The Wrong Letter

The letter came on a Tuesday and I knew right away it was a mistake. Not in a sad way. Just in a facts way. I'm Kez, I'm fourteen, and the letter said I'd been accepted to the Aldermoor Summer Programme for Junior Riders, and the thing is, I had never applied to the Aldermoor Summer Programme for Junior Riders. I'd never heard of it. My mum had never heard of it. We looked at the envelope for a really long time at the kitchen table. Here's the thing about riders, in case you're not from around here. Riders are a big deal. Like, the biggest deal. If you're a kid and a dragon picks you, your whole life changes, you go off to the academies and you get the uniform and people on the street kind of look at you. And dragons pick the kids who are special. Brave, or clever, or strong, or something. They've got a sense for it. No dragon has ever picked me. I want to be honest in this story so I'll just say it. I'm not brave. I cried at my own birthday party once because of a balloon. I'm not the top of my class, I'm sort of the middle, the comfortable middle where teachers forget your name in a nice way. I am extremely normal. I have always been extremely normal and mostly I was fine with it. So the letter was a mistake. Obviously. Some other Kez, probably, some Kez who was brave and clever, and the envelope went to the wrong house. Except my mum found the second page. The second page had a list of what to bring, and at the bottom, in different ink, handwritten, it said: We are aware of your situation, Kez. Come anyway. Bring nothing you don't need. — M. My situation. I didn't have a situation. I had a normal life and a balloon-related crying incident in my past and that was it. We tried to phone the programme. There was no number. We tried to write back to the address and the letter came back three days later, unopened, with a stamp on it that said NO SUCH PLACE, which is a very weird thing for a letter to come back saying when somebody at that place had clearly just written to me. I think a normal person, a sensible person, would not have gone. My mum even said that. She said Kez, this is strange, we don't have to do this. And she was right, it was strange. But here's the part I've never told anyone, and if I'm writing the whole story I should put it in. For my entire life I have watched dragons pick other kids and not me, and I told everyone, including myself, that I was fine with being normal. And mostly I was. But there was this small place, this really small quiet place somewhere under my ribs, that was not fine with it. That wanted, so badly it kind of hurt, for something — anything — to look at me one time and decide I was worth picking. And here was a letter. From a place that didn't exist. That had picked me. So on the first day of summer I stood at the end of our road with one small bag, because the letter said bring nothing you don't need, and I waited, because the letter said something would come. What came was not a bus. It came over the rooftops, slow, with the morning sun behind it so I couldn't see it properly at first, just a shape, a big shape, bigger than any bird, with wings that didn't flap so much as lean on the air. It came down into our road, and our road is not big, and it only just fit, and it folded its wings and looked at me. It was a dragon. An actual dragon, dark green like a wet forest, close enough that I could see it breathing, and I want to tell you I was brave but you already know about the balloon. I was terrified. I nearly ran. My legs were doing the shaky thing. And the dragon tipped its head at me, the way our neighbour's dog does when it's working something out, and it did not look at me the way I'd spent fourteen years dreaming a dragon would look at me. It did not look impressed. It looked, honestly, a bit puzzled, like it was also wondering if there'd been a mistake with the letter. Then it knelt down. In the middle of Maple Road, with Mrs. Otoole watching from her window, a dragon knelt down in front of extremely normal me, and waited, and I understood that it was waiting for me to climb on. So that's where the worst and best summer of my life starts. With me, and a confused dragon, and one small bag, and a place that doesn't exist expecting me for some reason nobody had bothered to write down.