The Story of Owen (5 page)

“Siobhan?” My music teacher's voice pulled me out of my speculation. She sounded concerned, and I realized that I was
sitting on the floor with staff paper everywhere and half the woodwind section within arm's reach.

“I'll clean it up!” I said. “What time is it?” I realized that I was having this conversation backwards, and looked up to make eye contact. “Good morning, Mrs. Heskie.”

I'd come in early today to play for a bit before classes started. Mum and Dad said they didn't mind when I did it at home, but Mum was on nights at the hospital this week, and I hated to wake up and start playing just as she was going to bed. Mrs. Heskie usually got to school by seven o'clock anyway, so it wasn't a big deal for her to let me use one of the soundproof music rooms.

“You just missed the five-minute bell,” she said. She was definitely laughing at me.

“Shoot,” I said, barely aware I'd spoken out loud. There was no way I was going to get all this put away before the final bell rang. I'd be lucky to get to my locker to drop off my coat as it was.

“You can leave it,” Mrs. Heskie said. “You'll be back at lunch anyway, and none of my morning classes will need the practice rooms today.”

“Thanks,” I said, and grabbed my bag.

“No running in the halls!” she shouted after me, but I ignored her and made a dash for my locker.

By the time I made it to English, seconds before the bell, I realized that my problem with Owen was that he wasn't a woodwind at all. The woodwinds, single and double reeded, were my default after the piano because they were the easiest for me to play. I'd been playing the piano pretty much since I was old enough to sit upright on the bench, and when I'd started
high school, I discovered that I took to woodwinds as naturally as if I'd been playing them all my life. But that wasn't going to be enough, apparently, if I ever wanted to get this song out of my head and onto the paper where it belonged. I was going to have to learn how to play the brass.

When I sat down at my desk in algebra, Owen was already waiting for me. His gym teacher must've let them hit the showers way earlier than my last gym teacher had.

“What are you doing tonight?” he asked, as soon as I was sitting down.

“Nothing,” I said. I had what most people would call a boring social life, a classical holdout in a punk rock world.

“Do you want to come over for dinner?” he said. “Aunt Hannah's been asking all month if I've made any friends yet.”

“Will they freak out that you've made friends with a girl?” I asked him.

“Will you freak out that you're having dinner with Lottie Thorskard?” he fired back.

“Fair point,” I said. “Sure, I can even drive us so you don't have to take the bus.”

Owen only took the bus in the afternoons. In the morning, he ran to school and Hannah waited for the school bus, so that
she could put his backpack on it. Most days, he beat the bus to school by several minutes. The cross-country coach had been devastated when Owen told her he simply didn't have time to play school sports.

“Works for me!” he said, and then Mrs. Postma called for homework.

Owen grimaced as he looked down at his assignment, but then squared his shoulders and handed it over. Most people who said things like “I'd rather face a dragon than take upper level algebra” meant it figuratively, but in Owen's case it was the literal truth. He was only taking the class because you were more likely to be commissioned as an officer in the Oil Watch if you had maths and sciences on your transcript.

“I talked with some of the guys during gym,” he said, as the paper shuffle went on around us. “They told me they'd never heard of Mr. Huffman doing anything like that before.”

I thought about it for a moment. Our second Friday had been quite simple, just protecting a medieval castle, but it was still more exciting than regular class work.

“He did wish you good luck back at the beginning of the month,” I reminded him, finally. “Maybe this is his way of teaching you specifically. It's not like it hurts the rest of us to learn it, and it definitely helps you, don't you think?”

“It takes a village to train a dragon slayer?” Owen said skeptically.

“Something like that,” I said. I knew people were already starting to wonder if Owen would come back to Trondheim after his tour in the Oil Watch, or if he'd go where the money was, in the city. I hadn't given it much thought, to be honest. I wasn't sure he'd be able to take on a dragon until he stopped
looking so scrawny, and I knew he had his own doubts. He didn't need my meddling. Also, I had that audition next week and we were probably going to have a pop quiz in algebra on Monday anyway, because Mrs. Postma was like that sometimes. “In any case, it was fun.”

“Maybe next week, I'll get to rescue you,” he said.

“Maybe next week, you'll be the dragon,” I pointed out.

Whatever he might have said to that was probably more interesting than algebra, but since Mrs. Postma started to talk, I never found out what it was. For the next hour, there wasn't much opportunity to chat. When the bell finally rang, we headed for our lockers. They were in the same hallway as everyone else in the eleventh grade, and I was surprised at how many people called out to wish Owen a good weekend in a way that seemed more genuine than starstruck. If I was Owen's friend, I was clearly not the only one.

“Did you tell your aunts I was coming over tonight?” I asked, wondering if he was looking for an out.

“Aunt Hannah told me to bring someone home,” he said. “She gets anxious when she thinks I'm not fitting in with the right crowd.”

It dawned on me that Owen and I had been spending quite a bit of time together. None of it was particularly social, but my friendships had always leaned more toward “do you want to work on this English assignment” than “come over and meet my famous aunt.” Now that such an invitation had been issued, I had to wonder if my relationship with Owen was developing beyond something I was prepared to deal with. Still, the opportunity to meet Lottie Thorskard didn't come along every day, even in a town as small as Trondheim. For that, I could at least
try to be neoclassical for the evening.

“And you think I'm the right crowd?” I said. I wasn't exactly a crowd to begin with.

“You caught Pearson,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“Everyone knows about Pearson,” I told him.

“Yeah, but Mr. Huffman didn't make him part of the game. He waited until you brought him up.” He stopped at his locker and I continued down the hall to where mine was.

I collected the books I would need for the weekend from my locker. I wondered briefly if I should sign the bari out for the weekend as well, if only to prevent someone else from getting it, but regardless of how much I liked the sax, I knew that it was just for fun. I needed to focus on the piano and my compositions over the weekend. If nothing else, it kept my parents from re-starting the university talk.

“Shall we?” I said when Owen showed up with his bag over one shoulder. Now that I was pretty sure we were friends, I decided I should probably be friendlier. Probably. Owen had a sense of humor, and it wouldn't kill me to try to be funny every now and then. I led the way into the parking lot, which was full of students doing their best not to maim one another in their rush to get home for the weekend. “I just want to drop my books at home on the way.”

“Or you could bring them and we could do the algebra together,” he said. “And maybe the English.”

“You really know how to show a girl a good time,” I said, but to be honest, the idea of not having to do my homework alone and getting most of it out of the way on Friday was kind of appealing. No wonder I was boring.

“Hey, being a dragon slayer isn't all glamour and commercial endorsements,” he said. I had the key in the driver's side door, and I hesitated before I turned it. He must have seen me, though, because after we got into the car, he turned to me and said, “Aunt Lottie is a lot like me. And she knew before the first day she started training that she'd probably get injured or killed fighting dragons. It's what we do. You can talk to her about it. It's not like she's traumatized.”

“She fell off the Burlington Skyway,” I said, as the engine turned over and began to hum. “That's kind of traumatic.”

“Yeah, but she spent her whole life preparing for something like that,” he said. “She's not emotionally bereft. She no longer has to risk life and limb on a daily basis, and all it cost her was a limp and the distinction of being the highest-paid dragon slayer of all time.”

“When you put it like that, it doesn't sound so bad,” I admitted, pulling carefully out of the spot. I didn't really relax until we were on the street. Mum and Dad had been worried that my having a car would make me isolated on the road and more vulnerable to dragon attacks on account of the carbon emissions, but honestly I was more concerned that I would kill one of my classmates in the parking lot because they weren't looking where they were going.

Owen's house was surrounded by cedar trees, which blocked it from view if you were on the road, but also provided a lot of material for burning if a dragon ever decided the house looked tempting. Inside the cedar hedge, the two-acre lot was almost entirely free of grass. To the side of the house there was a shed with a wide doorway and a nerve-wracking amount of smoke issuing from the chimney. As we pulled in, however, the
smoke thinned, and I knew that the fire inside the shed must have been banked.

“Aunt Hannah's work shed,” Owen explained, off my nervous expression. I felt kind of stupid, because I'd forgotten until that moment that Hannah was a sword-smith and made swords for her wife, brother-in-law, and nephew. “She knows what she's doing.”

I parked the car and killed the engine just as Hannah came out of the shed. She was quite tall, and had very broad shoulders. She smiled when she saw us, only a slight facial tick indicating her surprise that her nephew had brought home a girl instead of a boy, and we got out of the car.

“Aunt Hannah, this is Siobhan,” Owen said, waving at me with one hand and swinging his backpack up with the other. “From school.”

“Nice to meet you,” Hannah said, offering her hand.

“Hi, Ms.—uh,” I said, and then winced because I only realized after I said it that I didn't actually know what Hannah's last name was. “Thank you for letting Owen invite me over.”

“Hannah, please,” she said, and her smile let me know I hadn't offended her. “MacRae-Thorskard is such a mouthful. And you are quite welcome.”

“Owen!” said a voice from the house. I looked up and saw another woman standing on the porch, all of her weight on one leg. The most famous dragon slayer in North America. “You failed to mention the part where your friend was a girl.”

“Lottie,” Hannah said. “Be nice.”

“Where would be the fun in that?” Lottie said. I was, I imagine, quite pink, but I wasn't anywhere as pink as Owen. I
decided that I liked her. She turned to me and raised an eyebrow at my car. “You drive that thing?”

“I took all the classes,” I said defensively. My car wasn't much to look at, but it was as safe as a carbon emitting vehicle could be. “I'm Siobhan. I helped him find his classes on the first day, and now I can't seem to shake him.”

“That happens,” Hannah said, cutting off what I hoped wasn't another disparaging remark about my car. Owen looked at me like I had betrayed him absolutely, but Lottie laughed, and the awkwardness passed. “Lottie and Aodhan wandered into my father's smithy in 1985 and I haven't been able to shake them either,” said Hannah. “You're probably stuck with us.”

“Us?” I said, momentarily confused. I couldn't figure out why I would be stuck with all of them.

“You could have waited until dessert,” Lottie said to Hannah with a fond smile.

“Come on in, Siobhan. This might take awhile to explain.”

Today, they tell you way too often in high school, is the first day of the rest of your life. It may also, if you decide to drive your car without taking driver's ed, be the last day of your life. They like to really highlight that in the brochures.

At the precise moment little Amelia was watching Lottie Thorskard plummet off the Burlington Skyway, I was standing in the driveway, gawking at the 1998 Toyota Corolla that my parents had bought me for my birthday. I was more than a little surprised, to be honest. I hadn't expected them to trust me with a car so early in my relationship with driving.

And yet there it was: four wheels, paint a color of greenish yellow not ever found in nature, late spring morning sun glinting off the windshield. My very own car.

“Go ahead and say it,” my mother said. She has a healthy sense of the morbid, which I'd been told that her healthy sense of the morbid was typical of someone in the medical profession. I came by it honestly.

“You don't love me enough to buy me a hybrid?” I asked. They'd probably had this conversation themselves and I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to know the details. To be perfectly honest, I was less than concerned with my own mortality at this particular moment. I was already wondering how fast my car could go.

“Don't press your luck,” said my father. “Just make sure you always follow a truck and the dragon will go for it instead of you.”

“Do you love me enough to pay for driver's ed?” I asked.

“Nope,” said Mum with a careless smile. “You're on your own for that too.”

“I did make French toast, though,” Dad offered, as though that would save me from a fiery death on some deserted roadside.

“Best. Birthday. Ever,” I declared, and we went inside for breakfast and to listen to the morning news.