Dinosaur Boy

by Cory Putman Oakes

  “My dad,” Sylvie confirmed, still rocking. “I thought he would. But he didn’t even respond to my messages.”

  “Is he someone important?” I asked, remembering suddenly that Mathis had mentioned Sylvie’s father. If Mathis had known who he was, he must be someone prominent.

  “He is a restaurateur. I didn’t lie,” Sylvie said, raising her head slightly to look at me. “But he’s also the Chancellor in Charge of Martian-Human Affairs. It’s his job to investigate and arrest people like Mathis.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So that’s why you were so interested in the whole thing…”

  Sylvie shook her head.

  “At first, I thought Mathis was after you. Hybrids are big business in the illegal pet trade. They just weren’t Mathis’s business. I didn’t know that until the night we broke into her office.”

  “And when you knew she wasn’t after me…” I encouraged her.

  Sylvie shrugged.

  “She was still a smuggler. I thought if I told my dad, he would come to Earth and arrest her. And I could see him. I haven’t, you know. Seen him. Since my parents separated.”

  Sylvie’s lower lip quivered, and my heart went out to my alien friend.

  “I wrote and told him about Mathis, but he didn’t respond. So then I thought, what if I captured her for him? Then he’d really have to come here. And maybe…”

  Her voice faltered, and she drew in a ragged sigh.

  “Maybe he’d be proud of you?” I suggested, finishing her thought.

  Sylvie nodded and angrily swatted away a tear.

  “It’s stupid. He doesn’t care. He just let my mom take me to Earth. Now he wants nothing to do with me. He didn’t write me back. I don’t think he ever will.”

  My grandfather, who had been walking up behind us, paused at Sylvie’s words.

  “You haven’t heard from your father since you came to Earth?” he asked.

  Sylvie shook her head.

  My grandfather frowned.

  “Curious,” he said, and continued walking.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sylvie said, sniffing once and holding her head up high. “I don’t need him.”

  “Yeah!” Elliot said, slapping her encouragingly on the back. “That’s the spirit! Good riddance!”

  Sylvie doubled over from the strength of Elliot’s slap. When she sat up straight again, she had a watery smile on her face.

  “Yeah,” she repeated. “Good riddance.”

  I was pretty sure Sylvie would be OK. I, for one, was glad she had come to Earth. And even gladder that she was going to stay.

  Back in my living room, my grandfather put down his salad and fixed me with a serious look.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner,” he said. “I have been in mandatory post-mission decontamination for the past two months. I came the moment I got your emails this morning.”

  “That’s OK,” I assured him. “Thanks for coming today, though. We wouldn’t have known what to do with Mathis, once we sprayed her.”

  “We have Ms. Helen to thank for that,” he told me. “I went to look for you at school, but it was Ms. Helen who led me to the portables. I gather she’s been helping you all along?”

  I nodded. “But I still don’t understand why. I never got the feeling she liked me, or any of us, very much. She never talks.” And I suspected that, no matter what Sylvie said, there had to be more to it than Ms. Helen just really, really liking Mrs. Juarez’s flan.

  My grandfather smiled.

  “I’m sure Ms. Helen likes you fine. But I think she is also hoping that by helping you, word of her good deeds will get back to the Martian High Council. Ms. Helen is in politics, you know. She’s from Pluto. And the Plutonians have a lot to prove these days. Ever since they lost their planetary status and all.”

  Pluto? Well, I guess that explained why the front office was always so cold…

  My grandfather sat forward.

  “Before I forget, I have something for you.”

  He reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a vial. He held it up to the light, so I could see that it was three-quarters full of blue liquid.

  “Is that…” I trailed off.

  “A cure, yes.”

  “But—” I squeaked. “Mom said you were five years away from human testing…”

  “We are,” my grandfather said. “At least when it comes to formal human testing. Informal human tests have been going on for years at Amalgam Labs. As you might have guessed, from the change in my appearance since the last time we met.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the blue vial. A cure. A real cure. Exactly what I’d been looking for since the first day of school.

  My grandfather tapped the vial, making the blue liquid slosh around.

  “This is what I took, five years ago,” he told me. “It is one hundred percent effective. But it is also irreversible. Once you take it—if you take it—you will never be able to turn your dinosaur genes on again. So you must be sure.”

  He took my hand and placed the vial in it.

  “Think about it for a while,” my grandfather suggested, as he sat back in his chair to finish his salad.

  I took the rubber top off the vial and sniffed, curiously.

  It had no scent. Not even to my ultrasensitive dino nose.

  What would happen if I drank it? What if, when the dinosaur parts were gone, I went right back to being who I used to be? The Sawyer who never spoke up, never stood up for himself? Who hoped nobody would ever notice him? That Sawyer wouldn’t have tried to save a portable full of kids from aliens.

  And what else would be different? I thought about that day on the soccer field, when I had turned into the wind. I thought about the feel of the sun on my plates, the icy chill of the breeze. About the mouthwatering scent of freshly cut greens. And how the smell changed to a spicy nuttiness when they had molé sauce poured on them.

  Would any of those things be the same, once I was just plain old Sawyer again?

  I had come so far. The skin on the underside of my tail had toughened up, so it no longer hurt to drag my tail around. I hardly ever lost tennis balls off the ends of my spikes on accident anymore. And my mom had finished altering all of my clothes to fit over my dinosaur parts. I didn’t quite have the roaring thing under control, but I was sure that I’d figure that out too. Eventually.

  I jammed the rubber stopper back into the tube and looked up at my grandfather.

  He was smiling. He put down his salad bowl and leaned forward. For a long moment, he just examined my face.

  “You stood into the wind, didn’t you?” he said finally.

  I nodded.

  My grandfather’s smile changed from knowing to wistful. He put his hand very lightly on my topmost plate.

  “I miss that. Sometimes, I wish…”

  He trailed off, and I knew he was thinking about the day he had drunk whatever was in that tube. What had prompted him to make that choice?

  I would have to remember to ask him sometime.

  He cleared his throat and sat back against the couch cushions.

  “You keep that,” he said. “Just in case you change your mind one day.”

  I nodded and put the vial into my pocket.

  Later, before I went to bed, I put the vial on the very top of my bookcase. Where I could still see it, but just barely.

  It was nice to know I had it. Just in case. I’m only eleven, after all. A lot of things could happen in the future. Things that might make me decide I don’t want to be part dinosaur anymore.

  But right now, at this moment, I can’t picture anything that would make me want to be someone else.

  Like I always say, at least it isn’t boring.

  Never a dull moment.

  Author’s Note

  Sawyer may be the o
nly actual part-dinosaur in this story (aside from the stupid T. rex from New Jersey), but if you read very closely, you’ll find dinosaurs (and the people who study them) all over this book.

  The kids who make fun of Sawyer are all loosely based on carnivorous predators from the late Jurassic period that might have harassed a real Stegosaurus. Cici, with her prominent nose and dedication to the swim team, is based on Ceratosaurus, a theropod dinosaur with a large horned nose who likely spent a lot of time in the water. Parker, with his long face and birdlike build, is similar to Pterodactylus (commonly called a pterodactyl, and which, I feel compelled to point out, is actually a pterosaur—not a dinosaur—but still extremely cool). And Allan, with his large head, smallish arms, and penchant for eating meat, is based on Allosaurus, a dinosaur that looked a lot like a smallish version of T. rex and which paleontologists believe was Stegosaurus’s main predator. (Allan’s last name, “Huxley,” is a nod to Thomas Henry Huxley, who laid early groundwork for the theory that birds may have evolved from dinosaurs.)

  Sawyer’s dog, Fantasia, shares her name with a famous Stegosaurus fossil that was found in the death grips of an Allosaurus fossil. The Stegosaurus fossil was named Fantastia, and the Allosaurus fossil was named Dracula—the two of them together have been nicknamed “the fighting pair” and provided much of the inspiration for Sawyer and Allan’s relationship.

  Ms. Felch, Sawyer’s homeroom teacher, is named for Marshall P. Felch who found the first Stegosaurus fossil in 1876. Mr. Broome, the computer teacher, is a reference to Broome, Australia, where a number of dinosaur footprints (which were considered sacred to the aboriginal population there) were stolen in 1996. Some of the prints have since been recovered, but the stegosaur ones are still at large. Coach Carpenter is named for Kenneth Carpenter, a.k.a. the “Indiana Jones of Bones,” who, among other things, discovered the most complete Stegosaurus fossil ever found.

  Dr. Dana from the Amalgam Labs video is named for the Dana Quarry in Wyoming, the site in the Morrison Formation where Fantasia and Dracula were found. The other two scientists in the video are named for Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, two paleontologists whose famous (and often hilarious) rivalry in the late nineteenth century was nicknamed “The Bone Wars.” Marsh is credited with the discovery of the “type fossil” for Stegosaurus, and he also came up with the name “Stegosaurus” (as well as “Allosaurus,” “Triceratops,” and others).

  Dr. Gilmore, Sawyer’s vet, is named for Dr. Charles W. Gilmore, a famous paleontologist who named one of the subspecies of Stegosaurus and who was a prominent figure during the Bone Wars. Sawyer’s pediatrician, Dr. Bakker, was named for Dr. Robert Bakker who, along with his teacher, Dr. Ostrom, popularized the theory that birds are descended from dinosaurs and dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded.

  Morrison, Colorado (the site of the fictional “Camp Remorse”) is actually a town named after the famous Morrison Formation, where fossils have been discovered since 1877.

  Gary Simmons, the “second tallest kid” in Sawyer’s class, is an homage to my favorite Far Side cartoon (by Gary Larson) where cave-scientists name the Stegosaurus’s tail the “thagomizer” in honor of “the late Thag Simmons.” (I wanted to name the kid “Thag,” but honestly, when was the last time you met someone named “Thag”?)

  There are a few other references in this book. To some things that are more “extra” than “terrestrial,” which hint at Sylvie’s origins as well as to where we are headed in the next Dinosaur Boy book. But I’ll leave it to you to find those (cough, Dr. Cook’s lecture on the science fair, cough) and save my explanations for Dinosaur Boy Saves Mars…

  Much love (and dinosaur-sized hugs),

  C PO

  Thank you for reading!

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  Acknowledgments

  I am forever indebted to the following individuals for making this book a reality:

  My amazing husband, Mark Oakes, for being my ultimate support and my partner in all things. And our kiddos, Sophia and Alex, for so generously sharing Mommy with her imaginary friends.

  My agent, Sarah LaPolla, who not only championed this book but also inspired it, in a one-line email late one Friday night. (That’s right, she’s that awesome.)

  My editor, Aubrey Poole, and everybody at Sourcebooks for giving this book such a loving home. I can’t imagine a better place for Dinosaur Boy to have landed. Thanks especially to Becca Sage, the production editor, and her team for putting up with my annoying dinosaur nomenclature issues. Thanks to editorial assistant Kate Prosswimmer for all her support, Melanie Jackson, for her amazing work on the internal design of this book, Will Riley, for his work on the cover, and to Kathryn Lynch for all of her hard work.

  Kristen Lipscomb Sund, my friend and a genetic counselor at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, for talking me through some of the finer points of genetics. She deserves all of the credit for any real science that may have snuck into this book (and none of the blame for the stuff that I made up!).

  The awesome-beyond-description writing community of Austin, Texas, for taking me under their collective wing and making an author of me. Especially Cynthia Leitich Smith for her guidance, her fabulousness, and her willingness to eat weird cheese with me. And Greg Leitich Smith for always talking “dinosaur” with me at parties.

  All of my ladies from the “Lodge of Death” who saw this story grow from a quirky idea to an actual, real, live book. Especially Nikki Loftin (the tennis balls were her idea!), Madeline Smoot (for helping me through some tricky, early plotting), and Mari Mancusi (for being such a stellar writing buddy).

  And finally, thank you, for picking up this book. I hope you enjoyed reading it at least half as much as I enjoyed writing it!

  About the Author

  Cory Putman Oakes was born in Basel, Switzerland, but grew up outside of San Francisco, California. She earned her BA (in psychology) from the University of California at Los Angeles, and her JD from Cornell Law School, and then naturally decided to pursue a profession that utilized neither of these. Her first book, The Veil, (a young adult fantasy) was published in 2011, and she is proud to be making her middle grade debut with Dinosaur Boy.

  Cory lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, kids, and pets. She knew nothing about dinosaurs before she started writing this book, but now she can tell a sauropod from a theropod. She also makes a mean molé sauce. You can often find Cory on Twitter (@CoryPutmanOakes) and Facebook, and you can learn more about her (and her books) on her website: www.corypoakes.com.

  Don’t miss Dinosaur Boy’s next adventure:

  Dinosaur Boy Saves Mars

  February 2016

  Sawyer and his two best friends are on a rescue mission to Mars when they encounter bullying on a galactic scale: Mars is trying to kick Pluto out of the solar system.

  While searching for Sylvie’s missing father, Sawyer, Elliot, and Sylvie find themselves part of an intergalactic mess. Apparently, solar system squabbles are solved by soccer games! The upcoming Mars vs. Pluto soccer match will decide the fate of both planets—but the trio of Earthlings discover that there’s a secret plot to sabotage the game, one that puts the whole galaxy in danger. It’s up to Sawyer to save the day…as only a part-stegosaurus (with a taste for Tex-Mex) can.

 

 

 
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