"She won't," said Martha. She'd stood up when I did. Martha wasn't big for thirteen the way I was big for fifteen, but she was still a lot bigger than eight-year-old Eleanor. This is a lot of Eleanor's problem, as I say. She takes on the world because she hates being littlest; and she's a little littlest. But although I saw her face pulling into its usual pig-headed brat the-thing-I'm-going-to-do-first-is-the-thing-you-don't-want-me-to-do lines, she looked at me and then at Martha and wavered. This was a first with Eleanor so far as I know. She doesn't know how to waver. Martha and I must have looked pretty fierce. I was feeling like pig-headed brat roast for dinner, but I didn't know Martha knew how to look fierce. I looked at her though and she did.
She didn't sound angry the way I did, but she said, very calmly, "Eleanor, this is about all of our lives. This about you and me and Jake, and Mom and Dr. Mendoza, and Billy and all the Rangers, and everybody you know. And it's about Jake's dragon and all the dragons in Smokehill. You know dragons are why we're here, don't you?"
Eleanor is one of these people who when she comes into the room, whatever is going on becomes all about Eleanor. I didn't think even Smokehill really got through to Eleanor.
I was wrong. I don't know if Martha knew her better than I did — if maybe she was more Martha's sister than I'd realized. But Eleanor looked thoughtfully at Martha for a moment, and she looked smaller for that moment, just an ordinary kid. "Yes," she said, "I do." She added in more her usual manner, "I'm not stupid." And then she turned on me and stuck her chin out and clenched her fists and said, "And I'll even keep your secret for you, but first you have to apologize, and then you have to ask me nicely, and I don't care what you think you can do to me."
I was over my bad temper by then. And besides, Lois was so much more important. (Lois, who I was keeping trapped between my shins so she couldn't go burn Martha and Eleanor and, among other things, maybe give the game away after all.) "I'm sorry," I said, almost sincerely. "Please don't tell anyone about Lois, okay?"
She pulled her chin in a little and crossed her arms. "Okay," she said. And I believed her.
The grown-ups were really preoccupied at dinner that night, so they didn't notice I was really preoccupied too. Kit and Jane were there as well as Dad, and Grace and Billy. I don't know if having more silent grown-ups there was supposed to make the silence less obvious but it didn't. Grace and Lois and I kept the conversation going. Grace did a pretty good burble too, although she always did it the way you make "mmm-hmmm" noises at a four-year-old (human) who wants to tell you a story. It reminded me of being four, when Grace sometimes babysat for me. This didn't actually improve my mood. It seemed to me they were still "mmm-hmmming" me really.
I wanted to ask them how the meeting had gone, but I couldn't, since I wasn't supposed to know about it. It did make me a little angry that they seemed to think Martha and Eleanor wouldn't have noticed, even if they thought they had me safely tucked away (they were right about that, which was part of why I was angry), but I've noticed before the way children are conveniently assumed to be dumb when adults need them to be. You'd think the adults would learn. But who am I to be sarcastic? I didn't want to know about the poacher. The villain. I didn't want the poacher ever to cross my mind for any reason whatsoever. It was bad enough thinking about Lois' mom, every day, which I did, as I told you. I used to try to blot out the memory part of it by deliberately calling up that dragon cave I still dreamed about sometimes, which usually had her in it, because there she was alive which is how I knew it was only a stupid childish dream and it meant I really was a wuss.
I mostly could blot the poacher out. But this was the worst yet: that he had parents who could make big trouble for Smokehill. How do I explain this to you though? I did think about it, that evening, with all these preoccupied grown-ups eating Grace's food and pretending really badly that everything was normal, whatever normal was any more. I thought about it and kind of realized — although writing it down like this makes it again a whole lot more rational than it was at the time — that I couldn't think about it. It was too much. If there was a line, this was over it. My job was to raise Lois. Somebody else was going to have to deal with the villain.
About the time Lois started riding on my shoulders she also suddenly hey presto housebroke herself. What a major relief that was. Dragon diapers are the WORST. (And I should say I didn't do all my own laundry, if you counted Lois. We all did Lois' diapers. And — speaking of needing generators to run stuff — I can't imagine doing baby dragon diapers without a washing machine. Or anyway I don't want to. Mind you we were probably destroying the local groundwater table or whatever. They took more than one go and you didn't just throw them in without some preliminary detox either.)
But it was weird, how fast it happened, and how little I had to do with it. It makes sense if you figure that this must be the stage when the baby dragon is not merely old enough (and scaly enough) to look out of its mom's pouch but old enough to climb out and do its business outdoors, which must be a major relief to Mom. I had noticed that Lois' scales first started really looking like scales on her head, like they grew there first so she could look out and get used to the idea of out.
It was a relief in other ways too — her tail was turning into a tail, and the diapers didn't fit so well any more, and even Billy's ingenuity has its limits. Big disgusting yuck. I used to make jokes about Super Glue. Especially when— No, never mind.
The point is that suddenly it wasn't a problem any more. Except that it was because everything about Lois was a problem and the problem got bigger as she got bigger, and while no more dragon diapers was TOTALLY a good thing, dragon dung doesn't disintegrate that fast, so I had to get out there and bury the stuff all the time, and dragonlet digestion really puts the stuff through, so while I would have said she was never out of my sight when we were outdoors together (she'd better not be) she still managed to leave piles I didn't notice her leaving.
Then there was the fact that dragonlet pee slowly burns holes in almost everything it touches (it didn't burn right through the diapers, but it wore through fast enough that we had to patch them, and needlework is not my thing but Grace let me use pretty much anything in her sewing box, so some of them got kind of artistically interesting over time and repeat mending) and fortunately Billy and Grace's house didn't have any lawn to destroy, but she still almost managed to kill one of Grace's Smokehill-winter-proof, tougher-than-the-French-Foreign-Legion rhododendrons before I figured out how to persuade her — Lois, not Grace — to pee and crap in one sort of general area. Although this still wasn't foolproof. I swear I was always out there with my shovel — to the extent that if a dragon could get neurotic I should have given Lois a complex — and even so half the time when Kit or Jane came round the conversation would begin like this:
Kit or Jane: "Hi, Jake. There's a — "
Me: "Okay." And I go get my shovel. (If it was Whiteoak, he just looked at me. And I'd go get my shovel.) And miss whatever they'd come to say, probably, which may have been the idea.
Lois would always come with me. Far from developing a complex she was delighted for an excuse to go outside and play some more, and as far as she was concerned (evidently) my strange compulsion to bury her leavings was as good an excuse as anything else, and the house was getting smaller and smaller as she got bigger and bigger. (I wonder what she thought about the toilet. I always used to wonder that about Snark. I don't know how good a dragon's sense of smell is, but it would have to be really bad not to draw the correct conclusions about what the toilet is about. And a dog has to know. So isn't it thinking, Hey, why do you get to use that thing when I have to go outdoors even when the wind chill makes it sixty below and the snow is coming in sideways?)