“Just hungry,” I said.
But he’d already forgotten what he’d asked me—I could tell. I shuffled up behind him, unnoticed. The chart was scrawled in his handwriting with markings of longitudes and latitudes and degrees, cloud appearances at various heights, and phases of the moon. The map showed the familiar rectangle of the earth: Alaska all the way to the upper left (a paradise for sasquatches ever since the Alaskans lured a lot of them up there to solve their rodent problem), Royal Russia to the right.
Clustered on each continent were the red dots marking the major cities: Moscow, Beijing, Paris, London, Istanbul (I’ve always liked to look at those dots and imagine what the cities are like) . . . surrounded by empty, barely marked space. It’s the same in the US: The major cities—New York, Boston, Washington, DC—sprawl out toward towns like ours, and then mostly wilderness covers the rest of the continent. Dad calls the cities of the world “industrialized pockets” and the empty spaces “wild.” Though I guess the spaces aren’t really empty, at least not here—there are towns stretching as far west as Arkansas (a lot of them grown over by the woods) and then scattered frontier towns beyond that. But mostly, the farther you get from the cities, the farther you are into the territory of the beasts.
Now Dad was running his fingers out toward the edges of the map, and down over the Hawaiian Islands (which have always sounded wonderful because they’re ruled by someone called the Sugar Queen—Hawaii is the world’s biggest exporter of sugar), muttering something unintelligible about something called superstrings.
* * *
Most of the world, according to my geography teacher, was connected because of spices. People got tired of eating food with just the spices that they could grow in their own backyards, so they sent explorers out into the world for pepper, salt, cinnamon, and whatever else they could find. But people found more than that: They also found sea monsters, tigers, horses, mermaids, dragons, and eventually the edges of the earth. (When I showed Mom my homework essay about this, she smirked in her wry way and said, “I guess there’s something to be said for never being satisfied with what you have.”)
Ferdinand Magellan reached the western edge in 1520, confirming for the first time that the earth was flat. There’s a famous quote by him that goes, “I have seen the earth’s shadow reflected on the stars. I’ve seen that, compared to what’s beyond our edges, we are very small indeed.”
* * *
Anyway, after planting a flag there and splitting off from his flotilla, Magellan set a course due south to see the remote continent known as the Southern Edge, but was never heard from again. It’s widely assumed he accidentally sailed off the earth, but others think he was drowned by the Great Kraken at Cape Horn, who’s still alive and drowning sailors to this day.
Dad has a different theory. He thinks Ferdinand Magellan went to look for the Extraordinary World. He also thinks that he found it. Dad thinks that once you cross over to the Extraordinary World, you can never come back.
“What are you doing with that map?” I asked now.
Dad snapped his head up, seeming to really notice again that I was there. My dad and I have the same eyes—hazelish-brown—and the same pointyish chin, even though I wish I looked more like my mom instead. My face is pretty much a girl version of his—though he’s usually all stubbly.
“Just . . . daydreaming,” he said, turning red and folding up the map abruptly. He adjusted his black glasses on his nose and smiled at me in the fake way adults do sometimes when they’re hiding something from you. Then he glanced up at the clock above the sink. “Hey, shouldn’t you be in bed?”
So here I am back in my room. But now I can’t sleep.
I can’t stop thinking about the father dragon and his baby. I hope they’re somewhere safe and warm, even if they did smell bad and even if they eat disgusting things. I guess I can admit this here: I can’t help thinking that if I were flying over a valley and my wings were drooping and giving out, my dad wouldn’t even notice, much less be able to save me.
* * *
One more thing about the Extraordinary World. Something that is real about it is that many of the ships that went in search of it in the old days never came back—not because they found what they were looking for, but because of the Great Kraken. And now the southern ocean is scattered with phantom ships sailed by ghosts. They can’t be caught on film (no ghost can), but they are widely known to be real. That’s one of many reasons no one goes sailing around the Southern Sea exploring anymore.
And with that cheerful thought, I’m going to bed.
September 10th
Boring.
September 11th
I’m so bored.
September 12th
I may be the only twelve-year-old on earth who’s managed to break her arm and get grounded in the same week.
Tonight I’m a prisoner in my own room. I’ve renamed myself Andromeda and am trying to pretend that I’ve been trapped in a tower by a greedy centaur who wants to marry me, but my imagination doesn’t always work as well as it used to.
Anyway, I may as well just write the embarrassing truth here: I hit a girl in my class on the head with a stick.
I’m sitting in my windowsill as I write this. Sam the Mouse is feeling better today, and he and his friend from down the street are roughhousing in a pile of leaves out front. This may be the last year I’ll even jump in a pile of leaves—Millie says I won’t want to do things like that much longer. Even though she usually doesn’t know what she’s talking about, I worry that she might be right, because last year I raked up a pile of leaves and didn’t even have the patience to lie under it for more than a few seconds. I used to be able to do that for hours, looking up through the cracks in the leaves, but certain things don’t excite me the way they used to.
The Dark Cloud has come closer in the last few days, and it does seem that it’s headed for our neighborhood, since we’re the only collection of houses on top of this hill. I’ve added up all the old people on our block and there are four—five if you count Michael Kowalski’s grandma, who’s sixty-eight, which is sort of in the middle between old and not so old. I hope it’s not her, even though she’s always yelling at me not to ride my bike so fast.
My mom says we’re having ravioli for dinner and that I have to eat it in my room, even though I told her I’ll barf if I eat it. I reminded her of the last time she made me eat ravioli three years ago, when I did throw it up . . . all over a pile of Barbies beside my bed.
“That was self-motivated vomiting,” she said, closing her lips in a thin determined line and running a hand through her long dark hair, which is the exact brown (almost-black) color of Millie’s, only straighter.
My mom is the opposite of my dad—she’s admired everywhere she goes. Millie says it’s something about the way she “holds herself.” I think it’s that she looks like a painting and is always thinking of other people (she’s fascinated by our neighbor Mrs. Lipton’s boring tips on planting flowers, and she never forgets my teachers’ birthdays). How she and Dad ended up together, I’ll never know. Once, I asked her about it, and she just said with a smirk, “Your dad was really, really lucky,” and then looked at my dad to see his reaction. He didn’t even look up from his book.