The Dragon in the Driveway

CHAPTER ONE
AN ILL WIND

Ten-year-old Jesse reread his e-mail. He hadn’t included the information that the dog had turned back into a dragon for an instant the first time she was zapped, and that Mrs. Nosy-Britches, who lived across the street, was standing at her mailbox at the exact moment the zap happened.

“It’s the oddest thing,” Mrs. Nosy-Britches kept saying to anyone who would listen, “but I could swear I saw this very large lizard in the driveway across the street. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was some sort of a
dragon.”

Jesse finished and sent the e-mail. He listened to the rain rattling on the roof and watched the slide show on the screen saver. The pictures were of him and his parents in some of the places where they had traveled and lived. Looking at it made him happy, if a little homesick for his parents and even the places: India, Africa, Costa Rica…. When he
had first come to America to stay with his cousin Daisy, who was also ten, he had been so homesick that he had worn two wristwatches, one showing the time in the U.S. and the other the time in Africa, where his parents were. These days he wore just the one watch showing American time, but when there wasn’t quite enough to keep him busy, like now, he missed his parents.

Jesse was just shutting down the computer when he heard Daisy scream out his name. He leaped up, tore downstairs, slid down the hall in his socks, and collided with the kitchen table.

“What?” he said, panting. “What is it, Daze?”

Daisy was standing on a footstool gazing out the window over the sink. Her long white-blond hair was tucked behind her ears, which were pointy like an elf’s and bright pink with excitement.

“Jess,
look
!” she said, tapping the windowpane.

Jesse looked, but the panes were fogging up from Daisy’s breath. “What are we looking at?” he asked.

“Don’t you
see
?” Daisy whispered. “There and
there
?”

Jesse boosted himself up onto the edge of the sink, leaned over, and rubbed a clear spot in the bottom pane. He stared hard through the porthole into the side yard. Trunks and leaves and branches
were all churned up into one great green swarming, sopping mess.

“Boy, oh, boy,” he said, mustering some appreciation for the view. “The wind sure is blowing hard.”

Daisy tugged impatiently at the hood of his sweatshirt. “The two trees, Jess. See them?”

“
Which
two trees?” he said.

She groaned. “Get down and let me look.”

They switched places. Daisy pointed and said, “They’re standing right there, exactly ten feet from the house. I swear, Jess, those trees were not there before.”

Jesse shivered. “How can you tell?” he asked.

“Simple. There isn’t either a Douglas fir or a quaking aspen growing in our side yard,” Daisy said, getting down from the sink. “Plus they both have a bright strip of cloth or ribbon or something wrapped around their trunks. You can’t miss them.”

Even though he had been living in Daisy’s house for a while now, Jesse didn’t know every tree in the yard. That was Daisy’s thing. Her favorite saying was “Not knowing the names of the flowers and the trees is like not knowing the names of your own sisters and brothers.”

Jesse craned his neck and gave the side yard another scan. He couldn’t see anything out of place
or any bright strips of cloth. He didn’t want to make Daisy feel bad, but he didn’t want to lie just to make her feel good. “Sorry, Daze. I just don’t see what you’re seeing.”

Daisy’s face turned bright pink to match her ears. Before Jesse could say another word, she ran out of the kitchen. He heard her stocking feet pounding up the stairs. Seconds later, she slammed her bedroom door so hard, he flinched and drew the hood of his sweatshirt up. He took one last glance out the window just as a gust of wind came up and bent the trees toward the house, wagging their branches at him like long scolding fingers.

Jesse sighed. “I didn’t say I didn’t
believe
her,” he explained to the trees, as if they were the members of a jury. “I just said I didn’t see it myself.”

Suddenly the wind let up for a moment and the trees straightened. They looked stern but satisfied.

This storm is making us all wacky
, Jesse thought. Cabin fever: that was what Aunt Maggie had called it that morning before she left for work at the ad company. It did feel as if they were trapped in the cabin of a ship that was riding out an endless storm. It had been raining for five days. How much longer could it go on?

Jesse grabbed a container of coleslaw from the refrigerator and headed for the mudroom. Dragon
Keepers didn’t get time off, even in bad weather, and Emmy would be hungry for her midmorning snack of something rich in calcium. He pulled on his yellow rain poncho, still damp from the morning, when he had delivered Emmy her breakfast of leftover Brussels sprouts au gratin with a side of dandelion greens.

Jesse pulled up the poncho hood and opened the back door. The rain hit him full in the face. He stepped back into the shelter of the doorway and peered around. Leaves and broken branches lay everywhere. In the backyard, the light shone in the Rock Shop, the garden shed his uncle Joe had converted into a lab for his geology studies. Uncle Joe was hard at work on a project.

Jesse took a deep breath and plunged off the back landing, down the steps, and into the swirling wetness. The rain blinded him, so he followed his feet over the leaf-strewn ground to the garage. He groped around in his pocket for the key and fit it into the lock. Then he flung open the side door and kicked it shut, leaning against it to catch his breath.

“Jesse!” said the dragon, beside herself with joy at the sight of him. She bounded over, her long green tail smacking the concrete floor.

“Jesse—Jesse—Jesse!” Emmy had been able to speak since the minute she hatched. The sound of
her voice still gave Jesse a thrill. It was one of a kind—rich and rippling, like molten gold.

Jesse raised his voice over the rain drumming loudly on the garage’s steel roof. “I brought you a snack!” He showed her the coleslaw.

Emmy shook her head and pulled back. “No cabbage swill for me now, please, thank you. Aunt Maggie says I have robin fever,” she told him.

Jesse laughed. “That’s
cabin
fever, Em. And I’m afraid I don’t have a cure for it,” he said.

“Going outside will make me alllllll better,” Emmy said coyly. “Now? Please? Thank you. You’re welcome.” She swirled gracefully in a blue-green spiral and then drifted to a standstill before him.

Although she had been no bigger than a kitten when she had hatched four weeks before, now she was as big as a pony. There were two bumps on her shoulder blades, which Jesse thought might turn into wings. Two dark ridges ran down Emmy’s back and along her tail. A single horn sprouted from her head, which was shaped like a sea horse’s, only broader. She still smelled faintly of chili peppers, although the scent was fading as fast as her baby talk. Emmy’s eyes were large and sparkly and as green as emeralds. It had been her eyes that had inspired Jesse to name her Emerald. Those eyes looked a little sad now as she settled down with her
tail curled around her, like a great green cat, and said, “Why is our Daisy Flower unhappy today?”

Jesse shot Emmy a curious look. “How do you know Daisy’s unhappy?” he asked. “And since when is she Daisy
Flower
?”

“Since I say so. She is Daisy Flower, just like you are Jesse Tiger,” Emmy said.

“Don’t remind me,” he groaned. Tiger was his middle name, but sometimes he would just as soon forget.

“Why is she sad?” Emmy asked.

Jesse shrugged. “She saw something and I didn’t see it and she got upset.”

Emmy cocked her head. “Daisy has a cabin fever, too,” she said. “Daisy will go outside, just like Emmy. Then our cabins will cool down!”