Jodi Picoult - Between the lines

“Exactly,” Oliver says, taking the dagger from between his teeth so that he can talk to me. “I was proving a hypothesis.”

“Like whether you could burn this office down?”

“What office? Where are you, anyway?” Oliver asks. “And why am I sopping wet, down to my undergarments?”

“Long story…” I suddenly realize what he’s said to me. “You… you want to die?”

“No-I want to get out of here. But everything that changes in this story winds up fixing itself in the end. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Dead men walk again; broken barns fix themselves. What good would it be for me to write myself out of this book if I’m going to wind up right back inside it sooner or later?”

I remember the words on the page shimmering and changing before my eyes. “Hang on,” I say, and I flip to the page that has Pyro and Oliver fighting on it.

The text has gone back to the way it used to be.

I hurriedly turn again to page 43, where Oliver and I can speak freely. “You’re right,” I tell him.

“Obviously. I didn’t burn to death.” He sniffs at his sleeves. “Not even smoky. Delilah, I’m afraid I’m stuck here, destined to be part of this story forever. Nothing from this book will ever break through to the outside world.”

I think about how water has permeated that barrier-but in both cases, it was water from my world entering his, a one-way valve. The only time we tried to extract something from the book-that spider-it didn’t work.

Except, this time, something did escape.

“Oliver,” I say, “you’re wrong.”

He lifts his face toward mine. “How so?”

“When you ran into Pyro’s flames, were you holding the book you found at Rapscullio’s?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that must be the difference. When it caught fire,” I say, “so did the book I was reading. And it wasn’t just words like inferno and blaze writing themselves all over the place-it was actually flaming. ”

Oliver’s eyes widen. “You mean-”

“Yes.” I laugh. “You did it!”

“ What did you do?” My mother has come into Dr. Ducharme’s office. They are both staring at me as I stand in front of the fish tank talking to an open book.

“I, um, was just… proving a hypothesis,” I say, borrowing Oliver’s phrase. “In Biology we’re studying the ability of, uh, sea creatures to recognize the written word.” Closing the book, I wrap it in my coat and hug it to my chest. It leaves a damp spot on the front of my shirt.

If the psychiatrist didn’t think I was crazy already, seeing me reading to his angelfish will have sealed the deal. Knowing there’s no way to get out of this one, I smile at Dr. Ducharme. “So,” I say brightly. “Same time next week?”

In a way, Oliver could argue that his whole life had led up to this moment: when he stood toe to toe with the beast that had killed his father.

The dragon’s red scales shimmered in the heat of the day. His eyes were as black as the heart of the man who’d conjured him. His clawed feet scrabbled for purchase on the bald rock of the Cape of Passing Tides. As Oliver watched, Pyro tilted back his long throat, drew in a deep breath, and bellowed a plume of fire into the sky.

Oliver’s pulse was racing. He was so close to the dragon that he could smell charred flesh and ash. This was danger, up close and personal, in a way he’d never experienced and had carefully avoided his whole life. He wondered, as he had many times during his childhood, what his father had been thinking at this moment. Had King Maurice stood, steadfast, with no fear as he brandished his sword and ran toward his death? Had his last thoughts been of his beloved wife? The son he would never meet?

I cannot get out of this alive, Oliver thought.

He reached around his neck for the compass his mother had given him. If there was ever a time to turn tail and run back home, this was it. But as his fingers closed around the small disk, he imagined his father clutching it even as he battled this same dragon. Oliver wanted to be the sort of son that his father would have been proud of. The one who faced his fears, instead of falling prey to them.

He let the compass drop back beneath his shirt.

Maybe he did not have his father’s skill with a sword, or the kind of courage that inspired epic poems and legends. But that was not the only way to win a battle.

“Wait!” Oliver cried. “I didn’t come here to fight you. I’m here to help!”

The dragon took a menacing step forward and roared. Flames singed the hair around Oliver’s brow.

He remembered a childhood story that his mother used to read to him at night. “My,” Oliver said softly, “what big teeth you have.”

The dragon proudly flashed his massive overbite, gnashing his teeth inches away from Oliver’s face.

Instead of flinching, however, in the cloud of smoky breath, Oliver just frowned. “Well,” he said, “no wonder you’re in so much pain.”

The dragon, about to swipe his tail at him, hesitated.

“Look, dental issues are nothing to be embarrassed about.”

Pyro snorted, the fiery ball igniting a tree just to Oliver’s left. “Denying it will not make it any better,” Oliver insisted. “Do you or do you not have a smoky aftertaste in your mouth?”

The dragon blinked.

“Classic symptomology. You, my friend, suffer from an impacted firecuspid. If left unattended, it can lead to scaly skin, flaring of the nostrils, charred tongue…”

With each recognizable symptom, the dragon backed away, eyes wide.

“…and untimely death.”

The dragon sat back on his haunches and clamped his mouth firmly shut.

“Lucky for you, I have some experience with orthodontia.” Oliver took a step forward. “Just close your eyes, and open your mouth wide.”

The dragon slowly, warily, opened his massive jaws.

This was the place his father had died. Holding his breath, Oliver cautiously climbed onto the dragon’s spongy tongue. He stared at the teeth, large as boulders, with bits of flesh and blood caught between them. His boot slipped, and as he fell to his knees, something winked at him. It looked like a silver filling.

Oliver narrowed his eyes and realized that it wasn’t a filling at all. It was a knight’s helmet, a piece of the armor he’d created with Orville-made of the strongest, most fireproof material in the kingdom-reduced to a shredded ball of foil.

This knight had died. Oliver’s father had died. This dragon could swallow Oliver whole. No amount of skill with words and lies and ruses could protect him from bodily harm.

As if to underscore this fact, the dragon belched, and a gust of flame rushed toward Oliver like a wave. He reached into his rucksack and closed his fingers around the fire extinguisher that the mermaids had given him.

He pulled out the metal key to activate it and carefully positioned the canister between two enormous molars. “Now,” he said, gingerly backing out of the dragon’s mouth and wiping his tunic clean of saliva, “I need you to bite down very gently.”

Pyro clamped his mouth shut. Oliver counted to three under his breath, and suddenly white foam began oozing out from between the dragon’s gums. “Ah,” he said. “I can see it’s working…”

The dragon began wheezing. His mouth opened, but instead of a burst of flames came a sad, weak cough. Like any cornered animal, Pyro began to lash out with his claws and his tail, slicing the air. Oliver leaped out of the way, hiding behind a rock as the dragon retreated down the hill to the ocean.