School Read online

  SCHOOL

  Nathaniel Hardman

  Copyright © 2021 by Nathaniel Hardman

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission, except as allowed by fair use provisions.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination; any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Any references to real locales are used fictitiously.

  ISBN: 979-8576-7967-55 (paperback)

  ASIN: B08SVMGJYD (e-book)

  ASIN: B08WJ6P6F2 (audiobook)

  Cover art by Angel Martin

  Published by Kindle Direct Publishing

  PROLOGUE

  Tuynomosh, king of the Suyxo, stopped walking and cocked his head. Sounds of the night forest murmured around him – the whisper of a breeze through pine-fern needles, a bird’s cry, the scurry of a stinging lizard. He listened.

  Shaking his head, the king pushed through the underbrush into the moonlit clearing ahead. A cloud of neon butterflies rose up from the forest floor and scattered around him like shards of shattered rainbow.

  He felt a pang at what he was about to do, but he would do it. As long as the Chushr continued to dominate the skies, the Suyxo would never get out from under their thumb. They would never be free.

  Tuynomosh nodded to himself and raised his wand. He would do more than burn a few trees to gain the tool he needed to beat the Chushr.

  “Keshu,” he said, “Keshu, keshu, keshu, keshu...Oqur!” A flame burst from the tip of his wand into the dead branches scattered under the trees. “Keshu, keshu, keshu...” he continued to chant, a string of fire streaming from his wand.

  The fire caught on and began to grow. Flames spread through the grass, climbing up the nearest tree trunk. Smoke from the still-green grass and tree billowed up into the sky.

  Across the clearing to his right, another tree flickered, then sprang to life. A dozen boughs stretched toward the fire, shaking out a downpour of water like a dog just out of a pool. The fire hissed and shrank.

  Tuynomosh smiled. The tree man had come.

  Turning his wand on the leafy giant, Tuynomosh shouted, “Choshoythmu!”

  A ribbon of rippling air burst from his wand to connect with the trunk of the tree man, who had begun clawing at the ground with finger-like branches, tearing up chunks of dirt to throw on the fire. He rumbled in surprise as the spell hit him and swayed backward, his root-like tentacles straining and groaning to hold him upright.

  The spell would have paralyzed a normal man, but the tree man only turned, and for one lingering second, he made eye contact with Tuynomosh – sad, apple-sized green irises locking onto the king’s own black ones.

  “Choshoythmu!” Tuynomosh shouted again, but the spell hit only a tree, standing dumbly where the tree man had just been.

  A whistling in the air gave him a split second’s warning, and Tuynomosh dove away as a branch-arm lashed out from behind him. The tree man was there, swinging at the king with a dozen arms like clubs.

  “Keshu,” The king hissed as he rolled back, then rolled again. “Keshu, keshu, keshu, keshu… Oqur!” An instant before the fireball hit the tree man, he flickered, and the fire hit only a tree, standing innocent in a suddenly quiet forest.

  Tuynomosh cursed, then charged forward. “Keshu, keshu, keshu, keshu!” he shouted, sending flames up into the branches of the defenseless tree. If the tree man wanted to hide behind his flock, Tuynomosh would turn the whole forest to ashes.

  A rock the size of a man’s torso came hurtling out of the darkness to his left. He had no time to duck or dodge; it slammed into the shield of magic an inch from his head with bone-shaking force. A half dozen of his protective beads exploded to dust, and he went flying through the air.

  Tuynomosh lay on his back, blinking up into the starry sky, trying to clear his spinning head. The stars and moon swirled and danced. Branches above him swayed in the wind.

  There was no wind.

  “Choshoythmu!” he shouted. The tree man recoiled as the spell hit him in the face. “Choshoythmu!” Tuynomosh shouted again. The tree man drunkenly pushed his branch-arms down toward the king, trying to block the spells even as he swayed.

  Twiggy finger-claws raked across Tuynomosh, digging blindly for the wand or for blood or both. “Choshoythmu!” the king yelled, again and again.

  The tree man flickered, replaced by a leaning, misshapen tree. Tuynomosh panted, wiped blood from his eyes, and pushed himself to his feet. He would not stop. Not while the tree man had the key to breaking the Chushr. He raised his wand to the crooked tree.

  “Keshu-” he began.

  PART 1

  PRE-SCHOOL

  ONE

  “Maybe you should just transfer back to seventh-grade math.” Jeff’s friend Nacho suggested over the rumble of the bus’s engine. “With me.”

  “No,” Jeff grimaced, “I did all that testing, got all those signatures… Plus,” a grin spread across his face, “Seventh-grade math is too easy.” Then his face fell again, and he groaned, leaning his head against the seat in front of them. “I just wish everyone didn’t hate me so much for skipping ahead.”

  The bus jerked to a stop, and a dozen or so kids shuffled to their feet and into the aisle, dragging backpacks, saying goodbyes to friends.

  “It’ll blow over,” Nacho said as Jeff scooted past him. Up ahead, at the front of the bus, Jeff could see his sister Suzy with her friends – the pretty, popular girls, each wearing half a dozen campaign buttons, ribbons, or bracelets with slogans like “Suzy for President” and “Jenny for Historian.”

  Suzy was waving goodbyes all around, calling out to Karen to “Call me later!” even as she walked down the steps and onto the sidewalk.

  No one was calling goodbyes to Jeff.

  “And I wish Suzy weren’t in my class,” he muttered.

  At the front of the bus, he glanced over as he passed Jenny’s bench. His sister’s friend turned and smiled. Jeff’s breath caught. He smiled back, started to wave, and managed a, “See y…” before he registered that she was smiling, not at him, but at Peter Johnson behind him.

  His wave caught her attention. Jeff saw her eyes move from Peter to him. Her brow furrowed.

  He panicked. “See ya later…Bus driver!”

  “What’s that?” the bus driver asked. “Oh. Yes, I’ll see you tomorrow.” She gave him a grandmotherly sort of smile.

  “Ha!” Peter laughed from behind him as he gave Jeff a shove. “Jeff’s in love with the bus driver!”

  Jeff ducked his head and hurried out onto the street.

  He kicked a pebble home, trailing his sister, who didn’t look up from her phone once. By the time he walked through the front door of his house, she was already in her bedroom.

  Jeff patted his old mutt Dusty, dumped his backpack, kicked off his shoes, and collapsed on the couch.

  “See ya later, Bus driver,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head.

  So dumb.

  He unpinned the “Suzy for President” button from his own shirt and stuffed it between the couch cushions.

  He needed to get to his homework, but he felt too antsy. His mind rebounded painfully from the glares of his math class this morning to the awkward moment with Jenny on the bus. He turned on the TV for a distraction, waving away a black housefly that was buzzing around his head.

  Why hadn’t he just said bye to Jenny? Even if they weren’t friends, that would have been way less weird than shouting goodbye to the bus driver. He shook his head in disgust, then shooed away the fly again.

  He scrolled through Netflix for something to watch and paused at a gameshow. Jeff pictured
himself on the show and wondered if winning it would make him more or less cool in the eyes of his classmates. More cool, he concluded, and pulled out his phone to search for how to get on a gameshow.

  The fly landed on his head.

  Jeff tried to ignore it, but he could feel it walking on his hair, and for one insane moment, his brain associated flies and the brown of his hair with manure, and he thought the fly was going to lay eggs in his hair.

  He jumped up and swatted furiously all around his head.

  Jeff stood panting, looking around the room, just daring the fly to try and land on him again. As he picked his phone back up, he felt hungry and walked to the kitchen for a snack. Coming back to the living room, he smelled a strange spice, an exotic smell, and he looked suspiciously down at his potato chips.

  He licked one. It was salty.

  As he started in on his snack, the fly buzzed back over. Growling, he went back to the kitchen for the fly swatter. It better not lay eggs on my chips, he thought.

  When he returned with the fly swatter, he paused, staring. The fly perched on his bowl of chips was very green.

  He blinked. Vivid, bottle green. And the shape was wrong, more pokey than it should have been. Jeff ran back to the kitchen, to the junk drawer, for the magnifying glass, which wasn’t there.

  “Suzy!” he yelled, “Where’s the magnifying glass?”

  “Yeesh. You don’t need to yell,” Suzy said as she walked into the kitchen. She pulled an apple from the fruit basket and began washing it.

  “So do you know where the magnifying glass is?” Jeff demanded.

  “No.”

  “You don’t have ANY idea?”

  “No.”

  “Could you be less helpful?”

  “Probably.” Suzy took a bite of the apple, chewed slowly, swallowed. “Why do you want the magnifying glass?”

  “There’s this weird fly in the living room, and I want to look at it.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Well, it’s green and kind of spiny or,”

  “Gross.” Suzy cut him off. “Weren’t you and Nacho burning stuff with it last week?”

  “Yeah, but I put it back in the junk drawer,” Jeff lied. As soon as Suzy had said “Nacho,” Jeff remembered.

  “Well, I don’t know where it is then,” Suzy said. “It goes in the junk drawer.”

  “Yeah…” Jeff said. He waited until Suzy looked down at her phone and then ran out the sliding door to the backyard. The magnifying glass was lying in the dirt of the garden, water-spotted and rusted around the rim. He felt a twinge of guilt as he walked back in, polishing the lens with his t-shirt.

  “Sure you put it back in the drawer, huh?” Suzy said, looking smug.

  Jeff shrugged. “You wanna see this cool fly?”

  His sister checked her phone, gave a longsuffering sigh, and followed Jeff into the living room.

  The fly was back on the chips, eating. Jeff didn’t think you could usually tell when flies were eating. He eased forward with the magnifying glass.

  “What the...” Suzy breathed as she squinted through the lens with Jeff. “You know what that looks like?”

  “Yeah,” whispered Jeff.

  He could see the tiny jaw open, snap down, chew. He saw it toss back its head to swallow. He could see the minuscule talons gripping the edge of the chip. He could see the wings, dark green, folded, pointing up from the spiked back. He could see the tail twitching back and forth.

  Suzy put her hand on the magnifying glass and pushed it forward. Jeff pulled back. The fly flew away.

  “Jeff, you dork! You made it fly away!”

  “Look! It’s there. Shhhh! Don’t scare it off.” They froze. “Suzy, go get a cup. Let’s catch it.”

  “Uhhh… No.” Suzy straightened up, recovering from the enthusiasm of the moment. “I’ll leave that to you.”

  “Come on! Just help me for a sec.”

  Suzy grumbled something but stepped to the kitchen, reached around to the little basket of paper cups their mother always kept on hand, and slipped one off the top. She moved back toward Jeff, holding out the cup.

  The fly took off.

  Suzy squealed and jumped back. Jeff tried to swat it with his hand. He lost it for a moment. Then he saw it again, walking up the window. In one fluid movement, Suzy lifted the cup, stepped forward, and slapped it against the window.

  “Did you get it!? Did it get away?” Jeff was dancing.

  “Calm down. Yeah, I got it. Can you see it through the cup at all?”

  “No. Why did you use a paper cup? Now we can’t even see it.”

  Suzy pursed her lips. “Here. Get a piece of paper. We’ll slide it up,” she waved one-handed at the cup and window, “and then you can put it in a glass cup.”

  Jeff leapt over to his backpack, still sitting with his shoes by the front door. He whipped out a notebook, ripped out a page and thrust it out to Suzy. She held it flat against the window under the cup, then began to slide it up.

  “This feels—” Suzy began, then yelped.

  The cup had caught on fire.

  Suzy yanked her hand back, sending the flaming cup tumbling through the air. Jeff’s eyes bugged out as it landed on the carpet.

  “Put it out!” Suzy screamed.

  “With what?!” Jeff spun frantically, looking for an extinguisher.

  “Just stamp it with your foot!”

  “YOU stamp it!” He yelled back. He picked up a couch cushion. It was creamy white. “Ahhhh!” he war-cried.

  He stamped it out with his foot.

  A few minutes later, as Jeff vacuumed up debris, his mind was churning: It was green. It had wings and a tail. It breathed FIRE – how else to explain the cup?

  What else could it be… but a dragon?

  Some small part of him thought there had to be a more logical explanation, but he pushed that down as he pictured himself catching the dragon, raising it, showing it off, now puppy-sized, now horse-sized, now HUGE, to the kids at school. No one, he thought as he pulled the rug over to cover the burn mark, No one could pretend owning a dragon wasn’t awesome.

  Jeff straightened up and looked around the room.

  He was going to catch that fly.

  “Hey, are you going over to Nacho’s house tonight?” Suzy called from the kitchen. “‘Cause Jenny and Karen are coming over, so you need to go somewhere else.”

  “Yeah, maybe I’ll do something with Nacho…” Jeff said. His mind was racing. He needed to catch the fly, but in some way where he would come off manly and impressive in front of Suzy’s friends.

  If only it were a big dragon.

  Was there any plausible chain of events that would end with him striding through the door, shirtless, a sheen of sweat on his manly chest, maybe a trickle of blood running down his cheek from an artful cut on his forehead, maybe trailing Nacho, who’d be laughing at something he had just said? He’d see his sister’s friends sitting there, and a look of surprise would cross his face – a confident, masculine look of surprise – and Jenny would blush prettily at the sight of him and look away. But then she’d glance back with a coy little smile...

  “Yeah,” he sighed dreamily. “Nacho and uh, we’ll do something.”

  Suzy poked her head into the room to scowl at him. “At HIS house. You’ll do something at his house.”

  “Well, Suz, I’ve gotta catch that fly first before I go anywhere. What if that little dragon got stuck somewhere in the house and decided to burn its way out again? It could burn the whole house down! Plus, I just really want to show it to everyone.”

  “Yeah,” Suzy said, “The DRAGON? I don’t know...”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “Was it really THAT different from a normal fly?”

  “It had a tail! And talons! And it breathed fire!”

  “Well, what if it was just, like, the window made a glare or something, like the magnifying glass, and that was what burned the cup.”

  “Windows don’t d
o that! If windows made glares that set things on fire, every house in America would have burned down by now.” Jeff had gotten loud.

  “Why every house in America?”

  “‘Cause every house in America has windows!”

  “Well yes, but so do all the houses in other countries.”

  “Not in Africa. Or in other poor countries.”

  They argued this point until Suzy lost interest and walked to her room with a “Whatever,” and Jeff walked back into the living room to look for the fly.

  To his dismay, he found it.

  The fly was dead, lying in a fold of the curtain on the windowsill.

  He scrambled for the magnifying glass, which he had dropped on the couch, and peered through it. The fly looked smaller and drier than it had a few minutes ago, and the color was less vibrant. But the shape, the spikiness, and the tail still seemed very dragonish.

  “Dang it,” Jeff muttered. He stared for a long moment. Suzy came back down from her room, saw him staring, and joined him.

  “So weird,” she breathed, squinting into the magnifying glass.

  “You know, we can’t show it breathing fire now,” Jeff mused. “But it’s still pretty cool, right? We could still show it to people. I wish it weren’t all curled up like that…” He pulled a pen out of his backpack and inched it toward the little corpse. Suzy squirmed and made a half-hearted protest as Jeff’s pen tip went under one wing and gently rolled the creature over.

  “Hmm,” Jeff said, “I was trying to open up its wings, but it’s all clenched together. Let’s get some pins.” Suzy hissed in revulsion and hurried out of the room.

  “What?” Jeff said. “It’s just like a bug collection. You pin down the wings so you can see it clearly.”

  “Bug collections are the grossest things in the world.”

  “Not as gross as balut.” Suzy made no response to this, so Jeff continued, “Do you know what balut is? In the Philippines, they take an egg and bury it in the ground for a month, and then, when it’s good and rotten, they dig it up and eat it.[1]”

  Suzy came back into the room, her expression hovering between anger and disgust. “What does balut have to do with anything?”