The Dragon and the King
By James D. Swinney
“How old are you, Alice?”
“Eleven, sir,” she replied, not daring to meet his eyes for fear of receiving an even harsher punishment. Instead she sat on the chilly stone stairway just outside the school, staring at the ants and bugs that scurried about on the lawn and envying their simple existence.
“Then why do you act like you’re five?” Mr. James Barrows asked her. He paced the sidewalk in front of the girl, fuming visibly, his bright face turned bright red with fresh, hot anger. He threw his arms up with exasperation. “You cannot keep doing this, Alice! You can’t keep writing these…these… these things, and hope to get away with it!”
“I didn’t do anything, sir,” Alice insisted again, though she squirmed under his hot, lingering stare, wishing fervently to be anywhere else but there.
“Look at me!” he snapped. “I can’t stand it when you stare at the ground while I’m talking to you!”
She did as he told her, but she did not like what she saw in her teacher’s face. It burned, seethed with white-hot fury. He always had the shortest temper. She couldn’t understand why they had ever made him vice-principal. He was crazy! “I didn’t do anything,” she mumbled again.
“You wrote a story about Mrs. Larning, your own homeroom teacher, committing suicide, Alice!” Mr. Barrows exclaimed, spitting with anger.
“It wasn’t Mrs. Larning; it was Mr. Taylor,” Alice said, as if that made it any better. “It’s just a story, anyway. I don’t really want him to kill himself.”
“It certainly seems that way,” Mr. Barrows said. “Sure, it may be just a story now, but that is frightening behaviour from one your age. You should be learning during English Class, not writing stories.”
“That was our assignment, sir.”
“Not to write this kind of story, it wasn’t! You’re eleven years old, for Christ’s sake. You can’t write stories about death or suicide. It’s just not right!”
He sat down on the steps next to her, apparently having used up his anger for the moment. “What am I going to do with you, Alice? You don’t get along with the other children, you don’t pay attention in class, and you spend every waking moment either reading or writing. I would support this normally. Hell, I would promote this, but you write about unacceptable topics.
“I’m going to have to call your parents, Alice,” he said quietly, almost sadly. It was a surprising, though not unwelcome, twist from his usual attitude. “You’re being suspended for three days. I hope that you can behave better when you return. Now, you just wait here until I get back…” he said, trailing off as he stood and re-entered the school.
Brushing off her dress, Alice stood up. She was not quite ready to go home yet, she decided. And so, despite Mr. Barrows’ orders, she happily skipped down the steps of the school, clutching her notebook and a pencil and going to the one place in the city she knew that no one would think to look for her: namely, the alley behind the school. There she found solace in times like these, when the world seemed turned against her. There, among the garbage and the hideous stench, she found peace.
When she was safely situated on the old wooden crate that she regularly used as a chair, Alice laid her notebook on her lap, took out her recently sharpened pencil, and began to write. She had done this so many times, had written so many stories in the relative safety of her alleyway sanctuary. This was where she’d written the story of Mr. Taylor’s gruesome death, a tale about the city being sacked by Vikings, even a story that was meant to resemble her own life. Today, however, she had a different story in mind.
