Sometimes, at night, I forget that I’m a dragon and I think I’m just like other kids. I imagine myself squished down so that my shoulders widen and my legs don’t begin at the same height as the chin of my best friend, Lola. Sometimes, in my imagination—which always gets wilder right before I get serious about trying to fall asleep—I stare deep into the dark. Even though I’m looking at nothing, my vision slides in and out of itself, doubling horizontally but not vertically, even with my glasses.
Mom always used to remind me, that kind ofsilly Atone in her voice, that us dragons are meant to look at the bigger picture. Stare down at the world from the clouds. There’s no need for us to lumber along on the ground and peer at bugs.
But now Mom’s gone.
It happened like this: we were moving. We’ve moved a lot. We’ve moved every year as long as I can remember, sometimes multiple times a year. Sometimes multiple times a month. It helps that people need tchotchkes everywhere, or maybe they don’t need them anywhere, in which case it also makes sense for us to keep moving. When I say move, I just mean parking our RV, Ruby, elsewhere. Ruby’s just a regular-looking RV from the outside, mostly, and I say mostly because you can kinda see some of our beads dangling from the windows from the outside, if the curtains are open. And they usually are, except when we’re changing or hoping to sleep in. But we never sleep in. And we usually change in the bathroom, which doesn’t have windows, but does have a compost toilet—which we use only when we absolutely have to.
We like to keep a low profile; it helps when you’re parking illegally.
We had been in Helena, Montana, as of two months ago, but as of ten minutes ago, we’d been in upstate New York. Why we’d had to leave Helena so quickly I wasn’t sure, and Mom wouldn’t give me any sense. Not that she ever gave me much of a sense of anything. But I asked her, as we pulled into an empty parking lot in Schenectady.
“Any reason you picked upstate New York? Anything fun to do around here?”
“Put on your socks and shoes,” was all she said. “Let’s go get dinner.”
I struggled into my fluffy socks. My talons were getting longer, and I couldn’t find my clipper—I needed to ask Mom if she knew where it was, because big enough ones weren’t easy to buy. That’s the thing about being a dragon—unless you want everyone to see your talons—which Mom called “dogs”—then sandals were a no-go. We tended to stay away from beaches.
But before we could get all the way out the door, two people approached Ruby. What was weird was that they weren’t looking at the trailer—which was the part where we kept and sold our wares—but at the car. Anyway, our sign wasn’t up. We’d only just arrived, and it was drizzling.
They were both tall, leggy-looking despite their long raincoats, and even before one of them drew up their overlong pant leg, revealing a talon-shaped boot, I knew they were dragons. I couldn’t say how it was I knew—the cold scent on the breeze, like metal or blood; the way they walked, as though their feet could fly; the length of their bodies seeming not-quite-human—it was probably all of the above. I felt a rush of excitement. I had never met a dragon other than my mother and myself, unless you counted my dad—but I didn’t. I figured these two dragons would be here to meet us, maybe we’d finally found some kind of dragon community or something—maybe that’s what we’d been looking for all this time.
As usual, my thoughts were going way too fast.
Mom pushed past me down the steps, running across the parking lot toward the two dragons. She didn’t speak, they didn’t speak, she just pulled off her socks and shoes, whip-fast. Her claws dug into the ground. For a long moment I stood frozen—I didn’t know what would help or hurt. I reached down to my shoes to pull them off.
I stared as the taller of the two dragons arched a wing. It whipped down toward Mom, a blue-black gleaming sheet as tough as steel—and she drew her own wing to catch it. But her wing trembled under the weight of the stranger’s. I yanked at my socks.
The other dragon approached her from the other side, their wings not yet drawn. “Out of practice from years of disuse, are we, Neuma?”
My socks and shoes finally removed, I stumbled toward them. I barely thought about how odd it was to hear my mom’s name, Naomi, pronounced that way, or about how the dragon’s voice sounded like rocks. I drew my wings, ripping through my hoodie, as I began to run. I could feel the rush of lightness on my back as my wings rested on air instead of my sweaty skin. The drizzling water felt like fresh kisses. My claws extended from my knuckles—
In a single snakelike motion, the taller dragon threw Mom to the pavement, his left claw buttressed over her neck. “Aeon, if you don’t want your mother to get hurt, then stay still.”
I froze, trembling. I couldn’t see Mom’s expression, only her dark hair and one of her wings, which lay shaking.
“Aeon, turn around.”
I couldn’t bear to turn away, but I also felt like I had to obey. I turned slowly, partially.
A movement so fast my eyes couldn’t follow it, and the wind was knocked out of me. The other dragon had wrapped me in their wing, and I was trapped and facing away from Mom and the taller dragon.
By the time they let me go, Mom and the taller dragon were gone.
Maybe Schenectady wasn’t the right move.