by Kwame Mbalia
I smiled at Mom, because she looked happy. She took care of sick people in their homes all day, and she also let her brother, Hondo, live with us. He spent most of his time watching wrestling matches on TV and eating bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, so she didn’t wear smiles too often.
“But…” I didn’t know where to start. “You said I could be homeschooled.”
“For a year,” she said, still beaming. “That was the agreement. Remember? A single year.”
Pretty sure that wasn’t the agreement, but once something was in Mom’s head, it was superglued there. Arguing was useless. Plus, I wanted her to be happy. Really, really happy. So I nodded hard and fast, because the harder I nodded, the more excited I’d look. I even threw in another smile.
“When?” It was September, and that meant I’d already missed a month of classes.
“You start tomorrow.”
Crap!
“How about I start in January?” Yeah, you could say I was super optimistic.
Mom shook her head. “This is an incredible opportunity, Zane.”
“Doesn’t private school cost a lot?”
“They gave you a scholarship. Look!” She flashed the letter as proof.
Oh.
Mom folded the letter neatly. “You’ve been on the waiting list since…”
She didn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t need to. Since referred to the day this jerk —a jerk whose face was seared into my brain—had mopped the floor with me at my old school, and I’d sworn never to set foot in any “place of learning” again.
“What about Ms. Cab?” I asked. “She needs my help. How am I going to pay for Rosie’s food if I don’t work?”
My neighbor, Ms. Cab (her real last name is Caballero, but I couldn’t pronounce it as a little kid and the nickname stuck), was blind and needed an assistant to help her do stuff around the house. Also, she worked as a phone psychic, and I answered the calls before she came on the line. It made her seem more legit. She paid me pretty good, enough to feed my dog, Rosie. Rosie was a boxmatian (half-boxer, half-dalmatian) and ate like an elephant.
“You can work in the afternoons.” Mom took my hand in hers.
I hated when she did that during our arguments.
“Zane, honey, please. Things will be mejor this time. You’re thirteen now. You need friends. You can’t live out here alone with these…”
Out here was a narrow, dusty road in the New Mexico desert. Other than my two neighbors, there were tumbleweeds, rattlesnakes, coyotes, roadrunners, a dried-up riverbed, and even a dead volcano. But more on that later. Most people are surprised when they find out New Mexico has so many volcanoes. (Of course, mine was no ordinary act of nature, right, gods?)
“With these what?” I asked, even though I knew what she was thinking: misfits.
So what that Ms. Cab was a little different? And who cared that my other neighbor, Mr. Ortiz, grew weird varieties of chile peppers in his greenhouse? Didn’t mean they were misfits.
“I’m just saying that you need to be with kids your age.”
“But I don’t like kids my age,” I told her. “And I learn more without teachers.”
She couldn’t argue with that. I’d taught myself all sorts of things, like the generals of the Civil War, the number of blood vessels in the human body, and the names of stars and planets. That was the best thing about not going to school: I was the boss.
Mom ruffled my dark hair and sighed. “You’re a genius, yes, but I don’t like you hanging out only with a bunch of old people.”
“Two isn’t a bunch.”
I guess I’d sort of been hoping Mom would forget our deal. Or maybe Holy Ghost (who named that school, anyway?) would disappear off the face of the earth in a freak cataclysmic accident.
“Mom.” I got real serious and made her look me in the eyes. “No one wants to be friends with a freak.” I tapped my cane on the ground twice. One of my legs was shorter than the other, which meant I walked with a dumb limp. It earned me all sorts of nicknames from the other kids: Sir Limps-a-Lot, McGimpster, Zane the Cane, and my all-time favorite: Uno—for the one good leg.
“You are not a freak, Zane, and…”
Oh boy. Her eyes got all watery like they were going to drown in her sadness.
“Okay, I’ll go,” I said, because I’d rather face a hundred hateful eyes than two crying ones.
She straightened, wiped her tears away with the back of her hand, and said, “Your uniform is pressed and waiting on your bed. Oh, and I have a present for you.”
Notice how she dropped the bad news with something good? She should’ve run for mayor. There was no point in my griping about the uniform, even though the tie would probably give my neck a rash. Instead I decided to focus on the word present, and I held my breath, hoping it wasn’t a rosary or something. Mom went to a cabinet and pulled out a skinny umbrella-size box with a silver ribbon tied around it.
“What is it?”
“Just open it.” Her hands twitched with excitement.
I ripped open the box to get to the present that we didn’t have money for. Inside was a wad of brown paper and under that, a shiny black wooden cane. It had a brass tip shaped like a dragon’s head. “This is…” I blinked, searching for the right word.
“Do you like it?” Her smile could’ve lit up the whole world.
I turned the cane in my hands, testing its weight, and decided it looked like something a warrior would carry, which made it the coolest gift in the universe. “I bet it cost a lot.”
Mom shook her head. “It was given to me….Mr. Chang died last week, remember?”
Mr. Chang was a rich client who lived in a grande house in town and sent Mom home with chow mein every Tuesday. He was also a customer of Ms. Cab’s—she was the one who’d gotten Mom the job to take care of him until he died. I hated to think of Mom hanging out with dying people, but as she always said, we had to eat. I’d tried eating less, but that was getting harder and harder the older I got. I’d already reached a whopping five foot nine. That made me the tallest in my family.
I ran my hands over the brass dragon head with the flames flying out of its mouth.
“He collected all sorts of things,” Mom continued. “And his daughter said I should have this. She knew you—” She stopped herself. “She said the dragon symbolizes protection.”
So Mom thought I needed protection. That made me feel pretty miserable. But I knew she meant well.
I rested my weight against it. It felt perfect, like it was made for me. I was excited to cruise around with this much cooler cane instead of my dumb plain brown one that screamed I’m a freak. “Thanks, Mom. I really like it.”
“I thought it would make going back to school… easier,” Mom said.
Right. Easier. Nothing, not even this warrior dragon cane, was going to make my being the new kid any easier.
It was a low point, and I didn’t think things could get any worse. But boy, was I wrong.
That night, as I lay in bed, I thought about the next day. My stomach was all twisted in knots, and I wished I could turn into primordial ooze and seep into the ground. Rosie knew something was up, because she let out little groans and nuzzled her head against my hand, soft-like. I petted the white patch between her eyes in small circles.
“I know, girl,” I whispered. “But Mom looked so happy.”
I wondered what my dad would say about the whole thing. Not that I’d ever know—I’d never even met the guy. He and Mom hadn’t gotten married, and he’d bounced before I was born. She’d only told me three things about him: He was superbly handsome (her words, not mine). He was from Mexico’s Yucatán region. (She’d spent time there before I was born and said the sea is like glass.) And the third thing? She loved him to pieces. Whatever.
It was all quiet, except for the crickets and my guts churning. I clicked on the lamp and sat up.
On my nightstand was the Maya mythology book Mom had given me for my eighth birthday. It was part of
a five-volume set about Mexico, but this book was the coolest. I figured it was her way of showing me my dad’s culture without having to talk about him. The book had a tattered green cover with big gold letters on it: The Myths and Magic of the Maya. It was filled with color illustrations and stories about the adventures of different gods, kings, and heroes. The gods sounded awesome, but authors lie all the time.
I opened the book. On the endpapers was an illustration of a Maya death mask made of crumbling jade, with squinted lidless eyes and square stone teeth like tiny gravestones.
I swear the face was smiling at me.
“What’re you looking at?” I huffed, slamming the book closed.
I tossed off the covers, got up, and peered out the window. It was all shadows and silence. There was only one good thing about living on the mesa: it was a hundred yards from a dead volcano (aka the Beast).
Having my own volcano was about the most interesting thing in my short life. (Up until that point, that is.) I’d even found a secret entrance into it last month. Rosie and I were hiking down from the top, and about halfway down I heard a strangled gasp. Naturally, I went to investigate, half expecting to find a hurt animal. But when I parted the scraggly creosote branches, I discovered something else: an opening just big enough to crawl through. It led to a whole labyrinth of caves, and for half a second I’d thought about calling National Geographic or something. But then I’d decided I would rather have a private place for Rosie and me than be on the cover of some dumb magazine.
Rosie leaped off the bed when she saw me slip on my sneakers.
“Come on, girl. Let’s get out of here.”
I went outside with my new warrior cane and limped past Nana’s grave (she died when I was two, so I didn’t remember her). I crossed the big stretch of desert, zigzagging between creosote, ocotillo, and yucca. The moon looked like a huge fish eye.
“Maybe I could just pretend to go to school,” I said to Rosie as we got closer to the Beast, a black cone rising a couple hundred yards out of the sand to meet the sky.
Rosie stopped, sniffed the air. Her ears pricked.
“Okay, fine. Bad idea. You have a better one?”
With a whimper, Rosie inched back.
“You smell something?” I said, hoping it wasn’t a rattlesnake. I hated snakes. When I didn’t hear the familiar rattling, I relaxed. “You’re not afraid of another jackrabbit, are you?”
Rosie yelped at me.
“You were afraid, don’t try to deny it.”
She took off toward the volcano. “Hey!” I called, trying to keep up. “Wait for me!”
I’d found Rosie wandering the desert four years ago. At the time, I figured someone had dumped her there. She was all skin and bones, and she acted skittish at first, like someone had abused her. When I begged Mom to let me keep her, she said we couldn’t afford it, so I promised to earn money for dog food. Rosie was cinnamon brown like most boxers, but she had black spots all over, including on her floppy ears, which is why I was sure she had dalmatian in her, too. She only had three legs, so she got me and I got her.
When we got to the base of my volcano, I stopped abruptly. There, in the moonlit sand, was a series of paw prints—massive, with long claws. I stepped into one of the impressions and my size-twelve foot took up only a third of the space. The paw was definitely too big to belong to a coyote. I thought maybe they were bear tracks, except bears don’t cruise the desert.
I kneeled to investigate. Even without the moonlight I would’ve been able to see the huge prints, because I had perfect eyesight in the dark. Mom called it a sacred ancestral blessing. Whatever. I called it another freak-of-nature thing.
“They look big enough to belong to a dinosaur, Rosie.”
She sniffed one, then another, and whimpered.
I followed the trail, but it ended suddenly, like whatever creature the prints belonged to had simply vanished. Shivers crept up my spine.
Rosie whimpered again, looking up at me with her soft brown eyes as if to say Let’s get outta here.
“Okay, okay,” I said, just as eager as she was to get to the top of the volcano.
We climbed the switchback trail, past my secret cave (which I’d camouflaged with a net of creosote and mesquite branches), toward the ridge.
When we got to the top, I took in the jaw-dropping view. To the east was a glittering night sky rolling over the desert, and to the west was a lush valley dividing the city and the flat mesa. And beyond that? A looming mountain range with jagged peaks that stood shoulder to shoulder like a band of soldiers.
This was pretty much my favorite place in the world. Not that I’d ever been outside New Mexico, but I read a lot. Mom always told me the volcano was unsafe, without ever really saying why, but to me it had always felt quiet and calm. It also happened to be where I trained. After the docs had said there was no way to fix my bum leg, I spent hours hiking the Beast, thinking if I could just make my shorter leg stronger, maybe my limp would be less noticeable.
No such luck. But by walking the rim’s edge I learned how to be a boss at balancing, and that’s a handy skill when you get shoved around by kids at school.
I set down my cane and began teetering along the rim of the crater while holding my arms out to my sides. Mom would kill me if she knew I did this. One slip and I’d tumble fifty feet down the rocky hill.
Rosie cruised behind me, sniffing the ground.
“How ’bout I pretend to be sick?” I said, still stuck on how to get out of Holy Ghost school. “Or I could release rats into the cafeteria….There can’t be school if there’s no food, right?” Did Catholic schools even have a cafeteria? The only problem was, my ideas would only buy me a day or two.
A low rumble rolled across the sky.
Rosie and I both stopped in our tracks and looked up. A small aircraft zoomed over the Beast, turned, and came back.
I stepped away from the crater’s edge, craning my neck to get a better look.
I waved, hoping the pilot could see me. But he didn’t come near enough. Instead, he started zigzagging like a crazy person. I thought maybe he was borracho until he circled back perfectly for another run. This time he came in tighter. Just when I thought the pilot was going to pull up, he pointed the plane’s nose toward the center of the crater. The wings were so close to me I could practically see the screws holding them together. The plane’s thrust shook the ground, sending me stumbling, but I caught myself.
Then something started glowing inside the cockpit. An eerie yellowish-blue light. Except what I saw had to have been some kind of a hallucination or optical illusion, because there was no pilot—there was a thing. An alien head thing with red bulging eyes, no nose, and a mouth filled with long sharp fangs. Yeah, that’s right. An alien demon dude was flying the plane right into the Beast’s mouth! Everything happened in sickeningly slow motion. I heard a crash, and a fiery explosion rocked the world, big enough to make even the planets shake.
I did a drop roll as flames burst from the top of the volcano. Rosie yelped.
“Rosie!”
And before I knew it I was tumbling down, down, down away from the Beast, away from my dog, and away from life as I knew it.
Keep reading for a sneak peek at Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee!
I almost missed the stranger’s visit that morning.
I liked to sleep in, though I didn’t get to do it often. Waking up meant waking early. Even on the days I had lessons, my mom and aunties loaded me down with chores to do first. Scrubbing the hydroponics units next to our dome house. Scrounging breakfast from our few sad vegetables and making sure they were seasoned well enough to satisfy my four aunties. Ensuring that the air filters weren’t clogged with the dust that got into everything.
I had a pretty dismal life on Jinju. I was counting the days until I turned fifteen. Just two more years left before I could take the entrance exams for the Thousand Worlds Space Forces and follow my brother, Jun, into the service. That was all that kept me going.
The day the stranger came, though—that day was different.
I was curled under my threadbare blanket, stubbornly clinging to sleep even though light had begun to steal in through the windows. Then my oldest cousin Bora’s snoring got too loud to ignore. I often wished I had a room of my own, instead of sharing one with three cousins. Especially since Bora snored like a dragon. I kicked her in the side. She grunted but didn’t stir.
We all slept on the same shabby quilt, handed down from my ancestors, some of the planet’s first settlers. The embroidery had once depicted magpies and flowers, good-luck symbols. Most of the threads had come loose over the years, rendering the pictures illegible. When I was younger, I’d asked my mom why she didn’t use Charm to restore it. She’d given me a stern look, then explained that she’d have to redo it every day as the magic wore off—objects weren’t as susceptible to Charm as people were. I’d shut up fast, because I didn’t want her to add that chore to my daily roster. Fortunately, my mom disapproved of Charm in general, so it hadn’t gone any further.
All my life I’d been cautioned not to show off the fox magic that was our heritage. We lived disguised as humans and rarely used our abilities to shape-shift or Charm people. Mom insisted that we behave as proper, civilized gumiho so we wouldn’t get in trouble with our fellow steaders, planet-bound residents of Jinju. In the old days, foxes had played tricks like changing into beautiful humans to lure lonely travelers close so they could suck out their lives. But our family didn’t do that.
The lasting prejudice against us annoyed me. Other supernaturals, like dragons and goblins and shamans, could wield their magic openly, and were even praised for it. Dragons used their weather magic for agriculture and the time-consuming work of terraforming planets. Goblins, with their invisibility caps, could act as secret agents; their ability to summon food with their magical wands came in handy, too. Shamans were essential for communicating with the ancestors and spirits, of course. We foxes, though—we had never overcome our bad reputation. At least most people thought we were extinct nowadays.