“You don’t need to check the kettle,” Cecily’s father said. “Stay. Let’s talk about this idea Cecily has.”
Oh. That was new. The raw patch on Cecily’s chin throbbed. Cecily and her brothers exchanged glances, wondering if this was a trap.
“Well, I just wondered—”
“You didn’t wonder,” Cecily’s father said, pointing at her with the tip of his knife. “You decided that you know best.”
Cecily’s oldest brother stared at his lap. Yes, it was a trap, and it was already too late for any of them to escape. Cecily would have liked to say that she didn’t decide anything, that she didn’t think she knew best, but that would have been arguing, and arguing is even worse than deciding. A small, quiet part of her whispered that maybe she did know best, and after all, why couldn’t her ideas be good? She cupped that small, quiet part of her in her hands and crushed it, fast and merciless.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at her father’s hands because she was supposed to look at him when she was talking to him but she wasn’t supposed to look willful.
“Why are you sorry?” he asked.
Oh. That was new, too. She looked up at her brothers for help, but they looked as confused as she felt.
Another trap.
“I’m sorry for saying something stupid,” she said. “I didn’t think—”
“No,” her father interrupted, “you didn’t think.”
When he said that, Cecily’s eyes burned with tears, because this, at last, was familiar territory. She knew what to expect. As her father talked about her attitude and her thoughtlessness and everything else that was wrong with her, she swallowed those relieved tears back, because they’d only make things worse. She also swallowed back laughter, because this, at last, was the easy part.
So, you may wonder why Cecily climbs the ladder instead of simply opening up the barn door. Cecily would tell you why, herself, if she knew how to say it. But she is only ten years old, brave and bony and trying not to fall off a wet ladder, and it’s too hard to explain to a stranger who has never sat at her dinner table.
Cecily is thirteen years old, and there is a dragon in the barn.
She takes the bucket up the ladder every week now. Both of her brothers work at the foundry, and bringing home iron is their contribution to the dragon. She’s strong, and the bucket doesn’t seem as heavy as it used to, although it’s still heavy enough to dig grooves into her hands even with the kitchen rag wound around the handle. One of her brothers did put some cross bracing between the ladder and the barn, so it’s fixed in place now and she can climb it almost as fast with the bucket in her hand as without it.
Every summer, Cecily goes swimming in the deep part of the creek. Some of the boys from town like to dare each other to jump off a high rock, and they holler on the way down and try to make the biggest splashes they can. Cecily joins them sometimes. She used to get water up her nose, but this summer her middle brother taught her how to hold her breath and push a little bit of air out through her nostrils so that she doesn’t come up spluttering.
That’s how the dragon’s anger feels now. Cecily has learned how to be okay, how to breathe and climb and let the anger pass over her in waves, and she’s not afraid of it. She’s started to wonder if it’s really anger, or if it’s something else, something that only dragons feel, something that she’s always thought of as anger because she never knew how to look out for anything different.
And because, you know. It’s a dragon. You would assume it was angry, too.
Usually, Cecily takes the bucket up the ladder and pulls it into the hayloft behind her. Usually, she scrambles into the hayloft on all fours, dragging the bucket across the wood with one hand and feeling her way to the edge of the loft with the other. Usually, she tosses the contents of the bucket over that edge, and she listens to the sound of the dragon huffing and the scrape of its claws in the dirt and the dark. Usually she leaves as fast as she can.
But that’s not what she’s going to do today. She’s decided. She’s been deciding for months now, and she’s been chickening out for months, and today’s the day. She’s going to do it. Really, she is.
She climbs up the ladder. She scrambles into the hayloft. She feels for the edge of the loft.
She swings her legs over the edge.
She sits.
“Hello?” she calls down into the darkness. There is no answer.
Cecily picks up a piece of scrap iron out of the bucket, a big sharp curly piece, all black at the ends, that must have hurt whichever of her brothers had to carry it home in his pocket. She drops it between her knees and hears it hit the dirt a ways below her. Then comes the sound of the dragon moving, a sound like scrap iron shifting in a bucket, a sound like the frame of a ladder rattling, the sound of a house settling in the night when it’s dark and you’re six and you’re scared of monsters and you only hope that a blanket will hide you from whatever’s in the walls.
“I got my period today,” Cecily says. Her eyes are starting to adjust, and she can see that one part of the darkness below her is denser than the rest. “Seems like it should be a bigger deal than it is, but Mom just gave me a menstrual cup. I wish she’d let me use tampons,” she adds, although she isn’t sure if that’s true or if maybe she’s just saying it because it’s something different that doesn’t hurt too much to long for. “Anyway, there’s nobody I can tell about it other than her, and she doesn’t think it matters that much. So I thought I’d tell you.”
She throws another piece of scrap iron down, a flat piece the size of her palm. She can’t hear the dragon eating, but she can kind of see it moving, unless that’s just her eyes playing tricks on her.
“I thought you’d be scary,” she says. “I thought my period would be scary, too. I always think everything will be scarier than it is, but it all just kind of feels flat and weird and sometimes I wish I could die because it would be like running away forever and no one could ever be mad at me again—” She claps her hands over her mouth. She’s never said that out loud before. Where did all of that come from?
You are thinking that the dragon played a trick on her. You are thinking that maybe this is a dragon that feeds on emotions, that maybe it is pulling them out of her and hurting her in a way she doesn’t understand. You are thinking that her father was right to keep her from opening the barn door.
Cecily is thinking those things, too. But then she takes her hands away from her mouth, and she drops half the bucket of scrap iron off the edge of the loft, and she starts talking again, slower. She tells the dragon so many things—secrets and feelings and fears and wishes. The dragon listens, or maybe it doesn’t, maybe it just eats what she’s given it. Maybe it completely ignores her.
She doesn’t care. She’s never been able to talk to anyone about these things, and now she can, and they rise up in her like a shiver racing up a spine. Here is someone who will not get angry at her for feeling afraid or alone, someone who has time to listen to her, someone who might not be on her side but who definitely isn’t the enemy.
Finally, Cecily has found someone who she can talk to about the fact that there is a dragon in the barn.