Katie’s usually brighter than this. Maybe the smell was getting to her. She got sympathetic. “Jake,” she said gently. “There’s a lot of crap out there. It’s not worth getting mad all the time, okay? You’ve got better things to do. Think about the gate money this group brought us, and forget the rest.”
I stared at her, feeling as if my whole head was getting redder and redder, like if they turned the lights off you could have seen in the dark by the glow of my head. Why was she saying this to me? Why was it upsetting me so much that she was saying this to me? She was only telling the truth. Crap was crap and there’s a lot of it around. But it was probably crap that killed my mother—nobody will admit this but what probably happened is that the guide she’d been promised didn’t show and didn’t show, and she had to sit there watching her six-month sabbatical from Smokehill going for nothing (that much we knew for sure), and she found somebody else to take her and the somebody wasn’t good enough and either got her into trouble or let her get herself into trouble and then fled. But we’ll never know, okay?
After Mom died, and then Snark, my dog, only seven months and twelve days later, everything started getting to me a lot worse than it used to. All the time I’d been growing up we were both the biggest and acre for acre the poorest national park in the country. Because of the Institute we’re sitting ducks for all the dragon nuts out there, and lots and lots of them come, and while most of them are happy with the diorama and the film clips and the bus tour, and are perfectly normal okay humans with like manners, way too many of them want to bother the staff of the Institute and waste our time arguing and complaining about the traveling restrictions inside the park and the information available at the tourist center and the brush-off they get from our Rangers.
The staff of the Institute, what a joke. That’s my dad and a short-term graduate student or two. (Sometimes they’re only part-time. Their grant pays for them to live here but they spend most of their time writing their PhDs.) Since Mom died they haven’t even given him an extra graduate student. But these people don’t get it that we have to be this way, this strict and cautious, and we’re not ripping them off, we need their ticket fees to stay alive. And the government doesn’t get it either, which is why they never let us have enough money.
But Mom’s the one who had the sense of humor about it and while she was alive I used to think our fruit loops were funny because she did. She’s the one who started calling them f.l.s. It was after Mom disappeared that the f.l.s. didn’t seem so funny any more and my brain started zoning out and I started playing a lot more Space Marauder or Annihilate than I ever used to, and then when they found her at the bottom of that ravine with her neck broken and only her teeth to tell them who she was and no way of ever knowing what she was doing dead at the bottom of a ravine because she was a very, very careful person but what would you do if the only half sabbatical you were going to get that decade was being wasted because some pighead administrator had screwed up? And then my dog died and I was kind of a mess for a while. You don’t need to know any more about that, except that as almost-fifteen-year-olds go I was maybe a little twitchier than some.
All this and a lot more besides went boiling through my head for about the millionth time when Katie told me not to be so mad about all the crap there was around, while the nincompoop went on scrambling his students’ brains (actually he probably wasn’t—I don’t think many of them were paying attention), and where I stopped thinking was If I go berserk right now—in public—start hammering the walls with my shovel and screaming—in front of a bunch of sixteen-year-olds—I’ll never forgive her. Which was true, even if it wasn’t her fault. There was a lump like a burning basketball in my throat and I didn’t dare blink my eyes for fear of what would spill out. But even Eric’s eyes water sometimes when he’s doing odoratus.
The main thing I was thinking was, It’s been two years. Almost three. And a little thing like Katie being the wrong kind of sympathetic at the wrong moment and I’m going to pieces.
At last I managed to say, “The gate money wasn’t much. They’d’ve got a school discount.”
Katie took this as a joke, and laughed, and the danger was over. I went back to scrubbing, although I probably took some of the floor with it.
When I was younger I used to say that I didn’t understand why so many nuts had to be crazy over dragons. What about Yukon wolves, cougars, grizzly bears, ichthyosauruses, griffins, several kinds of shark, lions, tigers, and Caspian walruses, any of which will eat human when it’s available, and every one of which is on the next-step-extinction super-endangered list, partly, of course, because of their eating habits? But no. The biggest, fruitiest fruit loops go for dragons. Enter “dragon” at your favorite search site, and stand back. In fact, go make yourself a cup of coffee, because it’ll still be churning out hits by the time you get back. None of the rest of the critters comes close. Well, Nessie does pretty well, especially since they found her a couple of boyfriends in one of those Scandinavian lochs. Now everyone’s standing around waiting for her to reproduce. She hasn’t though. Maybe she’s a he after all, or the hes are shes too. It’s not only dragons we don’t know enough about.
For some reason I used to like to bring this up at breakfast, about dragons and fruit loops. Mom would say, “Yes, dear.” Or, “Eat your oatmeal, dear.” Or, “Have you done your homework, dear?” This last was a trick question because I’m homeschooled. If I wanted to spend my life on a bus I could’ve just about made it in to Wilsonville and back every day, to their crummy little primary school, but I’d’ve had to go to boarding school once I graduated from sixth grade and there was no way. And never mind being the freak who would have to have special transportation out to Smokehill. Mom had tried to get me to go to Wilsonville at first but she gave up.
(That made a precedent then, so when it was time for Martha to go to school she said she wanted to stay at Smokehill with me. Katie did some wavering and I know she and Mom talked about it a lot, using phrases like “social development” and “peer group.” But Martha in her quiet way can be pretty stubborn, and then it turned out she could already read—of course she could read, I taught her—so they were going to have to jump her a year, and where’s your social developmental peer group then? Especially because Martha was small for her age. At six you could like barely see her. So they let her stay home and it was pretty interesting because that’s when Katie and Mom came up with the bright idea of getting some of the Smokehill staff to teach us stuff, now there were two of us, so it was a “class.” So it wasn’t just Mom, Dad, the computer, and the boring out-of-date textbooks from Wilsonville we barely pretended to use.