People are amazing. They'll do stuff you can't believe anyone would do and not believe stuff that is under their noses. You can't trust them and you certainly can't reason with them. The laws are schizophrenic because people are schizophrenic. So even if the Friends of Smokehill might win against the Searles about their should-have-been-drowned-at-birth son because dragons are rare and endangered and romantic (so long as you forget they have pouches), you still had to assume we wouldn't survive the discovery of Lois. We'd not survive even worse if it came out about the eczema. It wouldn't matter that it wasn't her fault and that I didn't mind (much). It would make her a bad dragon — and it would make all the grown-ups around me bad grown-ups for letting it happen. And she was a bad dragon anyway — look at her homicidal mom — and we were bad (and crazy and dangerous) for having sided with the dragons against our own kind by trying to save her.

Or maybe when Lois grew up crippled or something I'd be the bad human who raised her wrong. You just don't know how other humans are going to react. And there were of course so many ways I could be raising her wrong. It was like even in my own head I couldn't answer all the people who would tell me I was, if they knew I was trying to. ALL ways were ways for me to be raising her wrong.

. . . And at this point my synapses all snap simultaneously and one of the emergency circuits cuts in and diverts me onto a familiar worry loop before I self-destruct.

. . . For example Lois ate everything now, at least she did if I didn't stop her, everything from raw spinach (ewwwww) to cream puffs with ice cream and chocolate sauce. Grace made cream puffs to die for, I admit, but you don't necessarily expect a dragon to get the details. The funny thing about Lois is that unlike a dog she never went around nose to ground vacuum-cleaning the floor or the yard or anything. What she did was watch us and eat whatever we ate. She didn't get many vegetables till she started watching Grace and Billy and not just me. But she'd eaten apples and popcorn almost from the beginning which seem even less dragony than vegetables. (You know the business of carnivores getting their greens from what the herbivore they're eating has in its stomach. And a lot of dogs like graze. Snark didn't eat grass so much as moss. He loved moss. Given the landscape around the institute he had plenty of opportunity.) If she'd ever learned to open the refrigerator door we would have been in big trouble. Fortunately she didn't. (I did keep her away from the cream puffs, after the first time, when I hadn't realized how sneaky she could be: Chocolate is poisonous to dogs, for example, and sugar isn't good for anybody, and Lois had enough marks against her already.)

And have I mentioned she snored?

But the point was that I was losing my nerve. The emergency-worry shunt was beginning to overload too because it was getting used so often. I began to feel like me turning seventeen was some kind of deadline — and the ads the Searles were paying for were so everywhere on TV now that Martha told me even Eleanor didn't want to watch TV any more. (Billy and Grace didn't have a TV. The farther-out Rangers' cabins mostly couldn't pick up the signal that the Institute's Godzilla-being-attacked-by-a-flying-saucer special unique aerial dish thingummy somehow squiggled through the fence.)

I was making up the deadline part, of course. Me turning seventeen — so long as the school equivalency went through okay — was going to make the game we were playing a little easier. But it wouldn't change the fact that the game was a deadly one. And you do start going nuts under pressure eventually. Not to mention the increasing difficulty of keeping a perpetually hungry, German-Shepherd-sized, more or less untrained and so far as we knew untrainable, very-high-activity-and-curiosity-level illegal animal, who might start setting fire to things any day now and whose wings were finally beginning to sprout, cooped up in a small house.

And it's a lie that Lois was untrainable. It's just that the idea of training usually means that you're supposed to end up where, if you ask someone to do something, they do it. If it's a dog it's like "sit" or "leave it." If it's a kid it's like "do your homework" or "turn the TV down." Or training like teaching a kid to get dressed in the morning, till he does it himself. Or a dog to go outside and not on the floor. I didn't housebreak Lois, she did it herself, which Billy and Dad and I sat around agreeing probably means that dragons have dens where they raise their kids, even after the kids climb out of the pouch.

I forgot to tell you, Lois doing it outdoors began the era of amazing numbers of outdoor barbecues, to give some disguise — and some excuse — for the latest eye-wateringly peculiar smells that hung around Billy and Grace's cottage. We were such barbecue freaks we were even out there in the winter and, trust me, at Smokehill, that's wacko. We did stop as soon as it got cold enough that even hot dragonlet poop froze pretty much instantly . . . but Billy had to help dig the trench next spring when it all melted — and we dug that trench fast.

Lois in the winter was a hoot, by the way. By her first winter she was way active enough that I'd've had to get her outdoors somehow to run some of her energy off anyway, but she was little enough and short-legged enough that without her body temperature acting as a natural snowplow it might have been a problem. As it was I worried about anybody who didn't know about her wondering about the weird snow mazes around the cottage, where Lois had melted some extremely bizarre trails. She didn't run, really, she cavorted. And I had to cavort along with her or with my pathetic human heat production I'd've frozen into a Jake-cicle.

By her second winter her neck plates gave me enough purchase that I could grab one and be kind of towed along, all bent over of course, and more clumsy than you can imagine. But laughing helps keep you warm too. The only drawback was that she ate even more after she'd melted a lot of snow. Just like in Old Pete's diaries about dragons in winter. Also just like Old Pete's diaries she showed no inclination to hibernate.

It was also pretty interesting — you do get a little claustrophobic here in the winter. Even being closed to tourists for three months doesn't quite offset this, although, believe me, it helps. And the main Institute building is pretty big, especially when it isn't full of tourists. (Snark and I used to have great games in the empty tourist hall.) But you miss being able to go outdoors easily — or being able to breathe without your nose gluing itself together and your lungs going into shock — or having to re-shovel the path you just shoveled the last time you had to hack your way down to the zoo or whatever — everybody does a lot of shoveling, besides the big plows that fit on the front of some of the jeeps — and although the fence slows some of the wind down, it'll still kill you if it can, and the big winter storms are just scary. How much bigger than you are are things like weather? A WHOLE LOT BIGGER. I guess you can ignore this most of the time if you live in a city, but you don't forget it for a minute in a place like Smokehill, and it sort of comes after you in winter.

But having an igniventator-equipped companion had a really funny effect on me — suddenly I didn't care about winter. If I felt chilly I could just warm myself against Lois for a moment; leaning over her to breathe would even unstick my nose. Except for the eating, and the relative increase of difficulty in cavorting due to whatever quantity of snow had to be melted first, the cold didn't seem to faze Lois at all. Although I admit that not having up to several thousand visitors a day the way it was in peak season, any one of whom might manage to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, might have had something to do with my suddenly more liberal attitude toward deep winter.