Eternal Bonds

The autumn air at Willow Creek Elementary smelled of damp earth and fallen leaves, the kind of golden afternoon that made most six-year-olds shriek and chase each other across the playground until their mothers called them home. Most six-year-olds. Emma Bennett sat apart from the chaos, tucked beneath the shade of an old oak tree at the edge of the schoolyard, her knees pulled up beneath her yellow sundress and a battered spiral notebook balanced on her lap.

She wasn't lonely, not exactly. She simply preferred the company of her pencil to the shrieking swarm of children on the jungle gym. In the notebook, in looping, uneven letters far too ambitious for a first-grader, she was writing a story about a dragon. Not a fierce one. A dragon who was afraid of his own fire, who hid in caves because he worried that if he ever breathed too hard, he might burn down the very things he loved.

She was so absorbed in shading his scales—green, she'd decided, though dragons in her mind could be any color they wanted—that she didn't notice Danny Marsh sneaking up behind her until it was too late.

"Whatcha drawing, baby?" Danny's voice carried that particular sneer that certain boys seemed born…

The sign-up sheet had been taped to the corkboard outside the gymnasium for exactly four days before Jake noticed it, which, considering how many hours he spent loitering in that hallway waiting for Emma to finish her locker rituals, was something of a personal record for his powers of observation.

"Emma. Emma, look at this."

She was rearranging her binders by color again, a habit that had survived the transition from elementary school with total indifference to the fact that she was now, technically, a sixth grader and therefore supposed to have outgrown such things. "Look at what?"

"The talent show. Sign-ups close Friday." He was already pulling the pen from behind his ear—a new habit, tucking pens there like he'd seen some older kid do, and Emma privately thought it made him look like he was trying too hard to look like he wasn't trying at all. "We're doing it."

"We are not doing it."

"We absolutely are doing it. I've already decided. I decided the second I saw the word *talent*, because I have some, and you have some, and between the two of us that's basically a guaranteed win."

Emma closed her locker with more force than strictly necessary. "I don't have a talent,…

The gymnasium had been transformed, or at least someone had made a valiant attempt at transformation, strings of white lights looped haphazardly across the basketball hoops, a cardboard archway spray-painted gold standing sentinel over the entrance, glitter already tracked across the polished floor in the shape of a hundred careless footprints. Emma stood just inside the doorway in a dress the color of dark plum, one her mother had insisted on hemming twice, and felt her heart doing something erratic and unhelpful behind her ribs.

"You look like you're about to take an exam," Jake said, appearing at her elbow in a rented jacket that fit him almost right, the sleeves a half-inch too long, his hair combed into some approximation of order that had already begun rebelling against the effort.

"I feel like I'm about to take an exam."

"It's a dance, Em. There's no wrong answer. You just stand there and move around a little and occasionally step on someone's foot." He offered his arm with a flourish that was equal parts genuine gallantry and total mockery of the gesture itself, the kind of thing only Jake could pull off without looking ridiculous. "Shall we?"

She'd told herself, in…