Dinosaur Boy

by Cory Putman Oakes

  “And just how many broken tails do you think Dr. Bakker has ever seen?” she demanded.

  I guess she had a point.

  But still. The vet?

  Dr. Gilmore, whom I had last seen when we brought Fanny in to be spayed, saw me right away. She bumped me to the front of the line, ahead of a golden retriever who had bitten through his stitches and a Pekingese with an ear infection. After a quick X-ray, she diagnosed me with a sprained tail and sent me home with an anti-inflammatory and orders to ice the injured area.

  My dignity was still smarting the next day, but my tail felt much better. And after school, Sylvie invited Elliot and me to visit her mother’s new restaurant. My mom seemed unusually enthusiastic about my going. Probably because the restaurant was on the edge of downtown, quite a long walk away, and Dr. Gilmore had told her that exercise would help my tail heal properly.

  The restaurant’s front door was papered shut. There was a large banner draped over the front of the building, which read, “COMING SOON—MAMA JUAREZ’S CUCINA.” Over the door was a drawing of a smiling woman with Sylvie’s hair and milk-chocolaty brown skin, offering a plate of tortillas to the passersby.

  Sylvie led us in through a door in the back. Inside, several dozen tables were shoved together in the center of a large dining room, and four men on ladders were painting the walls bright orange.

  “Hola, mi hija!” came a loud voice with a heavy accent.

  I was enveloped in a big, squishy hug (along with Elliot and Sylvie) before I could see where the voice was coming from. When I could breathe again, I noticed that the hugger bore a striking resemblance to the woman whose picture was above the door, except that her smile was even brighter in person.

  “Sit, sit!” she commanded, steering all three of us to one of the tables. “I’m so glad you’ve brought me some taste testers!”

  “Some what?” Elliot asked, as four waiters appeared, each carrying a tray so heavily laden with food that the plastic was groaning with the weight. They spread the plates out on the table in front of us and then disappeared back into the kitchen.

  Elliot sat obediently and grabbed a fork.

  “Mo-om,” Sylvie complained, scowling down at the table. There was easily enough food there for ten people.

  “Shush.” Mrs. Juarez kissed the top of her head. “You know it’s been a long time since I’ve done straight Mexican food. We’re finalizing the menu today, and I need opinions. Start with the tamales.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Elliot, who was already halfway through with the plate in front of him.

  Mrs. Juarez beamed at him. Elliot swallowed and seemingly remembered his manners.

  “I’m Elliot,” he said, sticking his hand out across a plate of enchiladas.

  Mrs. Juarez shook it.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Elliot,” she said, and then turned to me. “And you must be Sawyer?”

  I shook her hand as well.

  “That is a lovely tail you have there, Sawyer,” Mrs. Juarez complimented me. “Don’t you worry. I have a big salad coming for you. Do you like salsa?”

  I considered this for a moment.

  “I’m not sure,” I said finally. “I don’t think I’ve tried any since this summer.”

  She gave my shoulder a squeeze.

  “I’ll bring you out some, just in case you want to spice up your greens a bit.”

  “All right, Mom,” Sylvie said pointedly, nudging a plate of chile rellenos to one side, to clear a spot for her notebook. “We’ll try all of the food, OK?”

  “OK, Sylvie,” Mrs. Juarez said, in the exact same tone of voice. Then she narrowed her eyes suspiciously at her daughter. “Empty your pockets.”

  “What do you mean?” Sylvie asked. Her face was suddenly a mask of wide-eyed innocence. The expression looked really weird on her.

  “You know what I mean.” Mrs. Juarez tapped a foot impatiently and held out a hand, palm up. “Pockets. Now.”

  Sylvie’s innocent face melted, replaced by an annoyed scowl. Sighing, she dug into the front pocket of her sweatshirt and deposited two handfuls of candy corn into her mom’s hand.

  “Sylvia,” Mrs. Juarez scolded, shaking her head at the candy. “You know what your father thinks about this.”

  “Dad’s not here,” Sylvie said quietly.

  Mrs. Juarez started to say something and then stopped. Instead, she reached out and patted her daughter’s head through her orange hoodie.

  “I’m sure you’ve had enough sugar for the day,” she said finally. “Time for some real food. Pop your head in the kitchen when you’re ready to leave, OK? I’ll give everybody a ride home.”

  “OK,” Sylvie said, scowling at a bowl of chips.

  Mrs. Juarez disappeared around a corner.

  I sat down and took a sip of water while I studied Sylvie. She was still staring at the chips.

  Sylvie’s mom wasn’t what I had pictured at all. From Sylvie’s description, I had expected a mean woman who cared only about her restaurant. The real Mrs. Juarez hadn’t seemed like that at all. What was Sylvie’s problem?

  I looked at Elliot across the table. He was chewing. Chewing and looking worriedly at Sylvie.

  “So…your dad doesn’t let you eat candy?” I ventured.

  Sylvie looked up at me. For a moment, her eyes looked filled with hurt. I was just starting to get seriously concerned that she was about to cry when she blinked. And suddenly she was back to normal again.

  “Dad has a thing about sugar,” she said, reaching for a chip.

  “And he’s still on his business trip?” I prodded.

  “Yep,” Sylvie said flatly. Swallowing her chip, she opened her notebook and held a pen poised over the empty first page. “Focus, boys. We’re here to work.”

  “Oh, sorry, yeah,” Elliot said, pushing some enchiladas aside to grab another plate. “Let’s try this one next. What is this? Then we can start on the—”

  “No,” Sylvie snapped at him. “We’re not here to talk about food. We’re here to talk about what is happening at our school.”

  “Oh.” Elliot looked disappointed.

  “Here is what we know,” Sylvie said, leaning forward importantly. “Eight kids have been kicked out of school—”

  “Ten,” I interrupted. Justin Thomas and Gabrielle Clark had been sent to Principal Mathis’s office that morning, after they both yelled “feeding time” and threw sandwich meat at me. I could only assume that had been Allan’s idea.

  “OK, ten,” Sylvie amended, writing all of the names down in her notebook. “Ten kids have been expelled, and no one has heard from them since. We have visual confirmation that at least one of them is no longer living—”

  “Now hold on—” Elliot interrupted.

  “In his house,” Sylvie added, interrupting him back. “No longer living in his house. Under suspicious circumstances that would lead a reasonable person to believe that something out of the ordinary has happened to him.”

  “That sounds about right,” I agreed, as Mrs. Juarez returned holding a large bowl of salad.

  I winced as my injured tail thumped with involuntary delight.

  Mrs. Juarez placed the salad in front of me, along with two other smaller dishes.

  “This one is salsa,” she said, pointing to the first one, which was full of chunky bits of tomato and onion. “And this one,” she said, pointing to the second one, a rich-looking brown sauce, “is molé.”

  “Molé?” Elliot asked, his mouth full again. “What is that?”

  “A Mexican sauce, made from chilies, spices, nuts, chocolate, and a few other things,” Mrs. Juarez answered.

  “Chocolate?” Elliot exclaimed. “That’s awesome!”

  “You can’t taste it,” Sylvie said sulkily.

  Mrs. Juarez frowned at her daughter.

 
“You can if you’re paying attention, Sylvie. Let your friends make up their own minds.”

  Mrs. Juarez squeezed my shoulder as she straightened up.

  “I thought it might go nicely with your salad, Sawyer. You must get tired of plain greens all of the time. And Elliot, the same sauce is on the molé poblano. That’s the dish on your left.”

  “Cool!” Elliot said, exchanging his scraped-clean plate for the one Mrs. Juarez had pointed out. It was a giant stuffed green pepper drizzled with the brown mystery sauce.

  “Thanks,” I said, and gave my small dish of molé an experimental sniff. It smelled…warm. Which sounds weird, but it really did. Warm, like spices and nuts. I poured it over the top of my salad.

  Mrs. Juarez returned to the kitchen, and we returned to our conversation.

  “I really don’t think that Parker is dead,” Elliot offered, as he disemboweled the poblano with a knife. “If anything like that had happened to him, or to any of the others, we would have heard about it. Remember Gwen Carmichael?”

  I nodded, as Sylvie frowned.

  “Who is Gwen Carmichael?”

  “A sixth-grader who died in a car accident last year,” I explained, as I took a bite of the molé-covered salad. It was spicy. Spicy enough that I felt my eyebrows shoot up in surprise as soon as it hit my tongue. Somewhere behind the spice, I thought I could also taste the chocolate. But maybe that was just my imagination. I swallowed before I continued.

  “We basically didn’t even have school for two weeks after she died. We had special assemblies and meetings with crisis counselors, and we all had to make these fake roses out of tissue paper for her funeral. Stuff like that. It was all any of the teachers talked about for weeks.”

  “And Gwen wasn’t even in our grade,” Elliot pointed out. “There’s no way ten kids in our class have died and we haven’t heard anything about it.”

  Sylvie nodded and wrote Gwen Carmichael in block letters in her notebook.

  “So the school made a big deal about a student dying,” she summed up. “But they haven’t done anything about the ten kids who got kicked out. Interesting.”

  “Which means they didn’t die,” Elliot surmised, as he scraped a bit of dribbled sauce off his black Oregon State Beavers jersey.

  “Or it means somebody is covering it up,” Sylvie countered.

  “Covering what up?” I asked, coughing a little bit after my second bite of molé. This was definitely a sauce that fought back when you ate it. But I didn’t mind. Mrs. Juarez was right. I had been getting a little bit tired of plain veggies all of the time.

  “Whatever happened to them,” Sylvie answered. “I’m not saying they all died. But Parker’s mom said she missed him. And if he’s still alive, he’s definitely somewhere where he doesn’t need any of his clothes. That’s weird. Can we all agree that that’s weird?”

  “It’s weird,” Elliot agreed. “But what can we do about it?”

  “We can find out what’s going on,” Sylvie said. Her expression was so determined that I could tell Elliot and I were already on board with her plan, whatever it was, whether we liked it or not.

  “Who do you think is covering it up?” I asked. “And why?”

  Sylvie tapped her pen against her chin.

  “I’m not sure about the why,” she admitted. “But I think that part will be obvious, once we figure out the who.”

  “Then who is covering this up?” I asked again. “And do we even know what this is?”

  “This is a confusing conversation,” Elliot muttered, chewing.

  “The obvious who is Principal Mathis,” Sylvie said. “She’s the one who is kicking all these kids out in the first place, right?”

  “She’s the principal. It’s kind of her job,” I pointed out. I suddenly felt defensive on Principal Mathis’s behalf. She was, after all, going to a lot of trouble to defend me against the kids who were making my life miserable.

  “Yeah, but if anyone knows what’s happening to them, it’s got to be Principal Mathis,” Elliot agreed. “Even if she’s not the one doing it, principals know those kinds of things, right? They have files and stuff ?”

  “We need to find a way to sneak into her office,” Sylvie decided.

  “What!” I exclaimed. “Why can’t we just ask her?”

  Sylvie and Elliot exchanged that’s stupid looks.

  “If she’s hiding something, she’s not just going to come out and tell us what it is,” Sylvie informed me.

  “We’re just kids,” Elliot reminded me. “I doubt she’d talk to us about other students. Even if she’s not hiding anything.”

  “I vote that we sneak into her office and see what we can find,” Sylvie said.

  “I vote that too,” Elliot agreed, and shoveled a spoonful of rice into his mouth.

  I frowned. Somehow, the two of them had managed to get on the same page. But they had left me a few pages behind.

  Still, I found myself nodding in agreement. Sometimes, especially when you’re part dinosaur, it’s easier to just go along with the crowd.

  I grabbed a napkin to dab my watering eyes. I had eaten my entire salad. And now it felt like the molé was trying to escape through my eyeballs. Also through my nose, which had started running.

  All of a sudden I felt a sneeze coming on. I could tell it was going to be massive, but even I wasn’t prepared for how loud it was when it finally came.

  “AAAAAACCCCCCHHHHHOOOOOOOOOO!”

  Sylvie and Elliot both jumped. The guy at the top of the ladder nearest us jumped, too, and glared down at us.

  “Wow!” Elliot exclaimed. “That was one big dinosaur sneeze!”

  I shrugged and wiped my nose. I felt better. Like when a cold you’ve had for a long time finally goes away. Kind of cleaned out. Maybe I should eat spicy food more often.

  That Stupid T. Rex from Jersey

  The next morning, during computer class, Mr. Broome woke up for long enough to saddle us all with a boring spreadsheet assignment, then promptly went back to sleep at his desk. Almost immediately, people started gathering around Allan’s computer, just the way they had on the second day of school.

  And once again, Allan’s big head was blocking the screen so I couldn’t see what they were looking at.

  “Uh-oh,” I heard Sylvie say.

  She had taken the computer next to mine. Elliot was on the other side of her, and she had just angled her screen to show Elliot something.

  I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.

  “What?” I asked.

  Sylvie moved her screen so that I could see it too.

  It was the Portland Daily News website. And the top headline was:

  Dinosaur Hybrid Goes Prehistoric, Bites Classmate

  My first reaction was a strange mixture of guilt and confusion. Had I bitten someone and somehow forgotten about it? Who had I bitten? Had I hurt them? My teeth were still quite human, so I couldn’t have done any more damage to them than an ordinary human…

  But then I remembered Amalgam Labs, and how I wasn’t the only dinosaur hybrid in the world.

  “It was in New Jersey,” Sylvie reported, scanning the article. “A T. rex hybrid. He bit another kid in the middle of a soccer game.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” I joked. “I only bite people over volleyball disputes.”

  Sylvie and Elliot both snickered, but the half dozen kids who were gathered around Allan’s computer all turned around and stared at me, openmouthed.

  I gulped. I hadn’t realized they would take this so seriously.

  “I’m kidding,” I told them all. “I don’t bite people.”

  “This kid didn’t either,” Allan said, pointing at his computer screen. They had also been reading the article. “Until he did.”

  “That kid is a T. rex,” Elliot pointed out. “A meat eater.”r />
  “What does that have to do with anything?” Cici demanded. As usual, she was right next to Allan, backing him up. I wondered if she ever used her brain at all or if she just let Allan do all the thinking for the pair of them. Which didn’t seem like the best plan to me, considering how stupid Allan was.

  “Stegosauruses are herbivores. They eat plants.” Elliot explained. Then, with exaggerated patience, he added, “That means that Sawyer is more likely to attack the fern in the back of the classroom than you.”

  “Doubtful. I’m pretty sure it’s plastic,” I muttered.

  But nobody was listening to me.

  “A dinosaur is a dinosaur,” Cici sniffed. “Who cares if he looks like Stegosaurus? He might have the appetite of T. rex. We won’t know until he starts eating us.”

  “The article says the kid in New Jersey didn’t even need stitches,” Sylvie pointed out. “He wasn’t eaten.”

  “Oh sure.” Allan rolled his eyes. “That school is probably just protecting their dino boy. The same way this school protects Sawyer.”

  I opened my mouth to say something in response. I’m not sure exactly what. But before I could say anything, Allan just gave an angry grunt and turned his back on me.

  “Whatever.” Sylvie dismissed the whole thing with a wave of her hand. “Maybe now they’ll leave you alone. Try gnashing your teeth at them every now and then. That might help.”

  “Sure,” I said, frowning at my computer screen. I had no intention of gnashing my teeth at anybody. But maybe Sylvie was right. Maybe this T. rex kid gnawing on somebody’s arm in New Jersey would turn out to be the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  • • •

  It did not turn out to be the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  For one thing, the staring started again. There had been a lot of staring at the beginning of the year, on the playground and in the halls. It had never really gone away completely, but people at our school had gotten somewhat used to having a part-dinosaur in their midst. To the point where I could walk the halls without people gasping in surprise or stopping whatever they were doing to gape at me.