My Diary from the Edge of the World, Page 2

  September 8th

  (After Midnight)

  We just got home from the hospital and my arm is in a cast. I’ve survived a near death experience!

  Millie says I’m being dramatic, but I can tell she’s dying of envy because I’m the center of attention for once. Apparently she and Mouse made potato candy for me (my favorite) while we were at the hospital, but it turns out they ate most of it while they were waiting for us to get back. I hate Millie more than ever. No one ever hates Sam the Mouse.

  Anyway, I’ll try to get down what happened, as realistically as I can.

  I was up on my hill just finishing my last entry, when I saw the baby dragon flying across the valley. At first, like I wrote earlier, I thought he was a bird, but then when I stood to get a closer look I noticed the little puffs of smoke wafting behind him and the blue glint of his scales. I know that blue scales mean it’s a male dragon and orange scales mean it’s a female, but the strange thing was, he wasn’t behaving like a bird or a dragon at all—he flew crookedly, as if he didn’t quite know how to keep himself in the air. With every few strokes of his wings, he dipped farther and farther toward the valley and the busy streets below.

  I figured he might be the smallest of his litter and maybe not strong enough to migrate so early; Mom says that happens sometimes. From this distance he looked to be the size of a miniature pony, but I couldn’t be sure. Then, very faintly, I heard him let out a desperate howl, and then another. With each howl he sunk a little farther toward land and a little puff of smoke floated up and away from him.

  Just as I was making sense of it all there was a horrible screech behind me. I must have been too distracted to hear him coming until he was too close. As it was, I barely had time to turn around before something eclipsed the sun above me, and in a rush of horrible stench and a thud of giant wings, the father dragon was overhead.

  He was about the size of a large city bus, and his blue reptilian wings stretched out twice as long in either direction. He looked down at me only once, craning his neck to glare at me, his eyes green, speckled, and bright as limes. For a moment we were gazing at each other, and it sent a chill right through me. He smelled horribly of caves and moss and rocks and dead, burned animals. If he’d so much as let out a heavy breath, he would have melted me. But he gave me only a momentary glance before he turned his attention back toward the valley, swooping over me with a sound like sails catching wind. He was so close I could see the pearly scales along the bottom of his tail as he glided past.

  I don’t know what came over me, but instead of rolling into a ball—which is one of the first things they teach you in kindergarten about surviving dragon attacks—I stretched my hand toward that pearly blue tail, mesmerized by his glistening scales. That was a bad idea.

  The impact threw me back against the church stone. There was a horrible crunch, but at first I thought I’d broken the stone instead of myself. Then for some reason I had the thought (it makes no sense now) that my arm was a carrot wedged in the refrigerator door.

  The dragon kept going—I could see him soaring into the wide open space over the valley like an enormous blue kite, casting a dark shadow over a line of cars on Route 1 and then hovering just above the baby, flapping his wings, his screeches echoing off the mountains. The baby called back to him with a weak screech, then seemed to gain courage. Soon he was flapping harder and straighter, and lifting instead of sinking. I think that’s when I first suspected it was me that was broken instead of the church stone. I guess it was the scalding pain that suddenly shot out of my right elbow. Then the pain was everywhere.

  * * *

  Now my right arm will be in a cast for weeks. Well, at least I’m left-handed.

  In the hour since I’ve been home, I’ve revoked my membership in the Orphan Dragon Rescue group online that Millie signed me up for, though I’m staying in the group that helps the endangered unicorns that live in the Sierra Madres. Arin Roland says her dad says that only “bleeding-heart crazies” sign up for dragon rescue groups anyway, though Arin Roland is the most annoying girl in my sixth-grade class.

  PS: Mostly the rescue groups buy large rural pieces of land in England and Scotland so the dragons can have somewhere to live where they won’t wreak too much havoc. It actually helps people, too, because in the sixties about half of London was occupied by dragons and nobody could do anything about it. Real estate prices for the safer side of the city skyrocketed. So take that, Arin’s dad.

  * * *

  I just went down to the kitchen to see if maybe Millie lied and actually did hide some leftover potato candy somewhere, but instead I ran into Dad, sitting at the kitchen table and studying a big paper chart. Tilted the other way and lying half across the chart was a map.

  “Hey, honey,” he said, glancing up at me distractedly. “What are you up to?” Dad always forgets we have a bedtime, which isn’t surprising since he sometimes forgets we exist at all (or at least it seems that way). Even at the hospital tonight he kept asking the doctor to give him the details of how they were resetting my bone, as if I wasn’t sitting right there wincing and trying not to cry. (“Dragons breaking arms in Cliffden in September!” he kept saying. “And migrations didn’t even used to start till mid-October. That’s what the world is coming to!”)

  “Just hungry,” I said.

  But he’d already forgotten what he’d asked me—I could tell. I shuffled up behind him, unnoticed. The chart was scrawled in his handwriting with markings of longitudes and latitudes and degrees, cloud appearances at various heights, and phases of the moon. The map showed the familiar rectangle of the earth: Alaska all the way to the upper left (a paradise for sasquatches ever since the Alaskans lured a lot of them up there to solve their rodent problem), Royal Russia to the right.

  Clustered on each continent were the red dots marking the major cities: Moscow, Beijing, Paris, London, Istanbul (I’ve always liked to look at those dots and imagine what the cities are like) . . . surrounded by empty, barely marked space. It’s the same in the US: The major cities—New York, Boston, Washington, DC—sprawl out toward towns like ours, and then mostly wilderness covers the rest of the continent. Dad calls the cities of the world “industrialized pockets” and the empty spaces “wild.” Though I guess the spaces aren’t really empty, at least not here—there are towns stretching as far west as Arkansas (a lot of them grown over by the woods) and then scattered frontier towns beyond that. But mostly, the farther you get from the cities, the farther you are into the territory of the beasts.

  Now Dad was running his fingers out toward the edges of the map, and down over the Hawaiian Islands (which have always sounded wonderful because they’re ruled by someone called the Sugar Queen—Hawaii is the world’s biggest exporter of sugar), muttering something unintelligible about something called superstrings.

  * * *

  Most of the world, according to my geography teacher, was connected because of spices. People got tired of eating food with just the spices that they could grow in their own backyards, so they sent explorers out into the world for pepper, salt, cinnamon, and whatever else they could find. But people found more than that: They also found sea monsters, tigers, horses, mermaids, dragons, and eventually the edges of the earth. (When I showed Mom my homework essay about this, she smirked in her wry way and said, “I guess there’s something to be said for never being satisfied with what you have.”)

  Ferdinand Magellan reached the western edge in 1520, confirming for the first time that the earth was flat. There’s a famous quote by him that goes, “I have seen the earth’s shadow reflected on the stars. I’ve seen that, compared to what’s beyond our edges, we are very small indeed.”

  * * *

  Anyway, after planting a flag there and splitting off from his flotilla, Magellan set a course due south to see the remote continent known as the Southern Edge, but was never heard from again. It’s widely assumed he accidentally sailed off the earth, but others think he was drowned by the Great Kra
ken at Cape Horn, who’s still alive and drowning sailors to this day.

  Dad has a different theory. He thinks Ferdinand Magellan went to look for the Extraordinary World. He also thinks that he found it. Dad thinks that once you cross over to the Extraordinary World, you can never come back.

  “What are you doing with that map?” I asked now.

  Dad snapped his head up, seeming to really notice again that I was there. My dad and I have the same eyes—hazelish-brown—and the same pointyish chin, even though I wish I looked more like my mom instead. My face is pretty much a girl version of his—though he’s usually all stubbly.

  “Just . . . daydreaming,” he said, turning red and folding up the map abruptly. He adjusted his black glasses on his nose and smiled at me in the fake way adults do sometimes when they’re hiding something from you. Then he glanced up at the clock above the sink. “Hey, shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  So here I am back in my room. But now I can’t sleep.

  I can’t stop thinking about the father dragon and his baby. I hope they’re somewhere safe and warm, even if they did smell bad and even if they eat disgusting things. I guess I can admit this here: I can’t help thinking that if I were flying over a valley and my wings were drooping and giving out, my dad wouldn’t even notice, much less be able to save me.

  * * *

  One more thing about the Extraordinary World. Something that is real about it is that many of the ships that went in search of it in the old days never came back—not because they found what they were looking for, but because of the Great Kraken. And now the southern ocean is scattered with phantom ships sailed by ghosts. They can’t be caught on film (no ghost can), but they are widely known to be real. That’s one of many reasons no one goes sailing around the Southern Sea exploring anymore.

  And with that cheerful thought, I’m going to bed.

  September 10th

  Boring.

  September 11th

  I’m so bored.

  September 12th

  I may be the only twelve-year-old on earth who’s managed to break her arm and get grounded in the same week.

  Tonight I’m a prisoner in my own room. I’ve renamed myself Andromeda and am trying to pretend that I’ve been trapped in a tower by a greedy centaur who wants to marry me, but my imagination doesn’t always work as well as it used to.

  Anyway, I may as well just write the embarrassing truth here: I hit a girl in my class on the head with a stick.

  I’m sitting in my windowsill as I write this. Sam the Mouse is feeling better today, and he and his friend from down the street are roughhousing in a pile of leaves out front. This may be the last year I’ll even jump in a pile of leaves—Millie says I won’t want to do things like that much longer. Even though she usually doesn’t know what she’s talking about, I worry that she might be right, because last year I raked up a pile of leaves and didn’t even have the patience to lie under it for more than a few seconds. I used to be able to do that for hours, looking up through the cracks in the leaves, but certain things don’t excite me the way they used to.

  The Dark Cloud has come closer in the last few days, and it does seem that it’s headed for our neighborhood, since we’re the only collection of houses on top of this hill. I’ve added up all the old people on our block and there are four—five if you count Michael Kowalski’s grandma, who’s sixty-eight, which is sort of in the middle between old and not so old. I hope it’s not her, even though she’s always yelling at me not to ride my bike so fast.

  My mom says we’re having ravioli for dinner and that I have to eat it in my room, even though I told her I’ll barf if I eat it. I reminded her of the last time she made me eat ravioli three years ago, when I did throw it up . . . all over a pile of Barbies beside my bed.

  “That was self-motivated vomiting,” she said, closing her lips in a thin determined line and running a hand through her long dark hair, which is the exact brown (almost-black) color of Millie’s, only straighter.

  My mom is the opposite of my dad—she’s admired everywhere she goes. Millie says it’s something about the way she “holds herself.” I think it’s that she looks like a painting and is always thinking of other people (she’s fascinated by our neighbor Mrs. Lipton’s boring tips on planting flowers, and she never forgets my teachers’ birthdays). How she and Dad ended up together, I’ll never know. Once, I asked her about it, and she just said with a smirk, “Your dad was really, really lucky,” and then looked at my dad to see his reaction. He didn’t even look up from his book.

  Anyway, she always seems to know when I’m being honest or when I’m just being dramatic, which is annoying.

  Today was my first day back at school since the dragon incident. Millie, Sam, and I walked down the long green hill into town, then descended into the tunnels that we use during migration season. Sometimes students from other schools heckle us because of our dad, but not today; today I was on top of the world.

  I held my cast up high as we passed people so that they’d be able to see it in all its arm-length glory. “It’s not a trophy,” Millie said. (She’s refused to sign it because she says she can’t bring herself to “celebrate stupidity.”) Then she just waved a hand to billow her long, perfectly coifed hair, as if 90 percent of what goes through her head is, My hair, ahh my hair.

  We crisscrossed through the tunnels, past the entrance to the bank that’s guarded inside by one of the few vampires in Maine. (They prefer darker, rainier regions—though I guess if you’re a vampire and you can get a job in a dim cave, you’re pretty happy.) He always gives me the creeps, but Millie says she thinks he’s kind of cute. I think she’s just trying to shock me—he looks completely bloodless and his fangs are always sticking out, especially when he smiles and tries to be polite. Because of a law passed in 1965, vampires are only allowed to feed on animals (never people), but they give me the creeps all the same.

  After the bank the tunnels widen into a series of connected, well-lit caverns, where most of the stores are. We walked past the 7-11, where I usually buy M&M’s with money I’m supposed to spend on lunch, and past the little museum sponsored by the Ladies’ Historical Society of Cliffden. It gives a miniature but ambitious history of the events leading up to our town: from a diorama of the ancient Romans taming the Pegasus, to the signing of the Declaration of Independence by fifty-six men and one well-respected ghost, to the founding of our town by a fur trapper on the run from a ding-ball, which is a kind of cougar.

  In the aboveground foyer we parted ways: Millie sashaying off to her building and Sam coughing and trying to make himself invisible as he scurried toward the primary wing. I cut out through the door onto the grassy inner courtyard and made my way to my homeroom. I entered it bellowing, “WHO WANTS TO SIGN THE ARM THAT TOUCHED THE DRAGON?” There was a collective gasp, a room full of faces with mouths in the shapes of surprised and admiring Os, and then I was surrounded.

  * * *

  All through geography and Monsters of the Sea II, I played with a penny on my desk (tracing the giant on the back and Abe Lincoln on the front, and flipping it to see if it landed heads or giants over and over), and contemplated swallowing it to see how it would taste. My gaze kept drifting to the window, where the occasional dark silhouette of a dragon drifted across the horizon. Twice Mr. Morrigan, our teacher, scolded me for kicking my feet too loudly against Arin Roland’s desk, once for not having done the homework, and then finally for swallowing the penny after all.

  To tell you the truth, I don’t know what came over me at recess. Arin and I were foraging along the edge of the school building for a stick to use as a vaulting pole for the Lunch Olympics (which I invented on the spot, even though I’m not supposed to participate with only one good arm). I found one that would work perfectly, only suddenly I didn’t want to use it as a vaulting pole at all, I just wanted to keep it for myself and maybe use it as a curtain rod in my room. Even now I can’t imagine why I wanted to keep it so badly. I guess it was because I
knew everyone else wanted me to hand it over. And then when Arin stepped forward to grab it from me, it was as if I were possessed, because the stick rose so quickly and hit her across the head before I even thought about it. And then she was grabbing her ear, and Mrs. Corsiglia was standing in front of me, yelling at me so loudly I couldn’t even make out the words.

  I know I’m too old to hit people with sticks. Once I stop being annoyed, I’m 80 percent sure I’ll feel truly sorry.

  Anyway, now I’m grounded. It would be a lot more interesting being stuck in here if my imagination worked halfway as well as it used to.

  * * *

  Oh, something else interesting happened, between math and Flying Reptiles. Today we got Oliver. He’s skinny and has a fish face and his whole body seems to want to disappear, as if he thinks that if he hunches his shoulders down far enough no one will see him. He’s got bright green eyes and hair that looks like it’s never met a hairbrush and a long scar down one side of his cheek.

  We have such a small school that we only get a new student every couple of years. The last one was from Sweden and named Inez; she barely spoke English and smelled like bananas. This boy is no improvement. He’s quiet and bizarre. I think if I were as quiet as him, I’d disappear.

  At lunch he sat at the far empty end of the teachers’ table by himself with a bag of Skittles, not eating them like a normal person but instead slipping them under the table. It took a scouting mission by Matthew Howard to figure out that he was slipping them one by one to some kind of creature he keeps in his pocket, but we don’t know what. Arin thinks it’s a frog, as if frogs eat Skittles.

  Oliver looks like he’s mentally very far away, and he has a habit of touching the scar on his cheek as if he keeps reminding himself it’s there. I heard Arin Roland whisper to someone that he’s from Connecticut and his family was killed by sasquatches, and now he’s an orphan living with a foster family in town, so I guess maybe the scar is from the sasquatch attack.