Bronze Pen (9781439156650) (7 page)

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS THURSDAY, ONE OF
the days when Audrey had art for her elective period. She'd always liked to draw and paint, but in this particular class Miss Joyce, the instructor, never seemed very interested in anything that Audrey had done. So when Audrey showed her the not-yet-illustrated picture book she'd made for her extra-credit project in English, she wasn't expecting much. But Miss Joyce was surprisingly enthusiastic. After she leafed through Audrey's dragon story, she said that it was a well-conceived project and that she really liked the little twist at the end.

“What are your plans for the illustrations?” she asked. “Lots of little dragons, I should think. What medium are you thinking of using?” She fingered one of the pages. “I don't think this paper could handle water-colors.”

“Well, maybe I could use—,” Audrey was saying when
someone else interrupted with, “How about ink and then poster paint?”

Up until that moment Audrey had been only vaguely aware that the girl who was standing on the other side of Miss Joyce's desk was listening. A girl whose unfamiliar face meant that she must be new to Greendale Junior High. Not that Audrey knew everybody at school, at least not well, but the person who had just suggested poster paint wasn't the kind to be easily forgotten. Tall and closer to skinny than slim, she had golden brown skin and eyes and a wild mop of curly black hair. And now she was leaning closer, looking at Audrey's book and asking, “Dragons?” And then adding, “Dragons are one of my specialties.”

“Is that so?” Miss Joyce said. “That's an interesting coincidence, isn't it?”

From there, the conversation got rather involved, but it wound up with Miss Joyce suggesting that, since Lizzie—the new girl's name was Lizzie Morales—probably wouldn't have time to do an extra-credit project of her own before the deadline, she might be able to help Audrey finish hers.

“Would that be all right with you?” Miss Joyce asked Audrey.

So of course Audrey had to say it would be, even though she wasn't too pleased with the idea, at least not right away. She wasn't sure just why, except that the dragon picture book project had been inspired by a fairly private
part of her life. Personal things were involved, like her silly childhood game, a recent nightmare, and a lot of years of dealing with what might be called an overactive imagination. None of which she was going to discuss with anyone, whether they happened to be dragon experts or not. But she couldn't help being a little curious.

“How did you get into dragons?” she asked the new girl.

With wide-eyed sincerity, Lizzie said, “Oh, I'm related to a lot of them.” Then she grinned. “Just kidding. Mostly by reading about them, I guess. I've read lots of books about dragons. My favorite is
Dragonquest
by Anne McCaffrey. Have you read it?”

“Sure,” Audrey said. “I liked it too. But…” She hesitated. There was one small problem. Enormous flying dragons who soared through the sky, shooting out deadly sheets of fire, didn't seem to be that closely related to the dragon in Audrey's story.

“But?” Lizzie asked, so Audrey tried to tell her that the dragon in her story was small and rather timid. “He's just very young, I guess,” she finished. “Like, just hatched, maybe.”

“Oh, well.” Lizzie looked disappointed. “I haven't drawn any hatchlings.” She thought for a moment before she added, “Couldn't you change the plot a little? Would it be too hard to write it over and make the dragon a little more like—like one of…Wait, I'll show you.”

Opening a big, bulgy leather briefcase, she pulled out an apple and a squashed sandwich, which she dumped on the floor, and went on pawing through the contents of the oversized piece of luggage. She had added a binder, two or three books, and a beat-up pair of sneakers to the pile before she came up with a portfolio full of drawings.

Some of the pictures looked a bit ragged and dog-eared and had an odd smell. Tuna sandwich, perhaps, or dirty gym shoes—or both. All of that first bunch, even the dog-eared smelly ones, turned out to be very professional-looking caricatures of famous people. A little bit cartoonish, but easily recognizable pictures of Elvis Presley, all four of the Beatles, and even one of Queen Elizabeth.

Audrey was impressed, and Miss Joyce seemed to be even more so. “Did you really draw these yourself?” she asked, leafing through the stack.

Lizzie nodded and, looking a little uneasy, reached out trying to substitute another stack for the caricatures. “Those aren't the right ones,” she said. “Here. Here are the dragons.”

But Miss Joyce had just come across an especially interesting portrait of a man with horns and a long pointed tail whose lumpy, long-nosed face managed to look a little like—actually quite a lot like—Mr. Spaulding, the principal of Greendale Junior High.

“And this is…?” Miss Joyce asked, obviously trying to hide a smile.

“Nobody. Nobody real,” Lizzie said, quickly taking the devilish Mr. Spaulding away and handing Miss Joyce the other stack. “
Here
are the dragons,” she insisted. This time the picture on top was a drawing of a typically terrifying McCaffrey-type dragon carrying a handsome dragon-rider on his back and spouting a sweeping plume of fire and smoke. “There. Like that,” Lizzie said. “Wouldn't a dragon like that make the book a little more exciting?”

The picture was beautifully drawn and full of realistic details, but it certainly wasn't Audrey's dragon. And for some reason she felt it wouldn't be right to dump her baby dragon in favor of such a scary looking fire-breather. At least not in a book for little kids. But the only sensible argument she could come up with was, “Yeah, sure. But don't you think that kind of dragon might a little
too
exciting for first graders?”

“Well, yeah,” Lizzie said, grinning. “You might be right. Might scare their little pants off.”

Encouraged, Audrey went on. “And besides,” she said, pressing her advantage, “I don't have my special pen with me. The one I used to do the book. I'd have to use it if I did the book over.”

Lizzie pulled the book closer and examined the smooth, dark lettering Audrey had done with the bronze pen. She looked at it for quite a while, turning the pages and tipping the book from side to side. “Yeah, I see what you mean.” She moved the little book over to compare it to the hand
writing on the penciled notes in Audrey's binder. “Using that pen does do a lot for your…” She let her voice trail off into silence, leaving Audrey with a real need to know what she had been about to say.

“Does a lot for my what?” she asked urgently.

Lizzie looked up quickly and stared at Audrey. “For your handwriting,” she said finally. “What else?” She sighed. “Okay, I'll tame my fire-breather down a little, but not too much. I don't do Disney-type dragons. Okay?”

Audrey wasn't convinced, at least not until she saw the first fairly innocent but definitely not-Disneyish-looking dragon that Lizzie came up with. Still not exactly cuddly-looking, but somehow much more like the one in Audrey's story.

“Okay?” Lizzie asked. And when Audrey nodded uncertainly, Lizzie added, “All right. We're in business. Gimme five.” Audrey put out her hand, and Lizzie slapped it, before she started drawing her version of Audrey's dragon on each page of the book.

On the page about the dragon figurines, or toy dragons, she made a scattering of tiny dragonets that really did look as if they were made from glass or plastic. And then there was Audrey's baby dragon again, crawling out from under a bed, and crouching against a wall, looking hopefully ferocious.

As soon as Lizzie finished a drawing, Audrey began painting it in, blending shades of blue and green and
purple, punctuated by golden eyes and nostrils. The overall effect was pretty impressive. They weren't quite finished by the time the period was over, but when Audrey and Lizzie showed Miss Joyce what they'd accomplished, she was even more complimentary.

Back at home that afternoon Audrey decided, after some thought, to let her father see the nearly finished book and tell him about the new girl named Lizzie and what had happened in art class. The reason she had some misgivings about telling him was, of course, because he'd heard about her dragon before. Maybe seven or eight years ago when she used to tell him how she pretended, and almost believed, that a dragon lived under her bed. And she certainly didn't want him to think she still…But on the other hand, she guessed that John Abbott would like hearing about Lizzie and the whole art class episode. It was a good guess.

“Very nice job,” he said when he'd finished looking through the book. “Ought to be a bestseller.” He grinned. “And this Lizzie is quite an amazing artist. And something of an original herself, I think? True?”

“True,” Audrey agreed.

That night Audrey decided to sleep in her own bed for the first time since the return of the baby dragon, and except for a brief scratching noise that quickly died away, nothing at all happened.

T
HE EXTRA CREDIT AUDREY GOT FOR HER
picture-book project might make a real difference in her English grade, or it might not. But getting to know Lizzie Morales started making some differences right away. In art class on Tuesday she moved her desk next to Audrey's, and on Wednesday she was waiting for Audrey outside the cafeteria at lunch hour. For the next few days lunch became a few minutes of eating together and forty minutes of Audrey watching Lizzie draw pictures. Pictures of people in the lunchroom, of famous people, and then of people in Lizzie's family. Lizzie came from a large family, parents and grandparents as well as a whole lot of older siblings, so that took a couple of days all by itself.

Lizzie did a lot of complaining about her family—how impossible it was for her to have any privacy and how, as the youngest, she never got to make any decisions. And
how having a lot of older brothers was a real pain in the “you know where.”

She did have one sister, she told Audrey, but she was just a different kind of pain. “She's a whole lot older than I am.” When Audrey asked how old, Lizzie shrugged. “I don't know. At least sixty-five.” She grinned. “She acts like it, anyway. Actually, she just had her nineteenth birthday. But we have to share a room, and she's a real neatnik, and I'm definitely not. We drive each other crazy.”

But when Audrey tried to sympathize, Lizzie grinned and said, “Well, I guess it could be worse. The whole family does so much yelling at each other that when they get around to yelling at me, they're usually pretty much out of breath.”

When Lizzie asked about Audrey's family she told her a little about her mother's lousy job, where her boss hated her because she was so beautiful. “At least that's what my dad says,” Audrey said.

When Lizzie asked, “And what does your dad do?” Audrey only said her dad was sick and let it go at that.

It was about two weeks after they'd met that Lizzie announced that she would like to be invited to visit.

“To visit?” Audrey said, and then asked stupidly, “Visit what?”

“Your house?” Lizzie made it into a question. “Like, where you live?”

At least Audrey didn't make it worse by asking why, but
Lizzie went on to explain: “I guess I'm just curious to see what it's like being an only child. I haven't a clue. Missed out on that one by a whole lot. And you know what? Up until now I've never even had a best friend who was one.”

Audrey had mixed feelings. She kind of liked hearing that Lizzie thought they were best friends. But as for visiting at each other's homes, Audrey didn't know. It had been more than a year since she'd pretty much stopped asking friends over. Mostly because her mother thought that having extra kids around might be too stressful for her dad, but also because the whole atmosphere at the Abbotts' nowadays seemed to make most of her friends uneasy. So she hedged a bit by reminding Lizzie that she always went home early.

“Well, you couldn't come home
with
me. Not unless you wanted to ditch a couple of classes,” she said. But Lizzie quickly replied that she could come later by herself if Audrey would tell her which buses to take. Audrey couldn't think of any other excuses, so it was about three thirty on a Friday afternoon when Lizzie Morales arrived at the Abbotts' house.

Audrey, who'd been waiting in the living room, heard the front gate creak open. She went to the hall window and watched Lizzie trudging up the walk, carrying her huge lumpy briefcase.

Audrey had warned her about Beowulf, of course, but for a lot of people being forewarned wasn't enough to
prepare them for an enthusiastic Irish wolfhound greeting. But when Beowulf did his usual bouncy welcoming ceremony, complete with lots of sloppy kisses, Lizzie seemed delighted. And when Audrey introduced her to John Abbott, she said hello in an easy, unembarrassed way, which, in Audrey's experience, was hard for some people to do when they met someone in a wheelchair.

The first thing John Abbott said was, “Well, young lady. I must say I'm very impressed by your artistic talent.” And everything that was said after that was pretty much on the same theme. Lizzie got her portfolio out of her briefcase, and the three of them went through all her drawings, the dragons as well as the caricatures. Audrey's father was particularly interested in the caricatures.

At one point he went through the morning newspaper picking out people for Lizzie to draw. People like President Nixon and Golda Meir, both of whom Lizzie said were easy, because to do a good caricature, you need subjects who have features that are easy to exaggerate. And, according to Lizzie, both the president and the prime minister of Israel had noses that were naturally exaggerated. Lizzie sat down on the floor by the coffee table, and in a few minutes, she quickly and easily did recognizable sketches of them both.

There was also a picture of Laurence Olivier in the
Greendale Times
that day, but Lizzie said he would be harder to caricature because he was handsome. That was
when Audrey pointed to her father and said, “Can you do one of him?”

Lizzie looked at John Abbott from one side and then walked around to the other. “Not that easy, but I can try.”

So she sat back down at the coffee table and began to draw. It didn't take her long, and when she was through, there was a sketch of a man with a thin face, high cheek bones, and slanted eyebrows who, like John Abbott, managed to be kind of handsome without looking like Clark Gable or any other movie star.

When she was done, Audrey said, “Yeah. Looks just like him,” and her dad said, “Well, maybe. Twenty years ago.”

After that Lizzie put all her stuff away in her briefcase and said she would have to leave soon. But before she did, she wanted to meet Sputnik. “I'd like to see your dragon collection too,” she said. “I'll bet we have some of the same ones.”

After Audrey's dad went to his room to rest, Audrey and Lizzie went to the kitchen to see Sputnik, who wasn't in a very talkative mood, but he did do his “Polly-wants-a-martini” thing when Audrey asked him to.

When Lizzie asked if he said anything else, Audrey answered, “He used to say a whole lot of swear words because my dad got him from a man who swore. But now he seems to have forgotten most of them.”

“Oh yeah?” Lizzie said. “That's too bad.” Putting her face up close to Sputnik's cage, she asked him if he'd
forgotten something. “Come see me, pretty boy,” she said. “Five minutes with my brothers and it would all come back.”

Then they went to Audrey's room to look at her collection of dragons. After they took all the figurines off the top shelf and put them on Audrey's desk, Lizzie inspected each one very carefully. There were a couple, one of spun glass and one of china, that Lizzie said were exactly the same as hers. “Another coincidence,” Lizzie said significantly, and Audrey agreed, and it wasn't until later that she wondered why. Except for liking dragons, what other coincidences did a short, pale only child and secret author have with a tall, dark artist who came from a huge family and who wasn't a bit secretive about her special talent?

Audrey was still having mixed feelings about the whole thing that evening when, back in her room, she looked at some of the pictures Lizzie had drawn that afternoon and thought about how enthusiastic her dad had been about them. Sitting at her desk, Audrey picked up the picture of her dad that Lizzie had drawn, trying to figure out just which lines made it be John Abbott and not any other man with high cheekbones and tilted eyebrows. Getting out some unlined paper, the kind she'd used for the picture book, she picked up a pencil and began to draw. But it was no good. Even with Lizzie's picture right there to copy, she wasn't able to draw a good likeness. Or even a good caricature.

After a while she started wondering if her dad would be as enthusiastic about her stories as he was about Lizzie's drawings, if and when she decided to let him read them. Probably not, she decided, even though what she did required a large amount of talent too. Talent that certainly should be obvious to anyone who took the time to read her stories carefully. Which her parents might do, if and when she decided to let them.

Audrey dug out her novel notebook and began to go through it, reading bits and pieces of things she'd written and imagining how certain readers might react to some of the best parts.

She looked at some of the older stories first—ones she'd written in the fifth and sixth grades. Not too bad, she decided. Not great maybe, but, of course, she'd been younger when she wrote stuff like that.

She flipped through a few more pages until she came to the girl detective story. The one about the girl who could talk to animals. Reading over some of the scene about Hero, the dog who came to the rescue, particularly the dialogue between Heather and Hero, she thought she'd managed to make the dog sound intelligent and yet realistically doglike. It really was, she decided, pretty good writing. Good enough that a person who knew about such things—for instance, someone who had been a newspaper editor—should recognize that it showed real talent.

Turning a few more pages, she stopped where she'd
started working on the book for first-grade readers. There wasn't much there, just the title—
Debby's Dragon
—written in ordinary pencil. Because after that she'd made the little book out of construction paper and started using the bronze pen. And the result had been the picture book that was still displayed on Mr. Baxter's bulletin board with an A+ grade written in red pencil on the first page.

So using the bronze pen had resulted in a good extra-credit grade in English class. Audrey was beginning to wonder if there had been other, more mysterious results. Marking her place in the notebook, Audrey closed it, opened the top drawer of her desk, and took out the bronze pen.