The Story of Owen by E. K. Johnston Read Free Book Online Page A

inside for breakfast and to listen to the morning news.

    Only some of that is true, of course. I wasn’t wearing my watch, so I have no idea if the first time I saw my car was also the exact moment Lottie fell. It certainly makes for a better story that way, though. And it wasn’t my best birthday, either. That came later.
    But I did have to spend some of my precious summer holiday in driver’s ed, if only so that I could save a bit of money on my insurance, which, given our rural locale, was already guaranteed to be higher than if I’d lived in a city where a dragon could go for a factory instead of for me.
    After World War II, when automobiles became a staple of Western culture and the dragon population boomed thanks to the glut of carbon emissions over Europe, the United States, and Japan, there were a bunch of car-related tragedies in rural North America. It wasn’t so bad in cities or in Europe, where the population was concentrated and there were always more appealing targets for dragons to go after than a lone car. But in the countryside, a carbon-burning car was one of the most dangerous places to be. After a dozen years of debate on whether to allow teenagers to drive, the government finally implemented an education program to teach young drivers how to drive defensively, providing the basics of what to do in case a dragon tried to make off with your car while you were in it.
    To be honest, I was kind of excited to take the class. Trondheim had seen several cases of a car being carried off in the last decade, and more than a few people had been scorched while driving on the many unpaved side roads in the region, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. This was primarily for two reasons. First of all, a dragon was far more likely to go after a tractor than it was to go after a car, and we had nothing if not tractors aplenty. Second, as the mines in Saltrock grew in size and production, they presented a far more tempting target. Still, the class promised to be entertaining, and at the end of it there was the promise of independence from my parents—not to mention arriving on time for band rehearsals, since between my mother’s crazy schedule and my father’s lack of get up and go at six o’clock in the morning, my tardy record was a bit well spotted.
    â€œFirst thing’s first,” said the instructor on the first day of the four-day course. “How many of you are driving hybrids?”
    She sounded hopeful when she asked it, but she had to know that there was a chance that no one in the class would have one. The government had been pouring money into the development of electric cars for almost two decades now, and though they were effective in preventing dragon attacks, the jury was still out on how effective they were at not stranding their drivers in the middle of nowhere. Again, not a big risk in the city as there wasn’t a lot of nowhere to be stranded in, but around here it was something of a more pressing concern. They were also apt to throw a fit if driven on gravel roads. Since most of the kids in the area lived on farms, hybrids simply weren’t practical. Not to mention they were still quite expensive. Indeed, only two kids raised their hands. The instructor deflated a little bit but pressed on.
    We spent most of the morning learning about the more banal aspects of safe driving: four-way stops, three-point turns, small dragon evasion, and the like. By the time the afternoon rolled around, everyone was really, really bored. The instructor must have sensed that she was losing us, because after lunch we got into the real dangers. There was a video on fire suppression and another on how to evade an attack from the air (though this was, the instructor admitted, mostly useless if the dragon caught you on a gravel road).
    Then we got to the meat of the lesson: dragon identification. There weren’t a lot of different species of dragon in the Trondheim