As always, the station was Classic Vinyl. It was what Mom always wanted to listen to; she said it was the music of her generation. And now that she was gone—for now, I kept telling myself—the music just sounded to me like her. Stevie Nicks and Steve Perry, that was my mom. Well, she was more than her music tastes. But I would take what I could get.
Morv did not even look like they were listening. They rolled down the window a crack and stared into the distance.
Another one of my mom’s stories—or, I thought, somewhat irritatedly, one of the Dragonhood’sstories—slid into my mind. It was a more recent one she’d told me. Probably because it was a bit darker.
A dragon family lived in a big city in a small apartment, even though they were all long and lanky-limbed and did not always get along. They sometimes bumped into one another, and found their limbs wrapped around each other, even though they did not always like each other so very much.
Why did they not like each other sometimes? Well, because it can be hard to like someone you are around all day long, and there is not much room to breathe, and to remember that you love them, and that they are all you have, and that the world is so much sadder without them.
If they are always there you cannot remember that. You cannot learn that in the first place. This is called perspective. It is important to have but sometimes painful to acquire.
Nevertheless, sometimes a someone is simply bad, and there is no perspective that will teach you how much you love them. In fact, in these kinds of cases, getting away is the best option.
Only by getting far, far away will you remember how much the sun was hidden by their presence, like the looming shadow of a mountain beneath which you have lived your whole life, and thus you can never know what it is like to live outside of it, to see the sun in its full glory and feel the rasp of sunburn on your face and warm your scales like some species of lizards do, lounging on rocks until the warmth reaches their hearts. Sometimes some people are simply bad, or their goodness is so hidden even you in your purest, kindest, strongest form could never excavate it, or to do so would never be worthyourtime or happiness.
In this family in this small apartment in this big city in this skyscraper building there was one such member. He was the second oldest member, so he was not quite in charge of the family, but he possessed enough power to do great wrongs. It was only after one of his children stabbed him, possibly by accident, that the shadow was able to be moved and the sun to pour in through the apartments’ windows like gold, and turn it into a greenhouse for the children.
Only then could the children flourish and become tall—not just long—and their scales grew less gray and their grandmother remembered her power and how to wield it. One day someone opened a window and all the children flew out and whirled around the building like a tornado and whipped their tails up into the sky and were never seen again.
No one knows if they went to the sun or just elsewhere, or whether they left in joy or in fear. In freedom or exile. But the important thing is that they were gone, and those who were left could finally stretch their limbs in the comfort of their own, all-too-familiar home.
We had stayed longer in Florida than anywhere else, but we were still the weird family, with our RV where we sold tchotchkes and neverevergoing to the beach or the pool, or running under the sprinkler.
If we could even be called a family—after all, it was just me and Mom. Mom might’ve been the only family I knew, but every family I knew had two parents and at least two kids—and sometimes a grandma, a grandpa, or some stray aunts and uncles who lived in the bonus room. Not to mention pets. We could never have a pet, or at least Mom said we couldn’t.
When I went to school, I said I was a boy. Since first grade, I’d said I was a girl, because it seemed like girls were smarter, and I wanted to be smart, and they were allowed to wear any color they liked. But now I was tall enough that I only liked to wear black and dark blue, to make me seem smaller. And in sixth grade, being a super tall girl is a worse curse than being a super tall boy. Regardless, it was easy enough to change my mind when I changed schools every month or so.
Friends were never friends, not until Lola. There were kids I would sit with at lunch, at some schools. Jackie who invited me to his laser tag birthday party. George who wanted to be my partner in the science project. And Heather who liked being my hall buddy, and sometimes gave me erasers that looked like toys. But it was never anything really real. Not until Lola.
And with a name like Aeon, I could stand out in that way, too, and as far as I knew we didn’t have last names, really. Mom and I always agreed that the most important thing was to not stand out. She often called me “Ae,” pronounced like the letter ‘A’, as a nickname, so with every new school I’d come up with a new ‘A’ name to go by. When the school asked for papers Mom would always say, “Can we talk in the office? Ae, can you wait here?” and it wouldn’t be long before Mom and the office people emerged again and the school administrator was nodding as though everything was perfectly normal.
I never knew exactly what Mom said to convince them. When I turned thirteen, and she presented me with a ready-made driver’s license, with the name “Alex Murray” stamped on it, and a picture of me looking even older than I already unintentionally did. I still looked older than my age because of my height, but I didn’t know how she’d taken this picture or gotten that card. We didn’t have phones or computers or cameras.
We didn’t participate in the pace of society, Mom sometimes joked. I understood it was to keep our identities secret. Other than my driver’s license photo, I had no pictures of myself. I’d always matriculate into a new schoolafterpicture day and be sure to leave before graduation. So sometimes that photo made me kind of happy. But other times it made me anxious, because it was just one more way to be found. By whom, though?
I guess I now knew. Sort of.
What in the end, had been our mistake? How had they managed to find us after—well, I didn’t know how long?
I really wanted to get back to Florida. I really wanted to see Lola. She was my only friend. And so without Mom—I had to remind myself Morv might not be on my side—I only had Lola. And now that I was thinking about her—which I didn’t tend to allow myself to do—I couldn’t get her off my mind.
In the shotgun seat next to me, Morv appeared to have fallen asleep. I told myself it was an act. But subconsciously, I relaxed slightly into the driver’s seat. As long as a drive as this would be, at least I could breathe, and have an excuse not to talk. To let my thoughts drift freely.
One time, we were watchingFerris Bueller’s Day Off. Before Lola, I could count the number of movies I’d seen on one hand. So Ferris Bueller enthralled me. I used the movie as an opportunity to learn about what high school would be like. Occasionally I got confused between the characters who were high schoolers and the characters who were adults, because they looked kind of the same. I wondered if this would be a problem in real high school—whether the student-teacher divide would be as blurry as it was to me when watching that movie.
While I was thinking all these thoughts, Lola fell asleep on the couch.
I found myself leaning toward her, like she was down and I was up, and it was just gravity. But we were sitting with a whole square of couch between us, the corner square of her L-shaped couch. She was sliding sideways down her square, into the corner.
I reached out a hand and gently pushed her back up again.
She didn’t wake up. She just kept sleeping, her mouth slightly parted, her hair half covering her face.
The thought came into my head that I wanted to kiss her, but I was twelve and had never kissed anyone before and that seemed like one of the kinds of things that Mom would tell me never to do, she just hadn’t gotten the chance yet. And, most importantly, Lola was asleep. I couldn’t kiss her while she was asleep. The thought made my stomach churn.
So instead, I picked up her hand.
All of a sudden, without a sound, she was awake. The movie was still going but it was like the wind or some trees rustling, just the sounds of our environment and we weren’t listening to them. She looked at me and my hand over hers and giggled. And then she said, “Don’t you always leave?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t you always leave places, and never come back?”
“I guess so.”
“So why are you holding my hand?”
“Because—” I dropped it like it burned. “I don’t know.”
“I want to be your friend, AJ,” she said—I went by AJ then— “but if you’re going to leave, then—” she stopped, but I understood.
I never told Mom what happened that night, but the next day she showed me a map and said, “I’m thinking about heading west. We can stay south but I think the weather will be nicer up north. And sixth grade graduation is coming up. What do you think?”
I said I thought Disneyland might be better than Disney World, even though I knew that wasn’t true, and anyway I didn’t care. And anyway both were too expensive for me to go to if I didn’t have a friend—Lola—paying for everything. It was true that Florida weather was supposed to be hellish June-onward. But I’d sit in hell if Lola were with me.
I didn’t say that. I think Mom knew.