By the time the next lot of school equivalency testers came around to aggravate me, Lois could bear to stay by herself for an hour or two, knotted up in our very-us-smelling bedclothes with a hot water bottle. This only worked if the sheets hadn't been changed in a while. I thought this was very funny, because it meant that when our sheets got so high that Grace insisted that I change them — and this happened pretty last; baby dragons are smelly little beasts, however often you change their diapers — we couldn't wash them till the new ones had got pretty high too, so that I could go on practicing leaving Lois by herself. We couldn't even keep the door to our smelly bedroom closed, because part of Lois' fragile feeling of security was that it wasn't too quiet, and it was, too quiet I mean, in there by herself. She needed to hear Grace or Billy moving around. Which also meant that one of us had to be home all the time. (Occasionally one of the other Rangers who were in on it baby-dragon-sat.) Very labor intensive, raising a dragonlet.
Anyway I aced all my tests so fast the testers didn't know what hit 'em. I'd always been a pretty fair student — I've told you this already, I knew I needed to be — but this was almost ridiculous. I even aced Latin. Well, A minus. (But boy did I earn it.) But I was home all the time, wasn't I? I had a lot of time to study, so I might as well — and because the school-equiv creeps weren't going to go along with this apprenticeship scam if I didn't look like I was blooming and booming on it. (I actually gave up playing Annihilate — I mean completely. Lois didn't like the way I jerked and shouted when I was losing.) I was still having sleep-and-dream-and-headache problems, but I was getting more used to them, and it was actually easier to ignore — no, not ignore, live with — the headache if I was doing something, even schoolwork.
Martha was usually the grind who did the extra work and didn't just get As but hundred percents. I say it that way because I felt really bad about Martha (okay, here's a deep dark secret for you: also I was jealous that she is brighter than me), because she knew there was something up beyond just that I'd had some kind of freaky vision during my first solo and for some reason the grown-ups were taking it seriously. We used to do a lot of our schoolwork together, and we didn't any more, and because of pressure elsewhere the "class" lectures when some Smokehill person talked to the three of us stopped pretty much altogether so we didn't have that either. And that I was supposedly spending more time on learning Ranger stuff didn't cover it while the social worker and school-equiv gang still owned my ass, which they did. Even when I was there it was like my mind wasn't there with me — which it wasn't. It was on Lois, and whether she was okay. Zombie Jake, the New Not Improved Model.
Martha was sad because I hadn't told her what it was all about, but, being Martha, didn't nag me about it. She barely even asked, just wanted to know if I was okay. "Sure," I said, and she smiled, that smile you do when you know the person is lying to you. I felt lousy. She knew that I was — had been — planning to go off and get a few PhDs so I could study dragons like my parents. She also knew that I periodically packed that one in and swore that I was going to apprentice to the Rangers — but she also knew I said that mostly out of funk. Most of the grown-ups might buy it that I suddenly really knew what I wanted, but Martha knew me pretty well, and she also knew that Billy wouldn't've accepted me if it was just funk. Martha takes after her mom. They're both way too sharp to be easy to have around.
Eleanor knew there was something I wasn't telling her too and she was a total brat about it, but at seven, being a brat was almost her job and I didn't take it too seriously, except that Eleanor's force of character did kind of mean you had to take it seriously. She took it particularly personally from me because I was another kid, and there were only the three of us. The last family with kids had come and gone while I was still pretty out of it after Mom and then Snark, so I didn't remember them much (although I remembered their dogs), but Martha and Eleanor had been friendly with them and Eleanor really noticed when they left and kind of realized that what it was about the three of us was that we were the only ones who ever stayed. Eleanor nagged me, all right, but she didn't get any more out of me than Martha did. The difference was that sometimes I almost told Martha, and I never had to stop myself from telling Eleanor.
The real point was that Lois was, amazingly, still a secret from most of the Institute — usually everybody knows everything about everybody else who lives here. (It's a joke among the grown-ups that either your partner is faithful or gone.) Somebody was watching over us. Maybe the Arkhola had a song for it. But even if the Arkholas had a lot of songs for it, Lois' guardian angel was going to need a very, very, very long vacation when all of this was over.
This is hindsight again, but you weren't there, so I'm trying to tell you the story as it might have looked to a sane person at the time, if there had been any sane people around, which obviously there weren't. Hindsight tells me that we couldn't POSSIBLY have kept Lois a secret. So we didn't. But I've told you how ginormously difficult it is to get hired to work at Smokehill, and all that vetting does a pretty good job. I think the Rangers who do the hiring, and the senior ones pretty much all have a lot of Arkhola blood, sort of hum over the candidates, and if the humming goes right, you get hired, and if it doesn't, you don't. So what we had at the institute is a lot of people who were willing to leave a secret alone, because they would guess it must have something dangerous to do with dragons. Maybe Dad suddenly looked twenty years older and Billy stopped making his peculiar bone-dry jokes because of what was going on after the dead dragon and the poacher . . . but in that case why was Billy's house suddenly off limits now that the Rangers' underage apprentice was living there? Not to mention my mysterious semi-disappearance — what was I doing all those hours I was holed up at Billy's house? Vision on my first solo, huh? It must have been sooome vision.
Even now it's an effort for me to think about the poacher, even now when that part of it is more or less over and I'm trying just to tell it as a story. I don't even know his first name — I don't even really know what he was doing in Smokehill, except ruining everything. He was — and still is — always just "the poacher" to me like you might say "my worst enemy" or "the devil," if you go for devils, which I don't much since
I stopped playing computer games, but it's that kind of feeling, that blasting him through seven levels isn't good enough. He's "the poacher" because I hated him so much.
Sometimes I stopped even pretending to have any rational view of anything and called him "the villain" or "the bad guy" like what was happening was a Clint Eastwood film or something. He destroyed Smokehill. He did too. Sure, Smokehill is still around, and everyone (maybe even including me) would say that it's in massively better shape than it was four years ago. But the old Smokehill is gone, and he killed it, when he killed Lois' mom. This is the new Smokehill, and not everything about it is better (like me writing this story), and making anything better was certainly not in his plan.