by Deiri Di
First, she was a pariah because she was different.
Then she learned how to blend. She knew to keep her head down, her ears shut, and her mind closed off to the constant interruptions of her imaginary creatures. She practiced the art of camouflage. She pretended her world was bland and grey, just like everybody else.
She slept and dreamed the dream of average.
But she was not like everybody else.
There was a part of her that was crazy.
Vladmir had shown her that.
Mari stared at the egg and waited.
Now she was worse than a social outcast again. She was a target. Those photos showed her kissing two different boys, guys way above her own ranking on the school hotness charts on the same day.
No one cared that they kissed her against her will.
Or did they?
Mari blinked.
Did she tell anyone her side of the story?
Did she once open her mouth and speak?
No one asked her!
Was it her job to speak or theirs to ask her?
Mari let her hands unfold, palms towards the sky.
She was the only person she could control. Her thoughts, her words, her actions were the only things she had direct power over. If she wanted others to know her side of the story, she had to say it in the language they understood.
She had to speak.
Curling up in a ball and wishing the world was different wasn't going to change anything. She would remain a social pariah. She would remain subject to the story that Stephanie told everyone, a version of reality that painted her as a lustful villain.
Her leg tingled, asleep.
Mari shifted, lifting her foot to settle down on top of her thigh, in a half lotus pose that she'd seen online.
Why was she thinking about this anyway?
These thoughts came from the desire to fix the situation.
Why did she not want to be an outcast?
Mari chewed on that thought.
On the one hand, it seemed apparent that being an outcast meant that you couldn't benefit from the community's support. In high school, that meant that no one would help her with her homework, invite her to parties, or pick her first for the team.
Yet why did those things matter?
She was waiting for a dragon egg to hatch.
All the little trials and tribulations of high school seemed so insignificant in comparison. The entire focus of her life was about to change. She'd stolen the thrice stolen egg from Chase, and now she was going to spend the rest of her life raising a dragon.
It wasn't like she could just abandon it.
For the first time in her short existence, Mari understood something with such a weight that it pressed her shoulders down towards the ground.
She didn't get a normal life.
There was just no way it would happen.
Even if she could figure out college plus a baby monster, even if she found a partner who would still love her when she spazzed out at things he couldn't see, even if she was able to hold down a job in the face of fairy humor – her life would never be normal.
Mari took another deep breath.
She let it fill her up, opening her chest towards the sky as the weight of those thoughts drifted away with the power of a single, clarifying point:
She didn't want to be normal.
Mariposa didn't want to sit on the couch and vegetate her life away. She didn't want to work in a low wage job, struggling to survive the pain of debt and illness, subject to the whims of a political system run by people disconnected from the realities of existence. She didn't want to climb the corporate ladder.
Mari wanted something different.
Life is an endless spiral.
Her life was built upon the lives that came before her. The father who struggled with depression and low self-esteem. The stepmother who abandoned her body to the addiction of a poor diet and sedentary lifestyle. The mother...
Mari didn't like to think about her mother.
She couldn't do what everybody else did – fit herself into the nice little box of what people did before her. She couldn't fulfill expectations, rejoin society, and be another cog in the endlessly churning wheel of human development.
She could try and try again to be something she could never be, fit in, and find a place inside established definitions of behavior.
Or she could accept.
She could breathe.
She could deal with each problem as they came and find her own path forward into a dream she couldn't see just yet. She could do what she'd learned how to do and figure it out on her own.
She glanced at the clock.
An hour had passed.
The egg rocked ever so slightly.
Mari shifted, wiggling her toes. Who did she want to become?
She wanted to be able to run home without getting winded. She wanted to be able to run away rather than pick up the rock. She wanted to be healthy and mobile, able to deal with whatever life was going to dish out.
Alright then.
To accomplish that goal, she would no longer drive to school with her dad. They lived close enough. She would jog there every morning. She would bring a change of clothes, shower off in the gym showers, and when the bell rang, she would put her running clothes back on and jog home.
Who did she want to become?
She wanted to speak.
She wanted to face down the false words of others and give her side of the story. She wanted to have the tools to stand up for herself.
To accomplish that goal, she would have to learn how to speak effectively. That meant listening. She couldn't learn to be persuasive unless she understood what persuasive sounded like. From now on, she would pay extra attention to what other people said and to what she said.
Who did she want to become?
She -
The egg rocked, hard.
Her thoughts skittered and fluttered away like fairies after a doll shop raid, carrying with them the spoils of her intentions.
Another crack split the surface.
It radiated outwards, fine lines splintering off, creating a spider web of fractures in the surface of the egg. The lines glowed blood red.
A piece of shell popped off and fell to the carpet.
A tiny claw stuck through, hooking around the edges of the shell. Mari didn't move to help it along. If it genuinely needed help, she would be there to assist, but there was some value in facing a struggle alone.
Strength requires resistance.
The rock came down over and over again.
Adversity makes one stronger.
It had too.
Another piece of the shell popped off, widening the hole. A small reptilian nose stuck through. It was black, with glowing red veins lacing under the thin skin. The nose rested there for a moment, panting with the exertion.
Mari reached out and stroked the nose with one finger.
The dragon sniffed the air as she pulled back. Then the nose slipped back inside the egg, leaving the hole empty for all of a few moments. Then claws hooked all around the edges of the small opening.
The shell bulged around the hole.
The claws flexed, cracking the small opening outwards.
It all gave way.
The dragon was in her arms before she knew she had reached out to catch it. It trembled, panting, glowing red veins pulsing through the sheer black skin, keeping time with the frantic pace of a new heart. The dragonette rested its head on her forearm. Its arms wrapped around her arm as she supported it against her belly.
It opened one eye.
An inner eyelid, a vertical mucous membrane, slipped open to reveal a silver iris studded with black, as if the night sky was made purely of stars and the blackness was what was scattered across it.
The dragonette lay there, breathing heavily in her arms, worn out with the battle to escape the small cage of its childhood. Mari stared into its eyes and breathed with it.
Hungry.
The dragonette shifted.
HUNGRY.
It sniffed her skin, gripping at her forearm with talons that moments ago seemed so delicate. The grip was strong. The tips of the claws pricked against her skin.
"Careful!" Mari hissed.
The dragon looked up at her with its silver eyes and bared a set of small needle teeth, framed by fangs a viper would be proud to wield.
Hungry.
Mari slipped downstairs, it's hunger driving her like a sword against the skin.
Her parents had already gone to bed, and it was dark in the kitchen. She opened up the fridge. There was little in there but some milk and the turkey, ready to be popped in the oven in the morning.
Maybe she could nuke some of the microwave dinners.
The dragon didn't wait for her to figure it out.
It slithered down her arm and latched onto the turkey. The small claws shredded the plastic wrapping, and within seconds it was tearing off chunks of flesh and swallowing them whole.
Mari could taste its joy.
She reached in and pulled the whole bundle out of the fridge and put it on the counter: one turkey plus a ravenous dragon topping. Mari sat there and watched as the little dragon carved into the bird's flesh and stuffed the entire bird into its gullet, one slice at a time.
When it was finished, all that was left was bone.
The dragon's stomach bulged. It waddled across the counter towards her. She held out her arms, and it climbed up her sleeve and wrapped itself around her neck, tail curling up over its nose.
Mari had a huge problem on her hands.
How on earth was she going to feed a dragon?
What would it eat when it got bigger?
The dragonnette chirped and snuggled closer around her neck, pressing itself up against her jugular.
There were so many things she had to figure out.
There were so many things to do, so many things to learn, so many things to survive. She could only put one foot in front of the other. She could experience each moment as it came, learn each lesson, and strive to make the most out of everything.
Or she could sit there, stuck in the past, and feel only pain.
Right here, right now, she had a baby dragon that needed a name.
"I'm calling you Miss Kitty," Mari said.
Miss Kitty purred in response.
[ 8 ]
"Maybe fairies stole it," Mari crossed her arms and leaned against the wall.
"Mariposa, that is not funny!" her father snapped, slamming the fridge door shut. "It's bad enough that someone stole our turkey – do you have to go and say things like that?"
Mari grinned.
Her parents thought she was joking.
Heck, maybe now she could just tell the truth all the time.
"I know," Mari said. "It was a baby dragon. Hatched right up there in my room, then came downstairs and gobbled up the turkey. That has to be it."
The dragon snuggled up against her neck.
Her parents' eyes had just glazed over and looked past it, just like every other magical entity that came through as an agent of destruction, pinning the blame on her.
"No television for a week!" her father snapped.
Ha. Like she watched television anymore.
Life was way more interesting.
Cathy picked up her purse off the counter. "I'll go see what I can get from the store. Maybe a pre-cooked chicken or something like that. It'll be okay."
"It's not okay." Her dad crossed his arms. "This Thanksgiving was going to be special. I was going to do stuffing and everything."
"I know, honey," Cathy kissed him on the cheek. "But it isn't the food that’s important." She turned to direct her gaze at Mari. "Now stop teasing your father and use the Internet to teach yourself how to steam green beans."
Mari eyed the stove dubiously.
She never cooked. She just ate reheated frozen meals.
"It's time you learned how to cook, young lady," Cathy walked towards the door. "You don't want to be fat your whole life, do you?"
Oh, that hurt.
"I wouldn't want to end up like you!" Mari snapped back.
Cathy paused, hand on the door. "If that's the way you see it, then you better figure out how to steam some vegetables."
She closed the door behind her.
"That was uncalled for," her father said. "I'm so disappointed in you."
Those words sunk in like the ones spoken in anger never could.
Mari was like all girls, and she wanted her father to see her as something beautiful and special, someone to be cherished and loved. She wanted him to be proud of her. The words she spoke were cruel. They were mean.
How could she become a person who made people feel good rather than bad?
Mari walked over to the fridge and pulled out the bag of green beans. She could do this small thing. She didn't know how to apologize, but she knew how to learn. So she would learn to steam vegetables.
The dragon slept wrapped around her neck.
#
Thanksgiving day was over, and the weekend separated her from having to go back and face being the social outcast of the school. It was Friday. Two more days and she would see Benjamin again.
She would see Chase again.
She would see them again.
That thought brought on a tight feeling in her belly.
It was anticipation, with a mix of adrenaline – her brain chemically was creating the feeling of butterflies at the thought of Chase.
But first, she had a problem to solve.
How to feed a baby dragon.
Her family mainly lived off of microwave dinners. They didn't really cook food that often, so they didn't have meat just sitting around. That was one possible solution. She'd read up on weight loss, and it seemed that eating more vegetables and home-cooked meals was cheaper as well as being an important part of being healthy.
So that was a start.
Get her parents to go to a local farmer's market. There probably was one tomorrow – she should just find out when that was going on.
What else could she do in the meantime?
She needed to have something ready to go right this second.
Mari knew what she had to do – but to do it, she had to wait until dark.
Four am in the morning on Saturday night, Mari walked through the streets of LA's quasi-suburb, a sleeping dragon sleeping curled up in her backpack on top of a pair of garden gloves. The streets were dark, buildings yellowed with the occasional street lamp and a coat of air pollution.
Mari skulked through a neighborhood that had taken pollution control into their own hands instead of waiting for the government. They had taken sledgehammers to regular intervals in the sidewalk, ripping out chunks and planting trees that filtered the air for everyone. She wedged her hands into the pockets of her hoodie and hunched as she walked.
Hopefully, there wouldn't be any crazies.
"Monsters be lurking about these parts, child," said a cardboard bundled lump huddled up against the side of the building. "Best go hide thyself away." The cardboard bundle shifted and Mari could make out the shape of an old woman, layered in dirty sweaters and greasy hair.
Yep. Crazies.
But she had a dragon to feed and she was low on options.
Plus, she could totally handle magical monsters. What was a starvation-weakened homeless woman next to a tree monster?
She shuffled past the homeless woman and continued down the street.
She got to the local health food grocery store's parking lot – the kind of store that sold organic produce from local farmers. Since she was in a city, that pretty much meant urban farmers. They were the pioneers of a new way of life. Petroleum-based food production had become relatively expensive as oil prices soared due to a limited resource being guzzled with ecological abandon.
Around the back of the store were the dumpsters.
Mari s
et the backpack on the ground, put on the garden gloves, and threw her leg up over the side of the dumpster. This was going to be totally gross. She clutched the rim, wiggled her belly across the edge, and heaved herself into the mess.
The garbage squished under her feet.
Oh ew ew ew ew.
She'd read forums about dumpster diving, but this was the first time she'd done it herself. Grocery stores were notoriously wasteful, throwing out food that was still edible, just a little bruised or banged up. In the sunshine state of orchards and indoor grow operations, food was a commodity that had to be perfect.
Except when it wasn't.
There was a store a little farther away that sold bruised fruit in a separate section for cheaper than the picture perfect fruit in the more mainstream. It tended to sell very well. People making pies don't need perfectly rounded orbs of perfection.
Besides, if they really cared about where the food came from, they would just get a plot in the local community garden and grow their own, guaranteeing it wasn't a genetically modified organism.
Mari tossed a head of lettuce to the side.
She was looking for something a lot iffier than rumpled vegetation.
She shifted through the waste of a consumer mad society.
There it was.
Meat.
Mari gingerly grasped the plastic wrapper corner between two gloved hands and tossed it out of the dumpster. Then she went right back to wading. She could stop at just one chunk of flesh. This wasn't a human she had to feed.
This was a top-level carnivore.
Her dragon was only going to get bigger.
There were only a few chunks in the pile before Mari had finished shifting around the innards of the receptacle. She scrambled back over, sliding down the rusted metal until her feet touched the ground. Only then did she release her death grip on the lip.
Now came the super gross part.
She would have to cut open all the wrappers and sniff the meat.
She couldn't risk giv- uh oh.
A man was standing over her backpack.
He reeked of alcohol and vomit. There was a stain on the front of his shirt that could have been sweat or something much worse. She didn't want to know. He stared through her as if she didn't even exist, as if she just occupied the space for the image of another person within his head.
"You little slut." The word cut through the slur in his voice, accented by anger that rolled off of him in a cloud. "Look at you. Garbage."
