The Silver Moon Elm Read online

  “I suppose,” Jennifer answered with a glance at her lacy, lilac bra. “Goodness knows if I burn your shirt off next, I’ll want to match underneath!”

  That got them giggling again.

  “Don’t forget sneakers,” Bobbie reminded her, tossing her a pair. “Flats don’t go at all with what you’ll be wearing now!”

  The outfit wasn’t exactly what Jennifer had hoped for—she felt rather conspicious with shiny yellow Lycra shorts on her butt and an overlarge red T-shirt with FRISKY written in big black letters across the front—but it was, she thought, better than the alternative.

  And it did help her learn what the huge, ugly dome was behind the school.

  “Hey” came a boy’s grainy voice behind her in study hall. “Frisky.”

  Clapping a hand to her forehead and cursing Bobbie for her casual sense of style, Jennifer turned around. “Yeah, that’s me. Frisky. Who are you—Dopey?”

  The boy sitting at the next desk was vaguely familiar to her from Winoka High—short and stocky, with lots of stubble on a ruddy face, well-muscled, crew cut, a running back on the football team. Marky? Matty? Whatever. He hung around with Bob Jarkmand, she remembered. When Bob was Bob, and men were men.

  “Frisky. That’s Bobbie’s shirt, ain’t it? Sez Frisky.”

  “I guess.”

  He chuckled through a leer. “Yeah, Frisky. I remember Bobbie bein’ frisky.”

  Stop saying frisky! “What a captivating story. I smell a Pulitzer. You should probably leave me alone and start writing your memoirs right now…”

  “Yeah,” he blundered on, oblivious to her suggestion, “we macked behind the observatory. Got real busy. That Bobbie has real fruit jiggling around her gelatin, if you know what I mean.” He sniggered, a slow sort of heh-heh-heh as he dully ogled Jennifer’s breasts.

  “How poetic. I’m sure your way with words is what unlocked the gardens of her passion. Listen, creep, I—What observatory?”

  “Huh?” His eyes stayed on her chest, perhaps still working their way through the text.

  She snapped a hand out and grabbed the flesh under his jawbone, making him gasp. Ignoring his efforts to remove her hand, she lifted his head until he was looking her in the face. “Awwwb-suuur-vaaaa-torrr-eee. There’s one in this town?” And, ick, a girl actually let you feel her up next to it?

  He nodded as best he could. “Yeah. You know. Behind the school?” His thumb jerked off to the side. “Where all the astronomy classes are?”

  Throwing the fool’s head back so that he fell off his chair, Jennifer spun around in her own seat and tried to think.

  It’s an observatory.

  Astronomy classes are held there.

  Astronomy is one of four quadrivium subjects.

  I’m not in an astronomy class, the only one of the four they excused me from.

  They put me in Spanish instead.

  I therefore have no reason to go to the observatory.

  Clever of them.

  In Spanish class, she ignored new vocabulary words like desatento and complot, and kept strategizing.

  Who did she know who went to astronomy class? Skip, Bobbie, the A-List. How about Andi? She wasn’t sure.

  Would any of them help her get in? She imagined she could count on Skip, though she was a bit perturbed at him for not telling her last night that he had a class there. Maybe it’s a morning class and he missed it the first day, like you did with Ungodly Math 909, she reasoned. She could certainly ask him about that today after school. Maybe they could even agree to sneak into the observatory before Saturday afternoon’s soccer game with Eveningstar.

  And what about Bobbie? No, she didn’t quite trust her yet. Maybe it was who she/he was at Winoka High, or maybe it was the unnerving strength she had shown with that poison in the girls’ room. But she didn’t seem the type to go along with a plan that didn’t have her in a lead role.

  That left the rest of the A-List out, since they would probably all blab to Bobbie…with the possible exception of Andi. After all, Andi knew her secret now—and she hadn’t said anything to anyone. Should she invite Andi to come along with Skip and her?

  Just as the bell rang for the end of school, she decided that she would.

  Leaving class, she was surprised to run right into Bobbie and Andi, along with Abigail, Anne, and Amy.

  “Oh! Hey, guys.” She let a corner of her mouth turn up. “You checking on me to make sure I go straight home? Don’t worry, I’m…” She trailed off when she saw their expressions. Bobbie looked angry, and Andi looked miserable again. “What’s wrong?”

  The larger girl abruptly straightened and put on a shiny smile. “Nothing! Last class was a big bummer. Mr. Frost—our mathematics and geometry teacher—is such a jerk. He spent most of the time yelling at Andi here, just because she doesn’t like going up to the blackboard to present stuff. I wish we had Slider; I hear he’s way cooler. Anyway, come on. Time for soccer practice.”

  “But I thought you wanted me to go straight home!”

  “Oh.” Bobbie tossed her tight bob of blonde hair carelessly. “Yeah, Andi and I talked about that. Your leg’s okay to walk, isn’t it? You can just come watch. Right, Andi?”

  Andi silently examined the corner of the textbook she held in her trembling hands.

  Jennifer’s head was full of clamoring alarm bells. She knows. Andi told her.

  But before she could even think to run, the other three girls had surrounded her with forced smiles, and they were hustling her down the hallway, with Bobbie in the lead and Andi trailing behind. Nobody said anything as they walked. Jennifer desperately looked around for Skip, but the hallway was full of strange and unhelpful faces.

  “You look great in that T-shirt!” Bobbie loudly called over her shoulder as she skipped into the girls’ locker room. “But I think I need it back for soccer practice. You don’t mind, do you?” This made Jennifer halt at the doorway, but six firm hands pushed her in.

  There was another group of girls passing through the locker room, and Jennifer caught a glimpse of a coach walking out a back entrance, but she knew calling for help would only make things worse. Bobbie took her by the wrist and led her over to the bench where earlier they had wrapped her leg.

  “Now.” Her strong hand let go of Jennifer’s wrist. “How about that shirt.”

  Jennifer looked from unfriendly face to unfriendly face. They were in a circle around her. Sighing, she yanked the shirt off and tossed it to Bobbie.

  “By the way,” she shot at Bobbie, “I hear that shirt’s been busy behind the observatory.”

  The remark didn’t faze Bobbie. “Sneakers.”

  She kicked them off. They made sullen thumps against the tile floor. The bottoms of her bare feet itched.

  “Shorts.”

  “Bobbie, she doesn’t have—”

  “Shut up, Andi.”

  Jennifer took the shorts off and held them out.

  “Thanks.” Bobbie winked as she took them. “You can keep the sports bra; I never had much use for it behind the observatory. Hold her, girls. I don’t want her making a move with the locker open.”

  Amy and Abigail each took tight hold of an arm. While their grips were not as strong as Bobbie’s, Jennifer didn’t bother moving. If these girls only wanted to humiliate her, then struggling would only alert others who might want to do worse. And if these girls wanted to do worse themselves…Well, she’d worry about that then.

  Bobbie undressed and put on the clothes she had lent Jennifer. “Thank goodness I had these for both of us today, huh, Jenny?” She opened up her locker—revealing a glimpse of the soccer ball, but not much else—chucked her dress clothes in, and slammed the locker shut. “You girls get dressed quick. Jenny and I will meet you out there.”

  Without another word, she grabbed Jennifer’s wrist and pulled her through the locker room.

  Jennifer panicked. “Bobbie, please, I don’t—”

  “Shut up.” The larger girl tugged harshly, making Jenni
fer stumble. Then her tone changed back to fake-sweet again. “You know, Jenny, Andi and I had the most interesting conversation with Skip in the hallway. Andi told him we learned about your little secret—the daggers, she meant—but that it was no big deal. I even mentioned we had kinda helped you out. He seemed pretty happy to hear it, and so he got to talking a bit more freely. Imagine my surprise when he didn’t talk about daggers at all!”

  Jennifer was momentarily distracted when Bobbie didn’t go through the outside exit, but rather took her past it to the locker-room exit that led to the gymnasium. They must practice indoors because of the cold. Wanting very much to go anywhere but wherever Bobbie was taking her, she strained against Bobbie’s grip and managed to kick the door open. That was as far as she got. The larger girl yanked her along the hallway, and all Jennifer had to show for her trouble was a covering of goose bumps from the sudden blast of cold air through the open doorway.

  “I got tons of information from him about you, without him suspecting a thing! Oh, by the way, I invited him to practice, but he said he couldn’t make it. I told him we’d get you home later.”

  Bobbie’s eyes gleamed with sapphire malice. Jennifer got the message: Skip would not be around to help her.

  “Of course, Andi wasn’t surprised by what Skip told us.” Bobbie’s tone turned a bit harsher. “No, Doctor Andi apparently knew already. Why she didn’t tell me, I’m not sure. I’ll handle her later. But you—” She pulled Jennifer to a stop right in front of the gymnasium door. “You I deal with now.

  “You’re going to go through that door,” she continued. “Most of the varsity squad had free time last period, so there are a bunch of players already out there practicing, not counting coaches and parents and everyone else. Big game coming up Saturday, remember?”

  “Yeah.” Jennifer’s throat was getting dry. “I remember.”

  “Good. Anyway, when you go through that door, you’re either going to look like you look now”—she reached out with a fast hand and snapped the elastic of Jennifer’s underwear with a cruel grin—“or you’re going to change into what you really are.”

  Jennifer swallowed hard. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Through the door, Jenny.”

  “I’ll leave another way. Please. I’ll never come back if you don’t want me to, I swear.”

  Bobbie’s eyes traveled up and down her body. “If you wanna lose what little you’re wearing, keep talking.”

  The sounds of girls whispering and laughing increased. Bobbie’s friends were coming, having wasted no time in changing so they could see what would happen next. Jennifer couldn’t go back that way. But she couldn’t go through this door either—not dressed like she was, and certainly not as a dragon.

  “Bobbie—”

  “Fine.” The girl lunged forward. As Jennifer lost her breath against the cement wall behind her, she felt Bobbie’s hand reaching under a shoulder strap and pulling hard on the sports bra. A sudden kick to Jennifer’s wounded calf made her gasp.

  “Bobbie, no! Don’t! Please!”

  A fast, stiff elbow caught her across the chin. The shock of the blow disoriented Jennifer long enough for Bobbie to flip her around so she faced the wall, with an arm twisted painfully against her bare back. “Don’t try to fight, Jenny. You can’t win.”

  Head swimming with pain, fear, and humiliation, Jennifer closed her eyes, clenched her teeth, and began to cry. Where were her friends? Where was her school? Where were her parents? Wasn’t anyone going to help her?

  The catcalls from down the hallway answered her question. “Hey, Bobbie, wait up! We’ll get the bottom half!”

  Blubbering in short, mucus-filled whistles, Jennifer shoved back against Bobbie, but the larger girl had her pinned. “They’re all going to see you,” she whispered in Jennifer’s ear, breath reeking of onions. She managed to get one strap down over an elbow. “All of you.”

  Jennifer’s muscles strained violently and her spine rippled, but she couldn’t go anywhere. Her left arm was pinned by Bobbie’s efforts to pull down the bra strap. The right was secured by Bobbie’s superior strength. Her brain buzzed with the struggle for freedom.

  Change? the dragon inside asked desperately.

  Not unless you want to die faster, she answered herself.

  The humming in her brain got louder. Her ears were pounding. Her whistling breaths got shorter and shriller. The other girls were shrieking with laughter. Someone besides Bobbie grabbed her ankles and pulled her feet up off the floor. As she struggled helplessly against the army of hands that held every limb, they took her over to the gym doors. She felt a hand slide down her hip—

  —and then the shrieks turned to screams.

  The arms and hands on her abruptly let go. Jennifer collapsed to the floor as hundreds of black needles flew through the hallway, wings buzzing furiously as they drove themselves into the other girls’ arms, legs, and heads.

  Dragonflies, she told herself, barely believing the swarm that had come to save her. Not quite fire hornets, but let’s not be choosy. She crawled a few feet away as Bobbie and the others flailed at the gathering swarm of insects. Looking up, she realized she only had one real way out of this, and it was now or never.

  She got to her feet, steeled herself…and burst through the gymnasium doors.

  If those she saw next were surprised at the nearly naked girl that came running at them, Jennifer was no less stunned at the scene before her.

  The gymnasium at Pinegrove High was the exact dimensions as the one she remembered from Winoka High. The floor was familiar hardwood painted cobalt and maize, and the bleachers on either side of her entrance were still uncomfortable plastic. The entire wall opposite was glass, which had always given an excellent view of the athletic fields outside. This November afternoon, there was the slimmest of crescent moons in the darkening afternoon sky.

  Everything else was deeply wrong.

  There was a soccer net on each end of the gym—or at least Jennifer guessed they were nets. Really, they were two massive webs stretched over the painted cement walls, thirty feet high and thirty feet across. Between these nets, five or six students in spider form were kicking around soccer balls—several at a time—and jumping higher than Jennifer had ever seen a player jump. It looked like eight soccer games happening in midair at once.

  What kind of soccer is this?!

  Not important! she answered herself angrily, forcing herself to keep running. Get moving! You have to do it now!

  She sprinted between the bleachers and out onto the gymnasium floor. Turning, she could take in the dozens of human-shaped parents, little brothers, and others—Cripes, is that the school’s AV class with a video camera?—in the bleachers she had just run past. The spiders stopped playing and stared. The parents and little boys stopped talking and stared. The AV team stopped talking, stared…and apparently kept filming.

  They don’t know what you are, she tried to reassure herself as goose bumps had their way with every inch of her skin. Not until the others get out here. Taking a deep breath, she forced more tears down her cheeks and put a hand up to her mouth in her best imitation of a horror-stricken teenaged girl. Given her surroundings, it wasn’t difficult.

  “Bobbie Jarkmand’s a weredragon!” she screamed in despair, pointing back with an unsteady finger. “She’s in the girls’ locker room, attacking Andi and the other girls with a swarm of dragonflies!”

  A gasp went through the crowd. “That’s impossible!” one of the coaches said, but Jennifer could see his doubt and fear. “I’ve seen her morph! She’s no dragon!”

  “She’s half-and-half, I swear!” Jennifer persisted through renewed sobs, mind racing to stay ahead of her audience. She swatted vainly at thin air. “We didn’t mean to make her do it, I’m sorry, we didn’t mean to! We were teasing her about her skinny spider shape after she morphed for practice, and then she got angry, and we got into a fight, and she changed again, but this time she…Oh, God, somebody please help
me! HEEEEELP MEEEEEEE!!!!”

  With that, she took one last swipe at an absolutely harmless dragonfly that possessed the good grace to wander into the gym at that moment. Then she turned to run for her only possible escape route—the double doors that opened to the outside.

  It worked brilliantly. Seeing clear evidence of Jennifer’s sinister dragonfly-assault theory, every person in the gymnasium roared in outrage. Parents bloated themselves into eight-legged shapes, and the players already in spider form charged for the door to the girls’ locker room. Jennifer had an uncontested path to freedom.

  As she charged through the glass doors—which, to her delight, set off the fire alarm and automatic sprinkler system—Jennifer thought with no small satisfaction of how beaten and bruised Bobbie might get in the ruckus, before anyone could figure out what had really happened.

  Feeling the chill of November on her skin, she slipped into dragon form and took to the air, saying a silent prayer of thanks to the dragonflies she left behind.

  “Jennifer?!” The voice from below startled her.

  Pulling up and hovering, she turned to see Nakia Brandfire on the sidewalk below, in jogging sweats and sneakers. Her elegant Egyptian features stared up in terror. She saw me change, Jennifer realized.

  “That’s right,” she answered defiantly. “My name’s Jennifer Scales. I’m a weredragon. And so are you, I’ll bet. Your grandmother was Winona Brandfire, who’s the eldest dragon. When the universe is right. I can get it back, Catherine. I can make it right for dragons like us. But I need your help. Change now, and come with me!”

  “Change?” The question came meekly.

  “Yes!” Jennifer turned nervously to the gym’s glass walls. Everyone was still stuffed into the hallway to the locker rooms, but this wouldn’t last long.

  “Um…okay.”

  Nakia flexed her body…and to Jennifer’s horror sprouted two huge brown claws, eight milky tan legs, and a black stinger that dangled over her segmented midsection.

  “Oh, Catherine…”

  “My name’s Nakia,” the huge scorpion insisted with a sudden vehemence that made Jennifer pull back in midair. “And I don’t know why you keep calling me Catherine, but my grandmother Winona was the shame of our family. I’m glad she’s dead now! Really glad!”