Amy slips out the side door at half past nine, a secret grin spread wide across her cheeks. She steals away into the hot August sun with only a backpack and a water bottle at her side. She walks with purpose along the sidewalk, skittering onto the tough grass every few minutes just for the joy of feeling the rough blades against her bare feet. She carries her flip-flops in one hand. Her feet are calloused from too many shoeless walks. They are ugly and yellow but Amy likes them that way. They make her feel tough.
She slips into the reeds lining the marsh near the playground where no one can see her. She sits down on a dry patch of hardened mud and reeds. A bird sings overhead. Amy looks up, trying to find it. She peers through the dappled sunlight and spots it a few feet away. She just smiles and takes the book out of her backpack, cracking it open to the page where her bookmark is.
She reads for hours under the trees about dragons and runners and a wonderful world fourteen lightyears away called Pern.
Amy stares at the last page even when there is nothing left to read. A tear collects at the corner of her right eye and falls down her cheek to wet the thin paper page. It is older than she is, an old edition of Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern published in the eighties, and she knows it is a standalone book with no real sequel. It is over when she finishes that last page even if she reads it another ten times and pretends it is a new story every time. Moreta's story ends with that page. It saddens Amy: she loves the book more than she loves her own life. She wants it to be real so she can grow up and be a dragonrider and fight Thread with her beautiful golden dragon beneath her, forever a pair, never to be divided except in death.
But Pern is not real, just like Amy's mother always tells her, and Amy needs to let it go. She needs to make real friends and stop crying over things that never happened in places that never existed. Amy takes it hard when her mother takes her McCaffrey books away and bans her from going to the library at the end of the summer, saying that school comes first and this year there had better be more time studying math and English and less time reading fantasy novels.
Slowly, with increasing pressure from her mother and her teachers, Amy stops reading as much. She learns that if she can get through one class without reading a book, then she can get through another one and lunch, too, sometimes. Amy starts doodling in the corners of her notebooks and writing song lyrics instead, like everyone else. She daydreams while looking at the board and by eighth grade has forgotten why she ever needed to read everything that passed her by.
In ninth grade Amy sits in her Civics class playing with the pink and black scarf around her neck, her arms encased in wrist to elbow black-starred sleeves and her brown eyes carefully outlined in black. Her big black hoodie covers a not so shapeless form and her black skirt covers her black and pink striped tights just right. Amy is, in a word, emo. She draws skulls and sad-eyed little girls with pierced hearts, without feeling the wrist-slashing depression she knows she should to be a real emo, short for emotional, short for emotionally deprived, short for…Amy does not know. It is all a game to her. When the fohawk boy in the back row tips his chin at her she giggles and whispers to her friends.
That night she dreams of dragons, of a great shining bronze flying a beautiful golden queen in a flight so intense that Amy awakens to a bed soaked in sweat and an odd feeling between her legs. She goes to school the next day and forgets her dream for a very long time.
In twelfth grade Amy is a bored senior. School has no purpose anymore for her or her classmates. One or two still cares in French class or Statistics but not Amy. She is going to college in the fall. Never mind that it is the local community college, 'middle college' as the more talented seniors call it, because Amy knows she will be out of here in a few months. She will be eighteen and in charge of her own life and her own money, and her parents will never control her again. She will be free.
But Amy is unhappy. Her life feels pointless: she wakes up, goes to school, goes home, and starts it all over again, maybe watching MTV or Comedy Central when she gets home. She laughs at the jokes and the stupid things the people do until her dad or her stepmom get home and they eat dinner together. Her dad likes to watch the news at dinner so Amy knows a little of what is going on in the world and afterwards they watch Entertainment Tonight where she hears about the latest celebrity scandal or gossip. She goes to bed and listens to music for a while, sometimes Good Charlotte, sometimes Hinder or Fall Out Boy, or any angry, angsty song that is popular at the moment. The singers wail or scream about drugs and sex and lost loves, none of which Amy can really relate to.
She closes her eyes at the opening chords of a Linkin Park song, mouthing the words silently. Every so often she throws her head back and forth in imitation of all the old rock stars.
A tap on her window makes her look up. Amy never puts her music on loud because it hurts her ears too much even if it is hardcore. She searches the dark window for a branch that might have hit against it and shrugs when she sees nothing. She presses the back button and starts the song over again.
A sharp rap makes her look again, wondering if a stupid bird slammed into the window. She frowns and studies the window carefully for several seconds before turning back around.
Bang. This time Amy jumps up and runs to the window. Her heart pounds heavily against her ribcage and she throws the window open, cursing herself for having left the storm window up. Her dad would kill her if he knew she had it that way.
Amy checks the windowsill for any stray branches but there are none. She peers out into the dark night.
"Over here!" someone hisses, startling Amy.
She looks in the direction of the sound. There stands a boy with a helmet under his arm on her porch roof. Amy gapes at him for a moment then climbs out her window. She does not recognize him but surely he cannot be there for Gina, her stepmom, can he?
"I think you have the wrong house," she says, walking over to him.
The porch roof is fairly flat and Amy's been on it before when helping clean the gutters so it is not too hard of a walk. The boy waves at her invitingly and she smiles. Maybe I have a secret admirer, she thinks.
Amy is a step away from him when she slips on a smooth spot. The boy, not a boy at all, a definite man, grabs her by the waist and sets her carefully back on her feet.
"Hurry," he says, "We have little time before the Hatching begins."
Amy stiffens. Hatching with a capital H, like it is something important. Why does that sound so familiar? She wonders. Weird surprise date, going to watch some eggs hatch. She squints at the man in the darkness, trying to figure out who he is. Amy draws a blank, not knowing if that is a bad or good thing.\
"Hurry," he says again, a touch of a foreign accent to his speech that makes Amy's knees wobble, "Mount Hiseth and we will go."
Amy stops in her tracks, meaning to stare at him but before she realizes it, he has swept her off of the porch roof and onto some sort of gigantic animal. It snorts and propels itself into the air, spreading great wings that would have toppled the houses if they were not already so far below.
The man sitting behind her wraps his arms around her waist.
"Hold on," he whispers, wonderfully close to her ear, "Hiseth is going to take us between."
Something clicks in Amy's head as the darkness surrounds her. She opens her mouth to speak and the darkness is gone as they burst out into a brightly lit morning over a huge pocketed mountain. Down below Amy can see bursts of green and blue and brown, dragons all of them, asleep on ledges in the sun. Bulls mill about on the grassy plain below and little dots that must be people move about everywhere.
"Pern is real," she gasps as the dragon beneath her descends in a lazy spiral over Fort Weyr.
"Very real," the man agrees, a smirk playing across his handsome face, "Very, very real."