Annie was nine and lived with her Dad, who was always off on business trips and dumping her on Aunt Stephanie. Annie had all kinds of ideas, she was a creative dynamo, she created new inventions every morning at breakfast, drawing them on the plate with milk-sopping cheerios instead of eating. Dad would just chuckle a little and ruffle her hair. Aunt Stephanie would scold her for wasting the Cheerios and tell her she needed to eat her breakfast. Usually, by the time she got home from school in the afternoon, Annie had forgot the breakfast ideas, and would be dreaming up new ones. Sometimes though, she spent all day pondering the ideas of that morning and when she got home, she would try to build one of her inventions. But, she was pretty technically inept, they never came out the way she wanted, and she usually ended up kicking the misbegotten things to pieces and going to bed frustrated, lying awake and plotting what she would do next. Melanie, who was usually called Mel, was 11. She lived with her mom and dad and twin bratty 5 year old brothers, in a house down the street from Annie. Mel loved to make things. She constantly begged her mom and dad to buy her models, kits, anything she could make things out of. She got a radio kit and made all 300 projects in a week. But once the kit was done and the printed project book gone through, she needed a new one... her Mom suggested she make things not from kits, but Mel just sat and couldnt think of what to make. Even with Lego's she made the buildings on the boxes, rather than making up her own. One afternoon, Mel had finished building a remote controlled plane from a rather expensive kit her father had given in and bought her after she brought home a straight A's report card. Her mom saw her look of happiness at completing it, and then the inevitable frustration of having finished with no more to do. Why don't you go outside and fly it? her mother asked. Mel thought she should, just to make sure it worked right. So she took it outside and lay it on the sidewalk for a runway. Just then, Annie had come home with her latest cool idea, this one was for a dragon that could fly, breathe fire, and had a remote control. When she saw Mel getting ready to fly her plane, Annie could imagine the dragon taking shape around the plane... "That's IT" she shouted joyfully. "What's what?" Mel looked over at Annie doubtfully. The sixth grader had always dismissed her fourth grade neighbor as a little kid. "This? this is my plane. Don't touch it." "It would make such a cool dragon..." Annie twirled a little of her blond hair in her fingers and stuck the end into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully. "You could put papier mache and the fire could come out here... " she pointed "and legs underneath and it would be awesome!" Mel looked at the plane. "But, its got aerodynamics. You couldnt just put things all over it and still expect it to fly!" Mel had very little idea of what aerodynamics were, but she knew that Annie's suggestions would seriously mess with them. Annie looked a little disappointed. Mel saw that and felt... a matching disappointment, she was surprised by. "Well.. maybe we can get it to be aerodynamic... we can try..." As Annie's face lit up with hope and pleasure, Mel felt her heart skip a beat... she didn't know why but suddenly, making the dragon for Annie was important to her. "Let's ask your mom if you can go to the craft store with me, and we'll get the stuff..." Mel started feeling some enthusiasm for the new project. Annie laughed. "She's not my mom, she's Aunt Stephanie. My mom left us when I was little." Mel thought it was strange how Annie was laughing when she said something so sad. She wanted to hug Annie like she would one of her little brothers if he got upset. But she couldn't, Annie was skipping inside to her house to ask Aunt Stephanie if she could go to the store with Mel. Mel waited outside and Annie came running back out. "I can go! Let's go!" Annie grabbed Mel's hand and dragged her toward the shopping center that was across the big divided road that ran past their neighborhood. As they reached the curb, Mel watched the cars race by at what looked to her like 50Mph, about 15Mph over the speed limit. Annie tugged at her but she stayed on the curb. "Look both ways, remember?" Mel said. Even in her own ears she sounded like her mom. Annie stuck out her tongue. "I learned that when I was FOUR!" Annie said indignantly, then giggled. They waited till the cars cleared before walking to the median strip. There they waited again before crossing to the curb on the other side. "Why did Annie cross the road?" Annie asked Mel. Mel shrugged. "To get to the craft store!" Annie burst out laughing and Mel couldn't help but smile at her. --------------------- Inside the craft store Annie looked at everything. Mel already knew where it all was. She shopped here a lot, spending almost all her allowance on paint, glue, and other necessities for her models. She headed for the papier mache paste first, pushing the cart. Annie stopped to look at tubes of colored glitter. "This would make great scales for the dragon!" Annie said. Mel looked at the glitter. Annie grabbed a tube of red and gold glitter, throwing it into the cart. "If we put it on the papier mache while it's wet, it should stick just fine. But - newspaper will show through. I'd better buy some plain newsprint," Mel said, thinking out loud. Annie grinned at her and ran over to the artificial flower display. She grabbed a bright pink flower and put it behind her ear. "Look, I'm a Hawaiian princess" she said, doing her impression of a hula dance. "We need paste," Mel told her, delighted despite herself. She went and got the paste and Annie followed, still with the flower in her hair. "Hmm, now, how do we do the fire thing?" Mel asked Annie. Annie grinned and told Mel her invention for the fire-breathing part of the dragon. Mel looked impressed. It was really clever. She even thought it might work. On the other hand... "That sounds dangerous... it might set something on fire. What if the plane, I mean dragon, crashed into a house? Someone could die even." Mel looked serious. Annie looked back at her, crestfallen. Then Annie perked right back up. "I know, lets make it look like fire, but not really." Annie explained a new idea, with gold tinsel shooting out of the mouth then recoiling back in, so it was reusable. Mel thought this one was workable too, especially since the airplane had been configurable for extra wing-based propellers, so there were places to attach the spinning bar necessary and motorize it and even a switch on the remote control to operate it. Mel looked at Annie admiringly. "Wow, thats even better. Let's get the stuff." They headed to the electronics section of the shop where Mel picked up the things she'd need to get the new idea working, then they went to the holiday decorations area for the tinsel. "How about the legs?" Mel asked Annie. Annie stuck out her tongue. "Let me THINK a minute!" Annie said, then giggled and Mel started giggling with her. ----------------------------------------------- Mel and Annie took their purchases home and in Annie's back yard they began to work to transform the plane into a dragon. Mel started by building the fire-breathing mechanism, mounting it very carefully centered on the front of the plane where the head would go. She tested it carefully and the gold tinsel flew out and back just as she had hoped. Annie clapped and Mel felt a surge of extra satisfaction. Then the two of them set to work on the wire that would form the dragon's "skeleton". Annie went inside and brought out a book with an illustration of a dragon on the cover, and Mel copied the shapes of its wings and head. She looked at the eyes. "What can we use for eyes?" she asked Annie, who ran back inside leaving Mel to continue sculpting wire. Her hands were sore by the time she'd finished. Mel was attaching the head carefully over the gold tinsel works when Annie came back out gleefully waving two cats'eye marbles. "I found the eyes!" Annie shouted. Mel looked at them. They were too large to fit the head she'd just finished making. She started to say so.. "They're..." ...too big, but she couldnt finish. "...just beautiful," she finally said. She suddenly remembered a rock polishing kit her parents had got her a couple years earlier. It had ways to break down stones or trim them. "I'll be right back" and raced down the block to her house. She grabbed the rock polisher and accessories and ran back. "We can cut them down to fit using this," she said. Using the vise, chisel, and other tools, Mel carved the stone closer to the correct size. Then she and Annie took the polisher inside and plugged it in, and it polished the eyes. "Dinnertime," Aunt Stephanie came in to say. She saw her niece and the older dark-haired girl crouched around two tiny semi- precious gemstones. The visitor was fitting them into a wire head of a dinosaur or something, and her Annie was looking on, overjoyed. Both girls looked up at her word. "Already?" Annie whined. "We're getting so close!" Mel smiled. "I better go home now for my own dinner. I'll come back tomorrow and we can work on the dragon some more." "Come back after dinner!" Annie protested. - "I can't, homework. Tomorrow though, I promise." Mel laughed a little. "I'd rather come work on it than do homework anytime. It's been really fun." She left and went back to her house, where dinner wasn't quite ready. Her mom had her set the table and get her brothers' hands washed and then they ate. Mel ate quietly, thinking of Annie and her Aunt Stephanie eating alone, watching her little brothers push each other and throw peas, her father's scoldings and her mother's laughter, and was happy for herself and sad for Annie. Annie though was perfectly content. Aunt Stephanie told her how silly her project was and she just laughed. "It's the first one that isn't silly, I think," Annie said thoughtfully after she managed to stop laughing. "Because now I have someone who can really make things. It's going to be so cool!" Aunt Stephanie smiled indulgently then remembered herself and put on her stern aunt look again. "Make sure you do your homework, too," Aunt Stephanie reminded Annie. She knew that when Annie got all involved in a project she often forgot her schoolwork. ----------------------------------------- Three more afternoons went by before the dragon was ready for its first test flight. Mel tightened her hands on it nervously. There was no grownup saying this should work right in a nice neat instruction book. It might crash, in fact it should. Except that Annie's clever ideas and her skillful hands had made a beautiful piece of work out of the model plane. Its wings were longer and covered in black parachute silk on their webbed-look wire skeleton. Its head was a model of papier mache elegance, carefully painted by Mel to match the dragon's head on Annie's book. Annie had even done some of the work, cutting out the silk along Mel's painstakingly drawn wax-pencil lines. Mel used fabric glue to seal the wings. She knew how to sew but it would have taken far too long. Annie was eager to see the dragon fly. They took it out to the sidewalk where Mel had, days earlier, tried to launch it. She never had gotten around to it. What if she'd built it wrong in the first place? She shook her head to banish those doubts. She pressed the release then pulled the remote control lever that operated the wheels that were now encased in dragon legs. Mel had managed to persuade Annie that a running dragon with working legs would need a fancier remote-control, and take weeks instead of days. The dragon taxied down the sidewalk, gaining speed. Annie shrieked and Mel noticed, her concentration relaxing for a moment, the elderly neighbor lady who was carrying groceries down the sidewalk. "Watch out, Mrs. Garth!" she called. Mrs. Garth stepped spryly off the curb just in time. Mel pulled back the lever that controlled attitude and the dragon began to climb into the air. Annie jumped up and down cheering. Mel had a grin wider than she could remember in a long time. Mrs. Garth smiled at the two girls. "Very nice job, you two." She set her grocery bags on her car, parked by the curb, and watched the dragon fly in circles. Mel flew it away from her in a loop then back toward her, swooping low just in front of her and breathing "fire" in her direction. Mrs. Garth smiled more. "VERY nice." She kept watching until, worried for the power supply, Mel finally landed the dragon. Annie raced over to it. "It's okay!" Annie called over to Mel. The dragon had landed in another neighbor's yard. Annie picked it up and carried it with some effort, it being awkwardly large for her, over to Mrs. Garth, who took it and admired it, exclaiming over its details. Mel walked over to them also. "Look at those eyes," Mrs. Garth marveled. Annie beamed proudly. "I'd like to show this to Mr. Garth, you know, he loves dragons. Would you two like to come in for a snack?" Mel nodded, she had been hired before by Mrs. Garth to feed her cats while she and her husband were away visiting their grown children who had moved out of town. But Annie had to ask Aunt Stephanie for permission. Mel waited while Annie ran home to ask. "You two seem to have become good friends," Mrs. Garth remarked. Mel looked a little surprised. "I guess we have," she said. "She's only a fourth grader but, we've had lots of fun making the dragon together." Mrs. Garth smiled to herself. She waved to Annie who was racing back from home over to them. "Yes, yes, I can come over!" Annie shouted, ending a little too loud as she got up to where they stood waiting for her in the street. The three of them went into Mrs. Garth's house and Mr. Garth admired the dragon while Mrs. Garth set out Oreos, Nutter Butter cookies, and milk for the two girls. Mel ate two of each cookie, alternating, while Annie decided to try something new and took the sandwiches apart and recombined them, so she had a sort of peanut with chocolate circle in the middle shaped mixed cookies. Mel giggled at the mismatched cookies Annie was eating. Annie took another Oreo and another Nutter Butter apart. The cream filling stayed on half while the other half was a plain cookie, on each. Annie put the two creamy halves together and munched. "What are you going to do with the plain halves," Mel wondered aloud. Annie grinned at her open-mouthed, showing half chewed cookie. Mel made a face. Annie grinned even more and spit a little of the chewed up cookie and cream onto the plain Oreo half. She topped it with the Nutter Butter half and squished the two together as she finished chewing and swallowed. "Yuck," said Mel, "you aren't going to EAT that are you?" She glanced at the two adults, who were now talking quietly and ignoring the girls, although Mr. Garth was still bent over the dragon model examining the fire mechanism in the mouth. "I was," Annie said. "Why, did you want it? Ooooh, I dare you to take a bite." She stuck her tongue out at Mel. Mel looked at her. "Yuck, I wouldn't ever." Annie took a bite and deliberately chewed, purposely showing Mel the chewed up cookie. "Yummy, it tastes SO good, and now you will never know, cause I won't let you even try it, cause you're chicken to." "Am not. It's just gross, its been IN your mouth." Mel protested a fourth grader calling her chicken. "You are so. I've chewed ABC gum, it's the same thing." Annie looked triumphant. ABC gum, Already Been Chewed. "So, if you're not chicken, prove it. Eat it. Here." She held out the cookie with a bite out of it, to Mel. Mel took the cookie feeling an odd sensation as she looked at it. She giggled and then stopped, then took a bite. It really wasn't that bad a taste, a bit dry even, but the thought nearly gagged her. She managed not to gag and just ate normally, or as close as she could to normally. She finished it and gave Annie a slight smirk. "See? not chicken." Annie giggled. Mr. Garth walked over to the girls. "This is really quite amazing, girls," he said. He set the dragon on the glass coffee table. "Whose idea was it originally?" Mel pointed to Annie. "Hers," she said. "But she did most of the work," Annie said. "I'm terrible at making stuff." "I'm sure you aren't that bad," Mr. Garth said almost patronizingly. He looked the girls over again. "If you bring me the various things you make, maybe we can all make some money off them. I know the guy who runs the patent office in town." He smiled. "Cool," Mel said, and Annie echoed it. The two girls went home very excited about their next project.