“In which we meet Timothy Freshwater on the day he is expelled from the last school in the city.

Timothy Freshwater was used to people telling him he was too smart for his own good. No, not quite used to it, more like bored with it. Every parent/teacher conference it was the same thing:

“That lad is bored, that’s the problem.”

“Timothy knows too much; have you been reading to him?”

He would stare past whichever teacher it was this year and cross his eyes so his vision would get all blurry. And whichever teacher it was, they too blurred all together, would drone on and on about his potential. That really he would be a lovely boy, if only, he would... you know... and they would give him a hasty glance... apply himself.

Whatever.

Because Timothy knew the truth. What worried his teachers wasn’t that he was too smart for his own good. What did they care if he was bored in class? The same could be said of two thirds of his peers. No, what worried them was that he was too smart, full stop. He was smarter than all of them, and this put them on edge. They shrank into corners when he walked down the hall, and they punished him whenever they got the chance, and that’s why they expelled him. Time after time. Sure, at Reeling Comprehensive they said it was because he stuffed Dirk Walker into his locker. And at The Fortunate School for Boys it was because he carefully placed steaming dog droppings in his year-five teacher’s briefcase. It wasn’t because he organized a student walkout protesting the removal of chips from the school lunch menu at Central Tech. Oh, and it most definitely was not because he plastered posters around the school of the headmaster of Arlington Elementary kissing the art teacher.

No.

It was because he was smarter than them all and they knew it. And it terrified them. In year three, for example, he had tormented his teacher by answering all the math problems on the chalkboard before the Mr. Inklemeyer had finished drawing the equals sign. It had become a bit of a race, and had resulted in Mr. Inklemeyer’s spraining his index finger in his haste to beat Timothy to the punch. There was that year-four science class when he had drawn an anatomically correct picture of Mr. Plink, complete with labels, and made a photocopy for everyone. And then of course there had been Timothy’s rather short-lived glory of winning the creative writing award in year two, when a supply teacher pointed out his piece on the Happy Chipmunk was actually an allegory for something far more sinister.

Yes, they were all petrified of him, sitting there in the back row, scrutinizing them carefully. Never knowing when he would strike next. He would rock back and forth in his chair, making sure it squeaked ominously. He always found a chair that squeaked ominously. He was so good at squeaking that he managed to make year-six teacher number two burst into tears.

Well, bully for her. He wouldn’t sit idly by and let them smugly tell him what was what, when they didn’t really know themselves. They knew what was in their textbooks, but if you asked them questions, real questions, then they’d crumple onto the floor. Timothy used the Socratic method. He asked questions he knew the answers to just to get a rise out of them.

So, of course, it was no surprise when he was finally expelled from Montgomery.

“Well that’s that then,” said his dad, squinting over his steering wheel and taking a left turn rather abruptly. “There are officially no more schools left. You must be really proud of yourself.”

Timothy shrugged. “Whatever.”

So there you go. You’ve now met Timothy Freshwater, the boy who knew too much for his own good. But perhaps this description isn’t entirely accurate. In fact, I would say that Timothy Freshwater didn’t truly know how much he actually knew. And how much good what he knew would turn out to be. At least not yet. See, he had never met a dragon. But he was about to. And that would make all the difference.”