Eric's way with words.

"Jake, stop staring at your manuscript and look at me," he said, testily. That sounded so much like the old Eric I had to smile. I also looked up. He smiled back, sort of, but it was a pretty steely smile. "I was the grown-up, so I admit it was my fault, and my responsibility, and I didn't do it very well. All right, I did it lousy. And it maybe needed someone like you, someone catastrophically self-absorbed, and someone furthermore who doesn't have a clue about anything but his own strange little world — have you ever had a McDonald's hamburger, for chrissake?"

"Once. I didn't like it."

Eric snorted one of his laughter-substitute snorts. "Well, come to that, I don't like McDonald's food either. But I was twenty-six when I applied for the job here. I'd spent twenty-six years living in cities. Where there are always people everywhere — their noise, their buildings, their garbage — even if you're out in what passes for the country there's a permanent light haze at night from the nearest city and you're still smelling car exhaust. And you can always hear a car on a road somewhere, or your neighbors' TV through the common wall — and your electricity comes on wires from the power station. It may have taken someone like you to raise Lois — to raise a Lois. Someone far enough out of what passes for normal experience to connect with a dragon. That didn't make you a joy to have around."

"A misfit," I said, half involuntarily. I didn't really want to encourage him to keep talking about this, but I couldn't help myself. "A mutant."

"Nothing wrong with your genes," he said, and I remembered that my father was his Staunchest supporter and Mom had actually liked him. "But a misfit, if you like. just as Lois is. And the misfit the two of you have made together is changing the world. And yes, I was jealous, when I got here, watching you. That's the part Martha's got right. If a fairy godmother had offered me the chance to be a misfit like you — to grow up in Smokehill, to know it as the only world there is — I'd have been all over her."

"I do — I don't — I read the news — " I started to say, I started to try to say with some kind of dignity.

"Oh, the news," Eric said, like you might say, Oh, the cat threw up, or Oh, that's chewing gum on the bottom of my shoe. He shook his head. "You've changed. Or I wouldn't be bothering to tell you any of this." He did his laugh-substitute again. "Hell, I admire you now — I wouldn't want to be Jake Mendoza, hero of the universe — anybody designed the logo for your cape yet? Only time I've ever seen anyone with his head that far up his ass just keep on going and come out into the sunlight after all. Wouldn't have said it was possible. All part of the new physics I guess. I'm just saying . . . you were a damned annoying little bastard."

Only half to change the subject, because I also really wanted to know, I said, "When did you figure it out — about Lois?"

Eric looked away — up, down, sideways, as if he was looking for an answer like a lost tool that he must have left around here somewhere. "I can't remember not knowing. But I can't remember some kind of blazing moment of Eureka! It must be that Jake's raising a dragonlet! either. It's such a long time ago. Thank god it's all a long time ago." He went silent and broody again, but this time he wasn't looking at my manuscript, but at me, and worse, he seemed to see what he was looking at. More not-shuffling-feet from Jake. "Do you find it hard to remember, now? To believe that it was as bad as it was?"

I nodded. "Yeah. And I like finding it hard to remember."

"Yeah. Worst for you. . .for you and for Frank, and maybe Billy. It still sucked for all the rest of us. First the dead dragon and the son of a bitch who'd killed her, and — that was enough. And all those ass holes wandering around, with their cheap suits and cheaper attitudes, demanding to know everything, including a lot of stuff they wouldn't be able to get their heads around anyway, but especially not when they'd already decided we were guilty and couldn't prove ourselves innocent. You couldn't turn around without another asshole wanting to know what you were turning around for. And we were guilty of course just not of what they thought they knew.

"Slowly we all realized we hadn't lost the plot, there was something else going on, besides trying to save Smokehill. It wasn't just we'd made something up because we wanted it so badly. We all knew by the time you went off to Westcamp, I think. But saying it out loud might make it true somehow the assholes could catch us at. We saw it in each other's faces — and jerked our eyes away.

"It's funny now. But the thing — the only clue — that something was going on besides major damage control and the likelihood that we would lose Smokehill — the one thing anyone could actually point to, that didn't look like desperate wish-fulfillment — was the way you were behaving. You weren't even on the planet — which in your case, Jake, is saying a lot. There was this crazy wired intensity about you — but what could be more important than the havoc over the dead dragon, the havoc that might cost us Smokehill? And the way you'd always hated the poor damn lizards in the zoo and the poor stupid fools who wanted to believe they were dragons because at least they were there and you could look at them jeez, chill out — and suddenly all that went away? What else could it be but that you had got yourself a real dragon? And if you could hide it in a Ranger's cabin, it had to be a very small dragon. Baby dragon. So the one that got killed was a mom dragon. Simple. Simple when we knew you."

I took a deep breath and said firmly, "Eric, I always thought you were pretty arrogant."

Eric really did smile at that, a long, slow, glinty-eyed smile, like nothing I'd ever seen on his face before. "Takes one to know one, kiddo," he said. "And I dare you to put that in your story."

So I have.

Eric still cleans odorata's cage, if nobody volunteers. What head zookeeper cleans his own cages? Eric's even got staff now. Mind you, I don't think — Dan or no Dan — Eric's doing it to spare anyone. He just doesn't want anyone being mean to odorata. So I suppose I have to say he's not only not the kind of bully who likes to assign the worst jobs to the people he hates most, that he let me clean odorata means that even if he did think I was a pain in the ass, I was a responsible, conscientious pain in the ass. I suppose this should make me feel better.

But a tremendous lot has happened in these five years, besides most of us lifers being able to start to forget. And if you've got this far in my dragon adventures and have learned to survive (or skip over) my philosophical blather and general rant you might like to hear about some more of it. Help make up for the five years you've been waiting. Ha ha. And if you have been waiting, the first thing on your last-five-years list is the story about how Bud almost flew through the front gate — at least according to the mail we, especially me, gets, that's the first thing on your list. (I get a lot of lists. People seem to think I'm going to find them helpful.) But if this is all really a soap opera with dragons — as it is, according to the mail — you might want to hear some of the rest of it too.

Like how I asked Martha to marry me. At Dragon Central with Bud watching us. Not that he knew that I was asking her to marry me (although I never know what he knows really). I didn't know I was going to ask her to marry me. I was doing my famous dragon headache skull squeeze. I've got pretty good at this; I can temporarily ease about 75 percent of human dragon headaches in about 75 percent of humans who get them (which is to say all humans who spend any time at Nearcamp). Although unfortunately it seems more to do with my hands than with the squeeze, which means I haven't been able to teach anybody else to do it, which is bad news for at least two reasons, the first being the obvious one and the second being that this contributes to the Great Jake Myth and while five million acres is plenty to hide in most of the time there's no escape from the mailbags they bring every day and I've begun to wonder if I'd better never go out the gate again myself ever either. Just like the dragons. (I did finally learn to do TV, but only because the public was so weirdly eager to love me that they turned my deer-in-headlights mental and physical paralysis into becoming modesty, and after that it was like, oh, well, okay, if it's going to be that hard to do anything wrong I suppose I might as well relax and go with the flow.) At least we had our honeymoon in Paris.