Jennifer Scales and the Ancient Furnace (11 page)

“That’s right,” Mr. Mouton replied uncertainly.

Before she could say anything else, she was pulled through the office doorway with a squawk.

“I’ve never thought this about you before, Jennifer,” her father hissed once they were in the car and headed home, “but either you’re not nearly as smart as we’ve always thought, or you don’t care whether your family lives or dies.”

“Oh come on, Dad! Mouton’s a dork, and I was just having a little fun—”

“
This is not a game
!” He was shouting into the rearview mirror. “There are enemies—things you’ve never even heard of—that would cut my head off in an instant if they knew what I was. Yours, too.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” she pouted. “I hate living like this, anyway.” Looking out the backseat window, she spotted a black-haired ram in a suit, holding hooves with a scrawny blonde ewe in a floral print dress. A trio of fluffy lambs wove in and out of their path on the sidewalk. She rubbed her eyes, but the animal shapes were still there when she looked again… This was getting worse…

Her father went on. “We had hoped that you could have attended school for a few days, before pulling you out for ‘medical’ reasons. Missing school like you did last week, coming back for one day, and then disappearing overnight again will look suspicious. And then on top of that—on top of that!—you punch out an enormous kid like Bob Jarkmand. He may have deserved it, but a hallway boxing match is hardly compatible with a tale of chronic and debilitating sickness!”

“Maybe you can just say I’m mentally ill,” she sneered. “I feel like I’m going crazy anyway!”

The expression in the rearview mirror softened, but only slightly. “Of course you’re not crazy, Jennifer. And we’re trying not to land too hard on you, here—”

“You could have fooled me.”

“—but you need to use your head!”

She sniffed and wiped away tears in time to see a Jersey cow driving a minivan by them. Several peach piglets were strapped in the backseats. “I’m sorry I can’t get every detail of being a dragon down exactly right the first time.”

Elizabeth cut in. “Being a teenager while this is happening can’t be easy. But whether we understand your pain or not, you’ve got to listen to your father. He’s trying to tell you there are codes of behavior. When you break those codes, you put us all in danger. So you need to grow up.”

The way her mother inserted herself into this conversation infuriated Jennifer. She glared at the back of her parents’ heads. “In other words, this is a big vaudeville show, I’m your puppet, and you’re both annoyed that I’m not moving and talking the way I’m supposed to with an arm jammed up my wooden butt!”

***

They had not cared for that last clever metaphor at all, Jennifer reflected later in the quiet isolation of her room. Her posters of boy bands, soccer stars, and fantasy movies were on the floor in tatters. She was sketching an endless flock of sheep with her charcoal stick directly on the faded pink wall. Across their backs, she suggested a dark, winged shadow.

“Jennifer?”

She didn’t turn around. “Come on in, Susan. Skip and Eddie can come in, too. Make sure they know not to put weight on that top bit of the trellis.”

“What are you doing?” Susan sounded worried as the boys scrambled over the sill behind her.

“Who keeps their window open in Novem—Hey!” Eddie’s voice was even more concerned than Susan’s, but he tried to joke. “Won’t your parents execute you for doing that? My Dad caught me with crayons on the wall when I was four, and I can still remember the court-martial.”

Jennifer still didn’t turn around. “They won’t punish me. I won’t be spending much time in this room, anyway. And I figured you would be coming—that’s why I left the window open. Please close it, Skip.”

She heard the window close, then Susan’s tentative voice. It was difficult to pay attention: She could smell food.
Prey
? Her better sense chased the thought away.

Susan was saying that Skip had told her and Eddie about what happened with Bob Jarkmand, and that Bob had to go to the hospital, and the whole school was talking. That, and maybe Jennifer wasn’t coming back to school, because she had been expelled …

“That’s not true,” Jennifer interrupted.

Susan paused. “No? Then what happened?”

“I’m not expelled. I’m…” It was so hard to lie to her friends like this. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Skip was saying he heard maybe you were really sick, which makes sense,” offered Eddie. “I mean, the way you jumped out of my dad’s truck last week. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s cool. But please don’t feel alone. We’re here if you need us.”

Jennifer reached out behind her and grabbed Eddie’s knee as he crouched down by her. “Thanks, Eddie.”

They all breathed out with a bit of relief before she continued. “But this feels like a solo run, guys. At least for now. You can stay if you like. Put on some music, make yourselves at home. Heck, pick up a stick of charcoal if you want. But I won’t be talking too much.”

“I don’t get it,” Susan said, ignoring what Jennifer just said. “The championship wasn’t that long ago! You played great. That kick! And then hitting Bob in the hallway—you seem so strong. How can you be sick?”

Jennifer stood and began sketching trees off in the distance, far away from the sheep. No cover for the poor little sheep.

Her friend tried again. “Anyway, I acted like a jerk today when I didn’t even say hello. I couldn’t figure out what to say. I’m really sorry. I mean, you’re my best friend, and we haven’t seen or talked to each other in a long time. I miss you.”

Jennifer couldn’t bring herself to speak. Part of her was thrilled that Susan still cared, but most of her wished she had locked her window and avoided this. Why become best friends again, when she’d just have to disappear again before the next crescent moon—possibly for good?

A moment passed, and then Susan exploded. “Dammit, could you at least turn around and
look
at us?”

I’m afraid of the shapes I might see
, Jennifer thought. She remembered the spindly sheep on the bus, and the animals all over town. She liked her friends the way she remembered them, not stretched out like some kind of insane claymation farm movie characters. But she didn’t know how to put her fear into words.

“This is getting old fast,” snarled Susan.

“Susan, cut her a break!” pleaded Eddie. “We can’t know what it’s—”

“I had a mother who was sick, five years ago.” Susan interrupted. “I’m sure Jennifer remembers her. She died six months after the doctors discovered her cancer. She spent those six months wrapped up in her own pain, not talking to anyone. Not even me, though I stayed by her bed night after night. She got thinner and thinner in that bed. Barely a word all that time. And then she died, without making it right. It was selfish and cruel.

“If Jennifer wants to do this, fine. But I’m not wasting any more time here. It hurts too much to watch.”

Jennifer heard scraping at the window, which apparently was stuck closed now, then a slam on the sill. “Fine, screw the window. I’ll go out the front door.”

As Susan opened the door and passed into the hall, Jennifer caught a glimpse of her friend—a midnight-black Arabian galloping by, with glitter in its mane and long, velvety cheeks streaked with blush and tears. Jennifer set aside the image and remembered Susan’s mother. How stupid of her to forget! She should never have let her parents use illness as an excuse.

She wanted badly to call out, but now matters were worse. How would Susan feel if she found out that Jennifer and her family were using a wasting disease as some sort of neat and convenient cover story?

It didn’t matter. This was inevitable. She’d lose all of them. Not all right away, but one by one …

“Susan!” Eddie rushed out of the room, in the shape of a silver stallion. “Jennifer, I’ll get her. Susan!”

There were footsteps on stairs, and mumbled voices, and Susan shouting, and then her parents’ voices, too. Then Susan shouting again and a door slamming. Then silence.

She waited for a moment.

“Skip, if you’re staying, pick up some charcoal.”

“Okay.” She made out his shape out of the corner of her eye as he bent over, picked up a stick, and reached up with another hand to pull down one of the lingering posters on her wall. “You want more sheep, or something else?”

“Something else,” she said, shuddering. In her waking dream, she saw once more in his place the spindly sheep-creature from the bus. It was all she could do not to look at it directly as it pawed at her wall with graceless appendages. “Definitely something else, now. I don’t care what.”

Jennifer stopped eating the next day. Ever since the meeting with Mr. Mouton, she felt too predatory—she found herself craving meals too much and feeling guilty that everyone around her seemed to take on the shape, smell, or surname of a tasty snack. Of course, not eating made the cravings worse, and before the week was out, Jennifer saw food in the most alarming places—noodles in the bathroom sink drain, sugar cookies lacing the windows, and fish flopping around the dirty clothes strewn all over her floor.

She hardly left her room for three weeks, letting her mother bring her food she would not eat—she tried a bit of chicken soup once, and spit it out when it tasted like blood—and plead with her to sip water and nibble on bread. She covered her walls in charcoal—the flocks of sheep were now hunted by droves of vengeful angels and (where Skip had injected his own artistic taste) a couple of black, faceless butterflies. He had left enough pink from the wall showing through their wings that they looked a bit like that Swordtail that Jennifer had heard screaming in Ms. Graf’s class weeks ago—years ago, it seemed now.

Skip and Eddie came to see her every couple of days after school, sometimes together, sometimes apart. They invariably brought up food that Jennifer’s parents hoped she would eat if offered by different hands, and then ate it themselves when the ploy didn’t work.

More often than not, they appeared in their strange shapes—Eddie as a beautiful silver stallion with brown speckles, and Skip as a pair of overly tall and skinny sheep. Neither distortion was comforting to Jennifer, so she usually turned away, complaining that she needed to rest her eyes, and let them talk about high school (“boring”), and Bob Jarkmand (“healing”), and even girls they thought were cute (“giggling”).

If the topic was mundane enough, she would ask a question or two, just to keep them talking. After all, even if they would leave like Susan someday, she wasn’t ready to lose everybody at once. And perhaps after enough talk, a corner of Jennifer’s mind insisted, she could find some way to tell them the truth after all.

But the time was never right in those weeks after Susan left. Whenever Eddie or Skip turned the conversation to her or her condition, Jennifer would tighten and shake her head. They knew then to drop the subject.

One early morning, hours before sunrise, someone she had barely seen for two weeks woke her up: her father.

“We’re going,” he said simply.

“Where?”

“Grandpa’s farm. Get dressed.”

The idea of going to the farm during a crescent moon was enough to pique Jennifer’s interest. She had considered refusing to move during her next morph, just to have Skip the Sheep and Eddie the Horse walk in one day and find Jennifer the Dragon in her bed! But that could wait.

“Will any other weredragons be there?”

“Get dressed. Remember, no good clothes.”

He drove her up to the cabin himself, as the waning crescent moon drifted off to the east. Despite Jennifer’s protests, he did not let Phoebe come with them.

“There won’t be time to play with your dog. Your mother’s staying home. They’ll look after each other.”

And so they went up alone, in a quiet drive that seemed longer than it actually was. By the time they got to the cabin, Jennifer began to feel both excited and nervous—she saw the wildflower fields she had flown over, and the wrecked beehive, and the sheep (
real
sheep, not skinny-Skip-sheep) lying in the pasture.

“You got any of that morphine Mom used last time?” she asked her father nervously as he parked the minivan.

He glanced out of the corner of his eye. “I don’t exactly approve of your mother’s methods. There’s a lot about being a weredragon she can’t understand. Most of what you felt that first night was fear, not pain.”

“That’s funny. It felt an awful lot like back-bending, brain-cooking pain. Yep, now that I think of it, that’s what it was.”

“It won’t be so bad this time. The more the change happens, the more you get used to it. Taking morphine, or anything else, just means it’ll take longer for you to adjust.”

Nothing—not even the wind, nor the golden eagles she had seen daily on their last visit—made any movement or sound around them in the dusk. Her father got out of the minivan, lifted the back door, and pulled out the bags they had packed. “You didn’t pack enough, but your mother can bring up more clothes for you, in a week or so.”

“How long are we going to stay here?”

“For a while. Your mother and I decided—”

“
You and Mom
decided?”

“—that it’s simply too dangerous to let you wander around Winoka, where you might make a mistake—”

“What do you mean, make a mistake?”

“—and beyond that, we’re concerned for your health, since you haven’t been eating—”

“
I
can decide what I eat and when!”

“—so anyway, you need to stay someplace for as long as it takes.”

“For as long as it takes for what? For someone to actually seek
my
input on
my
own future?”

“For as long as it takes for you to get comfortable with who you are now.”

She followed him up through the barn and into the connecting mudroom. “Comfortable with who I am! I’m
never
going to be comfortable with who I am! I hate that I don’t look like you or Grandpa. I hate the way it changes the way I see and smell things. I hate the way it makes me lie to my friends. And I hate how much it hurts.” She flopped down on an armchair in the sitting room. Her father paused in the doorway to the kitchen long enough to look at her.