Project iDragon

020: Behind Yet Another Potted Plant

"You checked on Selphon right?"

She smacked me upside the back of the head causing my skull to snap forward with the force of it. Sometimes the girl didn't know her own strength. Madi looked tired and she had every right to be. This would be the third or fourth time I'd asked that question in the last two hours. "Yes. Of course." She sighed and rubbed her eyes. "I let him out for a brief evening fly around and then I gave him some dinner. I decided that today would be meat day as a treat since you weren't home. He was really agitated and burned the bottom of my pants – I had to get treated for that by the way." Her voice was sour, and she walked with a slight limp.

"Sorry," I muttered. I wasn't really sorry. Her emergency care insurance covered it.

"And next time can you at least mention that you have a lock on your bedroom door?"

"How else am I supposed to keep my parents from finding out about him?" I whined over the lid of my coffee.

"You're lucky you're such a responsible pain in the ass, otherwise they would have wholly invaded your privacy by now. "

"I just want to go back and check on him myself." I slumped over the table in defeat. The time was eight PM in the hospital cafeteria. The mood was sad and somber and – you know like a hospital. It's hard coming up with these descriptions when there's a lot on your mind. Madi and I were sitting behind a large potted plant in a little alcove behind the trash receptacles, drinking hospital coffee (which actually isn't as bad as they lead you to believe) and sharing something they called 'a cheeseburger and fries'. The staff had done some weird thing to try and make it healthy, and the resulting product looked like something that had been sitting in the sun for three days – but the soup and crackers looked radioactive, so we took the lesser of two evils.

I dragged my fingers down my face in exasperation before meeting Madi's gaze. "Where's Saida?"

We wanted to talk with her before we left.

"Not sure, we should probably go look for her," Madi replied through a mouthful of burger. She offered the sandwich to me and I took a tentative bite. "She was really shaken up by this whole thing."

"I mean, I don't blame her."

Every time I tried to think it over, get some sort of rational grasp of the situation, my mind circled back to one thing. There were more dragons. Selphon wasn't the only one and of course that made sense – yet there were more components to it than that. There were different types of dragons. And for some reason we couldn't see them...all the time. They just seemed to start appearing, but from where, from how? It was –

"C'mon, Dave man." Madi rose to her feet. "Let's go find her. I don't even know if she has a way home. We should check on Mark too to be honest." I glanced up to find her looking away at the front entrance to the emergency room. She brought her hand to the side of her head and she cracked a nervous smile.

"Why do you worry about her so much?" I keyed in. Madi was an arrogant type, usually taking to her own before even bothering with the pack of others. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I worried if she was lying about the concussion she didn't have.

"It's just that –" she dropped back down in her chair with a sigh. "She's alone all the time. I keep an eye on her in graphic design, but she doesn't really talk to anyone besides that friend of hers. She's got a motorcycle, a one-seater, she never goes anywhere with people and people don't go with her – and no one came to see her while she was getting checked up. Even Kiara's family is here. Well obviously, they're here – but Saida's here all alone."

"I see."

"I've grown up with her, David," Madi murmured. "She's a little icy – but I've known her since the first grade. She wasn't in every year with me, but every year it seemed like less and less people associate with her. Even teachers don't pair her in group projects."