My Diary from the Edge of the World (2 page)

Oops, Mom just spotted me—she's hanging out her bedroom window yelling. Her hair is all wet from the shower and flopping down the sides of her face like curtains. How's that for descriptive?

I'm back on the hill
—I think this will be my favorite spot to write and record my life. Mom's taken Sam the Mouse to a doctor's appointment and Dad is home working on a new invention to record something called “entropy” (I can't imagine a word that sounds more boring) so he won't notice where I am.

Dad was in the paper today, right between an article on a new mall in Waterville with a giant for a security guard, and a meeting announcement about the lady's quilting guild. There was a picture of my dad and then a headline underneath it that read
METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY OF UPPER MAINE OUSTS THEODORE LOCKWOOD DUE TO PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCES.

I guess that explains what happened at Dairy Queen
yesterday: Dad was just about to buy us our Blizzards (Heath bar for me, Oreo for Millie, M&M's for Sam, and Mom always gets a cherry dip) when a man stepped up to the register and paid for us. My dad was looking at him in confusion, smiling to be polite, when the man said, “You'll need all the help you can get, since you'll be out of a job soon.”

My dad just looked down at his wallet and shuffled his feet. He doesn't like confrontation. My mom, on the other hand, doesn't mind it at all, and she pushed her cherry dip against the man's shirt, pretending it was an accident. “Looks like you're out of a shirt,” she said. Then she turned on her heel and led us out the door, making us leave our Blizzards on the counter. I glanced back at my large Heath Blizzard in agony as we made our way out, but when Rebecca Lockwood, a.k.a. my mom, makes up her mind on something, you follow along. She's just that kind of person.

*  *  *

Mom says Dad is a great scientist but an unlucky one. He invented a special sort of barometer only to find out someone else had patented the same exact design eight days before. He was invited to present a paper on the three major types of clouds, titled “Cumulus, Stratus,
Cirrus, Seriously,” but got booed offstage by everyone, including the mayor, because he'd made one simple mistake on the math that threw the whole thing off. He actually wanted to go into physics in college instead of meteorology (he loves learning about the stars and planets more than anything else), but he didn't get good enough grades. This is the second time he's been kicked out of the Meteorological Society, which he helped to found. Sometimes it's like my mom's the only person who believes in him at all.

All the failures make him sad, I think, and sometimes he goes into a “swamp” (that's what Mom calls them) where he wears his pajamas for days. But it never stops him from being obsessed with science. Even last night after Dairy Queen, he watched the sun set in his usual way: First he stood at the living room window, then he walked upstairs to see how it looked from higher up, then he wandered out into the yard to view it from a few different places on the grass, all the while taking notes in a little notebook he carries everywhere. Meanwhile Sam was calling out for someone to reach the Teddy Grahams on the top shelf, and Millie and I had to stop fighting over the remote control and who would get up to adjust the antennae (the TV is
always
fuzzy) and
help Sam, when we're not even the parents. Dad doesn't notice
life
kinds of things at all. He lives in his brain.

Millie says that when I was being born, Dad brought his notebooks to the hospital and worked on some calculations while he waited. I'd rather not believe that he wasn't more concerned about my arrival . . . but the sad thing is that I do. Mom calls him “science haunted.” Instead of coming to our ball games or school plays like the other parents do, he climbs the hills around Cliffden with his instruments almost every weekend, long after dark, recording the positions of the stars and changes in temperature. Mom says, “He's got a great but unorganized mind.”

Still, beyond all his failures, the one thing that makes my dad such a target for jokes in our town, and the thing that's gotten him kicked out of the Meteorological Society twice, is his stubborn insistence on the existence of the Extraordinary World.

*  *  *

The Extraordinary World is an old legend—a land rumored to exist at the Southern Edge of the earth. Dad's one of the few people who believes it's real. He's written three letters to the editor about it in the
Cliffden Tribune
. He belongs to the Club for the Discovery of the
Extraordinary World with a bunch of weirdos, including the guy who put the burritos out for the dragons, and a lady who says she's secretly married to Prince William.

In the Extraordinary World, the legend goes, there are no dragons or krakens or sea serpents or Dark Clouds or bad omens. There are no demons or nymphs hiding in the forests, no vicious mermaids or yetis. “It's clear,” my dad wrote in his third editorial, “that the unexplored Southern Edge of the earth is the place we have to look for it, and we should pour our money and resources into doing so as soon as possible, for the benefit of mankind.” They also ran his editorial in the
Enquirer
alongside headlines like
I WAS KIDNAPPED BY AN ALIEN AND NOW I'M HAVING HIS CHILD!
and
THE EASTER BUNNY VISITED ME IN MY SLEEP WITH A MESSAGE FOR THE WORLD.

The Extraordinary World, people like my dad claim, is what our world would have been like too, if it had turned out—once the great explorers did their great exploring in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—that dragons and mermaids and things like that didn't exist. Without the beasts and monsters and wilderness that populate so much of our planet, they claim, life would be easier, more orderly . . .
safe
. Also it's supposedly full of all sorts of amazing technology: things
floating around space called satellites, all sorts of flying machines, highways and travel networks all over the world, and cities without number.

My dad's outspokenness on the subject means we get heckled pretty often. People call him La La Land Lockwood. I've seen the way people look at us when we're out shopping or at one of Millie's piano recitals, and I can't say I blame them. Not that
Dad
ever notices.

His hero is an astronomer named Prospero, who lives somewhere out west. People are constantly quoting him and citing his studies in their scientific papers. His newest book,
An Atlas of the Cosmos
, is a bestseller, and sometimes (rarely, because he's a bit of a hermit) he gets interviewed on
60 Minutes
. My dad reads everything he publishes. Apparently they went to college together, and while Prospero soared to the top of their class and became wildly popular, Dad worked diligently and got okay grades and graduated unnoticed by anyone but my mom, who was studying music theory, whatever that is.

Mostly Dad just contents himself with studying the weather and appearing on the local weather station every morning. I don't think it's so great to study something that always changes and always disappears, and then to spend your free time studying something that doesn't
exist. It's like he's spent his life concentrating on thin air. I wish he worked on something more permanent and interesting. Anything would be better: rocks, bugs, volcanoes . . . anything.

*  *  *

I'm watching a bird swoop in the distance over Bear Mountain. Then again it may be a dragon and farther away than I think. I just put this journal down and squinted to see, but I still couldn't tell.

Mom and Sam just got home, but I ducked behind the church stone so they wouldn't see me. I'm sure Mom's in the kitchen putting groceries away. Usually she sings at the top of her lungs while she does it, but today it's quiet in there. I hope everything went okay at Sam's appointment.

Now the bird across the valley is doing something weird. I'm going to stand at the edge of the lawn to look.

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.