Dragon Overnight

by Sarah Mlynowski

  “Good?” Ms. Starr asked.

  “One less brick, maybe.”

  Ms. Starr took one out.

  It still hurt, but Andres nodded.

  “I bet that feels better,” said Ms. Starr perkily. She patted him on the shoulder.

  Andres smiled. He knew he was supposed to be grateful. But as he followed his teacher toward the fire pit in the meadow, he missed the freedom of weightlessness.

  He and Ms. Starr were the first guests there. A young woman who was clearly a Flare was lighting the kindling, building a fire within a circle of stones.

  Twenty minutes later, the flames were crackling and snapping, and the UDM kids were beside him. Andres glanced across the fire at Tip. Tip made a funny face. Andres grinned, and the evening got better.

  Ms. Starr led everyone in campfire songs. She stood on a tree stump and got them all to sing “This Land Is Your Land,” “Oh! Susanna,” and other hokey classics Andres still kind of liked. A couple of Sage Academy Flare teachers lit sparklers. A couple of the fluxing students turned into kittens and chased each other around the grass.

  After a while, Mo emerged from the forest that bordered the field. She carried a large box in front of her.

  She put the box down several yards from the campfire. Flutterings came from within, and Andres heard a delicate, flutelike tinkling. Sebastian, who had worn his head cone during dinner, took it off.

  “That noise,” he said. “It’s the loveliest sound I’ve ever seen.”

  “Luminous Dragonettes are famous for their firbling,” Mo said.

  “Firbling?” said Marigold.

  “Luminous Dragonettes?” Sebastian said, his voice filled with wonder.

  “Luminous because they emit light, like fireflies do,” said Mo. “Dragonettes because they are one of the smallest dragon species we know about. These live in hives at one end of our property. They enjoy occasional outings, but they’ll fly back into their box at the end of the evening. They know the box will take them safely back to their home.”

  Nory’s dad, Dr. Horace, nodded. “Children, pay attention. There will be a quiz when we return to the academy.”

  “No one will have any trouble remembering these,” Mo said. With a flourish, she opened the box.

  Oohs and aahs rippled around the campfire. The Luminous Dragonettes were smaller than Mo’s hand, elegant and long, with brilliant, iridescent wings. They swarmed into the night sky.

  “That one—it glows purple when it flaps!” cried Marigold.

  “And that one glows yellow!” cried Willa.

  “Whoa,” said Bax.

  “They’re miraculous flukes of nature,” said Mo. “The laws of science say they shouldn’t exist, couldn’t possibly exist, but here they are. That’s why dragons are classified as magical animals, different from species we can explain with science.”

  Andres loved watching the dragonettes. He was entranced by their jeweled colors and their flashing wings. But he was equally content to watch Sebastian, who looked happier than he’d ever been.

  “Miraculous flukes of nature,” Andres heard Sebastian murmur. He caught Andres listening. He grinned. “Like us!” Then he closed his eyes and lifted his face, letting the dragonettes’ bell-toned firbling transport him to another world.

  Too soon, Mo was blowing on a funny-looking instrument to draw the tiny dragons back to their box. “Time for you campers to get to bed,” she said briskly. She closed the box and locked the hinge. “We have a big day tomorrow.”

  The grown-ups threw buckets of water on the fire. Elliott, confident in his upside-down magic, iced several logs to put out their flames.

  Tip and Phoebe clapped when they saw the freezing magic. Ms. Starr put her arm around Elliott. “You’re letting yourself shine,” she told him, “and it makes me happy.”

  “One more thing,” called Mo. She was standing on the tree stump, waving at them now that the fire was out. “Tomorrow morning is pajama breakfast, a tradition here at Dragon Haven. Teachers and students, come straight to breakfast in your pj’s, and bring your appetites. We’ll have the grandest waffle bar you’ve ever seen. Strawberry syrup, whipped cream, fudge sauce, fruit. I promise you’ll love it.”

  “Dude,” said Tip, appearing by Andres’s side. He held out his fist. “Waffles!”

  Andres bumped his fist against Tip’s. Dragon Haven was turning out awesome.

  In the girls’ cabin, everyone was in nightclothes. Willa had a fleecy pink sweatshirt and matching shorts. Marigold had a long blue nightgown that was surprisingly old-fashioned, given that she was usually a boots-and-leather-jacket kind of girl. Ms. Starr changed in the bathroom and came out in lime-green fleece pants and a T-shirt with a bunny on it.

  Nory had brought her purple sweatpants and a short-sleeve sports jersey for the Pouncers, her favorite tigerball team. But she didn’t feel like showing them off to the other girls. She felt strange to be sleeping away from Aunt Margo’s. And Father was here, and she had barely talked to him. And she couldn’t get comfortable in her bed.

  Once everyone was under the covers, Ms. Starr turned out the light. Then she retired with a flashlight to her bunk on the other side of the room, reading a book and leaving the girls to themselves.

  “The Luminous Dragonettes were so beautiful,” Marigold said with a sigh. “Mo said we get to see them again, tomorrow night.”

  “I want to see them every night as long as I live,” said Willa.

  “You know what’s cool?” Marigold continued. “The Luminous Dragonettes—when they firbled, it was like I could hear them inside my bones. I didn’t even need my hearing aid.”

  “I think I heard it in my bones, too,” Willa said. “I just didn’t think of it that way until you mentioned it.”

  “Do you think, tomorrow, we’ll get to see the big dragons?” Nory asked.

  “My mom says this place has a group of Tangerine Dragons,” said Willa. “They’re supposed to be fifteen feet high!”

  From far off in the forest, a tremendous and terrifying roar filled the cabin, rattling the wooden walls, and buckling the screened windows.

  Nory’s heart stopped. She forgot to breathe.

  The roar went on and on, sucking away all thought or even the thought of thought. Finally, it ceased.

  Willa spoke in a pretend baby voice: “I want my mommy.”

  Nory and the others laughed, but Nory knew it was not 100 percent a joke.

  She stuck her head under the pillow. She didn’t want to think about mothers. Her own had died when Nory was little. She had been a lovely mom, a doctor, a great tigerball player, a loud singer, a baker of muffins, and the kind of person who would always read just one more story before bed.

  With her gone, Father wasn’t much of a dad. He worked hard, kept the fridge filled with food, and kept the house clean. He did let Nory, Dalia, and Hawthorn have a lot of pets … but he was often cranky, and he didn’t seem to know how to talk to his kids. He read bedtime stories, but only in a slow, boring voice, and only books he deemed educational. Father was opposed to graphic novels and sports on television. He was opposed to dirt and chaos and beaver lodges and squid ink. He was opposed to chocolate chip muffins, even.

  Nory sniffed the air of the cabin for Father’s scent. He usually smelled like coffee and sandalwood aftershave. Maybe he had come by, invisibly, to keep watch over her and say good night? He was a Flicker, after all. He could do it.

  No. He wasn’t here.

  She was pretty sure.

  She knew she embarrassed him. Her magic embarrassed him, her school embarrassed him, her hair embarrassed him, her shirt.

  Father coming to tuck her in and make sure Nory was okay—that would be some magic, all right.

  Zamboozle, the dining hall smelled good. Nory forgot to worry about Father as she hurried to the buffet line the next morning. Regular waffles, chocolate chip waffles, blueberry waffles. There were all sorts of toppings, too. Whipped cream. Maple syrup. Chocolate syrup. Strawberry syru
p!

  She felt a tug on her sleeve.

  “Um, Nory?” Willa whispered. “Have you looked around?”

  Nory looked around.

  Ohhhh. Her stomach sank.

  Mo and the kids from Dunwiddle were the only ones wearing pajamas. The Sage kids and their teachers were wearing their uniforms.

  “Do they sleep in their jackets and ties?” Willa wondered.

  “No.” Nory knew they didn’t.

  Willa looked down at her own pink fleece. “They must think we’re so stupid.” She loaded her waffle with chocolate sauce, chocolate chips, and maraschino cherries. “What are they, too cool to wear pajamas to breakfast?” She shook her head and went to sit at the UDM table.

  Nory felt like a deflated balloon.

  “Good morning!” Anemone came up to the buffet. Nory nodded at her but continued making a sandwich of waffle, hot fudge, whipped cream, and then another waffle. Anemone’s uniform was very neat. Her jacket was buttoned and her long brown hair was scraped back in a ponytail that made her big brown eyes seem even bigger. Would she make fun of Nory’s sweats, slippers, and Pouncers jersey?

  Anemone didn’t say anything about it. “Did you see over there?” she said instead, clutching Nory’s arm. “There’s caramel sauce. Hot caramel sauce. I think I might move to Dragon Haven permanently.”

  Nory smiled. Maybe the Sage kids weren’t all laughing at the UDM students. “Thanks for the tip,” she told Anemone. She walked over and scooped caramel sauce onto her waffle sandwich. As she did, she overheard two Sage kids talking as they dusted their waffles with nuts and chocolate chips.

  “Just like Headmaster Snorace to ruin the morning,” one student said. “The kids from Dunwiddle must think we’re the most boring kids in the universe.”

  The second Sage kid laughed bitterly. “Snorace the Bore—everything’s always so dull when he’s around. Mo said we could wear our pj’s, and it’s her camp. Who gave him the right to say we couldn’t?”

  Nory stopped dead in her tracks. Snorace the Bore. That’s what they called Father. And he had forbidden the Sage kids to wear their pajamas to the waffle bar?

  Wow.

  Suddenly, the world flipped over. After years of living with Snorace the Bore, practicing for the day when she would wear the Sage Academy uniform, the strange fact of Nory’s upside-down magic had landed her with a group of people who proudly ate their waffles in hot-pink fleece, granny nighties, and sports jerseys.

  That made Nory feel … lucky.

  Andres wore his new super-heavy brickpack to Rock Garden Creek, home of the Tangerine Dragons. An enormous fence separated the dragon enclosure from the common camp space.

  Ahead of Andres, Ms. Starr, Nurse Riley, and the others gathered on top of a bridge that stretched across a canyon. In the canyon lived four Tangerine Dragons. They were recovering from injuries that kept them from living in the wild.

  Andres stepped cautiously onto the bridge. He moved slowly with the weight of the brickpack.

  “There you are,” Ms. Starr said, taking his arm. She fetched a leash from her knapsack and latched it onto Andres’s belt loop and the band he wore around his wrist. “Just in case. I still feel terrible about leaving your old pack behind. And then letting you dangle outside the bus! And then leaving you to be taken to dinner by the students from Sage Academy. I’m very, very sorry, and I have learned my lesson. I’m not letting you out of my sight, mister! Don’t you worry.”

  Andres sighed. He felt like a dog, wearing his leash when his feet were on the ground.

  Mo unloaded wooden crates of cantaloupes from the back of a red pickup truck that stood on the bridge. Nurse Riley helped. “It’s a favorite food of the Tangerines,” Mo explained. “And you students get to give them their breakfast.”

  Mo explained that Tangerine Dragons didn’t fly. They mainly ate fruit. They were extremely large, though, and they tended to roughhouse. It wasn’t safe for them to roam the property the way the Luminous Dragonettes could. Andres looked over into the canyon. There were three enormous, dusty-orange dragons wrestling and rolling around the banks of a creek that ran through the enclosed part of the forest. Each dragon was about the size of two elephants. They had huge mouths full of square-looking herbivore teeth, spiky tails, and tiny wings that didn’t look good for much of anything. The largest of the three was a runner, snatching up cantaloupe after cantaloupe in his mighty jaws as Mo and the other students threw them.

  Two other dragons shadowed the big guy and tried to get hold of his cantaloupes. They swiped at the melons with their claws, causing many of the fruits to roll away. Then the smaller dragons gave chase, batting and pouncing on them playfully.

  Andres picked up a cantaloupe and threw it. The big dragon caught it perfectly and swallowed it after two quick chews.

  “They’re a clan, but I sense you’ve noticed that already,” Mo said, appearing by his side.

  “A clan?” Andres said.

  “A family,” Mo explained. “It’s a mother and two children.”

  “That big one is a girl? Er … a female, I mean?”

  “Sure. Having a family is rare for our dragon rescue camp. Go on, make it a game if you like,” she called to the UDM kids. “Tangerines love to play with their food.”

  Nory gleefully pelted cantaloupe after cantaloupe over the bridge.

  “This is amazing!” Elliott cried.

  “That big one jumped fifteen feet,” said Sebastian, smiling.

  “The littlest one just stole a melon from the mom,” said Willa, laughing. “Did you see? Right from the side of her mouth!”

  “Don’t you want to throw another cantaloupe?” Ms. Starr encouraged Andres. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience!”

  “Don’t you want to throw one?” he asked her.

  “I’m happy just holding your leash,” said Ms. Starr. “Really I am. You go ahead.”

  Andres tossed one in, but he wasn’t feeling it. Ms. Starr was treating him like a baby. Yesterday, flying and swooping in the great hall while the Sage Flyers cheered him on, that had been awesome. Today, he felt weighted down by bricks and other people’s worry.

  His gaze landed on a lone dragon off by itself. He (or she?) was another Tangerine Dragon, the same size as the mama dragon who was catching the cantaloupes. The lone dragon’s hide was more gray than orange. He had soft-looking scales, and skin that folded in a way that reminded Andres of elephants. His snout drooped. He seemed scornful of the cantaloupe madness happening all around him, and Andres noticed that the young dragons kept their distance.

  “That’s Ernesto,” Mo said, her tone somber.

  “He looks old,” Andres said.

  “Yes, but he’s not as old as he appears. We thought housing him among the youngsters might energize him. Bring back his joy. But as you can see …” Mo let her sentence trickle off.

  “Where’s his clan?” asked Andres. The moment the question was out of his mouth, he knew the answer. “Never mind.”

  “These others never fully adopted him,” Mo said softly. “He doesn’t fit in.”

  A lump formed in Andres’s throat.

  “Why don’t you go over and feed him?” Mo offered. “If you send cantaloupes his way, he’ll eat them. The young ones don’t have the nerve to try to steal them from him. Ernesto can be a grump if you try to take his melon.”

  Andres took two cantaloupes and walked down the bridge to stand close to Ernesto. He was so close he could hear the dragon’s heavy breath and smell its fruity animal smell.

  “Here you go, big guy,” he said, tossing the cantaloupes down. Ernesto didn’t stand up, but he scooched on his belly over to where the melons landed and ate them with a gloppy swallowing sound.

  Ms. Starr was right behind Andres, holding the leash. “That was nice of you,” she said. “You’re always looking out for the underdogs, aren’t you, Andres?”

  Andres wished she would just go away and not make him feel like an underdog. Or any sort of dog. But
he didn’t say anything.

  “Ms. Starr! Ms. Starr!” Nory cried, running over. She was flushed. “It’s Bax!”

  “What happened?”

  “He’s gone missing!”

  Andres reeled. Bax … missing?!

  Nory’s story spilled out, a confusing narrative about Elliott freezing a cantaloupe and Marigold telling him it was mean and Willa trying to take it from him because a frozen cantaloupe could seriously hurt a dragon. Sebastian said no, it wouldn’t, and he’d really like to see the expression on the dragon’s face when it realized the cantaloupe was iced. Nory usually sided with Elliott on things, but she didn’t think you wanted to throw a frozen fruit at a dangerous animal.

  She’d turned to look for Bax to see what he thought—and he wasn’t there.

  No one could remember when they saw him last. Nory said she was pretty sure he’d been there when they started throwing cantaloupes … but then again, maybe he hadn’t.

  “Ms. Starr, Ms. Starr, what if he got startled by the dragons and fluxed?” Nory cried. “If he’s a swivel chair or a piano, we can find him easily. But what if he’s a rock?”

  Ms. Starr started to run, heading for the other end of the bridge where the rest of the UDM kids stood with Mo and Nurse Riley. Still on the leash, Andres had no choice but to follow.

  “Bax!” the kids started calling. “Bax!”

  They yelled his name, even though they knew that Rock-Bax couldn’t answer them. But Boy-Bax could, and Piano-Bax could make sounds, so it was worth a try.

  “He’s always a big gray rock,” Nory explained to Mo. “Like a boulder. So you can ignore, like, purple rocks and brown rocks and small rocks.”

  Mo nodded seriously.

  Andres was terrified. It had not occurred to him that if Bax turned into a rock in the middle of the forest, he could be lost forever. Bax couldn’t flux back into himself yet! And there was no way for anyone to know he was a fluxed boy-rock instead of a regular rock. Rock-Bax looked completely rocklike. He couldn’t move or do anything.