Chapter Seven - The Many Firsts
“Don’t worry about the reading thing,” Sharena said, handing me a brown paper bag. “There are more than a few people your age that can’t read, and they had years of practice.”
I sighed. “That’s not exactly comforting. That just tells me I might go years before I actually have a good grip on reading.”
“Oh, you’re doing fine.”
“I don’t feel like I’m doing fine. Three days of trying to get a handle on this, and all I’ve got is a few words.” I grabbed at the hem of my skirt. “Plus I’ve gotta deal with this.”
“Sweetie, you look wonderful.”
“I’m only just used to pants and a shirt. It feels weird to wear a skirt “
“You look like you’re dealing with it well,” Kenny said. I didn’t even notice him walking up to me, when did he get there?
“It’s not easy.”
Sharena smiled. “Kineas, don’t deny her pain, understand?”
“I’m not,” Kenny said, leaning against the counter. “It’s just interesting seeing a dragon in a skirt.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m a human right now.”
“How would you look if you were still a dragon wearing that uniform?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. It would probably look goofy.”
He turned to Sharena. “Is there some way we could do that at some point? Maybe slip her some elixir that lets her switch between human and dragon?”
I shook my head. “No. I’d sorta like to keep the fact that I was a dragon a secret, seeing as the whole town tried to…” I then chose my words carefully, “tar and feather me?” I sort of asked, glancing at Sharena. She nodded. “Yeah, Tar and feather me.” I picked up my book bag. “Did humans really do that to people?”
Sharena nodded. “Humans aren’t a very civilized species, despite how much we claim to be.”
“Okay, what about my mage power? Does that have to stay a secret, too?”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “It would probably be the best option, sweetie. It’s not uncommon for people your age to know magic, but being a mage isn’t common at all, let alone around here.”
I sighed. “So, I have to be completely unassuming and average. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?”
“You’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.” She smiled.
I nodded. “Yeah. Fine. I’m gonna force myself to be fine. If I’m not fine by the end of the school day, then tomorrow I don’t go to school.”
Kenny made a noise. “I dunno about that. That’d probably be more suspicious than you just being the weird new girl.”
Sharena rolled her eyes. “Either way, the two of you need to get to school.” She walked over to the front door and I saw the forest outside. Again. “If you don’t go now, you’ll be late.”
“Why do you risk being late for school just to have a scenic route through the woods?” I asked Kenny. Mithra was walking beside me, trying to get my attention. I picked him up and held him.
“We’re actually closer to school with the woods.” Kenny had gotten a carrot from somewhere, and suddenly I felt hungry. “I think you’re gonna like school. It’s easy, even if you don’t know how to read.”
“How does that make it easy?”
“Because you’ve got me to help.”
Mithra climbed onto my shoulder, which put me off-balance a little. “You think they’d actually let you help me?”
“I don’t see why not.”
I sighed. “Help would be great.” I glanced at the feathered cat on my shoulder. “I’m not entirely sure you can come, though.”
Mithra yawned. “I don’t intend on staying.”
Kenny laughed. For some reason, it made me smile. It was sorta funny, I guess. I had a feathered cat that could talk sitting on my shoulder while I walked to school. Yeah. Funny.
The walk itself was pretty uneventful. Kenny was right in that walking from town, where the house actually was, to school would be a greater distance. The place was huge, compared to most buildings in town. It was actually bigger than the inn that Kenny’s dad owned. Sharena had told me that kids from at least six towns around us were enrolled there, so I assumed it was the only school for teenagers around.
Kenny led me into the fenced-off school yard, then it occurred to me to make sure Mithra wasn’t with me. I couldn’t see him anywhere, so hopefully he was back at home. I walked around the yard, in between the other kids. Nobody looked at me funny, though it felt like they all were. If this was what it felt like being the new kid at school, then I felt a great deal of sympathy for everyone who dealt with this.
I found a spot by the door to the building and sat down, making sure to keep my knees together like Sharena showed me. Skirts were funny things, neither easy nor difficult to adjust to, just different. I hugged my legs to my chest, waiting. Kenny said that a bell would ring to tell us when school would start.
“Square root of seven twenty-nine is twenty-seven… The kingdom’s war with the north raged for thirteen years…”
I looked in the direction of the voice and saw a girl sitting on the ground with books and papers surrounding her. I could tell her parents had come from a continent to the east, or maybe she’d come from there, too. She would write things on the paper around her, then glance at one of her books and write something else on another paper.
The bell that Kenny mentioned rang, and the girl struggled to pick up all her stuff. I walked over to her and started to pick things up with her. She looked up at me with surprise, so I flashed her a smile. “You looked like you needed help.”
She nodded. “Yes, yes, thank you.”
I was about to respond to her, but Kenny grabbed me by the arm and dragged me inside. He led me into the building, down a set of stairs, through another hallway, and finally into a room where a woman was sitting behind a desk.
We waited for about twenty minutes before the woman at the desk looked up at us. “The principal will see you now.”
Kenny motioned for me to follow him into an office, which I did. In the office sat a man who looked to be around Sharena’s age (human ages were difficult for me to determine). He was writing something down on papers, but I couldn’t tell what.
“Mr. Endawa, it’s nice to see you.” The man looked up. “This would be your sister, I assume?”
Kenny nudged me toward the desk a little, so I took that as my cue to talk. “Yes, sir. My name is Riley.”
He looked back down at the paper. “Riley Endawa,” he muttered to himself as he scribbled something on the paper. “I’m told you have a hard time reading.”
I wanted to groan, but I didn’t. I was hoping I’d be able to go the day without anyone knowing that. “Um… Yes, sir.”
He nodded, for some reason. “Nothing to be ashamed of. At last report, approximately one-third of our students have trouble reading, most of them from the prestigious families around here. This letter from your father,“ he held the letter up, “tells me that you come from a poor village in the Plains nation, a village that was recently ravaged in the war.” He set the letter back down. “You’ll be put in classes with Kineas, he’ll help you along.”
I nodded. “Thank you, sir.”
He made a motion with his hands, like someone shooing away a rat. “Now, off to class with you.”
Kenny grabbed my arm again and yanked me back out of the principal’s office, then out into the hallway. “Well, that was easy,” he said.
“For you maybe. I felt… Unwelcome.”
He shrugged. “That’s just Principal Leifsson. He’s not a bad guy, he’s just not all that, well, friendly.”
“I could tell.” I pulled my hair away from my face. “You don’t have difficult classes, do you?”
He shook his head. “No. Plus, you’ll probably like gym.”
“Gym?”
“Yeah. Physical education, we pretty much just run and play sports.”
I sighed. “This sounds like it’s gonna be more difficult than I thought.”
“Remember, draw from your heart. Put down on the paper what it is you feel.”
The teacher - Mr. Rothun - passed me about the fifth time since Kenny and I got to class. I had the distinct impression he was trying see if I left my blouse open enough for him to look down it, but he was also peering around the guys like that, too. It was probably just nerves hitting me, since nerves was all I could even concentrate on right now.
I was better at sketching than I thought possible considering I’d never done it in my life. For whatever reason, I couldn’t keep the idea of drawing dragons out of my mind. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one. That girl I’d helped outside was sitting beside me, and she was drawing dragons, too, but her’s looked different. Mine actually looked like what real dragons looked like, whereas hers were goofy-faced, with little arms and no wings.
“How come it looks like that?” I asked her.
She looked surprised. “Oh, um… Where I’m from, we celebrate dragons instead of fearing them. We have festivals and one of the years of our lunar calendar is the Year of the Dragon.”
That seemed surprising. A culture that celebrated dragons? “You mean, everything the white dragon causes doesn’t turn your people away from dragons?”
She shook her head. “No. Dragons have been a part of our culture since our first emperor. He swore allegiance to the dragons, and told them that Huaxia would always be a place of safety for them.” She drew a symbol down in the corner, away from the dragon. “This is the symbol for Dragonland.”
It looked less like chicken scratches to me, but it still didn’t mean anything. I couldn’t read the common language, I sure as hell couldn’t read whatever it was she was writing. Whatever language Huaxia wrote with, it was sure pretty, though.
“Endawa,” Mr. Rothun said, looking in my direction. The problem was that Kenny was sitting right beside me, and we of course shared the last name. “Show me your art.” He tapped the corkboard (Kenny told me what it was) beside him. Kenny and I each looked at one another, confused. “I’m sorry, the shorter, more well-endowed Endawa in the room.”
I gulped. That meant me. I stood up, walked around the room, and made my way to the front of the classroom. I took grabbed a thumbtack off of the corkboard and tacked my dragon drawing on the board. “I don’t know if it’s any good.”
Mr. Rothun looked it over and rubbed at his chin. “Good? This is fantastic, Ms. Endawa.” The corkboard was on wheels, and he moved it closer to the ring of tables that we sat at. “Can anyone tell me what this is?” he asked.
Somebody on the other side of the room raised their hand. “It’s a dragon.”
Mr. Rothun walked over to the chalkboard (Kenny also told me what that was) and picked up one of the erasers. He threw it at the boy who had answered. “Wrong!” He walked back over to the corkboard and smacked my drawing. “This is photorealism! This is the kind of artwork you only find from those who have practiced day-in/day-out for their entire lives! All of you should strive to this level!”
Suddenly, I felt even more nervous than before. I didn’t want to be praised, I wanted to be the girl in the back of the room that nobody talked about. “It’s not really that good, is it?”
He walked over to a bookshelf that I hadn’t noticed until now and pulled a large red book down. “This is the artwork of the famous Oakfinder, a Dwarf whose level of art few have been capable of reaching, even after decades of work.” He set the book on the lip of the corkboard. “Ms. Endawa has done so.”
Dammit, this really wasn’t helping me. I felt nervous as hell.
“Return to your seat, Ms. Endawa. Create for us another masterpiece.”
I walked back to my seat feeling more nervous than I had when I’d been called up. I sat down, then slumped down in my seat. Kenny just smiled as he kept working on his drawing of the house. “I think you’re the first person he’s singled out since school started.”
In a sarcastic voice, I just said, “Gee, thanks.” I picked up my drawing pad and pencil. “This is not how I wanted my first day to go.”
“Enjoy it.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I enjoy it, I get people’s attention. I don’t want anybody’s attention.”
The next class was a history class. Today, specifically, the teacher was talking about Endawa village. It was the only word on the chalkboard that I could read, which wasn’t exactly a great thing. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the teacher kept morphing back and forth between forms. Starting at one end of the chalkboard, she’d be a human, then she’d become a coyote, then she’d become some odd furry thing that I’d never seen before but looked to vaguely humanoid. She kept talking in the common tongue, though. That was good.
“As we discussed last week, the Endawa family established the village over five hundred years ago, by Arcturo Endawa the First. His son, Arcturo the Second, was the one to begin the family’s dragon hunting heritage, by killing the dragon Nazarenus, the remains of whom currently provide the village’s center fountain.”
That surprised me. I didn’t know there was dragon in that fountain. How’d they make a fountain out of a dragon’s remains? I nudged Kenny. “Did you know the fountain was made of dragon?”
He shook his head. “I thought it was quartz, honestly.”
The teacher changed into a monkey-looking animal now. “Many believe that it was Arcturo the First who named the village after himself, but it was in fact his grandson, Bhaltair Endawa, who defeated the Qinatan conqueror, Osamu Nakajima, who the village was named after. It was named in his honor of his sacrifice. His wife, Osamu’s sister Riko, was the one to suggest the name.”
I whispered to Kenny, “I didn’t know you were part Qinatan, either.”
He shrugged. “It hasn’t exactly been obvious in the family for generations.”
“Kineas!” the teacher shouted. She had become a large bird that I’d never seen before. “You and your sister may already know your family history, but that does not make class an excuse to chat. Please pay attention!”
I raised my hand. “I’m adopted, so I’m sorta learning this all for the first time, ma’am.”
“Then I expect you to listen!”
I shyly lowered my hand. “Yes, ma’am…” Several of the other kids in class let out quiet laughs. Of course, I embarrassed myself.
Gym class alone made me wonder just how long I would be able to stand going to school. The locker room experience was odd enough, as I wasn’t used to changing my clothes in front of other people, even if they were other girls. When I was handed the gym outfit, I nearly doubled over in laughter as the shorts would cover almost nothing and the shirt only came to just above my belly button. The outfit came with its own special one-size-fits-all bra that was supposed to keep my breasts from flopping around.
The outfit wasn’t uncomfortable anymore than it was just odd to wear for someone who’s only worn a limited amount of clothes in their life. I felt like I was wearing less then when I had the skirt on, probably relating to the fact that the shorts pretty much just covered my underwear. If not for the shirt, I’d feel like I was parading around half-naked.
The girl beside me, who I semi-recognized from art class, handed me a small thing that looked like a circle. “What’s this for?” I asked.
“Rubber band to tie your hair back. Trust me, you’re gonna need it.”
Ii took the thing - the rubber band - and then realized I had absolutely no idea how to tie my hair back as she suggested. “Um… Can you do it for me?” I asked, shyly.
She looked surprised, but nodded. “Yeah, sorry. I didn’t think about it, you’ve probably never done this before.”
I wanted to tell her that she was more right about that than she thought she was. I didn’t, but the thought was still there. She took me into the restroom that the locker room had and did it in front of the mirror, so that I could see how it was done. That relieved me greatly, and I told myself I’d practice at home.
I looked odd with my hair tied back the way it was. If I looked at myself straight on, I could see a minor family resemblance to Kenny. I wondered if anybody else would notice it, because I wasn’t supposed to look like Kenny and I shared any DNA. Then again, I wondered if anybody even cared. So far, everybody was treating me like I’d always been there, like I was just another girl. Even when I had screwed up in history and art, they weren’t treating me like I was something new or even foreign.
“How good are you at dodgeball?” the girl asked.
“Huh?”
“Dodgeball, it’s a game where people throw red balls at each other. Whoever gets hit can’t play anymore.”
I shook my head. “I’ve never played it.”
“Well, I hope you’re a pretty good shot, it’s almost always boys vs. girls and the boys usually win.”
I watched her walk out of the locker room and prepared myself. Judging by what she’d described, I’d seen people play dodgeball before, when hiding in a forest once. The idea of being hit by a ball didn’t sound great, but if it was a game that people played, it looked like I was gonna havta play it, too.
I followed everybody else out of the locker room into the gymnasium. The room was big, mostly white, and had an orange floor. The guys were spilling out from their locker room, as well. Kenny was already out, sitting on the large bench… Thing… That I didn’t know the name of on the one side of the room.
The teacher walked across the room, a clipboard in his hand. “Alright, everyone, you know the drill. Girls on the left, boys on the right. I want two volunteers.” He pointed at Kenny and I. “You two.”
I leaned close to Kenny. “How are we volunteers if he picked us?” He shook his head. I followed Kenny over to the teacher, who checked some things off on his paper.
“Distribute the balls,” he said.
Kenny pulled me over to a cart kinda like the one we kept the stock in at the pharmacy, but it was filled with red balls. “Coach likes them in a straight line, for some reason,” he said. We pulled the cart to the center of the gym and he started on one end, I started on the other, each of us setting a ball down and then going back to the cart to get another. By the time we got to the center, there were fifteen balls lined up. I walked to one end of the girl’s line and Kenny walked to one end of the boy’s line.
The coach blew on a whistle. “Go!” Everybody scrambled for a ball and several of us - boys and girls alike - were knocked out almost instantly. I managed to jump out of the way and threw a ball straight at Kenny, not even realizing I’d aimed for him. The ball hit him in the head, and knocked him on his ass. He just smirked when he realized I’d been the one to eliminate him.
A ball whizzed past my head, forcing me to my feet. I grabbed another ball that had hit the floor and threw it blindly, hitting a red-headed boy in the stomach. I rolled out of the way when another ball hit the wall behind me (when I’d gotten close to the wall, I didn’t know). I grabbed that ball and hit a tan-skinned guy with a weird tattoo on his face.
I ran for another ball, jumped for it, and was just about to grab it when a ball hit me in the face. I was thankful that I was already on the floor, otherwise I would have landed pretty hard. The coach blew his whistle again. “Rios!” he shouted. I sat up and saw him patting the girl who’d given the rubber band on the back. “It’s about time the girls won a game.” He started moving the balls back into the center of the room. “Line up! half and half!”
The red-headed boy helped me up. “What’s that mean?” I asked.
“Half the boys and half the girls on either side.” He smiled. “I’m gonna be on your side. I don’t want you to hit me in the face again.”
I smirked. That was actually pretty funny.
I felt tired. Kenny never told me that school would be as exhausting as it was. Of course, a lot of that probably had to do with the four games of dodgeball we played in gym. My face still hurt a little from taking so many hits. I was almost dragging my feet as we walked home.
“You looked like you had a good time,” Kenny said.
“Huh?”
“At school. You looked like you were having fun.”
I nodded. “I was, kinda. It was nice to just be around other people.” I looked around the forest for the house, but I didn’t see it. Granted, most of the forest looked the same, so for all I knew, we weren’t anywhere near where the house was. “Nobody treated me like I was the new girl, which was nice.”
Kenny smiled. “There were some guys in the locker room talking about you.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Hey, Kineas, is your sister available? or Where’d your dad find such a hot girl like that to adopt? You’re actually getting more than a few guys interested in you.”
The idea of that concerned me. I hadn’t really put any thought into guys being attracted to me. Hell, I wasn’t even sure if I was attracted to guys. The idea wasn’t repulsive, or anything. I’d never really been attracted to girls, though I’d hardly met any female dragons in my life. I’d barely met any male dragons, either. I could actually count the combined numbers of both on one hand.
“The best one had to be when somebody asked Can your dad find me a girl like that? I think everybody laughed at that one.”
I said, “Wow, a boys’ locker room is full of way more talking than I expected.”
“Not as much as my friend Kaui says your locker room is nothing but talk.”
I shrugged. “Well, yeah, there’s a lot of it. I wasn’t paying attention to most of it.”
“Aw… I was hoping some of the girls said something about me,” he said, laughing. After a minute, he stopped. “Um… Wasn’t the house here this morning?”
I looked around. This actually did seem like the part of the forest where the house had been. “I thought it was.”
He sighed. “I guess that means we’ve gotta walk back to town. Maybe Sharena’s too busy at the pharmacy and didn’t have time to do the spell.”
“We should probably get there to help then, right?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Wanna race?”
Despite my exhaustion, the idea did seem kinda fun. “Why not?”
The pharmacy had a Sorry, We’re Closed sign on it when we got into town. I was actually kinda proud of myself for being able to read the sign, maybe I was getting better at it faster than I thought. There didn’t seem to be anything special happening in town, so Kenny and I continued on our way to the house.
As we approached, I saw two figures in the house, shadowed by the lights. One of them was Sharena, but I couldn’t tell who the other one was. When I pointed it out to Kenny, he got excited. He ran to the house, threw open the door and shouted, “Dad!”
I followed Kenny into the house and saw the man standing there. He was relatively young-looking, but there was an unmistakable family resemblance to Kenny. The man wore a sword on his back and had yet to set down a large bag that he was holding, but he was too busy ruffling Kenny’s hair and looking happy.
“Hey there, squirt. You been keeping the inn running while I been gone?”
“Yeah. Oh!” Kenny ushered me closer. “You two haven’t met yet.”
Kenny’s dad put his hand on my shoulder. “You must be Riley. Sharena’s told me a lot about you already. Name’s Irvine, and for as long as you’re livin’ with us, I’m gonna be your step-dad.”
