Chapter 26

Leah Walker

Leah Walker slept. She dreamed of a dark place full of colors, hanging in the air like stars that she could reach out and touch. They were memories. They were doors: countless doors in a huge room, an endless hallway. They were picture frames enclosing images, feelings, colors. Curious and unafraid, she stepped into one.

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Leah peeked around the corner of the door to Eric’s room. He was lying on his bed, looking at her. She’d been discovered!

She flung the door open and performed a diving roll into his room. “Look out!” she shouted. She squirmed around on the floor until she could kick the door shut. She covered her head with her hands as though ready for a bomb blast.

She peeked through her fingers at Eric.

“Uh, hey, Leah,” said Eric. “What’s up?”

Leah stood up straight and raised her arms. “Let’s play a game.”

Eric had been reading something, but he set it aside and rolled over in his bed to face Leah. “Sure. What kind of game?”

“House,” she announced.

“House, huh? Gotcha. I’ll be a billionaire part-time astronaut and deep-sea fisher who’s down on his luck and in deep with the Russian mafia.”

Leah nodded in affirmation. “I will be…a dragon.” She raised her arms over her head and made claws with her hands.

Eric nodded. “Yeah that sounds about right. But wait a minute…”

Leah, with sudden apprehension: “What?”

“You can’t be a dragon.”

Leah’s eyes widened. “Why not?”

“You’re too small,” said Eric. He scooted further off the bed to lean in for a closer look, carefully inspecting Leah. He nodded solemnly. “Yeah, no, it’s true. Way too small. You could be a dragon fly , though.”

Leah shook her head so hard that her pigtails whipped around and hit her in the face. “No. Dragon.”

Eric also shook his head. “Sorry, dragonfly. Maybe when you grow up.”

“Dragon!”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Absolutely not.”

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She stood in a dark, echoey room. It was round, and it was full of huge colored mechanisms all turning and ticking and moving at different speeds. They were so big that she couldn't see the tops of them.

The one closest to her was white. It was as big across as her whole apartment, and it was ringing and ticking and chiming, made of glass and metal and ice and all kinds of sharp and pale and sparkly things. It towered over her, this moving, moving, everywhere always moving machine.

She walked away from it, toward the wall. There was a window. Outside she saw a city, but it looked dark and empty. A huge moon hung up in the sky, but it was covered in clouds, and on it she saw oceans and green land like the world from space. Out in the dark city, a great and terrible beast roared, but it was a sad sound.

She heard things breaking, cracking, shattering behind her. She turned around.

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“Sorry about Claw Hands,” said Eric. “He was a good lobster.”

Leah nodded, sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve. Claw Hands, her only and best pet ever, had died.

“So I got you something,” Eric said. They sat at their kitchen table, the newly-cleaned and now vacant fish tank beside them. Eric held up a plastic bag, and he pulled out a red stuffed animal.

Leah’s eyes widened. “Is it a lobster?”

Eric shook his head as he handed it over to her. “No, but I guess it’s kind-of like a lobster. It’s a dragon.”

“Dragon,” said Leah. She took the red thing and looked it over. It was like the dinosaurs she had seen in books, but it had wings and spikes on its back and long whiskers coming from its mouth. It was soft. She hugged it.

“You can name it whatever you—”

“Frisby,” she said.

“What?”

“His name is Frisby Wiser.”

“Woah. Okay, that was easy.”

“Tell me about dragons,” said Leah.

“All right, sure. Dragons are awesome powerful magic monsters. They like, breathe fire, sometimes. Um. Yeah. Suitable material for a final boss battle.”

“Ohhhhh,” said Leah, making the noise she made when fascinated. She stared at the dragon. “Where do they live?” she asked. “Are there any in Chicago?”

“Maybe some,” said Eric, “but mainly they live in mountains and stuff. One of my friends is actually a dragon.”

“Ohhhhh.” Leah stared in amazement.

“Yeah she just passed the test the other day.”

“There’s a test?”

“Oh, you didn’t know? Yeah, for real.”

Leah hopped off her chair and onto the floor. She stared at him intently, clutching Frisby Wiser. “I want to take the test.”

Eric laughed. “Whoa, you gotta study for a while first.”

“What kind of test is it?”

“It’s pretty hard. It’s got, like, math and stuff. Dragons need to be all up on top of their game when it comes to arithmetic, right?”

Leah nodded as though this were obvious. “I know math,” she said. “I can add.”

Eric narrowed his eyes and leaned in close. “But do you know… division ?”

Leah considered this for some time, gazing intently at the floor. “What’s that?” she said finally.

“It’s when you…uh, I guess, when you take apart numbers into smaller numbers. Like, what’s six divided by three? It’s two, because there’s two threes in the number six.”

Leah again nodded. “It is like adding, but backwards. Taking apart numbers. I can do it.”

Eric smiled. “Oh yeah? Then what’s twelve divided by three?”

“Four,” said Leah without hesitation.

“Twenty divided by five?”

“That’s four, too.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Eric sat back in his chair and scrunched his eyebrows at Leah. “What’s thirty-six divided by six?”

“It’s still six. It’s the same each way.” She produced a rare smile at that; there was something funny about it.

“Um. What’s sixty divided by five?”

“It’s twelve.”

“Forty-seven divided by eight?”

Leah frowned. “It doesn’t come apart like that.” She paused. “Forty-seven doesn’t come apart at all!”

“Ninety-eight divided by two.”

“Forty-nine.”

“No, it’s…oh wait, yeah. Holy sh…smokes, Leah. And you’re just doing addition at school? Does your teacher know you can divide?”

“So can I be a dragon?” She jumped up and down in excitement.

“A what? Oh yeah. Sure. But, you gotta be older though. Why don’t you go play with, uh, Frisby?”

Leah went away singing a made-up song to a made-up tune: “Frisby Wiser is a dragon; dragons are like lobsters; but big and good at math and breathing fire; unlike lobsters, even Claw Hands…”

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Leah saw a girl sitting in a treehouse. She looked like a person, but had grey-green skin and big green eyes. Emerald jewels grew in her hair like a crown, and she wore a big green coat. She leaned against a pile of animals. But they were real animals, not stuffed: Leah saw a raccoon, some squirrels, and a bunch of birds and frogs and other creatures she didn’t know.

The girl sang a strange song that sounded like it didn’t have words in it, and her voice was beautiful. There was also another sound that went with the song she sang, a ringing sound like bells or chimes, but Leah couldn’t tell where it was coming from. The jewels in her hair sparkled. The girl in green looked like a princess from an old Disney movie, singing with all the animals around her. She was wrapping bandages around her hand, stained green. Was she hurt? Leah wanted to ask if she was hurt, but found that she couldn’t speak, or move. She could only watch.

But the girl with grass in her hair looked up at Leah anyway. Even though she was grey and green and weird, Leah thought she was pretty. She was small too, not much bigger than Leah. She squinted her eyes at Leah and tilted her head like a bird, and she looked confused, but she didn’t stop singing.

Leah saw that the treehouse room had a bed and a bunch of pots, and a computer-looking thing. The house had big windows, and a really big doorway without a door, and outside moved only the leaves and branches of more trees.

It was bright and sunny outside, but thunder suddenly boomed through the forest, shaking the branches and scaring the animals all around the girl. It didn’t scare the girl, but she stopped singing, and she stopped trying to look at Leah.

The treehouse trembled, and a huge dark figure blocked the whole doorway with a sound like crackling lightning. The sound was loud, and the animals all scurried away out the windows, but the girl with grass in her hair seemed happy to see the giant who had come like thunder. She jumped way high up in the air to greet him.

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Thunder crashed outside as though beating against their apartment building, and it rattled her windows. She tried hiding under her blanket, but it didn't help; the storm was still out there, something huge and wild and dark that she could not control, that nobody could control. She reached out and found Frisby Wiser, but even he seemed a little scared.

Leah slid out of bed, grasping the dragon to her chest, and scurried out of her room, across the hall, and into Eric’s room. Without ceremony she ran to his bed and crawled up under the covers next to him. Just like that, safe and warm. He stirred, said “Huh…wha?” in a sleepy way, then put his arm around her as she snuggled up next to him.

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Thunder again, but a different kind of thunder. An even scarier kind than thunderstorm thunder. Where was she? What had happened? She couldn’t remember. She only knew she was scared, and wanted her parents, or Eric. She began crying.

“It’s okay,” said a voice, deep and rough, but soft. “It’s going to be okay.”

They were outside, and there was a fire in front of her, which made her remember that she still had Frisby Wiser. She hugged him to her chest. But wait. This wasn’t Frisby! It was…a turtle? It made her think…that something bad had happened to Eric? Or somebody? She couldn’t remember!

But she was leaning against someone, and she didn’t remember who he was, but she knew his voice and she knew she trusted him, and she knew he would protect her no matter what even if he couldn’t walk very well. He had letters on his fingers, and a beard, and a great big voice that was even bigger than the thunder. He smelled like cigarettes.

It was all quiet and dark now outside, and there were trees around them, and even though the whole world outside of the fire was dark and scary, she felt okay knowing that the person whose breathing she felt against her back was with her.

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Leah slowly opened the door to Eric’s room. He was asleep! A perfect opportunity. She threw the door open, ran forward and leapt into the air over Eric’s bed. She landed right on him. A direct hit!

She expected him to wake up struggling, but he just groaned. “Leah,” he said. “What are you doing?”

“It’s a dance,” she informed him.

“A dance.”

“A dance.”

“Leah, get off me.”

“Do you want to make something?”

“Make something.”

“Yes.”

“Get off me.”

“No.”

“Fine. We can make something later.”

Later: they sat at the kitchen table molding playdough. Empty plastic cups littered the table and floor. Leah had constructed a screen out of books to block Eric’s view of what she was making.

“What are you making?” she asked him from behind the books.

“If I tell you, will you tell me what you’re making?” he asked.

“No. But I’m almost done.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, I’m done. What did you make?”

Eric cleared the books so she could see his model sitting on the desk. “It’s you, see?” It was a dragonfly, mainly red but with green eyes and yellow and blue and purple on the four wings.

Leah nodded in understanding, her face serious. “Her name is Extra Wings.” Then she turned to her own creation. It looked like a collapsed and melted cube, with angles and twisty parts in a big complicated mess made up of blue and black and purple playdough.

“I see,” said Eric. “But what is it?”

“It is something you use…” said Leah.

“Are you sure?”

“It is something you know about…”

“Which is?”

“It is something that is very big…”

“Okay, Leah, jus—”

“The internet.” Leah struck a triumphant pose.

Eric leaned close for a careful examination of the playdough. “Leah, this looks nothing like the internet.”

“Yes it does.”

“The internet doesn’t look like that. What’s with all the purple? And this twisty part?”

Leah tilted her head to one side and scooted partway around the table. “Maybe you are looking at it wrong.”

Eric’s phone rang. He answered it and turned away from the table. “Hey, what’s up? Nah, just getting educated by my five-year-old sister.”

Leah ignored Eric and began singing a made-up song about the twistiness of the internet.

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Clouds drifted through a blue sky. She sat up and looked around. A hilltop—green grass, trees turning gold in the cool air, mountains in the distance. Around her, lying on the grass, laughing and talking and pointing at the clouds, lay six other people. She recognized Eric; the others were about his age. The remains of an eaten meal were on a blanket nearby.

One of the girls turned to look at Leah and smiled. Leah smiled back. Then she fell back onto the grass and looked at the clouds again. Happy. She was happy here.

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Leah woke up on her bed. She lay there for a while, a little confused about where exactly she was. She tried to remember the dreams she’d just had. They were dreams, right? She thought so. Some of them had been good, others had been scary. She didn’t think she was dreaming now, though.

She grabbed her blanket from the inside and rolled right out of bed and onto the floor, cocooning herself. She rolled to the door, found that it was open, and moved like a worm out into the hall. Eric should be up by now. She rolled across the hall and bumped into his door. It was closed. She knocked on it with her head. No answer.

She remembered that Eric was going to go get a friend from the airport tomorrow. She rolled back into her room to get Frisby and make a sign for Eric’s friend.