Save the Dragons!. Martin Berman-Gorvine
these nasty arguments and my own uncertain future.
Even if I could get enough scholarships and student loans to go to college, what was waiting for me after that? If I was lucky, some cubicle job so I could repay those loans, and if I wasn’t, the same sort of scrabbling to make ends meet that Mom did.
All the adventures had been lived, all the fights worth having were over, unless I could somehow escape from all this—and Gloria’s Gateway Books offered a way.
* * * *
At last the click of a key turning in the front door lock. I stood up, clutching the bundle of letters from Dad.
Mom didn’t see me at first—she was talking to herself as she walked in, sorting through the day’s mail. She still had on her waitress uniform, that horrible short skirt that makes her legs look fat, the blue blouse with her name tag clipped to it, and the pink hairband holding back her curly black hair.
She must have forgotten that I’d stayed home from school, because she gave a start when she looked up.
“Teresa, oh! Are you feeling better?” She reached out to check my forehead.
I stepped back.
“Teresa, what the—what are you doing dressed in those clothes? You can’t be planning to go out when you stayed home sick from school today!”
I silently held out the letters. Her eyes flicked to them, then back to me.
“What were you doing in my room?”
“How come you never gave me Dad’s letters?”
She sat down suddenly and avoided my eyes.
“I didn’t want you hurt,” she said.
“What?”
“Your father left. He left! He wasn’t coming back. He was out having his fun. All those stupid letters from him would have just confused you. They would have made you miss him all the more. It was simpler this way. I just wanted to make it easier for you.” She raised her chin and looked at me with a gleam in her eye that reminded me of Nana. “I was going to give them to you when you were old enough to understand. Why else would I have kept them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you felt guilty about not letting me have them.”
“That is not true! I just wanted to protect you, protect what was left of your childhood.”
“Mom, I was fifteen! I think I was old enough to decide for myself. And Heather says Dad did send you money!”
“Oh, so it’s ‘Heather says’ now. Fine, yes, he sent me a little something now and then. Might as well have been nothing. And Heather didn’t have to struggle to keep the house. Heather didn’t have to take extra jobs to make enough money to keep you fed and clothed.”
“Well, maybe you’ll be able to stop worrying about that soon.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Where are you going?”
But I just slammed the door behind me.
Chapter 6
I was crying as I made my way through the gathering dark toward Gloria’s Gateway Books. I kept dabbing at the tears with the back of my stupid baby-blue mittens. Another example of how Mom thinks I’m still a little kid!
Did I want Tom to see me like this? His first glimpse of the girl who (I hoped) would be the love of his life to be an ugly snot-nosed mess? No, of course not. But I couldn’t stop crying.
At that moment I hated Mom and Dad and Heather for making me so miserable, and I’d always hated my classmates for treating me like a freak. Kylie was the worst of the bunch. The only person in this world who had ever really cared for me was Nana, and she was dead.
As soon as I met Tom, I would beg him to let me stay in his world with him. I would seek asylum, yes I would, in his British America! I’d never go back, and instead of fighting over me, everybody could fight over who had made me run away. All they wanted to do was fight anyway, so they’d be happy. And Kylie and her gang could go on being shallow self-absorbed little b-words, but they’d have nobody to be mean to any more.
Relax and enjoy the walk, Gloria’s note had said. There wasn’t much chance of that, and the crummy neighborhood I walked through seemed grayer and more run-down. But somehow my feet knew where to take me even if my head didn’t, and before it got completely dark I saw the welcoming light of the bookstore.
I ran to the door and pushed it open, startling Tiferet from her perch atop a stack of books that I hadn’t seen before. Maybe Tom’s already here, and these are all the books he’s going to buy! Tiferet turned into an orange streak and disappeared into the back.
“Sorry, kitty,” I called. “Tom? Tom, are you there?”
No answer. I followed the cat into the gloom, toward the secret back room. The doorway I’d made stood before me, and I heard someone moving around.
“Tom?” I called again, over the pounding of my heart. A hard rubber ball in my chest that kept bouncing against my rib cage.
Was that a muffled voice? I peeked into the hidden room, but no one was there. The bare light bulb dangled from its cord, casting sharp shadows on those heaps of incredible books.
The shadows shifted. I blinked once, twice. Could it be? Sure enough, the light bulb swayed, as if someone had just brushed past it.
“Tom?” I shouted.
A muffled voice said “Teresa?”
“Tom! Tom, where are you?”
“I am here in the back room!” the voice said.
“Huh? But I’m in the back room!” I said.
“Well, I am here as well. Right in the corner where the audio platters are.”
Audio platters? Oh, he must mean records! I turned. A stack of vinyl records sat in the far corner, all right, but no one was standing there. Where was the voice coming from? It sounded like whoever it was, was standing right beside me, yet the voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, even from inside my body.
Suddenly I started shivering so hard that my teeth clattered together, even though the room was too warm. A cat yowled and I jumped. That noise too seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, but then Tiferet bounded from of the corner where Tom had claimed he was standing. She leaped into my arms. Then things got really weird.
* * * *
It was harder bidding everyone farewell on Sunday afternoon than I expected. A good deal harder. In fact, it had not been so difficult for me to part with them since I first left for boarding school three years ago. I even shed a few tears.
“Stop crying, big brother, you look like a total idiot,” Jo whispered as she hugged me.
“I shall make you pay for that,” I whispered as I hugged her back.
“You’re not going to forget to send me that voicegram, will you, Tommy? So I can know if you found your Teresa?”
“Perhaps I shall,” I said.
Dad pretended not to notice that I was crying, but he patted me on the back in addition to his usual handshake.
“You keep those marks up, Tommy,” he said. “I’m holding a place open for you at the DRRAGON base. We’re doing exciting research that I didn’t have time to tell you about this weekend. And I have my own special side project as well. I just know you’ll want to be a part of both projects.”
“Thank you, Dad,” I said softly.
A hug from Mum was what I needed most. “I do not know what is bothering you, Tommy boy, but remember we all love you,” she said, softly so as not to give Jo ammunition or make me look unmanly in front of Dad.
And really, what was bothering me? I waved goodbye