LGBT friendly children’s story. (Patreon)

I have been indulging in Harry Potter, but in some ways this fandom makes me sad.  I knew Dumbledore was coded gay before JKR said anything (tragic backstory, wild colored robes, shifting his own morals for a man he loves).  However, the only obviously gay character never gets a happy story. In face, when you look at the actual books, the only obviously gay character is an asshole.  I mean, sure, a children’s story is not going to discuss who is gay and who is straight, but it’s not hard to decode. And then we get to JKR’s garbage ideas.  They make me so very sad.  So, anyway, my brain started thinking about a children’s story that would try to avoid some of the toxicity, and my brain spat this out.  Why?  No idea.  I just follow the muse.

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Dakota’s family was full of remarkable children. His cousin Cyril was the same age as him, but Cyril volunteered at the animal shelter and all the teachers smiled when he passed. He didn’t have the best grades, but everyone talked about his kindness. Cousin Ada was the brilliant one. She brought home loads of awards with colorful stickers and scribbly teacher signatures. She never went anywhere without a book in her hand.

In another family, maybe Dakota could have been the strange child. The outsider. After all, his parents had died, leaving him with Aunt Anita and Uncle Norbert, so he literally didn’t fit in. His aunt and all three cousins had beautiful thick, dark hair, and Ada called his dishwater blond. He looked a little like his uncle because they were both lanky and tall, but Uncle Norbert had a certain grace about him and Dakota had failed every fitness test his P.E. teachers had ever put in front of him.

He should have been shoo in for the title of odd child. However, Bob had claimed that role. He painted. Badly. But he liked to walk around the house with a paintbrush, declaring his artistic eye demanded that Aunt Anita’s green vase be moved from the living room to the dining room. Given that those two rooms were really one room on the first floor of their Chicago townhouse, that meant moving the vase six feet.

But Aunt Anita would sigh and move it.

Aunt Anita would do anything for her three children. She had given up working at an office after Dakota had arrived to stay home with them. That meant that Dakota didn’t remember her ever working because an official had escorted him to his aunt and uncle’s house when he was almost two years old. They said his parents were gone, and since Uncle Norbert was his mother’s closest relative, they were now responsible for him.

Having parents who had died was the only remarkable thing about Dakota. In a house full of loud voices, sometimes he felt like he disappeared, like he would merge with his shadow and vanish into some dark corner of the crowded three bedroom home.

And the home was crowded. Cousin Bob and Cousin Cyril had so many friends who were always draped across the couch or camped on the floor in front of the only working television in the house. Cousin Ada’s best friend, Janet, had moved in with them after her parents had done something really bad—something people would only talk about in whispers. Even when Dakota had caught Uncle Norbert in the garage by himself, Uncle Norbert wouldn’t explain. As much as his uncle avoided him, when he could catch his uncle alone, the man would fold his long body to crouch in front of Dakota and talk to him like he mattered.

Unfortunately, Uncle Norbert worked. A lot. And while Aunt Anita cooked and cleaned and patted him on the head if she encountered him in the hallway, she didn’t look at him. For almost ten years, he had drifted through the house. It wasn’t like they meant to ignore him. On his birthday, everyone would begin by singing happy birthday to him, but then Bob would snatch the first piece of cake or Cyril would lecture about how they should take the cake to the homeless shelter and Aunt Anita would get frustrated and threaten to take her slipper to their backsides if they didn’t stop being so dramatic.

Irony.

When Dakota had learned that word in school, he had remembered what it meant the first time because his aunt always shouted for other people to stop being dramatic.

But it didn’t matter how it started. It always ended with the family and whatever school acquaintances had shown up arguing in the other room while Dakota stared at his cake. When third grade started, Joey Clark had announced that inviting a whole class to a birthday was stupid. People were only supposed to invite their friends. That had ended the tradition of having an audience for his birthday argument, but it hadn’t ended the arguments.

“Someone put garbage in the recycling!” Aunt Anita shouted. “Someone better get down here and wash this recycling because if I get one more warning from the city, I am going to take a flip-flop to everyone’s backside!”

“It was Bob!” Cyril shouted. He was probably telling the truth.

“No it wasn’t!” Bob shouted over the sounds of the video game he was playing with his friends. “I saw Janet in there a few minutes ago.” Dakota knew how this would end. He was always the last one anyone remembered to blame. He used to try to complete the circle by blaming someone who had already denied the crime, but that just led to Aunt Anita thwapping him with her slipper until he had rushed to complete the chores. But if she couldn’t find him, she would choose another child just to avoid doing the chore herself.

So Dakota pulled the chain for the attic stairs and clambered up into the darkness. He was supposed to share a room with Bob and Cyril, but there wasn’t space for him. So he had cleaned the attic, pushed boxes of broken toys and old Christmas ornaments against the brick to stop the cold from seeping in, and dragged his mattress up the stairs.

He was the only one up here, and that made it special. He could lay out his toys and books and no one stepped on them. None of his brothers or their friends would even come up because they complained it was cold or hot or dark, but Dakota thought it was perfect. Sometimes he imagined the shadows moved to create scenes across the steep, slanted ceiling. Often it was a beautiful mountain scene with birds whirling through a misty sky. Other times it showed battling dragons or castles with knights marching in formation. Dakota even had a television, a broken thing with no picture, but he used it like a radio, listening to his favorite cartoons and imagining what it would look like. That was better than trying to borrow Ada’s phone.

Hours later, Dakota heard his aunt in the hall below. “Where is that boy?” Dakota assumed she wanted one of his cousins and kept reading his comic. However, she called his name, and Dakota startled so badly that he ripped the page. Putting the comic carefully aside, Dakota pushed the attic hatch open and stuck his head through.

“Yes, Aunt Anita?”

She frowned at him. “What are you doing up there?”

He blinked. He had moved to the attic two years ago, but he supposed there was no reason for her to notice. “I was looking for some old comics I couldn’t find,” he said. He had the vague fear that if she knew he lived up here, she would lock the hatch. She didn’t like it when he was strange.

“I need you to run to the market,” she said.

“Couldn’t—”

Dakota didn’t get any further before his aunt cut him off. “Everyone else is busy, and I need cake flour. Here’s five dollars, bring back the change.” She didn’t wait for him to climb down. She put the bill on one of the rungs and walked away.

With a sigh, Dakota abandoned his refuge and climbed down. Now that he was almost twelve, his aunt had decided he could be trusted to walk places alone, and she remembered his existence much more often when she needed chores done.

He picked up the money and shoved it in his pocket before walking past Bob and his friends in front of their video game. Heaven forbid he pause his game and do chores. But Dakota knew Aunt Anita wouldn’t ask that of him. Having friends in the house meant immunity from chores.

None of the others noticed when Dakota left the house. Chicago had been unseasonably warm with very little snow this winter. In the shadowed corners of alleys, ratty piles of dirty snow still waited for spring to melt them, but for the most part the roads and sidewalks were clear. He had crossed the second street when Sir Knight found him. Sir Knight fell in beside him, sniffing his pockets. “I don’t have anything for you today. I can buy something at the store, though.” Aunt Anita would be angry that she didn’t get all her change, but he would happily endure a few thwacks for Sir Knight.

“No need. I had good hunting last night. Two squirrels.”

Dakota looked down at the huge dog that walked beside him. He was tall and long with a black face and a fawn body and a tail that curled up over his back. Most of the people on the street avoided him, even though he was the friendliest stray dog ever. Most dogs would curse at him and run away when Dakota offered to help.

“You’re still too thin. I could get soup bones and some cheap meat,” he offered.

Sir Knight put his nose in the air. “I am a Kangal—a proud breed that goes back thousands of years. My ancestors are painted on the walls of temples in the Middle East. I can hunt for myself, little lamb.”

“I am not a lamb,” Dakota said. A man in a suit gave him an odd look, and Dakota ducked his head and wished he was invisible. Luckily, people talking to themselves on the street was common enough, even if people having a conversation with a dog was not.

Sir Knight huffed. “I am from a long line of guardians in charge of sheep and goats. And you are more sheep than goat. Goats have an unpleasant sense of humor. My mother told me the stories even if I am a city dog.”

“Sheep are stupid,” Dakota countered. “I am not stupid.” This was not the first time they had this specific argument. Dakota had long ago lost his claim to being a human child because, as Sir Knight pointed out, human children did not understand animals. But he would rather be a young goat than a young sheep. He stepped in a puddle formed by someone washing down their stoop and groaned when cold water soaked into his sock.

He leaned against a fire hydrant and picked up his foot to look sadly at the wet sock that showed through the cracked sole.

“You need new shoes, little one,” Sir Knight said, neatly avoiding the discussion of whether Dakota was a sheep or goat.

“I told my aunt.”

“And yet you have no new shoes.”

Dakota sighed. It was easy enough to claim clothes from his older cousins. As they outgrew their wardrobe, Dakota could pick his favorite pieces out of the boxes his aunt would collect for the charity shops. But shoes were another matter. His cousins never gave up their shoes. Bob worshipped his shoes and said they were works of art and even if he couldn’t wear them, he could appreciate their aesthetic value. And Cyril never bought shoes unless his old ones were falling off his feet. Like Dakota’s were.

“I could show her my shoes and muddy sock when she’s at the computer. If she orders me new ones right away, maybe she wouldn’t forget,” Dakota said. “And then I could have shoes that fit. His toes were always squished in his current sneakers.

“I do not approve of your flock. I would tend it much better if I were in charge.” Sir Knight reinforced that by nudging Dakota to get him moving toward the store again. “After all, I am from a long line of guardians trusted to protect their flocks through attacks from wolf packs. I have the breeding for the task and your aunt clearly does not.”

“My aunt is fine,” Dakota said, even though she kind of wasn’t. His foot squelched in his shoe.

Sir Knight huffed. That meant he didn’t want to argue. Some older boys sitting on the edge of the skate park half-pipe watched him. The group that included a boy with long blue hair and several girls was gone, and they were the ones who usually told the bad ones to leave kids alone. Dakota would be afraid, but with Sir Knight next to him, no one bothered to demand a sidewalk tax. And that was good because with only one bill, Dakota would have been face with either surrendering the only money he had to buy the flour or running. He was good at running, but the skate park kids with their boards were faster.

Soon, he was at the store, and Sir Knight had to leave him. The store people always shouted at him when he came in, even though he was polite enough that he would never steal. If someone tried to accuse him, he probably would have lectured them about his noble ancestors, although everyone else just heard huffing and whining and little woofs. Or when Sir Knight was angry, they heard big booming barks and growls instead of his creative suggestions about their intestines. But people at the store never let Sir Knight in.

The cake flour was on sale for $3.51, so Dakota wasn’t going to have much change. He went up to the meat counter and put the basket with the flour down on the floor at his feet. “Excuse me!”

The men in their white aprons ignored the scruffy looking boy, probably hoping that some parent would come drag him away.

“Excuse me!” Dakota said more loudly.

The oldest meat cutter looked at the youngest one. With a sigh, he put his knife down and came over. “What?” he asked.

“My flour is $3.51, but my dog is hungry and wants something to eat.” Maybe Sir Knight didn’t say that, but Dakota knew it was true. “What can I buy for him with my change?”

The man blinked at him for a second before turning to his two comrades. “The boy wants something for his dog, but he only has a dollar.”

A rat-faced man laughed. “Tell him to get a candy bar.”

“Don’t say that,” the oldest snapped. He turned to Dakota. “Chocolate can kill a dog, and it will make them sick at the very least.”

Dakota knew that. He wouldn’t have given Sir Knight a candy bar, and if he had, Sir Knight would have lectured him about proper care and feeding of a dog as noble and special as he was. “Do you have anything I can feed him?”

The man sighed and came out from behind the counter. He picked up a package with a long section of bone cut in half, one with a bright orange “Manager Special” sticker that meant it was so old that it needed to be eaten the same day. “I suppose it won’t hurt to give you this.”

“Thank you, sir,” Dakota said as the man wrote a note and stuck it to the top of the package. Dakota tucked it into his basket and headed up to the front counter to check out. Once he was outside, Sir Knight immediately joined him, abandoning his search of the nearest garbage can.

“You smell of meat,” he said. Despite his earlier claim that he didn’t need anything, he had his nose in the air, sniffing the bag.

“The man gave me a bone. It has some good meat and cartilage on it, and it has all the marrow.”

“That’s wonderful.” Sir Knight licked his lips.

“We can go to your den and hide it.”

Sir Knight considered. “No, it’s best I walk you home. I can carry my bone back home afterward.”

“I wish you could live with me,” Dakota said sadly.

“You don’t have room for a creature as large and majestic as I,” Sir Knight said. He raised his curled tail up so it was like a flag over his butt.

“You’re probably right,” Dakota admitted. There wasn’t even room for him in the house, so there definitely wasn’t room for Sir Knight.

Chapter Two

School bored Dakota. He went to the local middle school, and the students were more interested in refining their graffiti and sneaking food into class than learning anything. All his cousins went to other schools, but his aunt had forgotten to send in the school choice application for him, and by the time she remembered, all the good schools were closed to enrollment, so he went to O’Leary Public Middle School. It was horrible.

March was almost over, and the playground was a mire. It has snowed after Spring Break, which wasn’t all that uncommon, but now the dirty snow lined the playground and the ground was thick with mud that smelled of car exhaust and dirty children. Fahad had lost his shoe and the teacher had been forced to put it under the faucet to get the layers of black off it. So Fahad was walking around school with a sock that sported a red cartoon face.

In short, it was an average day. Dakota sat on the top of the monkey bars and watched as kids fed the unwanted portions of their lunch to Sir Knight through the chain link fence. A teacher came out and shouted at Sir Knight, but instead of running away, he took the last offering—a bit of sandwich—and considered the teacher with contempt before he turned, twitched his tail higher, and strode down the street. He’d wait for Dakota to get out of school, but he’d do it out of sight of adults who might call animal control.

A man stopped on the sidewalk and watched the teacher for a moment before he turned toward the playground. His gaze immediately found Dakota. In fact, he stared at Dakota. That never happened. If Dakota did something odd, maybe strangers on the street might notice him for a moment, but he never kept their notice. The boys from the skate park, at least the ones who claimed the end by the bicycle shop, were always trying to get Dakota to shoplift for them because he was so good at being not noticed.

But this new stranger studied him like one of the bugs that Mrs. Williams had pinned under class in her science classroom. Dakota didn’t like it. He wished with all his heart that the man would go away. That usually worked, but the man seemed immune to Dakota’s wishing. He didn’t look like the sort of man who should be outside O’Leary Public School at all. He had on a light gray suit jacket and slacks with a black turtleneck underneath, and he stood with one hand in his pocket like a model on a magazine cover.

Maybe he was one. Or might have been in the past. He looked a little too old to be in fashion now. Ada always talked about how people had to starve themselves and get surgery to look twenty if they wanted to be a model, and this guy had wrinkles at the edges of his eyes that made Dakota think he smiled a lot.

Maybe the teacher noticed he didn’t belong because she moved to that part of the fence and crossed her arms. After a couple of minutes, the man moved on. Dakota slipped off the monkey bars and retreated to the classroom unseen.

If that had been the only strange thing to happen, Dakota would have dismissed it as a fluke, but after school he noticed another person watching him. He and Sir Knight were sitting under a slide in the public park, and a woman with her blonde hair pulled up in a bun stood at the bus stop staring at him.

Dakota fed Sir Knight the next bit of a mushed peanut butter sandwich as he watched the woman.

“Who is she?” Sir Knight asked.

“I don’t know.” Dakota kept his head down and his voice soft. He didn’t want her to see him talking to a dog and call him strange. He didn’t want her to look at him at all. Like the man at the school, she was dressed too fashionably for this part of town. She looked like one of the women in newspaper pictures of fundraisers at the museum. Her blonde hair was pulled up into a high pony tail, and she had on a shiny blue blouse with a tight skirt and jacket and the highest heels Dakota had ever seen.

“I don’t like how she’s looking at you,” Sir Knight said. Dakota silently wished for her to go away, but when she didn’t, Sir Knight got to his feet. His legs were stiff and his tail high. That was the sort of dog speak that most people could recognize, and they would back away. They didn’t want an angry Kangal challenging them.

The woman ignored the warning. “Hey, you leave him alone. I don’t like how you’re looking at him. He’s mine,” Sir Knight shouted to her, although she probably only heard barks and growls. That was enough to catch her attention, though. She transferred her attention to Sir Knight and stared at him. Sir Knight hated it when people stared. He said that in dog-speak, staring was like insulting someone’s ancestors, and Sir Knight was very proud of his lineage all the way back to those temple walls.

“Get lost!” Sir Knight shouted, which definitely came out as a booming bark.

With a startled squeak, she took a step to the left and disappeared into thin air.

Dakota’s mouth fell open. With a satisfied huff, Sir Knight returned to his side and threw himself to the ground. “Scratch my belly. I have an itch,” he demanded. He half rolled onto his back so his ears flopped open, showing their pink insides.

Dakota did as Sir Knight asked. “Did you see that?”

“I saw a rude woman.”

“She vanished.”

“Oh, she’s one of those sorts.”

“Those sorts? What sorts?” Dakota pulled a twig from Sir Knight’s fur.

“There are people who will vanish into air and houses that you can only see if you squint. Mother said that was true back home, too. Of course, Kangals are a proud and ancient breed, so we have learned how to see those sorts. You have to watch out for them because you don’t have a lot of warning if they’re going to attack your flock.”

“You’ve never had a flock,” Dakota pointed out.

“I have you,” Sir Knight countered, “and if those sorts are going to watch you, I need to stay close enough to warn them to keep their distance.” He lifted his head and gave Dakota a firm look. He would not allow anyone to hurt his flock, even if Dakota was a flock of one.

Dakota laid his head on Sir Knight’s shoulder. “I didn’t think people who could vanish existed outside of books.”

“Humans have terrible imaginations. If they write books about an idea, that idea probably exists somewhere in the world.”

“But vanishing people?”

“Stranger things exist than vanishing people. But vanishing people annoy me and I don’t want to talk about them. So scratch my ear if you’re going to lay on me.” Dakota complied. He liked scratching Sir Knight’s ears.

That night, Dakota lay in his attic room and watched the shadow figures on his ceiling. His stomach still churned with anxiety at the idea that there was a sort of person who could vanish and that the sort of people with that skill might be paying attention to him. He didn’t want them to notice him. Sure, sometimes he wished his teachers would praise his right answers or that his aunt would ask him what he wanted for dinner, but that was a different sort of attention. That wasn’t like strangers watching him.

His mind kept replaying images of the two strangers. As the house quieted and everyone else dropped off to sleep, he came to the conclusion that they knew each other. If he mentally put the man next to the woman, they fit. The shadows on the ceiling shifted to show the vague outline of a man in a turtleneck sweater and a suit next to the woman with her short skirt and jacket. It was like putting two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle right next to each other.

And they were watching him. Fear made a cold shiver go through Dakota, and a crackling sound filled the air as the cold Chicago air made ice form along the ridge of the roof. No one ever noticed Dakota. At school when he introduced himself and said his parents were dead, at least half the kids would make sympathetic noises, but when he tried to talk to him, they all stared at him blankly until he went away.

Or they made him go away.

But no one stared at him. He hated the feeling that these people who could disappear into the air could be anywhere. Watching him. The ice grew thicker along the inside of the roof and Dakota’s breath turned white. Dakota pulled his blanket up higher and anger started to creep into his heart. Aunt Anita said children shouldn’t be angry. She said that forgiveness was more important than any other emotion, and she said that loudly and while shaking a spoon threateningly when the children were angry with each other.

But Dakota thought he had a right to be angry with adults who frightened him. They had no right to watch him at school or when he was in his special hiding place at the park. They had no right to make him feel uncomfortable. Above him, the ice grew thicker and the roof timbers groaned under the weight.

If those people were here right now, Dakota would yell at them. He was almost twelve, and he was grown enough to tell adults to leave him alone. In school, they had class presentations about how they had a right to tell adults ‘no.’ Above, the roof creaked, and Dakota looked up as light from outside shone through the cracks. He was wondering where the cracks had come from when the weight of the ice defeated the brave supports that had tried to hold up the roof. One loud bang warned Dakota before the roof collapsed onto his attic nest.