Home of the Dragons

There weren’t always Dragons in the Valley. To be honest, if it wasn’t for my mom’s refusal to drive me to school each day, I doubt that the Dragons coming to the Valley would have even had one iota of impact on me.

But, alas, we are talking about my mom here, so of course she did get involved, and now I’m fully submerged in this ancient mythical battle that I have no business being a part of.

It’s probably best if I take a step back and provide some context.

First, understanding my mom is a huge part of this story. What you need to know about her is she is a boss ass business bitch who takes no prisoners (my words). When we lived in New York, she was an exec at a hedge fund in FiDi, and it was obvious that she loved what she did. I could see the power it gave her when she would regale us about her day. She’d tell us with a coy smirk over dinner how she had made men tremble just by asking for their quarterly report.

My dad on the other hand was a generally quiet, and boring accountant (his words). My parents both planned for career paths in finance, but they couldn’t have ended up on more opposite sides of the spectrum.

Prior to the start of this school year, I lived in New York City. Upper West Side to be precise. I had just finished my junior year at the Calhoun School and everything was fine. Maybe a bit boring, but fine.

Then, several bad things happened in a relatively short period of time.

First, my dad died. He was on his way to LaGuardia for a work trip when a semi-truck lost control during a freak rain storm. The Uber driver lived, only my dad died.

Then, my mom’s dad died.

Twenty four hours later, my mom’s mom died. The doctors said grammy passed from grief at losing her husband. Frankly, I was surprised the doctors were allowed to say the cause of death was grief. Isn’t that just a dramatic way of saying, “heart attack”?

My grandparents were older, in their early 80s, so it wasn’t completely unexpected. But still, it was too much death in just one month.

We went out to their home in San Fernando Valley for the funeral only two weeks after we buried my dad. It was nice to have a change of scenery, in theory, but there wasn’t much to be desired about the old home. The two story house was perched atop a hillside in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing other than dust and dried up bushes that looked as if they would combust into flames if someone so much as looked at them funny.

When we got back to New York, that was when the real processing began.

For me, I found that I coped with my grief by being insincere and sarcastic to everyone, about everything, at every opportunity provided to me. If I had a therapist they would likely tell me I was being avoidant.

That wasn’t how my mom coped, though.

“Mom, have you eaten today?” I would ask her, every day, at every meal as she rushed in and out of rooms. I would follow her as she moved with a protein bar in hand, attempting to shove it into her purse.

She would laugh and wave me off, like this was some fun game we would play. She would then fix her blazer collar that had popped up, and grabbed more coffee.

“I’ll see you later sweetie,” she would call back to me, not answering my question. She was in constant motion from one place to another; perpetually staying in motion, never letting her mind stay for too long in the grief.

Then one day, her system broke.

I found her standing in the hallway, her posture catatonic, her body upright and rigid. She didn’t move a muscle for at least 10 minutes. It was an eerie sight seeing her there in the hallway, partially due to the dim lighting of the single sconce on the wall, but also because her frame had wasted away to look almost skeleton.

When I approached her, I carefully put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her, but she just crumpled under my touch. Her body fell to the ground and turned to a heap of tears, blood curdling screams, and clawing at her own hair.

I didn’t know what to do. I was only seventeen at the time and I still feel my heart palpitate at the memory of it. I wanted to yell, “Yeah same! I’m sad too!” but I had to emotionally shut down and only observe, keeping my distance as she processed it all.

Then at the end of it, her face suddenly scoured of the previous emotion that came roaring out of her, decided that we had to move to her late parents home in San Fernando Valley. That she couldn’t be around these memories anymore.

Moving would mean having to finish out high school somewhere brand new.

A small part of me wanted to finish my senior year out at the Calhoun School, but a bigger part of me didn’t care one way or another.

I could make friends fine, but I didn’t know how to keep them. I could be charming, and funny; just enough to suck them in. But when it came to maintaining the bond, I panicked. I didn’t know what I had to offer them, and figured they would eventually get tired of me.

One hell of a self fulfilling prophesy.

With no real friends or boyfriend to speak of, I gave in and said I didn’t care if we moved to the West Coast to be in the Valley. I did use the move as an opportunity to persuade my mom to let me just get my GED and not even go back to high school. That proposal was a non-starter (her words).

I just wanted to be done with school. I thought it was pointless to sit around in a classroom for eight hours a day, five days a week. All it was was someone telling you the world was going to be like once you graduated, and claiming that they’re preparing you for it. Deep down in my gut, I knew high school would never prepare me enough for life.

For as long as I could remember, I had this nagging feeling that there had to be something more to life than what was shown to us. This feeling only intensified after my dad passed away. I mean, could life really just be go to school, get a career, do that for awhile and then you die?

In retrospect, that nagging feeling I felt was very foreshadowey, which I now find to be very funny.

Packing up our apartment was a blur, and with all of our belongings on a truck, my mom and I headed off to start our new lives in the Valley, which was how I found most people referred to it.

Leading up to our move, my mom had been stressing over where to send me to school. I would use her stress as fodder to push my GED instead of high school agenda.

One day, I had printed out a nifty little think piece from The Atlantic about the unfounded stigmas of getting a GED rather than finishing school. I sat perched atop a kitchen island stool, sipping coffee, waiting for my mom to come in and see it.

She was a blur in a pant suit that day. Everything was hectic what with the move and it being her last week at the hedge fund. Amidst the chaos, she paused and stared at the aptly placed article on the counter.

“What is this?” She asked curtly.

I shrugged, keeping things casual. “Just an article I thought would be helpful to read.”

She scanned the first few sentences, then with her chin still positioned low, her eyes flicked to mine. It was bone chilling; I could see why mortal men would fear this woman.

“You’re finishing out your senior year,” She stated as fact, not leaving an ounce of space to counter.

“This would be way easier!” I called out to her after she had already moved away from the island and over to the coffee pot. I knew as soon as I said it I screwed up my argument.

“Exactly Sammi!” she exclaimed, spinning around, nearly colliding with me. “If you think I’m going to let you go with the easier option when it comes to your education,” she would stress education in such a way I almost sank to my knees, “then you have another thing coming.”

We would go through variations of that conversation about every other day for a week or so. Deep down I think she liked to verbally spar with me because I didn’t fear her like everyone else. For me, I liked watching that fire in her eyes that had dimmed since my dad died.

But then reality crept in and finally it dawned on my mom that no matter where I went, she was going to need to drive me at least 30 minutes each way to school each day. I didn’t have a drivers licenses, and after what happened to my dad, I had no intention to get one.

It wasn’t until we arrived back at my grandparent’s house that it felt like the universe had finally thrown my mom a bone, and me a big FU.

Instead of the empty lot, and a never ending expanse of nothingness across from my grandparents home, now stood a state of the art, multilevel, school campus.

We knew for sure it was a school campus by the stone engraved sign out front:

The Hawkley Institutie - Home of the Dragons

I looked to my mom who was standing next to me in the drive way, staring with her mouth agape, nearly panting with joy at the beacon of hope across the street.

“Mom it says it’s an institute. It’s probably not even a school,” I tried telling her, hoping she would cool on the idea of sending me to the random school that happened to pop up, literally overnight, right across the street from where we’d be living.

“It says Home of the Dragons sweetie,” she retorted sweetly, gesturing to the rock slab with writing 50 feet away. “That sounds fun! At least it’s not some racist mascot.”

It wasn’t worth arguing with her in the moment. I had two months before the new school year was to start, and I felt confident that between then and having to step foot into a school, I could convince my mom to just let me get a GED.

Honestly, I don’t know why I was so pressed to skip the last parts of high school. I did think school was pointless, to be fair, but I had no clue what I wanted to do, and knew even less about who I was. So why rush the process?

Still, I didn’t want to go to a school that had “institute” in the name. The first thing I did was try to look up anything about the so called school, and there was not a scrap of information to be found about it on the internet, which is saying something.

“It’s probably very prestigious,” my mom would call back to me as I would read aloud details, or lack thereof, when I found them.

“Mom it’s not even on Google Maps!” I would shout back to her, turning Google Maps to satellite view and only seeing the empty lot on the hilltop.

“It was just built, what do you expect?” she would reply back, loud enough for me to hear from several rooms over.

There was no stopping my mom at that point. Her dream was one thing, and one thing only: For me to go to the Hawkley Institute so she wouldn’t need to drive me to school every day in California traffic.

The topic of me going to the Hawkley Institute cooled for a bit as we settled into a rhythm of going through Grammy and Grandpa’s house and organizing the space so it would be livable for us. Plus, mom got a new fancy job at a FinTech startup in Santa Monica each day, so she was gone for large chunks of time during the day. After some time passed, she let the matter of what school I’d go to slip for long enough until it hit her one day that if I wasn’t enrolled somewhere soon, I probably wouldn’t be able to attend any school that year.

Which was my plan all along. For her to forget. But then she didn’t.

My mom realized that because the Hawkley Institute had no online presence, it made it incredibly difficult to find a phone number to enroll me.

But like I said, my mom is tenacious.

So she started going each day to the school doors before she left for work at 7am, banging for at least ten minutes before giving up. She’d do the same around 6pm when she got home.

I would watch her from my new bedroom window, which looked out over the school.

The school itself was quite impressive to look at, if I was being honest. It had a brutalist look to it, but also felt as if it had been there for centuries by the weathered gray of the stone walls, instead of only being there a little over a month.

Everything about the building stood in stark contrast to its surroundings. The landscape the school was set against was brown and dusty, with the only plant life to speak of being tufted, dried up bushes that looked as if they would spontaneously combust into fire.

One day after her daily knocking at the door of Hawkley Institute, my mom stormed back into the house, slamming the door behind her.

I ran down the stairs to see her pounding away at the keys of her laptop at the messy kitchen island counter top.

“What happened?” I asked from the stairway, which gave me a decent line of sight to what my mom was doing.

“They won’t take you,” she spat out, her fingers hitting the keyboard that much harder as she said it.

I tried to act upset, like I was offended too. But really, this was all working out in my favor. It was way too late to try to get me into another school; so it was either Hawkley or a GED. This development played right into my preferred outcome.

“But I’m going to fight it,” my mom continued, bending at the waist to look at what she had pulled up on her laptop screen.

“Fight it?” I was already feeling queasy. I knew what that meant when my mom said she would fight something. It meant she would win, and I would likely be catastrophically embarrassed by the level of effort and screaming she would emit to get her way.

“I’m curious what the San Fernando Board of Education thinks about rejecting a student without so much as seeing their transcript,” she said with a quippy tone, mostly to herself.

I left my perch on the stairs and made my way to the kitchen to see what she was searching.

“Mom, are you ratting on them to the Government?” I asked, seeing a dot gov website pulled up.

“The man I spoke to was very rude. He said something about me ‘needing to knock it off’ and when I told him you would be enrolling at their school, he said no and slammed the door!” she shouted, incensed at the rudeness of it all.

“Some schools are really hard to get into,” I tried to tell her.

“They don’t even know you!” she snapped back. She caught my eye for a split second before getting a tortured look on her face and turning her attention back to the computer screen.

It was around that time where I started to realize my mom had a hard time looking at me, and I was convinced it was because of how many similar features I had inherited from my dad.

My hair was a brown curly mess, with little streaks of gold highlights that would come through in the sun, just like my dad’s. He kept his hair shorter than mine, but it was always a bit unruly. I usually kept mine at shoulder length, but was in the process of growing it out to put some distance between our appearances.

But there was no getting away from the eyes. Mine were a deep blue green, exactly like his were.

The shape of my face was my moms: Somewhere between a heart and a box shape. Our physical frame was similar too: We were an average height at 5’5” with athletic looking features. My mom worked out relentlessly, but I didn’t, which felt misleading as people would assume I was athletically capable, when at best I was athletically optimistic.

In the moments where I caught her lingering on the appearance of my hair for too long, or flicking her stare away from my eyes, I could tell she felt all sorts of shame. Because it felt like she couldn’t help resent me just a little for being alive when my dad was dead.

Maybe the fight with the Hawkley Institute was just a convenient distraction to her, but my mom went into battle ready to go down swinging.

At first, she sent letters to the Board of Education. She would find it odd, because the Board of Education would reply to her complaints via letter and state that there was no Hawkley Institute in their district. Then, before my mom could correct them, we’d get another letter saying, “the Hawkley Institute was in their right to choose who they wish to admit into their school.”

Then, my mom began going door to door in the near by community, asking residents if they thought it was OK for a local school to not admit students from town to their campus.

I never went with her on these foot campaigns, but my mom would often come home complaining that people thought she was crazy. I bit my tongue, because she was being crazy. I did find it weird when my mom told me that a lady she had spoke to twice in one evening forgot who she was only after thirty minutes from their first conversation, but I figured the lady was just feigning ignorance and wanted my mom to go away.

That was when my mom began contacting local news stations, and the tide began to shift with the Hawkley Institute.

I would find out later that short of killing us both, which had been proposed, emphatically by some of the staff, that the Hawkley Institute determined the only other way to contain the disaster that was my mom was to just admit me into the school. Just days before the school year was suppose to start there was a letter in our mail box accepting me into the Hawkley Institute.

My mom popped a bottle of Champagne that night, but wouldn’t let me have any and ended up pouring most of it down the drain so she wouldn’t get too drunk.

A part of me was happy for her to get this win, even though getting accepted into the Hawkley Institute was exactly what I didn’t want.

Who wants to go to school directly across the street from their own home? I would go to bed looking at the place I’d be for eight hours a day. It felt like a nightmare to me.

It turned out that living in close proximity to the school would end up being the least of my concerns, because on the first day entering the halls of Hawkley Institute, it would become abundantly clear that I did not belong there.

I came to find out that every student that walked the halls of Hawkley, not only passed, but received top marks on their Svlarbard’s International Assessment of Magical Abilities test, which was only conducted every five years and only to candidates who cleared their preliminary assessments.

The first problem was, I had I not taken or even heard of the Svlarbard’s assessment, which the student body would eventually come to find out to mixed reactions.

The more glaring issue, though, was that I was admitted into the Hawkley Institute of Magical Excellence with no known magic whatsoever in my blood.