Well, we won. But most of it hasn't been much fun. Wildly exciting, some of the time, and fascinating, but rarely fun. There's been a lot of pressure on us from the beginning to go on tour, Lois and me. Gulp's too big and also too scary and also practically speaking impossible to transport. Just one kid sneaking back to watch Gulp take off from the Wal-Mart parking lot in East Styrofoam and getting a broken head from being caught in the backdraft would destroy all the good we'd done, not to mention the wear and tear on poor Gulp even if nothing went wrong. (It probably bothers me the most that she'd try to do it, if I figured out how to ask her.) And I won't risk it with Lois either — I wouldn't even when she was still small enough to squeeze in the back of a big station wagon, and the Searles still looked like they might win, and I was still desperate.
Dad backs me up, every time, when I say No tours. And he's still the head of the institute, as well as my dad. Dad says that I'm the real expert, and he's right, of course, except that "expert" is not what I am, but it takes a really big person, it seems to me, to sit back and let your barely-eighteen-year-old son take the lead in your life's work, which is essentially what my dad has done. (Have I mentioned recently that he's the real hero? The human real hero.) And yet he's as happy as a puppy in a closet full of shoes, because he can finally study his beloved dragons up close — although he's still at the early "ow ow ow" Stage of the Headache, which gets in the way. Turns out all humans get it, sometimes even some of the TV crews and they're not even trying to communicate anything except "please do something that will get me a bigger budget."
(And just by the way, Dad and I had the worst roaring and thundering argument of my entire life when he found out about my Headache. I know what it was, of course — he'd been feeling like a Bad Father all along, about everything, and especially about the eczema, even though I'd managed never to let him see it, which probably made him even more suspicious, and the truth is there are more bits of me that will never be beautiful because of Lois, and while Dad kept uneasily letting me make that decision, he didn't like it, and he was pretty sure I wasn't telling him the whole truth, which I wasn't. I never told anyone about the Headache. Because I didn't have to. And that pushed him over the edge. I kept yelling at him, "So, what were you going to do? Make me send her back?" Stupid of me maybe to tell him at all, but it was going to come out anyway as soon as he read about it here.)
I might as well be writing this as working on my dictionary because my dictionary is getting nowhere fast. Not that in some ways we aren't — getting somewhere — or I hope we are. It's pretty funny watching Lois — often now with Martha — giving Gulp her talking lessons, for example. I've told you that dragons mostly don't seem to talk out loud — or anyway what we'd call words are only maybe a quarter of dragon language and it's a support quarter, not a leading quarter. It seems to me there's a fifth fifth or sixth sixth in there somewhere that I don't even know what it is, and I think there's some kind of layers action too. . . . But meanwhile Gulp is learning to burble. What we're going to do with the burble — or the cheep, chortle, peep and whatever else — I don't know yet. But you know, why do dragons have the vocal cords and the larynxes if they don't use them? Maybe they fell out of the habit of talking out loud as they got good at the head stuff. Or maybe they stopped talking out loud after the Australian "war" with chatty, deadly humans. So we're going to begin a new habit. I hope.
But the stuff that is the most translatable into human word facsimiles is surface stuff, like where the food is, and bees go back to the hive and tell each other that, you know? And nobody gets into screaming contests about how intelligent bees are. If you were only using your ears and eyes, a dragon sentence like "There is a valley north of that hill that you can see from here, and then west of the hill beyond that which you can't see from here, but you could if you flew up a few [tree lengths? Dragon lengths? I still don't have much grip on dragon measurement and yes this is another problem] which has a good spring at the bottom of it" would come out something like "There is beyond [something] and beyond [something else] [something] of [something] good [something]." And they don't "speak" in "sentence" shapes anyway. You see why I keep getting mixed up.
I'm guessing that Bud and Gulp are still the only ones on the dragon side who are working more or less from the same page (of the dictionary, ha ha) that I am — we're the ones who had our little/big epiphanies, that first day aboveground after Gulp had brought us to Dragon Central. We're the ones who thought "Right. Here's the starting line. . . . Uh, where's the track?" Gulp is learning to talk out loud. Bud watches over my shoulder a lot when I'm using my laptop, and he's seen that graphics program. Maybe it's just as well I don't know what a dragon laugh is. And speaking of intelligence, I think that the dragons, as we go on yattering and yammering at them (and squeezing our skulls and saying "ow ow ow"), are beginning to feel about us kind of the way we feel about dogs. (And when your dog goes "roooaaaaoooow" at you don't you sometimes go "roooaaaaoooow" at him back?) And we've been living with dogs for forty thousand years and are still arguing about how best to get our point across to them.
Dad, by the way, doesn't disagree when — usually I've just come away from a particularly frustrating session with some member or members of the white coat brigade, which tends to put me in a ranting sort of mood anyway — when I say that dragons are more intelligent than humans. He says I'm prejudiced, but he doesn't disagree. He just says we don't know yet. He likes not knowing. He likes the process of finding out. It makes him happy. It's the first time since Mom died he's been happy.
And we're actually talking about her for the first time. Or not talking about her so much as just letting her be part of the conversation. Mom said this, Mom said that. (And I wish I had more of her humor when the white coats start sticking me with their specimen-impaling pins, which is what it feels like sometimes. The scientists who can't stand the headaches but don't give up easily study me.) But it's like she's part of our family again. The door's been opened. It was like nailed shut for six years but it's open now. I knew something important had happened when I heard him call her Mad, one evening, at dinner with Billy and Grace. Up till then if he mentioned her at all he called her Madeline, which he'd never used when she was alive.
It makes both of us miss her more in some ways but . . . well, it's the way it is. Somebody you loved dying isn't something you get over, you know? You get used to it because you have to. You carry it around with you — because you have to. And even after I stopped scratching my cheeks and playing Annihilate all the time and became something more like normal again from the outside, missing Mom was still in there doing stuff to me.
Since Dad and I started talking about her again I've stopped dreaming about her. This is mostly a relief, but I miss it a little bit too. And since Lois has dragons to teach her how to be a dragon I don't dream about Lois' mom either. I miss those dreams a little too. I just don't like people dying, you know? And Snark would have been way jealous of Lois, but he'd've got over it. And at least Snark was old, for a dog. It wasn't exactly okay that he died, but it so wasn't okay in any way that my mom and Lois' mom died.