The Story of Owen (4 page)

“Nobody took a turn!” one of the seniors protested. “How can I be dead already?”

“Siobhan called for Pearson,” Mr. Huffman said. “That was your turn.”

There was considerable scraping and more than a bit of teasing as the dead dragon slayers got out of the way and the remaining four dragons picked a slayer to attack.

“Can we gang up, or do we have to fight evenly?” Sadie asked as all four dragons tried to sit around her, facing down Owen across the desks.

“Where are my UN reinforcements?” I demanded at the same time.

“Yes, you can, and they're on their way. Which means it's the dragons' turn again,” Mr. Huffman said, passing out blue ribbons to the eight dead dragon slayers. “Congratulations on your reincarnation. You are now representatives of the United Nations. Please wait for orders.”

“Orders from whom?” Alex Carmody said, wrapping the ribbon around his wrist.

“Orders from Siobhan,” Owen said. “Unless you want to be Pearson.”

Alex looked at me for a moment. “Not a bit.”

I looked at the map we'd made, spread out along the canal in a thin line. Owen was the closest to Port Said, the last surviving
ship in the inadvertent convoy, and Sadie used her turn to sic all five dragons on him. I would be upset if he died, I realized, but it was far more convenient for him to sink behind us than it was for the dragons to pick a target that would block our path to Suez.

“Reinforce the front of the line,” I said to my blue-ribboned troops. They hesitated, looking at Owen. “Now!”

They moved to the front of the room and used their turns to shepherd the ships down the canal in a more or less orderly fashion, though we did lose two more tankers, with all hands, in the process. With their help, turn by turn, the oil ships started to reach Suez and the relative safety of open water.

“A little help, Mr. Pearson?” Owen said. His boat had taken significant damage. His detail card kept it moving forward, though at a limping pace. Sadie was merciless in keeping the dragons on him, and he couldn't hang on much longer. I checked my card again and remembered that my tanker was one of the old Egyptian models, and sparsely crewed. It was my turn and my call.

“I'm abandoning ship,” I announced. “And lighting the oil on fire.”

Everyone looked at me like I was insane, and perhaps I was. The dragons flinched; everyone knew that no matter what else a dragon was doing, it would follow the smell of burning oil for kilometers. I'd just made myself the biggest target in the Middle East. Mr. Huffman waved them on, and they all came to circle me.

“Do we have to?” asked Sadie, knowing that her turn was about to be wasted on something that was tactically unsound.

“You do,” Mr. Huffman said. “Dragons can't think, and thank goodness for that.”

“It's your turn,” I said to Owen. “You have to get around me while the dragons are distracted, before the fire spreads.”

“Where are your lifeboats?” he asked.

“Upriver,” I told him. “I'm not stupid.”

“You just lit yourself on fire in the middle of the biggest dragon battle since Vimy Ridge,” he pointed out, but he moved past me and stopped to pick up the life boats. “I don't really think you're in a position to say things like that.”

“So now what?” asked Sadie, from the center of the dragons who flocked around my burning tanker.

“What do dragons usually do when they're fighting over oil?” Mr. Huffman asked.

Sadie sighed. They would turn on one another. “Good job, Siobhan,” she said. Then she paused. “Wait, if Pearson's dead, who writes the Oil Watch code?”

“Everyone, take a seat somewhere,” Mr. Huffman said. He was holding the meter stick in both hands and swinging it back and forth like a golf club. By the time we were settled, it was in his left hand, and he was scratching his head with it. “Pearson was a great man, I am not gainsaying that, but do you really thing that he was the only person on earth who was capable of codifying the Oil Watch? If Pearson had died, it would be called the Hammarskjöld Oil Watch, after the other man who helped Pearson write it.”

“But Pearson didn't die,” I said. “I did. This was just an exercise to see what we would make of a similar scenario. If it had been the actual battle, I wouldn't have been able to light my tanker on fire and Owen's would have gone down. I would have made it to Suez and written the articles, and the Pearson Oil Watch would still become the front line in the international defense of oil.”

“Exactly,” Mr. Huffman said. “These are models, thought experiments if you will, to see what you will do, what you can think of when you're in a tight spot. Although I must admit that I hadn't expected anyone to light themselves on fire the first week.”

“You mean we get to do this again?” Alex said, excited.

“It is called Offense/Defense Friday,” Mr. Huffman said. “I imagine there will be a Friday at the end of most weeks.”

There was generalized laughter at that, and we moved the desks back into place.

“I'm sorry I took your seat,” Sadie said to me, her voice low enough that no one else could hear her over the scraping of the desks against the linoleum floor. There was something about her tone that made me doubt her sincerity.

“I think it turned out okay,” I told her, and smiled. She smiled back as the bell rang.

It wasn't until halfway through lunchtime, in the middle of a particularly intricate section of music, that I realized the cafeteria was probably abuzz with stories about the girl who lit herself on fire to save Owen Thorskard.

Everything in Trondheim is fireproof, or at least as close to being fireproof as it can possibly be. Special care is, of course, taken around buildings like the hospital, the schools, and the hockey arena. Never let it be said that here in Canada we do not have our priorities in order. Most of the houses are made of brick with glass windowpanes fitted tightly against the frames for maximum heat retention. Stone houses with heavy slate roof slabs or stainless steel panels instead of shingles are becoming more common, but the expense is more than average people can afford. Most families in Trondheim just cover the chimney, block the fireplace, install gas heating, and hope for the best.

Saltrock Collegiate Institute had been an older school than Trondheim SS, with grounds that backed onto the bluffs along the shore of Lake Huron. It wasn't less safe than Trondheim Secondary was, but given the choice between a school that looked like something out of a Viking dare and a school that
looked like a fortress, even the most loyal Saltrock alumni had admitted that if we were going to amalgamate, it was better to do so in Trondheim. It was worth pointing out that Trondheim was much more central, and therefore busing students to it would be cheaper, but both of those factors were mere footnotes in the final recommendation made by the Board of Education.

The high school in Trondheim had been built three times, not because parts of it had been burned, but because as more and more people moved to the area, the school required more physical space. The oldest part of the school was the most heavily fortified, three stories built of red brick, with the entrance-way flanked by two guard towers. It had narrow windows and thick walls, and it housed the more flammable aspects of the high school environment, like the library and the art room. The second phase of building added the quad, four long hallways around a central courtyard that was mostly used to demonstrate to grade nine students how
not
to act during a dragon attack. These hallways were mainly for big classrooms: music, drama, and the various shop classes, along with the cafeteria and the administrative offices. The final phase of building had resulted in a second, slightly smaller, gymnasium that was mostly used for badminton and volleyball, as it tended to echo a lot, making basketball or floor hockey something of an exercise in auditory torture.

The population surge that had resulted in the building of all these extra hallways had more or less waned by the time I started grade nine, and that's when the whispers of amalgamation first started. Two years later, we were all one big happy family, and the Board of Education had moved into the old Saltrock CI building, where they could be attacked by
dragons on a weekly basis, for reasons that were still unclear. The consensus, unofficially of course, was that this was probably what karma had intended.

Ever since the second week of September, when we had played at dragon slaying in history, Owen navigated the halls a bit less like he was completely lost. He had no problem making friends—not a big surprise—and every time I saw him, he looked more settled. We spent a lot of time together at school—with three classes in common we had little choice—but I was busy with music most evenings and weekends, so I didn't see him outside of school. By the end of September, he was at least managing to get to class on time on a regular basis, but I could tell by the amount of red pen on his algebra homework that his schoolwork wasn't going very well. I didn't think it was my business, though, so I didn't mention it. I figured that he probably had other things to worry about.

Even though we still had a whole other year after this one before we would be out in the world, there were a lot of decisions to be made. I had made mine with my course selections: English was required, history was sure to be a good mark on my transcript, I needed music to live, and algebra was a compromise with my father for not taking any of the business or accounting classes on offer. Next semester I had drama, French, and two free periods that I had already negotiated with my music teacher to spend in the music room, working on extra projects for university applications that weren't even due for another twelve months. I'm a planner, what can I say?

But at the same time, I was also unsure. I knew I could get a degree in music, but I wasn't sure what I'd do with it afterward. I loved composing, loved taking the streams of notes I saw around me and turning them into something that everyone else could hear, if I ever actually let another person listen to them, which I never did. But composition wasn't really a high-paying job, unless I somehow managed to become John Williams, and while I didn't mind the idea of teaching kids to play piano or training them with various band instruments, the idea of teaching at a high school made me want to hide under my bed.

As far as I was concerned, Owen had it easy. He just had to get through high school and then everything was decided for him. When they turned eighteen and finished high school, all dragon slayers were conscripted into the international dragon slaying force, called the Pearson Oil Watch after the aforementioned Lester B. Pearson, who had come up with the treaties that made it possible. The slayers served all over the world, wherever there was oil or some other natural resource that was a tempting target to dragons. The idea was to make sure that the dragon slayers were loyal to their comrades and their jobs first, and their countries second. After their four-year term of service was up, they were welcome to take any contract they liked, as Lottie Thorskard had done, or to retire and start training someone else, as Owen's father had tried to do before his sister's injury.

I suppose it crossed my mind from time to time that Owen might have appreciated a bit of freedom, or even that he was terrified of getting some sort of fiery death, but he never acted like it was something that kept him up at night. He had laughed with me, that first day, and seemed like a normal kid.
Ever since then, though, he had been weirdly professional at school. I figured that he just wanted to keep his distance from his rapidly increasing group of fans, or maybe that he wanted to focus on his studies and his training. He didn't owe Trondheim anything, after all, and there was a very real chance that after he left for his Oil Watch tour, we'd never see him again, except on the news when he did something brave enough to save people or to get himself killed.

As October began and Thanksgiving weekend loomed, I had more or less resigned myself to someday being able to tell my students that I had shown Owen Thorskard how to get to English class the first day of school and that this would be the limit of my anecdotal time with him. I wasn't even particularly upset about it. I had plenty of other things to worry about. But something pulled at me. And it meant that every day, three times, when Owen slid into the seat next to mine and smiled, I smiled back at him.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was. I spent three days trying to tease it out on the piano, the notes pulling at me as I scratched them out on the staff paper I preferred to scribble on rather than letting the computer take dictation for me. The piano was all wrong for him, though. It was too big and complicated. There were too many tones at the same time. Owen wasn't shaped in chords. I knew the entire saxophone family was wrong without even picking one up, and the flute was out for sure. All of them were fine for support in the main piece, but the melody belonged to something else, and I couldn't identify it.