Cecily is sixteen years old, and there is a dragon in the barn.
She has been coming to the hayloft once a week for the last three years. She tells the dragon everything. She doesn’t know if it’s listening to her or not. She doesn’t need to know. She told it about her first kiss (two summers ago, at the creek, when Nolan dared her to kiss him instead of daring her to jump off the rock). She told it about her mother falling down the stairs (it happened right in front of her, and she felt a bigger jump of terror than she would have predicted, but the next day everything went back to normal and her mother was just as distant as always, only with a big bruise on her leg). She told it about running away from home, back when she was making plans to run away from home, and she told it about deciding that the risk of getting caught wasn’t worth the reward of making it to the city and disappearing forever.
“Besides,” she added, chucking a handful of iron between her feet, “if I disappeared, who would feed you?”
Today, she’s in the barn, and she starts talking before she even finishes climbing the ladder.
“Nolan kissed me again,” she says. A cobweb catches at her hair, and she swipes it away as she crawls toward the edge of the loft, shuddering—she hates that feeling, the cling and drag and the phantom itch of tiny legs on her neck. “He kissed me! I went to town to get eggs and he was there, and he walked me home, and he kissed me right at the edge of the field, can you believe it?”
Cecily knows that she should be suspicious of this boy. You don’t need to tell her that. She knows that boys are trouble, and she knows that she’s not allowed to date, and she knows what her mother and father would call her if they found out about Nolan. She knows because they found out about it the last time Nolan kissed her, at a big picnic for the foundry workers and their families. Nolan’s father works at the foundry, and he found Nolan and Cecily kissing inside the big inflatable bouncy castle. It was there for little kids to play in but no little kids were playing in it, so Nolan and Cecily decided to go inside and see if it was as fun as it used to be, and it turned out that it was, and then they fell down and they fell together and it didn’t feel like they were in there a long time but it was long enough that Nolan’s father came looking for them.
She knows the risks, is the point. But it’s Nolan, and he holds her hand in his and he strokes her thumb with his thumb and he cups her chin in the crook of his index finger, and she thinks, maybe, possibly—
“I think I love him,” she tells the dragon.
The dragon makes a sound that Cecily has decided is a sigh. A fresh wave of that feeling drifts through the barn like cold water mixing into warm—that feeling that she used to think was anger, but now she’s pretty sure is just hunger. She drops more iron.
“I think I’m in love with him,” she says, “and I think I want to bring him home to meet Mom and Dad.”
You’re right—that does sound risky. It is risky. It will not go well. Cecily’s mother and father will not be happy to hear that she wants to bring this boy home. But Cecily will be sitting between her brothers when she tells them, and her brothers will hold her hands under the table and give her courage she doesn’t have, and she’ll stay calm and reasonable and she’ll be brave, and eventually, her father will throw his hands up and say that he’ll just have to meet the boy and see for himself.
When Nolan comes over for dinner, he will bring flowers for Cecily’s mother and whiskey for her father. He will be nervous, and he will be achingly polite. Cecily’s father will interrogate him in a way that is supposed to seem playful but is still menacing. Cecily’s mother will not say whether or not she approves. Cecily’s middle brother will pronounce him acceptable, and when everyone else has gone to bed, her oldest brother will knock on her bedroom door. He will fold her into a tight hug and tell her that she found a good one, and when he pulls away from her, there will be tears in his eyes because he knows that she’s found someone who makes her shine.
The next week, Nolan will come back for another dinner, with more flowers and more whiskey, and he will establish himself as the one who holds Cecily’s hand under the dinner table.
Cecily is seventeen and a half years old, and there is a dragon in the barn.
There is a ring on her finger.
She climbs the ladder and she’s carrying the bucket in her left hand like always, and the handle of the bucket makes the ring dig hard into the soft place where her finger meets her hand. It hurts so much, and she makes a mental note to put the ring on a chain around her neck the next week, the next time she has to climb the ladder.
If it wasn’t for that pain, she would feel those waves of hunger. She’s sure now that it’s hunger she feels, and not anger—she’s gotten used to the way it intensifies as she climbs the ladder, to the way it comes in waves if she takes too long throwing more iron down to the hulking shadow in the barn. She doesn’t usually pay attention to it, but as she climbs the ladder this time, it’s enormous, enveloping, overwhelming.
Or at least, it would be, if it wasn’t for the pain in her finger. All her attention is on that pain, and it’s just the same as when she digs her nails into her palms to get through one of her father’s tirades or one of her mother’s long, cold silences. She notices the sharpest hurt, and she ignores the rest.
When she gets to the loft, and she sets the bucket down on the wood, the pain in her finger vanishes, and then she notices the hunger. It’s blistering, white-hot, and absolute. It crushes the breath from her lungs, and she tries to make a sound, some kind of oh-no sound, but she can’t, because the second she opens her mouth it’s choking her, more hunger than she’s ever felt before, more hunger than she’s ever imagined, and it’s in her brain, and it’s in her belly, and she can’t stand it.
She throws the entire contents of the bucket of iron off the edge of the loft, and the hunger dies away a little, enough for her to cope. She gasps, heaves, drags the back of one wrist across her brow to keep sudden sweat from dripping into her eyes.
“What was that for?” she asks, breathless and indignant. There is no answer from below—only the sound of the dragon moving. She can still feel that hunger, but it’s drifting around her like the heat of a summer day now, instead of pointing at her like a flamethrower. “Shit’s sake,” she whispers. She turns the ring around on her finger nervously. “Anyway,” she says, “I’m getting married.”
Nolan asked her the night before. They were on a blanket in the field behind the barn, far enough away that the dragon’s hunger didn’t reach them, and they were looking up at the stars. Nolan was due to start working at the foundry the next week, and he wanted to ask her before he started working there. She knew he was going to, knew because her middle brother had told her that Nolan had showed up to ask her father’s permission.
“He wanted to make sure that I really wanted it,” she tells the dragon. “He said he was sorry to spoil the surprise, but he wanted to make sure that I wasn’t getting stuck in anything on account of not knowing how to say no.” She shakes her head at the shifting mass in the darkness, listens to the dragon’s slow, deep breathing. “I told him that I want it more than anything.”