monster so joke’s on you.”
Not my finest zing, but I was at least quick in my retort. I tossed my short blonde hair back haughtily and started on my way to the library when Libby threw another one at me.
“Glad you know so much about your friends. Oh, I mean, dragons. Not monsters, my mistake! I get them mixed up – they’re both imaginary.” Libby and her lemmings burst into obnoxious giggles. Their kind of giggling isn’t even real laughter – it’s like one Head Chicken laughing to announce to the others to laugh, and they all nervously sound their clucking obediently for fear of being ostracized themselves.
“I mean, dragons, right? I mean, right?” Libby said, flipping her head back and forth to her subjects. Was there actually a question in there, or did she not understand the purpose of voice inflection to reflect a question mark at the end of a sentence? She over-enunciated the word dragon, breaking it apart so idiotically.
“Dra-guhnz!” Libby squealed again.
“You seem to know a lot about me, Libster.” I finally shot back. “Stalker much?”
I hated using their colloquialisms, but it got me the social point. I walked quickly in the other direction to the fading roar of high-pitched omg!?’s and can you even?!’s. A dragon right now would be pretty handy, I thought dejectedly. But those distraught feelings quickly got swept away in my academic reverie of my favorite noble beasts.
The handiest dragon at the moment? Hmmm … my mind’s eye scanned the regions of the world … I enjoyed the occasional Gonggong, because who doesn’t love a destructive Chinese water god. I had dabbled in Leviathan concepts, again, a protector of the seas. I had been turned on to this fearsome fella while playing after school at a friend’s house – said friend (more like school acquaintance whom my mother forced me to interact with because socializing is good for you blah blah blah) has a father who is a professor of ancient Jewish studies or something and had a book on Canaanite mythology. Color me intrigued.
I loved that most Leviathan descriptions land it somewhere between a whale and a crocodile. Fearsome! However, I am not the strongest of swimmers. So having a water dragon at my beck and call was perhaps a bit lofty of an ambition. Honestly, how could I possibly conduct such a being with any dignity? The daunting Gonggong or Leviathan would be majestically diving and swooping through the restless expanse of oceans unknown while I’m giving it a thumbs up from a lifeguard tower safely land-mounted on a beach somewhere? Not the best look for me.
I like the Wyvern – more of your classical dragon with a ridged spine and regular appearances in Old English folklore. Plus, it’s typically land-dwelling, which is bit more in my comfort zone. I smiled, exhaling happily as I mentally flipped through a glorious rolodex of my formidable friends.
I always come back to my favorite: a European Arrowtail. Small enough to fit through these school halls, but still with a decent set of wings so I could just take off. They’re a little feisty though, those europeous sagitta caudus. They pummel their opponent with quick, tiny bursts of fire balls rather than one long continuous fire stream.
I lingered, lost now, in a lovely daydream of captaining an Arrowtail. I ordered the lithe beast valiantly through the halls from atop its scaly back. I directed my dragon’s fire balls at imaginary targets as I walked, eyeing with soldier precision the daily inconveniences of Beecher. Dumb “wet paint” sign that’s been hanging above the hallway to the locker rooms for way too long: whooooosh! Now dry paint. Charred, even. What do we have here? Terrible gym teacher who makes me climb a stupid rope for no actual reason: whooooosh! One big ball of leg-hair fire. Oh, look! Busted drinking fountain that’s forever leaking but never allowing that blessed liquid from its spout: whooooosh! Gone. Obnoxious elevator that seems to exist only to torture those of us with tired legs or service overweight principals: whooooosh! No more. Just a beautiful tube of swirling fiery glory.
I passed Ellie, my old friend from art camp, who limped by me on crutches. I made a mental and very sincere apology to Ellie for depriving her of the elevator. Those crutches were gonna be a real doozy on the stairs.
“That is not a great use of my powers.”
An old male voice with a very proper English accent startled me out of my musings.
I looked up to be face to face, eyeball to eyeball, nose to flaming-nostril-spout-thing, with. a. dragon.
“I mean really, of all my skills, you choose the most embarrassingly brash one. I look like a fool, poofing out all those silly balls of flame, like a poor magician spitting out birthday candles.”
What just spoke? Was I hallucinating? Having a stroke? Asleep? I was quiet for a long time. It seemed like a long time, anyway. One of those out-of-body experiences you hear about where it’s as though you’re looking down at your own self. In this case, my self was standing dumbfounded, unnoticed by a sea of seventh graders hurrying past me to their next classes, in my holey jeans and aqua blue hoody, clutching the straps of my zipperless backpack, while I stared at what I could only perceive to be an adolescent European Arrowtail Dragon.
“An adolescent? Oh, go on! Oh that’s rich!” the dragon laughed and thumped his small spiny tail about.
“W-w-wait…” I finally stuttered. “Are you from London?”
The dragon looked at me askance, a bit bemused.
“Really. Of all the things in this world or any other, that is your first question for me?” he laughed. “Come on, then. Let us go.”
He turned and trotted away, gaining speed. He was lithe and moved like a cat. A giant, scaly cat. I ran to catch up, my gait awkward with my untied shoelaces. I didn’t know what I was doing – a dragon had just appeared in front of me and now I was following it? He hadn’t answered my question, and a million more were pouring into my brain.
“Go?” I cried, “Go where? Are you talking to me?”
Breathless now, I jogged through the halls after him as his pace deftly quickened. He must have seen my sorry athletic state and taken pity on me, for the mighty beast stopped abruptly. I thought he was giving me time to catch up to him so we might, you know, have a chat about, oh, I don’t know, who he is and what he is doing in the halls of my school and why and how he got there.
I felt a small, firm talon grasp my upper arm, and suddenly I was hoisted through the air and set upon a smooth, scaled back. His tail pressed against my backpack to better balance me. I couldn’t process what was happening, but I knew better than to question it at that moment.
As he positioned me, pulling my arms forward atop his massive neck and shimmying about until I tucked my legs up against my sides, the dragon never stopped moving. He turned left out of the math and science hall into the commons. Reaching this massive open space, his wings burst open and spread wide at his sides. Classes were still going; the school’s halls and commons were more or less empty, but Lester the janitor was up ahead of us, and I swear I saw Ms. Neally the librarian poke her head out as we sped past the double doors of the library.
We were really picking up quite a pace! How were we not being noticed, or yelled at, or stepping on Lester the janitor, or … or going through that window! I threw both arms around the sinewy, strong neck and squeezed my eyes shut. My face pressed against the warm scales. They weren’t slimy, or rough; they were more fibrous and even silky, like the hairs of a cello bow.
“That’s it, child! Hold on now; you’ll be fine! I really do love this part!” he shouted giddily as he hunched down in a pounce like a jungle cat and then exploded upward.
“Wait! What? Where!? Why?!” I seemed to only remember writing prompts in this time of shock. A few other words I’ve heard my mom say may have escaped out of my terrified mouth as we dove directly through a four-inch-plated glass window on the south wall of the science lab.
“No! Wait! Fly? Flying? Did you step on someone?!”
I couldn’t control the screams and exclamations shooting from my mouth. My eyes were clenched so tightly shut my face hurt. My stomach dropped like I had the wind knocked out of me. I felt the sensation of rising higher, that thrilling push gravity meets you with when you’re taking off in an airplane.
And then … weightlessness.
And wind.
And quiet. (Once I stopped screaming.)
My eyes stayed shut. Through the quiet, something strange pricked my ears. I was hearing … I was hearing a flock of geese? Their honking gained volume and closer and closer until honkhonkhonk resounded loudly next to me.
“Your questions are curious,” the dragon said nonchalantly.
I had to look. When my eyes finally fluttered open, I gasped. It was breathtaking! I was flying! Well, the dragon was flying; I was basically balancing/not falling to my death. But, I was doing a fine job of both. We were pretty high; the dragon’s wings flapped majestically at a steady tempo. They were beautiful as they moved. The light caught their every sinew and made their expanse glisten. I peered over my shoulder. Careful now, I thought. My school grew smaller and smaller behind us, finally nestled in a sea of tiny houses looking more like a video gamescape than an actual neighborhood I lived in.
The tops of trees now were just inches away from my tensely tucked feet. We circled over a mass of the green giants, then dropped slowly into their leafy, needled arms. We seemed to dance our way down from the clouds. This dragon took the stage as the prima ballerina, the backup cast of trees moved deftly in step with our pirouetting flight; we never even touched a single tree branch.
The dragon’s arms and legs extended out from beneath him like the landing gear of a plane. My heart pounded with his rhythmic stepping as his mighty talons smoothly absorbed the landing. He trotted a few strides ahead, slowing his pace gradually and naturally until we came to rest in a grassy opening.
He looked over his shoulder at me and gave me a wink. Leaning forward, he reached both his arms up, grabbed my sides, and lowered me to the ground. Ground! Such a lovely, welcome thing. How we were suddenly at the park down the street, unharmed, I had no idea.
“You don’t ask how I fly, who I am, where I came from … you wonder about my lovely elocution, how we don’t step on anyone, and why we are at a park,” he broke off, chuckling, trotting back and forth and stretching his talons.
I couldn’t tell if he was actually needing a quick stretch and trying to be health-conscious or simply showing off his luminescent brownish-black scales and toned musculature. As he stretched, his wings opened up fully again. But from my vantage point on the ground looking up at them now, I could see their pearly underside. The tops of his wings were darkly covered and rough-looking, despite their iridescence. But underneath they looked like opals! This combination resembled the mussel shells my mom loved to pick apart in her beurre-blanc sauce. She’d save some for me to soak up with freshly made baguettes. My mom! Did she know?
“Your mother is quite fine; you needn’t worry, especially as you’ve been gone from school all of twelve minutes,” Dragon said, opening up a book and flipping through it from the back forward. But where had he stowed a book?
“You ask a lot of questions, none of them immediately pertinent,” he murmured, not looking at me, but drawing a single talon down a page, tracing the outline of a triangle. The page singed as he touched it.
“You’re reading my thoughts!” I burst out.
Dragon looked sideways at me and winked.
“Finally you say something germane. Perhaps you may be as clever as you think yourself to be, Evechild.”