down one side of his cheek.
We have such a small school that we only get a new student every couple of years. The last one was from Sweden and named Inez; she barely spoke English and smelled like bananas. This boy is no improvement. He’s quiet and bizarre. I think if I were as quiet as him, I’d disappear.
At lunch he sat at the far empty end of the teachers’ table by himself with a bag of Skittles, not eating them like a normal person but instead slipping them under the table. It took a scouting mission by Matthew Howard to figure out that he was slipping them one by one to some kind of creature he keeps in his pocket, but we don’t know what. Arin thinks it’s a frog, as if frogs eat Skittles.
Oliver looks like he’s mentally very far away, and he has a habit of touching the scar on his cheek as if he keeps reminding himself it’s there. I heard Arin Roland whisper to someone that he’s from Connecticut and his family was killed by sasquatches, and now he’s an orphan living with a foster family in town, so I guess maybe the scar is from the sasquatch attack.
The thing is, personal tragedy is the kind of thing that can get you a lot of attention at my school. If he’d tell people his story, they’d be flocking around him. But Oliver just sat through lunch quietly, barely looking at his surroundings. Everyone stared at him all through lunch, and some people looked at me to see what we should do. I just ignored him.
Walking to the front office to be sent home later, I noticed him sitting by the fountain, whispering to the thing in his pocket, and I decided he was even stranger than I thought.
PS: A note on sasquatches, from history class: The sasquatches were instrumental in helping the north win the American civil war. Sasquatches are generally brutal creatures with little or no conscience, but they abhor the enslavement of anyone, even their enemies (humans!). So in the 1860s hordes of them emerged from the deep woods of the Smokies to fight on the Union side. Thanks to them, the war was over three months after it started.
September 16th
I write this from under the covers with a flashlight. I’m too worried to sleep.
Sam has one of his endless colds, and I can hear him coughing in his room down the hall. He went to the doctor again today and they’re doing some tests and I can tell that my parents are tense about it. Everyone has been quiet tonight. Dad is in one of his “swamps.”
“Please stay out of trouble and don’t worry your father,” Mom keeps saying. But I don’t think it’s fair that Dad gets to hide in his swamp while the rest of us have to go on acting like normal people all the time.
The Dark Cloud was on our block tonight when we came home from school. We were coming up the hill and there it was, just hovering about twenty feet above the street where we usually play roller hockey, gray and still and puffy, with that black hole swirling in the middle. (Millie says it’s the clown’s leering mouth.) We skirted widely around it, walking behind our neighbors’ houses and coming into our yard through the back, Millie pulling Sam along beside her.