She smiled gratefully and felt better, because he sounded like he meant it. No pressure. This probably wasn’t the big deal she was making it out to be.
She sighed. “I’ve just seen what happens when people break up, and they hate each other. I don’t think I could stand it if that happened to us.”
“I just want to go to the dance with my friend.”
That made it sound so simple. That’s all it was, then. Going to the dance with her friend.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay? Okay what?”
“Okay, I’ll go to the dance with you.” She smiled.
His eyes lit up. He grinned and looked so pleased, she was glad she’d said yes. He fidgeted, like he wanted to hug her. Boyfriend and girlfriend would have hugged. But they were just friends. So they didn’t.
“Okay. Cool,” he said. “Um…I guess I’ll see you later then.”
It didn’t seem fair, that they’d made this momentous decision and then had to go off to something as mundane as class. “See you.”
He had math in the next hall over and turned in that direction. She had to backtrack to English class. They were both going to be late. Kay was the last one in the room when she slipped through the door.
Before Kay even sat down, Tam leaned over and hissed, “Well? What did he say? What did you say?”
Surely Tam could guess what had happened, as hard as Kay was blushing. Kay wasn’t sure how to say it. “I—”
Mrs. Ryan stood at the front of the class. “All right, people, we’re starting Act Three of Romeo and Juliet today, so please open your books.”
Saved by classwork. Tam managed to glare even as she retrieved her book from her pile of belongings. Mrs. Ryan was writing vocabulary words on the chalkboard. Kay hunched over her book to avoid looking at Tam.
Everyone jumped when a howling siren rang out. Dragon-raid drill. Or maybe it wasn’t a drill. Someone had found out what happened, one of the dragons, and now they were coming to get back for the one little incursion over the border. One little mistake, and the decades’ long peace was over.
Don’t stop to look. That was the drill. Go inside if you were outside. Leave your classroom single file, go to the hallways in the center of the building—fireproofed with steel, lined with cinder blocks. Crouch on the floor, arms over your head. If you stopped to look for them, even glancing out the window for a moment, it would be too late.
They did the drill several times a year—every year since preschool—until it was routine. A few kids goofed off, elbowing each other and giggling, and the teachers yelled at them. All of it just like it always was. The only person who was nervous was Kay. She looked down the hall, trying to see where Jon was, but couldn’t find him.
Dozens of kids lined the hallway, crouched on the floor, arms over their heads, waiting.
“Like this would even do any good if a dragon really wanted to set fire to the place,” Tam said, leaning over to whisper at Kay. “It’s not like anyone even sees them anymore.”
“I saw one,” said a guy named Brad, from her other side.
“Where?”
“In the air, kind of way off.”
“That doesn’t count.”
Across the hall, Pete said, “We should just go in and bomb them all. They’re just animals, it’s not like they can do anything about it.”
But they’re not, Kay almost continued the argument. They talk. They’re intelligent. One of them saved my life. And they could be coming right now because she’d crossed the border and broken the treaty. She gritted her teeth to keep from saying anything.
“Then why do we even do the drills, if they’re not dangerous?” Tam said.
Pete answered, “I don’t know—it’s stupid. We’ve got the air force base—they could just bomb the hell out of the dragons, then we’d never have to worry again.” In fact, jets from the base patrolled the border, flying over the town of Silver River a couple of times a week. It wouldn’t take much for them to continue on to the mountains where the dragons lived.
“Quiet!” one of the teachers called to them.
The alarm kept going, and they huddled in rows on the floor. Kay waited for the fires, the conflagration, to sweep over the building.
Nothing happened. It was just a drill. No one had found out about what Kay had done yesterday. She tried to calm down. The alarm stopped after another minute, and everyone filed back to their classes.
The Federal Bureau of Border Enforcement organized and encouraged the dragon alarms. At home that evening, Kay tried to think of a way to ask about what was worrying her, without really asking. Dad was on duty that night, so it was just her and her mother.
“We had a drill at school today,” Kay said, over a dinner of chicken casserole out of a box.
“Oh, was that today?” her mom said, still chewing. “I knew there was one scheduled, but I wasn’t keeping track.”
“So it was scheduled. There wasn’t a particular reason for it or anything.” No increased dragon activity because of a certain stupid girl getting caught on the other side of the border…
“Yup. It was on the schedule.” Her mother was distracted by food and by the stack of reports on the table next her and didn’t seem to wonder that the question was maybe a little strange.
Kay tried to make the conversation sound innocent. “So…why do we even have drills? There hasn’t been an attack in, like, sixty years. Does the bureau really think they’d attack now?”
“It’s just in case, Kay. We don’t know anything about them. They did it before, they may do it again. If someone crossed the border, if they decided we were a threat—we don’t even know what they’d consider to be a threat.” Her mother sounded frustrated. “We just have to be ready for anything.”
“Would we ever attack them instead?” Kay asked, thinking of Pete, who wanted to bomb them.
Her mother set aside the packet of papers she’d been reading and regarded Kay. “My job is to uphold the integrity of the border established by the Silver River Treaty. That’s the official line, and I’m sticking to it.” She quirked a lopsided smile.
“But unofficially? Do you think we’d ever attack them?”
“What brought this up?”
Kay shrugged. “Some guy at school talking.”
“Repeating what his parents say at home, I’m sure,” her mom said with a sigh. “Some fanatics think we gave up too much territory to the dragons and that we should take it back.”
“But that wouldn’t ever happen, right?” Kay asked, suddenly uneasy. They treated the drills like a joke—she didn’t ever want to have to do one for real. She tried to think of what a war with the dragons would look like, but couldn’t. If that ever happened, Silver River would be in the middle of it.
Her mother went back to looking at the report and said flatly, “No, I don’t think so.”
That didn’t really convince Kay. She didn’t know how many more questions she could get away with before her mother got either frustrated or suspicious. “They talk, right? Why don’t we still talk to them?”
“That’s the way they wanted it. They thought we’d all be safer if we stayed isolated from each other. Don’t they teach you this in history class?”
“A little.” They did cover dragons in history class, especially in Silver River, but mostly with broad strokes. There wasn’t much detail to go on, and the dragons came across as this distant, mysterious enemy. What else was there to know? seemed to be the attitude. Kay wished now that she’d been paying more attention. “No one seems to know much about it. Couldn’t we have, I don’t know, told them we wanted to keep talking?”
Her mother said, “At the time, I don’t think it occurred to anyone to argue with something that can breathe fire.”
It wouldn’t have occurred to Kay either, until yesterday.