Rose

"That's a dragon!"

Rose's head snapped around at the sound of the voice from behind her.

"She's drawing a dragon!" Trevor Wallace leaned over his desk, pointing over Rose's shoulder at her sketch pad. "Look!" he said, waving his arm. "That's not the assignment!"

"Shut up!" she hissed at him, but she was too late.

Coach Hyatt lumbered across the classroom, angling his bulk between the eighth graders' chairs as he bore down on Rose. He towered over her and stared down at her paper. "What's going on here, Gallagher?"

"I'm just drawing, sir ... Coach," Rose said, forcing a smile. She knew he preferred being called "coach," even when he was doing his extra duty as an art teacher.

"That looks to me like a dragon," he said, jabbing a thick finger at her sketch pad.

Rose looked at her drawing. She couldn't deny it. "Yes, Coach."

Trevor Wallace snickered. Rose shot him a glare that promised painful vengeance.

Rose's friend Lisa spoke up from the seat beside her. "It's really good, though. I bet nobody else drew anything as good."

The picture was good. The dragon spread its great bat-like wings across the page, crouching as if preparing to leap aloft. A serpentine tail coiled behind it, and elegant horns curved back from behind its eyes. It was so perfect that it seemed to breathe on the page. The strange thing was that Rose couldn't remember why she'd decided to sketch a dragon. It seemed so familiar, like she'd seen it in a book or a dream. There was no denying it was an excellent drawing, maybe even her best.

This fact did not move Coach Hyatt. "I don't care if it's a dang Picasso! Is it the assignment? Is it?" He leaned close to stare into her eyes.

"No, sir," Rose squeaked.

"What was the assignment?" He straightened up and surveyed the class. "Hmm? Anyone remember?"

"Coach!" Trevor's hand shot in the air. "Draw something from our lives, sir!"

"That's right. Now this here" — he knocked a knuckle on Rose's desk — "is make-believe. Did anyone else draw something make-believe? What about you, Wallace?"

Trevor was more than happy to show off. "I drew my baseball glove, Coach."

"Darned right you did," Coach Hyatt said.

Rose made a gagging face at Trevor's pathetic sucking up.

Coach Hyatt whirled and focused on Lisa. "What about you, Miss Sanders? Did you remember the assignment?"

Lisa gave Rose an apologetic look and held up her own sketch pad. "My dog," she said. "It's not very good."

"Good, bad, it doesn't matter!" the coach said. "It's just art. What matters is whether you executed the assignment I gave you. You there! McBee! What did you draw?"

"It's 'just art'?" Lisa whispered as Coach Hyatt heaved himself over to the next desk to continue his inquisition. "What a total goon. I wish Mrs. Jersey taught this class full time instead of just subbing when there's an away game."

Rose could agree with that, but she had another concern. "Do you think he's going around to check on everyone?"

"I think so," Lisa said. "He's on a roll."

Rose still had a chance. She flipped the page in her sketchbook and snatched up her pencil, angling her body so it blocked Trevor's view of what she was doing. If he blabbed again, he'd ruin her plan. Fortunately, Trevor was absorbed in watching the coach stomp around the room and interrogate each student.

"Gomez, let's see," Coach Hyatt said. "A cactus? Good, good. Leeds, what's that supposed to be? Oh, a cat? Looked like a fish. Never mind, good work. Pong, that's a fine-looking car. Your dad's? Good. Now, Ostrom, that's ... Wait a minute, Ostrom."

Rose glanced up from her work to see Coach Hyatt towering over the desk of her friend Clay Ostrom. If anyone else had messed up the assignment, it would be Clay. Rose didn't think she'd ever seen Clay draw anything from real life. If it didn't exist in a fantasy epic or a space opera, Clay didn't waste his energy thinking about it.

"That looks like a dinosaur," Coach Hyatt said. "Did you not hear the assignment? Why'd you draw something make-believe, boy?"

"Dinosaurs aren't make-believe!" Clay shot back. He adjusted his glasses and glared up at Coach Hyatt. Clay was skinny and small for a thirteen-year-old, but he wore a ferocious expression of defiance in the face of the looming coach.

Coach Hyatt didn't seem to notice. "Well, there are no dinosaurs in your life, Ostrom. The assignment was ..."

"This isn't really a dinosaur," Clay said.

The teacher peered down. "Looks like one to me, boy."

"No, it's a drawing of a statue of a dinosaur," Clay said. "See, my uncle works at the Lost World casino down in Vegas, and I go down there all the time to look at their model dinosaurs. This is the statue of a triceratops from the shopping promenade."

The coach's face suddenly lit up with a smile, and he delivered a friendly slap to Clay's back that nearly drove the boy through his desk. "All right, Ostrom! Way to improvise! So, looks like everyone completed the assignment except for you, Gallagher."

Rose sat up at her desk and smiled at him. "But, sir, I did complete it. Look."

Coach Hyatt trundled over to examine Rose's sketch pad. "What's this?"

"It's my horse," she said. "His name's Beans. See?"

As the coach took her pad, Trevor spoke up, his voice ratcheting up to almost a soprano. "But, Coach! She just drew that! The dragon is on the other page!"

This was true. Rose had drawn horses so many times that she could whip up a reasonably good sketch in about a minute. Coach Hyatt's circuit of the class had given her ample time to produce a serviceable illustration of Beans.

A broad grin appeared on the coach's ruddy face. "Now that's how you execute a two-minute drill. Nice hustle, Gallagher!"

"Coach!" Trevor's indignant squeak sent ripples of giggles through the classroom.

"Pipe down, you hamburger heads!" Coach Hyatt commanded over the babble. "I've got homework for you." Rose listened as he rattled off the assignment, smiling in satisfaction as Trevor Wallace muttered angrily behind her. When the bell sounded, she lingered to pack her backpack while her classmates crowded toward the door, eager to be on their way home.

"Can I look at it?"

Rose turned to see Clay threading his way awkwardly through the other students. She gave him a curious look. "At what?"

"The dragon," he said. "Can I see it?"

"Oh. Sure."

Clay flipped aside the page with her impromptu horse drawing, his eyes widening as they lit upon the dragon. "Wow. That's awesome," he said, his voice tinged with a mixture of respect and envy. She knew he was only a passable artist himself, no matter how much he practiced. "That's your best yet."

"You think?"

Clay had seen plenty of her drawings over the years and had even hung some of her pictures of knights and monsters on his bedroom wall. He never held back his criticism when she missed some detail on a suit of medieval plate mail or if she got the heads on a chimera wrong, so his admiration meant a lot.

"Easily," he said. "Where'd you get the idea?"

"I'm not sure," she said. The dragon had just burst onto the page. Sometimes drawing was like that for her, but this time she'd really lost herself in her art.

"It's so good." He tapped the sketch pad. "You should frame it. See you later, Rose."

"Frame it," she said, looking at the drawing. Yes, she could frame...