Dragonhaven

The first two years of Lois' life are both really blurry and really clear in my memory. There are all kinds of little sharp clear pieces in it, mostly about watching Lois grow and worrying about keeping her healthy, that are still dead immediate like they happened yesterday. But I have very little sense of the time passing, except for Lois getting bigger, which I really liked seeing, was hooked on seeing, because it was the only clue I had that maybe she was okay and thriving. I'm sure we had lots more close calls than I know about (or want to, even now) but one that I do know about, and scared me to death at the time, was the next time the school-form-filler-outer gang came to test me on the nonacademic stuff.

I think they were suspicious of the apprenticeship, although at that point, with the hooha about the poacher going on, everyone who wasn't one of us was suspicious of everything at Smokehill, and maybe it wasn't only cops who hang around talking loudly in gift shops who thought there was something strange about Dad "handing over his only child" to the Rangers. So what happened was that the usual school pencil pushers brought a doctor along without warning us. Usually I got a complete medical only once a year, and the last one had only been them six weeks before Lois happened, so I should have had a long spell yet to get her used to staying by herself, or at least not needing skin, which she kept burning. And here less than six months later was this dweeb telling me to take my shirt off so he could listen to my heart. And he took one look at my stomach, of course, and freaked.

Don't panic, I said to myself. You look guilty when you panic. This is another of those great hindsight things  -  he must have been thinking about some kind of really kinky child abuse or self-harm (I can't offhand think of anything that would leave marks like a dragonlet's tongue), and if I'd seemed frightened that would have made him think so all the more, and he would have started raking through our business and discovered that we were keeping some kind of big horrible secret. Child abuse didn't cross my mind at the time, but the big horrible secret sure did. I don't know where I got the nerve  -  maybe from spending so much time with Billy, who even told cops where they got off calmly  -  but I looked at my stomach and said, "Oh, yeah, eczema. My mom started getting it when she was about my age."

The tension level immediately sank about sixty fathoms and although he still wasn't happy  -  "Why didn't you report it? We could have given you something for it long ago, before it got this bad"  -  I think he stopped worrying that he had something to report back to headquarters. He muttered about stress levels and preoccupied single parents and looking at my diet and changing our laundry detergent and taking some scrapings to see if it was some kind of weird fungus instead of eczema (he did this, and the results must have been negative for weird funguses, even if Lois did kind of look like a large walking weird fungus), since it was rather unusual eczema (duh), and then he said he'd prescribe some cream for it as it was a pretty painful looking case (that was true enough; I give him credit  -  he was very gentle with the scraping taking) and it was peculiar that it was only on my stomach. Here I showed him some other littler Lois marks on my arms and my feet and legs, and this seemed to cheer him up. Doctors are weird.

Then when he found out I was living with Billy and Grace he wanted to talk to Grace about laundry detergent and what I ate which I found pretty insulting but Grace thought was funny. But at least it meant I got back to Lois before she had a heart attack and Grace had to go up to the institute and get her instructions how to take care of me. At least the doc didn't insist on coming to see my room.

After that it was always the same doctor, and after a while he wanted to write some kind of paper on my skin complaint, which he wasn't even sure was eczema, he said (bright of him), and he sure tried to get me to come up to some hospital and have some fancy tests done, but I didn't want to go (leave Lois overnight?) and Dad wouldn't make me, obviously, and since I was healthy except for the eczema, the doc reluctantly let it go.

The other seriously scary near miss  -  except that it wasn't a miss at all  -  was Eleanor's fault. That she and Martha knew something was up in itself wouldn't have been a big deal, necessarily, kids at the Institute were always being not told stuff, and overlooked or got out of the way  -  or told to get out of the way like it isn't normal to want to know what's going on. Being a kid is probably like that everywhere. It's maybe worse here in some ways because we all live here  -  nobody goes home from the office. Martha and I knew this  -  I've been here since I was born and Martha since she was two  -  and it was just the way it was. But it's one of the reasons that families with kids old enough to know the way the rest of the world works never stay here long. Even if both parents have jobs they like the kids hate it. They're kept out of the grown-up stuff and there is no kid stuff. Since pretty much every kid I've ever talked to (and most grown-ups) say they hated school I don't entirely get this  -  seems to me not having to go to school might balance not having lots of friends your own age. But I guess it doesn't.

Eleanor was another story. Of course she's the youngest, so that's a big thing right there  -  she's always trying to be older. But Eleanor has to be out there. Martha and me, if we're told to go away and leave the grown-ups alone, find a book to read or baby orphan to feed (ha ha). Eleanor hates being shut out of anything. Which is why, since she got old enough to be usefully and sort of applied-ly a brat instead of just a general brat sort of brat, Martha and I knew more stuff about the Institute than we used to, because she's always generous (to the other members of our oppressed race, the children) with her info. And this time whatever they weren't being told bothered Martha too; because I was in on it. I think Martha might have been kind of bracing herself for, this to happen  -  that I would suddenly become one of the grown-ups, or at least not a kid like her and Eleanor any more  -  and maybe she thought my solo overnight really had been it, the place where I crossed the line. But this was kind of more spectacular than she expected. And it drove Eleanor insane.

I've already told you I felt bad about not really being friends any more. Friends with Martha anyway, interactions with Eleanor don't really come under that heading. It's like I'd barely seen Martha and Eleanor except for my fifteenth birthday party which after the first hour I just wanted to be over with because I had to get back to Lois who I knew would be starting to shred the bedclothes. That's not too flattering to the people at your party. It was already a strange party because Grace hadn't come  -  but someone had to stay home and make not-alone noises for Lois. Billy brought the cake she'd made but it was still strange. And I saw Martha and Eleanor when the school testers came, but none of us was at our best then. That was one thing we had totally in common. All three of us hated the grown-ups who came to prod us and take notes like we were some kind of science project or field survey. I felt like giving them tips. Our Rangers did it so much better.

But while it was Eleanor's idea, I think in this case Martha went along with it. And so one afternoon when Lois was about seven months old and I was home alone doing extra schoolwork so I could sit still longer and let Lois sleep on my (bare) feet for longer, first because any time she was asleep I wanted to keep her that way as long as possible and second because I'd been over three hours at the Institute the day before and she'd been pretty panicked and crazy by the time I got back. (Panicked and crazy was getting bigger and heavier too, she was going to be leaving bruises some day soon, as well as eczema, never mind the grisly idea of her giving the slip to Billy or Grace or whoever her jailer was that day, and galumphing up to the institute to look for me. Or just getting hopelessly lost in the woods. This really was not likely  -  at least not until she was big enough to keep galumphing with Billy or Grace hanging around her neck  -  but it was still another thing that worried me.)

Also . . . this is another of those things I don't know how to explain, even in hindsight, although I have a much better idea what was going on now than I did then . . . my stupid permanent headache was sort of better when I was thinking about stuff: I've said it was easier to live with if I was doing something, but that's not quite right. It's like it liked certain kinds of brainwork. It liked educational stuff, not worry stuff. It didn't exactly hurt less, but it hurt better. Remember I said, about when I first had it, that it sometimes seemed like it was trying to fit inside my head and couldn't figure out why it couldn't make itself comfortable? Well now it was like something in my head that was interested in some of the same things I was interested in. Headline in the National Stupid People Press: Boy Believes He Was Kidnapped by Aliens and Has an Alien Spy Thingy Implanted in His Brain. Photos on page seven. I didn't  -  didn't think I'd been kidnapped by aliens, I mean  -  but I did start to sort of half think of my headache as almost another thing  -  like me, Lois, Billy, Grace, the Smell, and the Headache  -  but without finishing the other half of thinking about it, because it was too weird.

Anyway. So Headache and I were deep in this afternoon when I heard the door bang and I had about five seconds to jerk myself out of whatever I was doing and think that the bang didn't sound right and that neither Billy nor Grace was due back till later, and then a voice I knew only too well said, "What is that smell?" and I was on my feet and would have been out of my bedroom door and closing it behind me in another five seconds but Eleanor was too fast for me.

"Oh, shit," I said. If Dad had been there that would have been my allowance for that week. (Sure I have an allowance, even in Smokehill. How do you think I paid for all those on-line hours of Annihilate?) But if he'd been there he'd've stopped it from happening somehow, I don't know how, put a bag over Eleanor's head and said three magic words or something. Dad copes. It hasn't been good for his temper but he copes.

Lois poked her nose around the desk leg, not happy at the abrupt removal of my feet, but generally speaking always ready to be thrilled at meeting someone else so long as I was there too. She did one of her peeps. Not that I could ever say for sure what happy was in Lois terms, but her spine plates, now that they were big enough to do anything, tended to erect themselves when she was what I would call happy and interested. They stiffened now. And her nostrils flared, and she did a kind of ooonnngg-peeEEEeep-oooonnngggg. I told you about my dad suddenly believing Billy's story was real when he heard the weird noises coming from under his son's shirt. Sound and smell are very convincing. Just seeing something that looks like a low-level goblin out of a bad computer game isn't so convincing.

"What is that?" Eleanor said, in that way you do when you're really surprised: Whaaaaat is thaaaaaat? It takes a lot to surprise Eleanor. By this time Martha had joined Eleanor in the doorway, except by then Eleanor was out of the doorway and going toward Lois. I grabbed her arm. "Leave her alone," I said.

"Her?" said Eleanor. "Ow. You're hurting me."

"Tough eggs," I said. I was so shocked it was taking me a little while to get angry but I was going to be spectacularly angry when I got there. "What are you doing here?" I looked at Martha, but she wouldn't meet my eyes. Eleanor wouldn't meet them either, but that was because she was staring at Lois. Eleanor has no conscience. And Martha was pretty fascinated too. Who wouldn't be?

"What is that  -  she?" said Eleanor. "How do you know it's a she?"

"She's a dragon, isn't she," said Martha in this spaced-out voice. She was as shocked as I was, sort of from the opposite direction. We were both seeing the last thing we expected to see.

"No, she's an aardvark," I said. I couldn't quite come out and say, yes, that's right, this is my baby dragon, Lois. This is the big secret no one has been telling you. "What are you doing here?"

Eleanor finally turned away from Lois long enough to look up at me. I still had her by the arm. "I wanted to know what was going on," she said in her shoot-from-the-hip way. She might lie, cheat and steal to get where she wanted to go, but she'd tell you she'd done it once she got there.

"But  -  " I said. I didn't know where to begin.

"They're all in some meeting about something," she said. "The grown-ups. So there wasn't anyone watching us  -  for a change," she said with scorn, although at eight years old and living in the biggest and wildest wild animal park in the country it was hardly surprising she wasn't allowed to wander around by herself  -  and Katie did know that Martha couldn't be expected to keep Eleanor from doing something she was determined to do. Where was Katie when I needed her?

"Meeting," I said blankly. I was trying to remember if Billy and Grace had said anything about where they were going. Billy usually didn't. Grace usually did. But Grace wasn't a Smokehill employee; she just sold the admin some of her drawings. She wouldn't be going to a Smokehill meeting. Would she? All the grown-ups. And she loved Smokehill as passionately as any of us. "It can't be all the grown-ups," I said.

"It is though," said Eleanor. "They've closed the park for the day and everything. For this big special meeting. We're not supposed to know about it. They close the park and the grown-ups all disappear but we're not supposed to notice."

"Mom said she'd only be gone a couple of hours and everyone was busy," said Martha mildly.

"Busy going to the meeting," muttered Eleanor.

"We're short staffed," Martha continued as if Eleanor hadn't said anything.

"We're always short staffed," said Eleanor. "But there's never been a meeting for all the grown-ups before."

"About the caves?" I said, completely at a loss. I remembered Dad yesterday saying, really casually, that I could have the day off, stay home, away from the Institute. At the time I thought he just meant, and give Lois a break, because I'd been so long we knew she'd be in a state when I got back. He probably did mean that  -  but had he arranged for me to be delayed yesterday, to give himself the excuse to tell me not to come up today? What damned meeting? But suddenly I knew. And I didn't want to know.

Eleanor gave me one of her famous you-don't-know-anything-you-pathetic-schmuck looks. "No, stupid. About the dead guy. Oh!" She looked back at Lois. "You're right, Martha. It's a dragon." That's another thing about Eleanor. She never believes anything anyone tells her until she works it out for herself and it suits her to believe it. "The dragon the dead guy killed was a mom dragon, and this is her baby."

I decided without any difficulty not to say that this was her fifth and only living baby, and how I knew this, but I didn't deny that Eleanor was right. Pretty good thinking for eight. . .

"She doesn't look like a dragon," Eleanor continued. "She looks like. . ."

Eleanor actually paused. I'll tell you for free that most people's imaginations aren't up to describing what a dragonlet looks like, and Eleanor was always so busy trying to figure out how to get in the way out here in the real world she hadn't worked on her imagination much. I was allowed to describe Lois to myself as looking like roadkill or one of the monsters out of the first series of Star Trek, but I didn't want anyone else doing it. So I managed to interrupt. "Just stop there. I don't want to hear."

Martha knelt down, the way you do with small children and animals to get them to come to you. This works too well with Lois  -  she peeped delightedly and shot out from under the desk where she'd been keeping the backs of my legs hot. I dropped Eleanor's arm just in time to fend Lois off. "Don't  -  she'll burn you." Too late, of course  -  Martha might have listened but Eleanor instantly reached out to pat her. "Ow," she said, like Lois had hurt her deliberately.

This made me madder than it should've. Not at Lois. At Eleanor. "I told you," I said, trying to be patient. "She'll burn you. She can't help it. She's just hot."

"What do you  -  " Eleanor began accusingly, and then stopped and looked at her hand. She hadn't touched Lois long enough to have left a red mark. "Oh," she said. "Eczema. It's not because your mom had it." The things that kid picks up. "No," I said.

"If she opens her mouth, can you see the fire inside?" said Eleanor. It was a reasonable question for an eight-year-old.

"No," I said. "It's a special organ, like you have lungs to breathe, dragons have a fire-stomach for fire." Which was about as much as anyone knew: We were all eight-year-olds about dragons. I was down on the floor now too, with my arm around Lois' neck. It was mostly only fresh bits of me that weren't used to it that really burned any more  -  although my stomach stayed pretty scaly  -  and I was wearing a longsleeved shirt. Eleanor sat down in front of me, staring with renewed fascination at Lois, now only a few inches away. I was used to it, but at this distance you could feel her radiating heat, like sitting too close to the stove.

"Your eczema should be a lot worse," said Eleanor.

"You get used to it," I said.

"I've always wanted to see a dragon up close," said Martha.

And suddenly we were on the same side again. Suddenly I realized that while everything, Lois' life, Smokehill's future, everything that mattered, was about to have to rely on whether we could come up with a good reason to make Eleanor keep her big blackmailing mouth shut, it was also a relief to be a kid among kids again, even if I was the oldest and Eleanor was a pain in the butt. When you're the only kid surrounded by grown-ups, even when the grown-ups are busy protecting you, you spend a certain amount of time just holding your own line, just hanging on to being yourself. When you're with other kids you don't have to do this. Well, not so much. Eleanor has always been pushy. She was a pushy baby.

"Yeah," I said. "Me too."

"What's her name?" said Martha matter-of-factly, as if naming a dragon is a perfectly ordinary thing to do. As if having a dragon to name was a perfectly ordinary thing.

"Lois," I said.

"Lois?" said Eleanor. "That's a stupid name for a dragon."

This was so typical an Eleanor remark I didn't bother to answer it, and I didn't care either. But Martha said quietly, "I think it's a nice name," and mysteriously this made me feel really good.

We all sat there a little longer, staring at Lois. Lois, who was extremely used to me holding her off from flinging herself on the few people she ever got to see, had given up, and collapsed half onto my lap, grunting and murmuring a little from the awkwardness of her position, but also because she had this funny habit of muttering into silences in conversations. That was how we usually have conversations, right? Someone talks while everyone else is quiet, then someone else talks while the first person shuts up, and so on. I hadn't had a good shouting-over-each-other match with Dad since Lois came. Probably all the conversations she ever heard were polite ones. Snark had known my schedule better than I did, and if I was late to be doing something (like getting on the sofa after dinner to watch TV, so he could join me), he reminded me. Lois didn't seem to have much sense of time, but she had a sense of conversation. If no one else was saying anything, she did. And I'd got in the habit of letting her finish. After Lois had had her mutter, I said, "What is this about the poacher?"

Martha sighed her worried sigh, but Eleanor launched straight in. "His parents are on TV all over the country saying that dragons are too dangerous and they should all be killed!"

I gaped at her. "They'll never make that stick."

Martha said, "They're very, very, very, very wealthy."

I don't know how good an idea about money most kids have, but I'd grown up listening to my parents not just trying to figure out how to make the year's budget work and what we could get along without so it would stretch a little farther, which probably most kids listen to in most families, but about the really dazzling mess of getting, keeping, justifying, and accounting for funding for the Institute. I knew about congressional subcommittees and private donors and action groups and lobbyists. And I knew instantly  -  as Martha, whose mom was a member of the Institute's budgetary council, also knew  -  that very, very, very, very wealthy people who wanted something and didn't care how they got it were very, very, very, very dangerous. I hadn't thought I could worry any more than I was already worrying, all the time, about Lois. I was wrong.

"It's been going on for months," said Martha. "Well, since -  since it happened. At first nobody took them seriously. But they just kept at it  -  "

The first two years of Lois' life are both really blurry and really clear in my memory. There are all kinds of little sharp clear pieces in it, mostly about watching Lois grow and worrying about keeping her healthy, that are still dead immediate like they happened yesterday. But I have very little sense of the time passing, except for Lois getting bigger, which I really liked seeing, was hooked on seeing, because it was the only clue I had that maybe she was okay and thriving. I'm sure we had lots more close calls than I know about (or want to, even now) but one that I do know about, and scared me to death at the time, was the next time the school-form-filler-outer gang came to test me on the nonacademic stuff.

I think they were suspicious of the apprenticeship, although at that point, with the hooha about the poacher going on, everyone who wasn't one of us was suspicious of everything at Smokehill, and maybe it wasn't only cops who hang around talking loudly in gift shops who thought there was something strange about Dad "handing over his only child" to the Rangers. So what happened was that the usual school pencil pushers brought a doctor along without warning us. Usually I got a complete medical only once a year, and the last one had only been them six weeks before Lois happened, so I should have had a long spell yet to get her used to staying by herself, or at least not needing skin, which she kept burning. And here less than six months later was this dweeb telling me to take my shirt off so he could listen to my heart. And he took one look at my stomach, of course, and freaked.

Don't panic, I said to myself. You look guilty when you panic. This is another of those great hindsight things  -  he must have been thinking about some kind of really kinky child abuse or self-harm (I can't offhand think of anything that would leave marks like a dragonlet's tongue), and if I'd seemed frightened that would have made him think so all the more, and he would have started raking through our business and discovered that we were keeping some kind of big horrible secret. Child abuse didn't cross my mind at the time, but the big horrible secret sure did. I don't know where I got the nerve  -  maybe from spending so much time with Billy, who even told cops where they got off calmly  -  but I looked at my stomach and said, "Oh, yeah, eczema. My mom started getting it when she was about my age."

The tension level immediately sank about sixty fathoms and although he still wasn't happy  -  "Why didn't you report it? We could have given you something for it long ago, before it got this bad"  -  I think he stopped worrying that he had something to report back to headquarters. He muttered about stress levels and preoccupied single parents and looking at my diet and changing our laundry detergent and taking some scrapings to see if it was some kind of weird fungus instead of eczema (he did this, and the results must have been negative for weird funguses, even if Lois did kind of look like a large walking weird fungus), since it was rather unusual eczema (duh), and then he said he'd prescribe some cream for it as it was a pretty painful looking case (that was true enough; I give him credit  -  he was very gentle with the scraping taking) and it was peculiar that it was only on my stomach. Here I showed him some other littler Lois marks on my arms and my feet and legs, and this seemed to cheer him up. Doctors are weird.

Then when he found out I was living with Billy and Grace he wanted to talk to Grace about laundry detergent and what I ate which I found pretty insulting but Grace thought was funny. But at least it meant I got back to Lois before she had a heart attack and Grace had to go up to the institute and get her instructions how to take care of me. At least the doc didn't insist on coming to see my room.

After that it was always the same doctor, and after a while he wanted to write some kind of paper on my skin complaint, which he wasn't even sure was eczema, he said (bright of him), and he sure tried to get me to come up to some hospital and have some fancy tests done, but I didn't want to go (leave Lois overnight?) and Dad wouldn't make me, obviously, and since I was healthy except for the eczema, the doc reluctantly let it go.

The other seriously scary near miss  -  except that it wasn't a miss at all  -  was Eleanor's fault. That she and Martha knew something was up in itself wouldn't have been a big deal, necessarily, kids at the Institute were always being not told stuff, and overlooked or got out of the way  -  or told to get out of the way like it isn't normal to want to know what's going on. Being a kid is probably like that everywhere. It's maybe worse here in some ways because we all live here  -  nobody goes home from the office. Martha and I knew this  -  I've been here since I was born and Martha since she was two  -  and it was just the way it was. But it's one of the reasons that families with kids old enough to know the way the rest of the world works never stay here long. Even if both parents have jobs they like the kids hate it. They're kept out of the grown-up stuff and there is no kid stuff. Since pretty much every kid I've ever talked to (and most grown-ups) say they hated school I don't entirely get this  -  seems to me not having to go to school might balance not having lots of friends your own age. But I guess it doesn't.

Eleanor was another story. Of course she's the youngest, so that's a big thing right there  -  she's always trying to be older. But Eleanor has to be out there. Martha and me, if we're told to go away and leave the grown-ups alone, find a book to read or baby orphan to feed (ha ha). Eleanor hates being shut out of anything. Which is why, since she got old enough to be usefully and sort of applied-ly a brat instead of just a general brat sort of brat, Martha and I knew more stuff about the Institute than we used to, because she's always generous (to the other members of our oppressed race, the children) with her info. And this time whatever they weren't being told bothered Martha too; because I was in on it. I think Martha might have been kind of bracing herself for, this to happen  -  that I would suddenly become one of the grown-ups, or at least not a kid like her and Eleanor any more  -  and maybe she thought my solo overnight really had been it, the place where I crossed the line. But this was kind of more spectacular than she expected. And it drove Eleanor insane.

I've already told you I felt bad about not really being friends any more. Friends with Martha anyway, interactions with Eleanor don't really come under that heading. It's like I'd barely seen Martha and Eleanor except for my fifteenth birthday party which after the first hour I just wanted to be over with because I had to get back to Lois who I knew would be starting to shred the bedclothes. That's not too flattering to the people at your party. It was already a strange party because Grace hadn't come  -  but someone had to stay home and make not-alone noises for Lois. Billy brought the cake she'd made but it was still strange. And I saw Martha and Eleanor when the school testers came, but none of us was at our best then. That was one thing we had totally in common. All three of us hated the grown-ups who came to prod us and take notes like we were some kind of science project or field survey. I felt like giving them tips. Our Rangers did it so much better.

But while it was Eleanor's idea, I think in this case Martha went along with it. And so one afternoon when Lois was about seven months old and I was home alone doing extra schoolwork so I could sit still longer and let Lois sleep on my (bare) feet for longer, first because any time she was asleep I wanted to keep her that way as long as possible and second because I'd been over three hours at the Institute the day before and she'd been pretty panicked and crazy by the time I got back. (Panicked and crazy was getting bigger and heavier too, she was going to be leaving bruises some day soon, as well as eczema, never mind the grisly idea of her giving the slip to Billy or Grace or whoever her jailer was that day, and galumphing up to the institute to look for me. Or just getting hopelessly lost in the woods. This really was not likely  -  at least not until she was big enough to keep galumphing with Billy or Grace hanging around her neck  -  but it was still another thing that worried me.)

Also . . . this is another of those things I don't know how to explain, even in hindsight, although I have a much better idea what was going on now than I did then . . . my stupid permanent headache was sort of better when I was thinking about stuff: I've said it was easier to live with if I was doing something, but that's not quite right. It's like it liked certain kinds of brainwork. It liked educational stuff, not worry stuff. It didn't exactly hurt less, but it hurt better. Remember I said, about when I first had it, that it sometimes seemed like it was trying to fit inside my head and couldn't figure out why it couldn't make itself comfortable? Well now it was like something in my head that was interested in some of the same things I was interested in. Headline in the National Stupid People Press: Boy Believes He Was Kidnapped by Aliens and Has an Alien Spy Thingy Implanted in His Brain. Photos on page seven. I didn't  -  didn't think I'd been kidnapped by aliens, I mean  -  but I did start to sort of half think of my headache as almost another thing  -  like me, Lois, Billy, Grace, the Smell, and the Headache  -  but without finishing the other half of thinking about it, because it was too weird.

Anyway. So Headache and I were deep in this afternoon when I heard the door bang and I had about five seconds to jerk myself out of whatever I was doing and think that the bang didn't sound right and that neither Billy nor Grace was due back till later, and then a voice I knew only too well said, "What is that smell?" and I was on my feet and would have been out of my bedroom door and closing it behind me in another five seconds but Eleanor was too fast for me.

"Oh, shit," I said. If Dad had been there that would have been my allowance for that week. (Sure I have an allowance, even in Smokehill. How do you think I paid for all those on-line hours of Annihilate?) But if he'd been there he'd've stopped it from happening somehow, I don't know how, put a bag over Eleanor's head and said three magic words or something. Dad copes. It hasn't been good for his temper but he copes.

Lois poked her nose around the desk leg, not happy at the abrupt removal of my feet, but generally speaking always ready to be thrilled at meeting someone else so long as I was there too. She did one of her peeps. Not that I could ever say for sure what happy was in Lois terms, but her spine plates, now that they were big enough to do anything, tended to erect themselves when she was what I would call happy and interested. They stiffened now. And her nostrils flared, and she did a kind of ooonnngg-peeEEEeep-oooonnngggg. I told you about my dad suddenly believing Billy's story was real when he heard the weird noises coming from under his son's shirt. Sound and smell are very convincing. Just seeing something that looks like a low-level goblin out of a bad computer game isn't so convincing.

"What is that?" Eleanor said, in that way you do when you're really surprised: Whaaaaat is thaaaaaat? It takes a lot to surprise Eleanor. By this time Martha had joined Eleanor in the doorway, except by then Eleanor was out of the doorway and going toward Lois. I grabbed her arm. "Leave her alone," I said.

"Her?" said Eleanor. "Ow. You're hurting me."

"Tough eggs," I said. I was so shocked it was taking me a little while to get angry but I was going to be spectacularly angry when I got there. "What are you doing here?" I looked at Martha, but she wouldn't meet my eyes. Eleanor wouldn't meet them either, but that was because she was staring at Lois. Eleanor has no conscience. And Martha was pretty fascinated too. Who wouldn't be?

"What is that  -  she?" said Eleanor. "How do you know it's a she?"

"She's a dragon, isn't she," said Martha in this spaced-out voice. She was as shocked as I was, sort of from the opposite direction. We were both seeing the last thing we expected to see.

"No, she's an aardvark," I said. I couldn't quite come out and say, yes, that's right, this is my baby dragon, Lois. This is the big secret no one has been telling you. "What are you doing here?"

Eleanor finally turned away from Lois long enough to look up at me. I still had her by the arm. "I wanted to know what was going on," she said in her shoot-from-the-hip way. She might lie, cheat and steal to get where she wanted to go, but she'd tell you she'd done it once she got there.

"But  -  " I said. I didn't know where to begin.

"They're all in some meeting about something," she said. "The grown-ups. So there wasn't anyone watching us  -  for a change," she said with scorn, although at eight years old and living in the biggest and wildest wild animal park in the country it was hardly surprising she wasn't allowed to wander around by herself  -  and Katie did know that Martha couldn't be expected to keep Eleanor from doing something she was determined to do. Where was Katie when I needed her?

"Meeting," I said blankly. I was trying to remember if Billy and Grace had said anything about where they were going. Billy usually didn't. Grace usually did. But Grace wasn't a Smokehill employee; she just sold the admin some of her drawings. She wouldn't be going to a Smokehill meeting. Would she? All the grown-ups. And she loved Smokehill as passionately as any of us. "It can't be all the grown-ups," I said.

"It is though," said Eleanor. "They've closed the park for the day and everything. For this big special meeting. We're not supposed to know about it. They close the park and the grown-ups all disappear but we're not supposed to notice."

"Mom said she'd only be gone a couple of hours and everyone was busy," said Martha mildly.

"Busy going to the meeting," muttered Eleanor.

"We're short staffed," Martha continued as if Eleanor hadn't said anything.

"We're always short staffed," said Eleanor. "But there's never been a meeting for all the grown-ups before."

"About the caves?" I said, completely at a loss. I remembered Dad yesterday saying, really casually, that I could have the day off, stay home, away from the Institute. At the time I thought he just meant, and give Lois a break, because I'd been so long we knew she'd be in a state when I got back. He probably did mean that  -  but had he arranged for me to be delayed yesterday, to give himself the excuse to tell me not to come up today? What damned meeting? But suddenly I knew. And I didn't want to know.

Eleanor gave me one of her famous you-don't-know-anything-you-pathetic-schmuck looks. "No, stupid. About the dead guy. Oh!" She looked back at Lois. "You're right, Martha. It's a dragon." That's another thing about Eleanor. She never believes anything anyone tells her until she works it out for herself and it suits her to believe it. "The dragon the dead guy killed was a mom dragon, and this is her baby."

I decided without any difficulty not to say that this was her fifth and only living baby, and how I knew this, but I didn't deny that Eleanor was right. Pretty good thinking for eight. . .

"She doesn't look like a dragon," Eleanor continued. "She looks like. . ."

Eleanor actually paused. I'll tell you for free that most people's imaginations aren't up to describing what a dragonlet looks like, and Eleanor was always so busy trying to figure out how to get in the way out here in the real world she hadn't worked on her imagination much. I was allowed to describe Lois to myself as looking like roadkill or one of the monsters out of the first series of Star Trek, but I didn't want anyone else doing it. So I managed to interrupt. "Just stop there. I don't want to hear."

Martha knelt down, the way you do with small children and animals to get them to come to you. This works too well with Lois  -  she peeped delightedly and shot out from under the desk where she'd been keeping the backs of my legs hot. I dropped Eleanor's arm just in time to fend Lois off. "Don't  -  she'll burn you." Too late, of course  -  Martha might have listened but Eleanor instantly reached out to pat her. "Ow," she said, like Lois had hurt her deliberately.

This made me madder than it should've. Not at Lois. At Eleanor. "I told you," I said, trying to be patient. "She'll burn you. She can't help it. She's just hot."

"What do you  -  " Eleanor began accusingly, and then stopped and looked at her hand. She hadn't touched Lois long enough to have left a red mark. "Oh," she said. "Eczema. It's not because your mom had it." The things that kid picks up. "No," I said.

"If she opens her mouth, can you see the fire inside?" said Eleanor. It was a reasonable question for an eight-year-old.

"No," I said. "It's a special organ, like you have lungs to breathe, dragons have a fire-stomach for fire." Which was about as much as anyone knew: We were all eight-year-olds about dragons. I was down on the floor now too, with my arm around Lois' neck. It was mostly only fresh bits of me that weren't used to it that really burned any more  -  although my stomach stayed pretty scaly  -  and I was wearing a longsleeved shirt. Eleanor sat down in front of me, staring with renewed fascination at Lois, now only a few inches away. I was used to it, but at this distance you could feel her radiating heat, like sitting too close to the stove.

"Your eczema should be a lot worse," said Eleanor.

"You get used to it," I said.

"I've always wanted to see a dragon up close," said Martha.

And suddenly we were on the same side again. Suddenly I realized that while everything, Lois' life, Smokehill's future, everything that mattered, was about to have to rely on whether we could come up with a good reason to make Eleanor keep her big blackmailing mouth shut, it was also a relief to be a kid among kids again, even if I was the oldest and Eleanor was a pain in the butt. When you're the only kid surrounded by grown-ups, even when the grown-ups are busy protecting you, you spend a certain amount of time just holding your own line, just hanging on to being yourself. When you're with other kids you don't have to do this. Well, not so much. Eleanor has always been pushy. She was a pushy baby.

"Yeah," I said. "Me too."

"What's her name?" said Martha matter-of-factly, as if naming a dragon is a perfectly ordinary thing to do. As if having a dragon to name was a perfectly ordinary thing.

"Lois," I said.

"Lois?" said Eleanor. "That's a stupid name for a dragon."

This was so typical an Eleanor remark I didn't bother to answer it, and I didn't care either. But Martha said quietly, "I think it's a nice name," and mysteriously this made me feel really good.

We all sat there a little longer, staring at Lois. Lois, who was extremely used to me holding her off from flinging herself on the few people she ever got to see, had given up, and collapsed half onto my lap, grunting and murmuring a little from the awkwardness of her position, but also because she had this funny habit of muttering into silences in conversations. That was how we usually have conversations, right? Someone talks while everyone else is quiet, then someone else talks while the first person shuts up, and so on. I hadn't had a good shouting-over-each-other match with Dad since Lois came. Probably all the conversations she ever heard were polite ones. Snark had known my schedule better than I did, and if I was late to be doing something (like getting on the sofa after dinner to watch TV, so he could join me), he reminded me. Lois didn't seem to have much sense of time, but she had a sense of conversation. If no one else was saying anything, she did. And I'd got in the habit of letting her finish. After Lois had had her mutter, I said, "What is this about the poacher?"

Martha sighed her worried sigh, but Eleanor launched straight in. "His parents are on TV all over the country saying that dragons are too dangerous and they should all be killed!"

I gaped at her. "They'll never make that stick."

Martha said, "They're very, very, very, very wealthy."

I don't know how good an idea about money most kids have, but I'd grown up listening to my parents not just trying to figure out how to make the year's budget work and what we could get along without so it would stretch a little farther, which probably most kids listen to in most families, but about the really dazzling mess of getting, keeping, justifying, and accounting for funding for the Institute. I knew about congressional subcommittees and private donors and action groups and lobbyists. And I knew instantly  -  as Martha, whose mom was a member of the Institute's budgetary council, also knew  -  that very, very, very, very wealthy people who wanted something and didn't care how they got it were very, very, very, very dangerous. I hadn't thought I could worry any more than I was already worrying, all the time, about Lois. I was wrong.

"It's been going on for months," said Martha. "Well, since -  since it happened. At first nobody took them seriously. But they just kept at it  -  "

Kept throwing money at it, I translated silently.

"And they've started the Human Preservation Society"  -  I didn't know Martha knew how to sound that scornful  -  "and they're really well organized."

Have hired goons to write letters and hang out with members of Congress and other people who like playing with money and power, I translated. And because they have lots of money, they've hired effective goons and send lots of letters.

I hoped Dad's coping mechanism was up to it. My brain was doing a slow, dazed reshuffle of my awareness of the tension level around the Institute. It made me feel silly and self-absorbed (or Lois-absorbed) to be reminded that the world  -  the world that mattered  -  didn't actually revolve around us. I wasn't enjoying the reminder. It was also incredibly stupid of me to have forgotten about the death of the poacher, even if it had been months ago now, and I didn't want to remember. I remembered the death of Lois' mom all right. I still thought of her every day.

You can't pet a dragonlet. Well, you can, but in the first place you'll probably burn your hand, depending on how sensitive your skin is, and in the second place I figured it couldn't feel like much to the dragon. Even as a squishy baby Lois had noticeably thick skin, and now that she was growing scales, it was more like running your hand over pebbles. But she was certainly an interactive creature and, as I say, noisy. I was having the petting reflex as I thought about the poacher  -  I'd half petted the hair off Snark when I was worried about something  -  but I'd learned to deflect the reflex in Lois' case. Unfortunately I didn't think about this any more  -  I wasn't used to having people around with me and Lois  -  so I burbled at her. I could do a half-decent Lois burble. I couldn't peep and I couldn't mew, but I could burble. She turned her funny snout up toward me  -  she'd been staring at Martha and Eleanor as keenly as they were staring at her  -  and burbled back.

"You're as goofy about that dragon as you were about your dog," said Eleanor, who was four when he died and shouldn't have been able to remember him at all. He wasn't her dog and she'd never found him interesting. She probably didn't mean to sound as snotty as she did sound, but she sounded pretty snotty.

I stood up. I did not have a brilliant coping mechanism. "You shouldn't be here, and if I tell anybody you were here you'll get into more trouble than you've ever imagined getting into," I said to her. This was not what I'd planned a few minutes ago when I'd been thinking about how my first priority was to think of a way to make Eleanor keep her mouth shut, but then I hadn't had any plan. If I hadn't been so pissed off at her saying what she'd said, though, I'd have known better than to threaten her, which was always the thing that worked least with her. But Martha surprised me.

"She won't," said Martha. She'd stood up when I did. Martha wasn't big for thirteen the way I was big for fifteen, but she was still a lot bigger than eight-year-old Eleanor. This is a lot of Eleanor's problem, as I say. She takes on the world because she hates being littlest; and she's a little littlest. But although I saw her face pulling into its usual pig-headed brat the-thing-I'm-going-to-do-first-is-the-thing-you-don't-want-me-to-do lines, she looked at me and then at Martha and wavered. This was a first with Eleanor so far as I know. She doesn't know how to waver. Martha and I must have looked pretty fierce. I was feeling like pig-headed brat roast for dinner, but I didn't know Martha knew how to look fierce. I looked at her though and she did.

She didn't sound angry the way I did, but she said, very calmly, "Eleanor, this is about all of our lives. This about you and me and Jake, and Mom and Dr. Mendoza, and Billy and all the Rangers, and everybody you know. And it's about Jake's dragon and all the dragons in Smokehill. You know dragons are why we're here, don't you?"

Eleanor is one of these people who when she comes into the room, whatever is going on becomes all about Eleanor. I didn't think even Smokehill really got through to Eleanor.

I was wrong. I don't know if Martha knew her better than I did  -  if maybe she was more Martha's sister than I'd realized. But Eleanor looked thoughtfully at Martha for a moment, and she looked smaller for that moment, just an ordinary kid. "Yes," she said, "I do." She added in more her usual manner, "I'm not stupid." And then she turned on me and stuck her chin out and clenched her fists and said, "And I'll even keep your secret for you, but first you have to apologize, and then you have to ask me nicely, and I don't care what you think you can do to me."

I was over my bad temper by then. And besides, Lois was so much more important. (Lois, who I was keeping trapped between my shins so she couldn't go burn Martha and Eleanor and, among other things, maybe give the game away after all.) "I'm sorry," I said, almost sincerely. "Please don't tell anyone about Lois, okay?"

She pulled her chin in a little and crossed her arms. "Okay," she said. And I believed her.

The grown-ups were really preoccupied at dinner that night, so they didn't notice I was really preoccupied too. Kit and Jane were there as well as Dad, and Grace and Billy. I don't know if having more silent grown-ups there was supposed to make the silence less obvious but it didn't. Grace and Lois and I kept the conversation going. Grace did a pretty good burble too, although she always did it the way you make "mmm-hmmm" noises at a four-year-old (human) who wants to tell you a story. It reminded me of being four, when Grace sometimes babysat for me. This didn't actually improve my mood. It seemed to me they were still "mmm-hmmming" me really.

I wanted to ask them how the meeting had gone, but I couldn't, since I wasn't supposed to know about it. It did make me a little angry that they seemed to think Martha and Eleanor wouldn't have noticed, even if they thought they had me safely tucked away (they were right about that, which was part of why I was angry), but I've noticed before the way children are conveniently assumed to be dumb when adults need them to be. You'd think the adults would learn. But who am I to be sarcastic? I didn't want to know about the poacher. The villain. I didn't want the poacher ever to cross my mind for any reason whatsoever. It was bad enough thinking about Lois' mom, every day, which I did, as I told you. I used to try to blot out the memory part of it by deliberately calling up that dragon cave I still dreamed about sometimes, which usually had her in it, because there she was alive which is how I knew it was only a stupid childish dream and it meant I really was a wuss.

I mostly could blot the poacher out. But this was the worst yet: that he had parents who could make big trouble for Smokehill. How do I explain this to you though? I did think about it, that evening, with all these preoccupied grown-ups eating Grace's food and pretending really badly that everything was normal, whatever normal was any more. I thought about it and kind of realized  -  although writing it down like this makes it again a whole lot more rational than it was at the time  -  that I couldn't think about it. It was too much. If there was a line, this was over it. My job was to raise Lois. Somebody else was going to have to deal with the villain.

About the time Lois started riding on my shoulders she also suddenly hey presto housebroke herself. What a major relief that was. Dragon diapers are the WORST. (And I should say I didn't do all my own laundry, if you counted Lois. We all did Lois' diapers. And  -  speaking of needing generators to run stuff  -  I can't imagine doing baby dragon diapers without a washing machine. Or anyway I don't want to. Mind you we were probably destroying the local groundwater table or whatever. They took more than one go and you didn't just throw them in without some preliminary detox either.)

But it was weird, how fast it happened, and how little I had to do with it. It makes sense if you figure that this must be the stage when the baby dragon is not merely old enough (and scaly enough) to look out of its mom's pouch but old enough to climb out and do its business outdoors, which must be a major relief to Mom. I had noticed that Lois' scales first started really looking like scales on her head, like they grew there first so she could look out and get used to the idea of out.

It was a relief in other ways too  -  her tail was turning into a tail, and the diapers didn't fit so well any more, and even Billy's ingenuity has its limits. Big disgusting yuck. I used to make jokes about Super Glue. Especially when -  No, never mind.

The point is that suddenly it wasn't a problem any more. Except that it was because everything about Lois was a problem and the problem got bigger as she got bigger, and while no more dragon diapers was TOTALLY a good thing, dragon dung doesn't disintegrate that fast, so I had to get out there and bury the stuff all the time, and dragonlet digestion really puts the stuff through, so while I would have said she was never out of my sight when we were outdoors together (she'd better not be) she still managed to leave piles I didn't notice her leaving.

Then there was the fact that dragonlet pee slowly burns holes in almost everything it touches (it didn't burn right through the diapers, but it wore through fast enough that we had to patch them, and needlework is not my thing but Grace let me use pretty much anything in her sewing box, so some of them got kind of artistically interesting over time and repeat mending) and fortunately Billy and Grace's house didn't have any lawn to destroy, but she still almost managed to kill one of Grace's Smokehill-winter-proof, tougher-than-the-French-Foreign-Legion rhododendrons before I figured out how to persuade her  -  Lois, not Grace  -  to pee and crap in one sort of general area. Although this still wasn't foolproof. I swear I was always out there with my shovel  -  to the extent that if a dragon could get neurotic I should have given Lois a complex  -  and even so half the time when Kit or Jane came round the conversation would begin like this:

Kit or Jane: "Hi, Jake. There's a  -  "

Me: "Okay." And I go get my shovel. (If it was Whiteoak, he just looked at me. And I'd go get my shovel.) And miss whatever they'd come to say, probably, which may have been the idea.

Lois would always come with me. Far from developing a complex she was delighted for an excuse to go outside and play some more, and as far as she was concerned (evidently) my strange compulsion to bury her leavings was as good an excuse as anything else, and the house was getting smaller and smaller as she got bigger and bigger. (I wonder what she thought about the toilet. I always used to wonder that about Snark. I don't know how good a dragon's sense of smell is, but it would have to be really bad not to draw the correct conclusions about what the toilet is about. And a dog has to know. So isn't it thinking, Hey, why do you get to use that thing when I have to go outdoors even when the wind chill makes it sixty below and the snow is coming in sideways?)

She weighed about thirty pounds when she housebroke herself, but that's still a pretty fair weight to carry around on your shoulders (if you're only a human), especially when it wiggles. The thing I worried about the most  -  the most after the possibility of someone taking a wrong turn and wandering into Billy and Grace's backyard some day, especially some day when I hadn't got out there with my shovel, or maybe in fact I was out there with my shovel, and with Lois herself  -  was that she was going to start practicing her fire-throwing. The fact that she was alive proved her igniventator was working, and the skin on my stomach sure believed it. And as well as getting bigger and noisier she was getting livelier and she wanted more action. How do you teach a dragon to come, sit and stay? Fortunately she still had little short legs and couldn't run as fast as I could. (Snark had been able to run faster than me by the time he was twelve weeks old, although I was still pretty little myself then.) But I was pretty sure this wouldn't be true much longer. I was also keeping a sharp, anxious eye on her wing stubs, but they didn't seem to be doing anything much yet either.

But speaking of training a dragon, it was at this stage, when she was beginning to spend significant amounts of time outside her mom's pouch equivalent that I began to realize . . . this is going to sound really stupid . . . that she was trying to, uh, respond to me, I mean aside from the fact that she still got hysterical if I wasn't around for more than about two hours.

I've raised, or helped raise, baby birds and baby raccoons and baby woodchucks and baby porcupines, and watched the Rangers raise baby bears and baby wolves and baby eagles, and some of them even survived to grow up and fly or run or trundle away. But when a baby robin gets all excited and sticks its neck out and opens its mouth and goes "ak kak kak kak kak" at you it's not exactly responding to you. It's responding to the prospect of getting fed. It never thinks about being a robin, and it doesn't care what you are, so long as you're feeding it the right stuff. (Chopped up earthworms rolled in dirt are a favorite. Delicious.) I also know that animals raised by humans tend to grow up funny because they aren't getting socialized by their own kind and don't learn how to do it, but even then I'm not sure that what they're doing is confusing themselves by trying to be human. What they're doing is failing to learn how to be themselves.

And I was a little silly about Lois . . . okay, more than a little. But can you blame me? The point is, when she started spending more time at a little distance, so we could like look at each other  -  that was another thing, her eyes had suddenly gone all sharp and focused at about five months; I'd begun to think that maybe dragons don't use sight much (and then I'd remember her mom's eye, sharp and clear and focused as anything  -  and dying  -  and then I'd remember all the impossible stuff I'd seen in that eye about hope and despair  -  and then I'd take my mind off it like peeling Snark as a puppy off the shoe he was disemboweling) anyway, when Lois could watch me properly, she started trying to do what I was doing. For a while I could ignore it, put it down to why your cat walks on your keyboard when you're trying to use your computer, why your dog suddenly wants to play fetch when it's your turn to get dinner.

But she wasn't just trying to get my attention. It took me a while to figure this out  -  dragons and humans are shaped so much different. It's not like baby chimps learning to crack coconuts with stones by picking up a stone and banging with it because that's what Mom's doing. Or maybe it is. When I was typing, if she didn't want a nap, Lois used to dance. I should maybe say I'm kind of a dramatic typist. I had had to practice keeping my legs and feet still when Lois first got out of the sling, so she could lie on them while I typed. If they weren't held down, my feet started tapping all by themselves. (Which wasn't actually such a bad thing, because if she didn't want a nap  -  and she way too often didn't want a nap  -  she'd dance with my feet. This was a little distracting I admit, but I usually managed to keep typing.) She made great wheezy inhale noises when I was breathing in something especially wonderful that Grace was taking out of the oven, but that may just have been that she agreed with me. When I'd scratch my head or pull my hair and grunt while I was doing schoolwork I didn't like (which tended to make the Headache worse too) she'd scratch and shake her head  -  and grunt.

Sometimes it was more complicated than that  -  or maybe what I mean is it was harder to decide it didn't mean anything. But when I was doing laundry she began to collect whatever small loose stuff she could around the house, shoes, magazines, dropped pencils, wet rain stuff hanging over the radiators, and including snaffling towels off the rails (which in theory were hung too high for her to reach), snuggle them around a while on the kitchen floor (I tried to rescue the towels in time), leave them while the washer ran, and then bring them outdoors and spread them out on the ground (sometimes this was kind of hard on the magazines) when I hung the stuff up to dry.

This really did catch my attention because it seemed to me to say something about her attention span and her, you know, mental processes generally. It was way too complicated, you know? In fact it started making me think scary Dragons Are Intelligent thoughts so I concentrated on trying to prevent her from "washing" anything that would make more work for me. I told myself that baby critters are always getting into other things  -  especially things you don't want them to get into  -  it's what they do. It's part of being a baby critter. It's part of growing up. Half-grown raccoons are incredibly creative escape artists and nosy and boy can they get into trouble. It's hardwired. Nothing to get paranoid about. Nope. Nothing at all.

And I've said she was noisy. Well, I talked to her a lot. That went back to that very first day, that awful day when I found her, when we were like both yattering from our different traumas. Well, same trauma, different angle. It's like we'd just never stopped, it's just the frenzy level had dropped some, and most of our yattering now was pretty cheerful. A little overwrought sometimes maybe but pretty cheerful.

I've told you she had learned really quickly to "talk" during pauses in a conversation  -  the one time she consistently broke this rule was while I was in the shower. (She'd gone on not liking to get wet.) I always left the bathroom door half open so she could follow me in if she wanted to (which she always did, but I kept hoping . . . ) and she talked to/with the shower. I could hear her  -  the water going whoosh whoosh whoosh and Lois going kind of woooosh whoosh waaaaaaaash wiiiiiiiiiiiish, as if she assumed the shower was either one of my noises or a major monologist, and didn't quite understand why it only made this one sort of splash-and-splatter-punctuated roaring cry.

So if there was no one else at home sometimes I sang. Now there is a noise to drive the birds from the trees and the dragons into the deepest caverns of the Bonelands. Even Lois' mimicry boggled at trying to do the dragonlet version of a shower and Jake singing. Although she did do a good hum. In fact her humming was the nearest of all her noises to any of the noises humans make. Sometimes we hummed together.

But I think I played with her more once Martha and Eleanor were in on it. Things just felt a little less harrowing. That being-on-the-same-side thing even made me feel a little more at ease with the child welfare people, and I swear child welfare people pick up the smell of fear like mean dogs do and have no clue that the fear might be of them. (Mean dogs know perfectly well that it is. We've  -  Smokehill I mean  -  only ever had maybe two mean dogs since I've been old enough to notice, and they don't last past the first snap. One of the families with kids, one of the kids ran away when Dad banned the dog, and then the rest of the family gave up and left too. More of Dad's graduate students. He doesn't have the best luck with his graduate students.)

Eleanor nearly ruined everything though by deciding to be helpful by adding corroborative testimony, like in police shows on TV. She asked the doctor if he couldn't do anything else for my eczema (his creams hadn't worked, not surprisingly, but also because I hadn't bothered to use them) because she was sure it hurt more than I admitted. Thanks, Eleanor. Maybe it worked out okay though, since the doctor knew that Eleanor was a busybody. So maybe that Eleanor pretended she knew it was eczema was corroborative testimony. (I taught her to say "corroborative testimony" and she forgave me for being ticked off that she'd opened her big mouth about it at all.)

Anyway. Lois used to lie on my feet at supper (everybody else carefully and awkwardly keeping their feet out of the way around Billy and Grace's little kitchen table, especially after she started to generalize about people and wanted to be friends with everybody she saw. Even if you were unsympathetically wearing shoes she'd put her hot, scratchy nose up your pantleg to be sociable) which was usually the four of us humans plus one dragon. Except when Dad couldn't get away or Billy was on duty or aggravating some investigators or checking what the diggers and builders were (still) doing to the caves after they'd closed down for the day (work on this had slowed down a lot since the scandal started). And then sometimes we had  -  Jane or Kit or Whiteoak  -  or Nate or Jo, who Billy'd added to the dragonsitting/Jake's Sanity Conservation rota  -  and people having a meal together talk (except Whiteoak of course. I learned "thank you" and "please pass the whatever" in Arkhola from having Whiteoak for dinner. Even Whiteoak wasn't going to risk being rude to Grace I think). Maybe they talk especially when they aren't completely comfortable with each other, and Dad and I hadn't been completely comfortable with each other in years, and we also weren't seeing as much of each other as we used to, so most of the time we talked a lot to cover up the silence.

(Except of course if there'd just been a big meeting about what to do about the poacher's parents  -  which nobody ever did tell me anything about, just by the way, until years later, when I asked Dad. He looked at me blankly for a minute and then gave a sort of hollow nonlaugh. "We didn't figure anything out, that first meeting," he said  -  and Dad doesn't talk in italics all the time the way I do. "We didn't figure anything out. We just sat around and moaned and shouted and tore our hair." He stared into space for a minute, frowning. "It was pretty goddamn awful.")

It was a joke for a long time when, if a silence did manage to fall, we'd hear Lois doing her peeping and burbling under the table, which got gruffer and rougher as she got older. But I think I'm the only one of us humans who noticed that it wasn't just getting gruffer and rougher, but it was starting to rise and fall in a rhythm  -  kind of a lot like the sound of people talking.

I thought about this for a while, kind of hoping that someone else would notice too, but if anyone did they didn't say anything to me. But dragon noises, as I say, are peculiar so probably only my ears could make anything about Lois' sound effects seem familiar.

It had been Eleanor's remark about my goofiness that had really made me think about it. Between Lois and . . . between Lois and Lois it was really easy not to think about anything but getting through every hour as it came. So up till Martha and Eleanor met Lois I suppose I had kind of been thinking about Lois almost like a funny looking dog with strange habits. Snark imitated all kinds of human things and we all just said oh, what a clown. Eleanor made me realize that while I was just as goofy about Lois as I'd been about Snark, I was goofy about her differently. Not just because she wasn't a dog. Not just because she was the first addition to my family after fifty percent of it had died. Not just because of the dreams.

So one afternoon when I'd done more schoolwork than I could stand, and it was sunny outdoors, and we were alone at the cabin, I took her out (she waddled and murmured behind me, her scaly feet and the tip of her now steadily lengthening tail making a funny little scuttling noise on the kitchen linoleum like maybe there were several baby dragons following me instead of only one) and sat down on the ground with her and said, "Hey, Lois." I said it very carefully and deliberately. "Heeeeeey" on a falling note and "Lois" as two distinct syllables, "Lo" higher and stronger and "is" dropping off and down.

I didn't sit on the ground with her so much any more because for some reason this got her all excited and she was too inclined to stick her face in my face and give me more eczema (what a good thing she wasn't a face-licker), but it was a good way to get her attention. When she rushed over to touch her nose against mine I fended her off with a hand and said "Hey, Lois" again.

She stopped trying to make face contact and looked at me as if she knew this was important. She didn't have that squashy look of something that had been stepped on any more, and her head was beginning to look almost a little horsey, narrow at the muzzle and wider between the eyes. Her eyes were a little bulgy like an animal's who expects to have a lot of peripheral vision, but they were also protected by some nobbly, bumpy ridges, so who knows. Maybe dragons see the world with a nice scalloped frame around it. Baby dragon eyelashes, by the way, are halfway to being spines, which means that when your baby dragon blinks its eyes when it's falling asleep against your stomach, you feel like you're being peeled. (Some of the spinal plates, the erectile ones, have slightly serrated edges too, which are in effect more like a cheese-grater.) I must have good resistance to pain or something. I never minded the eczema or the peeling nearly as much as I minded the diapers, and the diapers were over.

She peeped at me. "Hey, Lois."

She peeped again, except it was more of a grumble. "Hey, Lois."

Another rumbly peep. But this one was a three-syllable peep, and the first syllable was longer than the other two.

"Hey," I said, more softly. "Lois."

And she answered a quieter three-syllable peep, and the long syllable fell down the scale and the first short syllable was higher and stronger and the second short syllable was lower and deeper.

I looked at her and she looked at me. Sure, mynah birds can do better, but do they do better while you're both straining with alertness at each other? It takes weeks to teach a parakeet to say its first words. The air was nearly humming around us, and the Headache tried to break out of my skull again, which it didn't do so much as it used to except when I woke up from dreaming about big dragons and caves with weird lighting effects. I suppose I'd noticed before that the Headache tended to get worse when Lois and I seemed to be getting, you know, intense at each other. But I wasn't thinking about that either. I did wonder occasionally if maybe it was a brain tumor, but weirdly since I'm so good at worrying about everything I could never really get going worrying about that.

So I sat there looking at her with her looking at me. I was excited and thrilled and also . . . frightened and horrified. Frightened because it was like I was finally facing that I had this whole extra responsibility I'd only been trying to keep her alive, which had been more than enough, but now I'd been reminded, forcefully, that just feeding a wild orphan isn't enough, and what do you teach a dragon about being a dragon? What was Lois trying to learn from the very funny-looking dragon she thought was her mom by mimicking the noises she (well, he) made?

I had no idea. And nobody could tell me. And I had read Old Pete's journals so often I knew them almost by heart and he couldn't tell me either.

And I hated the idea that the best Lois had to look forward to was growing up to live in some kind of cage and being dumbly fed by humans for the rest of her life because no one would've taught her how to be a dragon. Okay, Lois being alive was a miracle.

I wanted more miracles. That's all.

I also perversely suddenly didn't want any other humans to notice that Lois was trying to speak human. Add this to the long list of things I can't really explain. I was afraid of . . . how their reactions might make me think about it, I guess. Just the fact that they'd have reactions (Dad would get all fascinated and remind me to keep careful notes and Billy would just nod slowly and go on with whatever he was doing) felt like someone putting a hand on your soap bubble: pop. (Although as soap bubbles go, Lois didn't make the grade.)

But I was realizing what it really meant that Lois was Lois to me first and a dragon second, however stupid that sounds, like I could forget 1,61. half a nanosecond that she was a dragon. But everybody else could afford to see her as a dragon. And this meant I saw her as . . . ?

I had a lot of sleepless nights after that afternoon. While Lois snuffled and gurgled under the bedclothes. While I worried I also noticed  -  especially noticeable in an enclosed space like between your sheets  -  that her burps and farts smelled more and more like singe and char. I was sure Lois would be brokenhearted if she woke up one morning and discovered she'd fried me in her sleep . . . but what if she did?