The Scaly Boy (G #3)

I Am Accused of 'Liking Things'

    One of the nice things about having an extremely wealthy, overprotective principal incontestably attempting to fill the father role for everyone was he did indeed have his own airplane, but you should already know this. Don't ask me anything about it because I don't know zilch about airplanes, but from my perspective it looked pretty big.

    A few days of Mr. Wales pulling some strings were had a private flight of our own, blah blah, boring stuff. I didn't care. I hated airplanes personally. You want to know what was hard? Convincing him to let us go. The entire flight over he kept mumbling things under his breath and hunching his shoulders up. Not everyone was coming as well. Theo was coming, because Mr. Wales was stressed out enough just trying to manage us all, along with Will, Genny, Justin, Dylan, Azmus, Icie, Sabine, Chespin, Tui, and I. We were the 'older kids' who got to go on special field trips like this, yippee.

I'll spare you a long, seven hour, boring, flight later and tell you the interesting stuff happened when we checked into our two hotel rooms. I was slightly salty the four girls got their own room when I had to share with six other boys.

"Are we allowed to call beds?" Justin asked, sitting criss-cross on the far right one.

"Dylan get's his own, you guys can divide up the rest." Mr. Wales commanded, setting down our suitcases.

Theo nodded, but the remaining five of us let out a collective groan as we realized that left us two beds. Dylan smirked from his perch on presumedly, his chosen bed.

    "Hey, anyone who bunks with me can pay my hospital bill for any gaping, bloody, ulcers." He taunted.

    Mr. Wales whacked the back of Dylan's head, and insisted the teen was joking. I decided personally to shut up and fight over the remaining beds. A few minutes a teenage squabbling and ordering more blankets for those of us on the floor, Theo had pulled out his laptop. He and Chespin were gathered around Dylan, who was typing.

I walked away from the spontaneous pillow fight, started by Justin, to see what was up. It was either that or I accidentally slice a pillow in half. They were looking at a map, it had lots of colors and words and numbers.

"You guys are going to love learning how to use the subway." Dylan commented, as his typed in search came up.

"This is where the bank is?" "Theo asked.

Dylan nodded, "do you want me to send it to you?"

"Actually I was hoping you might come with us, because you used to live here and know how to get around." Theo suggested, glancing at him hopefully.

Dylan glanced down at his feet and started rubbing his arms again. "I really don't want to go back there, if that's alright with you. Besides, it's a lot of work getting me anywhere nowadays."

Theo nodded. "I can respect that. We can call you if we need help right?"

Dylan nodded. Only me, being slow to put things together as I always am was still hung up on Theo's words.

"Wait you used to live here?" I blinked.

Chespin gave me that sassy eight-year old glare. "Come on Tyler, like, everyone knows that by now."

Part of me was surprised Dylan used to live here, the other part of me was hung up on the fact I had been sassed by Chespin. All three of the boys who were currently in this conversation seemed amused, which I won't lie was frustrating to some extent.