The Dragon Tree (14 page)

             
“I’m serious, Hiro. No fooling, I wouldn’t want to climb down from that shelf again. So
thank you
.”

             
Hiroki sighed and put the Buick in gear. He checked his mirror to make sure Eva was behind him and he piloted the car down the access road. It wasn’t quite dawn yet, but the sun would rise soon enough.

             
“You gotta try it, Hiro. Flying,” said Billy.

             
Hiroki turned to look at Billy, his eyes cool and clear. “I’m going to.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

             
As Eva pulled the SUV into her parents’ driveway, she noticed the ovular object sitting in the passenger seat. She wasn’t sure how she had failed to see it before. The coarse black fiber that covered its surface was unmistakable.

             
Hiro must have put it there while I was… with Billy.

             
The living room curtains parted and Rosa’s face appeared between them. Even from inside the SUV, Eva could see that her mother had been crying. Like Eva, she still wore the dress she wore to the wedding the night before.

             
Eva snatched the fruit from the dragon tree and slipped it down the front of her dress. With a heavy heart, she stepped out of the SUV.

              “I would scream at you, Eva, but I did all my screaming last night.”

             
Eva sat at the kitchen table with Rosa, both of them cradling a cup of tea. Rosa’s hands were shaking, and her teacup clanked repeatedly against its saucer.

             
“Your poor father took the brunt of the yelling for you. Salvadore is a good man, a kind and gentle man. He deserves better from his wife than abuse he hasn’t earned. He deserves better from his daughter than brazen deception.”

             
Eva made no attempt to prevent her tears from coming. She didn’t even bother to wipe them away. She looked down at her wrinkled pink dress, worried that her mother would notice the unnatural bump made by the hidden piece of fruit. There were enough layers of fabric covering the area that she was probably safe. But the sight of the pink material itself made her nauseous. She’d been wearing the dress when she slipped her hand into her father’s jacket. If he saw her in the dress now, he would remember the image of her marching around the Humphries house to do her misdeed.

             
“That kind boy Aidan gave your father and me a ride home. He told us that he had some sort of argument with you. He said it was all his fault and he would do whatever it took to make it up to you.” Rosa locked eyes on Eva as if bracing herself for a debate. The debate never came, so she continued. “I happen to think you’re to blame. If I know Aidan and his family like I think I do—”

             
“You don’t know them,” Eva whispered.

             
“I know class when I see it. And when Aidan told us you were going to see that boy from the track meet – that Hudson boy – I nearly passed out. What are you thinking, Eva?! Staying out all night with riff-raff like that? Don’t you care about your reputation? Don’t you care about your safety?”

             
“Billy isn’t dangerous. He’s my friend—”

             
Rosa slammed the tabletop with her palm. “I don’t ever want to hear that name again in this house! I forbid you to see him again. I absolutely
forbid
it! You can run to your father and plead your case with him, play the part of the weepy daughter, but he won’t listen this time. I assure you, little girl, that your dear father agrees with his very angry wife.”

             
Eva shook her head slowly, searching for words. None came. She pushed her neglected tea into the center of the table and finally wiped her eyes dry. “I’m sorry, mama.”

             
“Sorry isn’t good enough.”  Rosa rose from her chair and placed her cup and saucer on the kitchen counter. She smoothed down the front of her dress and touched her curls, clearly distressed to feel how much they had fallen during the night. The bags under her eyes seemed to grow heavier before Eva’s eyes, and her voice dropped an octave as she turned back to her disappointing daughter.

             
“Go to your room, Eva. And don’t wake your sisters.
They
slept in their beds last night.”

             
The twins had
not
slept in their own beds.

             
When Eva entered her bedroom, she heard the girls snoring under her covers in identical fashion. She took her hand off the light switch without flipping it and, still wearing her pink dress, climbed into bed between Anita and Myra. They stirred, but they didn’t wake. She felt the piece of fruit from the dragon tree slide farther down her dress and yelped quietly, but managed to fish it out and buried it under her pillow.

***

              Hiroki made it back to his house mere minutes before his mother returned from an overnight shift at the clinic. He bounded up the stairs and crept into his bedroom, careful not to walk heavy on the creaky second-floor hall and wake his grandfather.

             
He would have gladly slept through the last hour of the night, but Hiroki’s mind was replaying the previous night’s events. He stared at the ceiling, wondering if the leaves that had worked for Billy would fail for him. He had eaten the two items in the wrong sequence, after all. Maybe the leaves only worked if you ate them second. He rolled onto his side and peered out his window, anxiously waiting for the sun to rise.

             
I’m going to transform. Any minute now. And it’s going to hurt.

             
But then the sun rose. Hiroki had not changed.

             
And he wouldn’t change for at least sixteen hours. Plenty of time to think through his options and make a smart decision.

              Strong smells from the kitchen drew Hiroki downstairs. He found Reiko at the stove, frying bacon and whipping raw eggs into yellow slurry.

             
“Well good morning!” Reiko said. “I couldn’t sleep so I thought I’d make you a real breakfast for once. Cereal gets old after awhile, right?”

             
Hiroki nodded eagerly and gave his mother a kiss on the cheek. She affectionately swatted his butt with a hand towel and sent him to the kitchen table. “How many eggs do you want?”

             
“I don’t know, two,” said Hiroki. The moment the number left his mouth, he noticed the gnawing ache in his empty stomach. “Maybe… six?”

             
“Six!” Reiko laughed. “You have to save room for sticky buns, with the red bean paste you like. I’m making everything in my repertoire.”

             
Hiroki popped up from the table and wandered over to the fridge. He pulled out a carton of orange juice and upended it. He guzzled every drop in seconds and tapped the bottom disappointedly.

             
Reiko was watching, amazed. “You must be having a growth spurt. Do your ankles hurt?”

             
Hiroki shook his head. “I feel great. Six eggs, please. And bacon and sticky buns and whatever else is in your, your um…” he trailed off, enjoying the sensation of the orange juice sloshing around in his belly.

             
“My repertoire,” Reiko said, stirring her eggs. “Get your grandpa up so he can join us. I want him to see how much this new version of his grandson can eat.”

             
Hideo had materialized at the kitchen door. He slowed as he walked past Hiroki on his way to the table and leaned toward his grandson. Hiroki flinched at his grandfather’s closeness, and nearly recoiled when he realized what his grandfather was doing.

             
He’s smelling me.

             
Hideo found Hiroki’s eyes and shook his head slowly. The meaning of the gesture was perfectly clear to Hiroki. The full weight of its meaning only sunk in when he sat down across from Hideo and the old man refused to acknowledge his presence.

             
“Mom?” asked Hiroki, his voice cracking.

             
“Yes, son of mine?”

             
Hiroki lowered his eyes, ashamed to feel that his lip was quivering. “Nevermind.”

              After the uncomfortable moment with his grandfather at the breakfast table, Hiroki hurried out of the house as quickly as he could. He drove around aimlessly for about twenty minutes before surprising himself by taking the turn west for Hudson.

             
With William Rasmussen’s truck gone, the trailer looked deserted. But Hiroki knew Billy would be sound asleep inside. He sat in the Buick for a few minutes before he finally climbed out and knocked on the door.

             
“Shouldn’t you be at school?” Billy had answered with a yawn.

             
“It’s Sunday.”

             
Still groggy, Billy followed Hiroki into the Buick without much thought. Only when they pulled into the library parking lot after a silent ten-minute drive did Billy wake up fully.

             
“Eva better be inside, or I’m walking home.”

              “This isn’t the first time I’ve been in a library, you know,” said Billy. He was tipping back in his chair, completely ignoring the stack of books in front of him. “Not even my second time. I’ve got a library card in my room somewhere, I think.”

             
“That’s very impressive,” said Hiroki without looking up from his book. It was a text on folklore, each chapter devoted to a different region of the world. He started with Asia simply because his Japan-born grandfather had experience with dragons, but the more he flipped through the book, the less surprised he was to find references to dragons in almost
every
culture. “I assume that means you know how to read.”

             
“Yes, ass wipe,” said Billy a little too loud. A few readers glanced up from their books to shush him. “Why don’t you explain to me again why this isn’t a huge waste of time.”

             
“We need to learn about dragons,” Hiroki answered.

             
“Maybe
you
do. I don’t need to learn about them since… well, you know. I’m kind of an expert already. Where the hell is Eva?”

             
“I don’t know,” Hiroki whispered.

             
“Think she got home all right? She probably never drove before last night and those access roads are in bad shape.”

             
“I said I don’t know, Billy.
I don’t know
.”

             
Billy threw his hands up. “All right, what’s with the tone?”

             
Hiroki had left a message on Eva’s cell, pleading with her to join him at the library. He wasn’t certain they could find any valuable information from books, but he was determined to do as much research as possible before he let the dragon blood in his veins transform him.

             
If she found the fruit in the passenger seat… She needs to research, too.

             
“Okay, here’s something good.” Billy had flipped open a book on mythology and was tapping a page with his forefinger. Hiroki slid over to take a look. “See Hiro? It says right here that dragons aren’t real. Case closed.”

             
Hiroki frowned and slid back to his own book. The center pages were full of illustrations and photographs. One photo featured a medieval shield with a fierce dragon on its crest. It was hundreds of years old – from the Crusades – and was encased in a Scottish castle where its lord had once lived.

             
The dragon was blue.

             
“They can’t all be blue, right?” Hiroki asked aloud. “Unless they always live near water and it helps them stay hidden from view.”

             
Billy shook his head dismissively. “They –
we
, I mean – stay hidden from view because our big beautiful dragon bodies are reflective on the bottom.”

             
“You got that from one of those books?”

             
“Nope. Got it from Eva. If she ever gets here, I’m sure she’ll tell you all about it.”

             
Hiroki glared at Billy, not buying a word of what he was said, until he remembered his digital camera. He had taken multiple photos of Billy as he flew away from the cliffs last night, but Billy wasn’t visible in any of them.

             
“I think she’s right,” Hiroki said with a reluctant smile.

             
“She usually is,” Billy added. “Notice how we learned something about dragons without reading a book? Give it up for the non-readers!”

             
“Awesome, Billy. You’re illiterate. That’s something to be proud of.”

             
Billy was still grinning, but the grin now looked a bit forced. He dropped back down in his chair and reached for the mythology book. “I told you, Hiro. I’ve got a library card.”

             
Hiroki pretended not to notice the wounded edge in Billy’s voice and returned to the photo of the shield. The details of the dragon icon weren’t quite right. The legs were too long, and the dragon had a mane like a lion. The tail was more feline than reptilian, as well. If the medieval understanding of dragons was passed down from real experience, the dragons in Europe must be a different species. The mane could help dragons in colder climates to stay warm. And the tail? He couldn’t think of a good reason for different types of tail. Still, the thought of different species made a lot of sense. He filed it away for further consideration.