aldersprig | Two Years Ago - Badges - a story of Dragons Next Door

Two years ago, I wrote Questions for the "Spooks, Creeps, Ghosts, and Ghouls" Giraffe Call. This follows that.

I admit, Juniper joining a Girl Scout troop was not my favorite idea when she broached it.

The troop, like her school, was mixed, which both a point for and against it. Juniper needed more experience dealing with "normal human kids," on the other hand, dealing with normal human kids sometimes meant she came home crying, because they didn't live in the same world she did.

Sage and I conferred. Then we debated. Then we bargained. Then Juniper went to Girl Scouts.

First, there was that incident with the Rakshasa. The Girl Scout leadership, you see, is entirely human. They're entirely human and very, very mundane, and they didn't know what a Rakshasa was.

I had a talk with them - and a much longer talk with the Rakshasa - and the troop got a second leader. I thought everything was settled. Juniper was having fun. She was even making friends, friends with human girls. She even had her first sleepover - which meant I had a nice long conversation with three human mothers and, in the end, one of of them slept over, too. We braided each other's hair and watched bad movies; it was like being back at the Pumpkin again.

Things were going well, and the Rakshasa hadn't eaten anyone (my brownies, she said, helped quite a bit). Then Junie came home with her new friends, crayons, and blank badges. After they'd been working for three or four hours, I thought to ask what they were up to.

Junie looked up at me with her best I'm-innocent-really-Mom expression. "We're making new badges." Her friend Mirella was drawing something very very tiny with pen in the middle of her badge.

"New badges?"

Courtney held up her paper, on which, in very careful handwriting, was listed a full description of what had to be the badge Mirella was drawing. "They don't have enough badges. So we're making more. This is the pixie furnishings badge."

Well, at least she was spending time with more girls her age...