My Diary from the Edge of the World Read Online Free Page A

Lipton’s boring tips on planting flowers, and she never forgets my teachers’ birthdays). How she and Dad ended up together, I’ll never know. Once, I asked her about it, and she just said with a smirk, “Your dad was really, really lucky,” and then looked at my dad to see his reaction. He didn’t even look up from his book.
    Anyway, she always seems to know when I’m being honest or when I’m just being dramatic, which is annoying.
    Today was my first day back at school since the dragon incident. Millie, Sam, and I walked down the long green hill into town, then descended into the tunnels that we use during migration season. Sometimes students from other schools heckle us because of our dad, but not today; today I was on top of the world.
    I held my cast up high as we passed people so that they’d be able to see it in all its arm-length glory. “It’snot a trophy,” Millie said. (She’s refused to sign it because she says she can’t bring herself to “celebrate stupidity.”) Then she just waved a hand to billow her long, perfectly coifed hair, as if 90 percent of what goes through her head is, My hair, ahh my hair.
    We crisscrossed through the tunnels, past the entrance to the bank that’s guarded inside by one of the few vampires in Maine. (They prefer darker, rainier regions—though I guess if you’re a vampire and you can get a job in a dim cave, you’re pretty happy.) He always gives me the creeps, but Millie says she thinks he’s kind of cute. I think she’s just trying to shock me—he looks completely bloodless and his fangs are always sticking out, especially when he smiles and tries to be polite. Because of a law passed in 1965, vampires are only allowed to feed on animals (never people), but they give me the creeps all the same.
    After the bank the tunnels widen into a series of connected, well-lit caverns, where most of the stores are. We walked past the 7-11, where I usually buy M&M’s with money I’m supposed to spend on lunch, and past the little museum sponsored by the Ladies’ Historical Society of Cliffden. It gives a miniature but ambitious history of the events leading up to our town: from adiorama of the ancient Romans taming the Pegasus, to the signing of the Declaration of Independence by fifty-six men and one well-respected ghost, to the founding of our town by a fur trapper on the run from a ding-ball, which is a kind of cougar.
    In the aboveground foyer we parted ways: Millie sashaying off to her building and Sam coughing and trying to make himself invisible as he scurried toward the primary wing. I cut out through the door onto the grassy inner courtyard and made my way to my homeroom. I entered it bellowing, “WHO WANTS TO SIGN THE ARM THAT TOUCHED THE DRAGON?” There was a collective gasp, a room full of faces with mouths in the shapes of surprised and admiring Os, and then I was surrounded.
    *  *  *
    All through geography and Monsters of the Sea II, I played with a penny on my desk (tracing the giant on the back and Abe Lincoln on the front, and flipping it to see if it landed heads or giants over and over), and contemplated swallowing it to see how it would taste. My gaze kept drifting to the window, where the occasional dark silhouette of a dragon drifted across the horizon. Twice Mr. Morrigan, our teacher, scolded me forkicking my feet too loudly against Arin Roland’s desk, once for not having done the homework, and then finally for swallowing the penny after all.
    To tell you the truth, I don’t know what came over me at recess. Arin and I were foraging along the edge of the school building for a stick to use as a vaulting pole for the Lunch Olympics (which I invented on the spot, even though I’m not supposed to participate with only one good arm). I found one that would work perfectly, only suddenly I didn’t want to use it as a vaulting pole at all, I