Mitch appears with a bucket of wet sand and begins constructing a castle wall around Paul's head. “We're building a fortress. Mr. Paul is the prisoner.”
“I'm not a prisoner. I'm a—” Paul pauses. “What am I?”
“You're the dragon,” Aidan says, dropping to his knees with the intense focus of a boy who has found his creative vision. “The dragon who guards the treasure, but the knights trapped you. We're the knights.”
“I don't want to be a dragon.”
“You don't get to pick. You're buried.”
I lower myself onto the sand next to Paul's head. Close enough to talk. Close enough to see the sand in his eyebrows and the way his mouth is doing a thing it almost never does.
He's almost smiling.
Not fully. Paul Spencer doesn't do full smiles. But the corners are twitching and his eyes have that crinkle that means his face is trying to do a thing his brain hasn't authorized.
“You let them bury you,” I sayquietly.
“They're persuasive.”
“They're eight.”
“Eight-year-olds are the most persuasive humans on the planet. They don't understand no. They just keep asking with different words until your resistance collapses.”
“That's called parenting.”
“That's called a siege.”
Aidan is now drawing scales on the sand around Paul's neck with a stick. “Dragons have scales. Hold still.”
“I literally cannot move.”
“Good. Scales require precision.”
I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them. My son is drawing on the sand around the neck of the man who told me my coffee maker was a fire hazard and my children were a dock liability. Aidan's tongue is sticking out the way it does when he's concentrating. His curls are full of sand. He's utterly absorbed, completely happy.
And Paul is letting him.
My throat tightens. I swallow against it.
“Mom, he needs food,” Mitch announces. “Prisoners need food. It's in the Geneva Conventions.”
“You don't know what the Geneva Conventions are.”
“Olson told me. It means you have to feed prisoners or it's a war crime.”
“Feed the dragon,” Olson says with dignity.
I look at Paul. Paul looks at me. His entire body is underground and his head is surrounded by a sand fortress and my son is drawing scales on his neck and two other eight-year-olds are invoking international law to demand I feed him.
“I have goldfish crackers in my bag,” I say.
“I'm not eating goldfish crackers.”
“You don't have arms.”
He blinks. Processes this. “I'm not eating goldfish crackers that get hand-fed to me on a public beach.”
“Then starve, dragon.”
