Amy caught a ride from one of Kyan’s black ops team back to her apartment, grabbed her book bag that was the cause of the whole incident today, and flew on to the campus.

Her heart beat in her throat.

The parking lot was full and the halls brightly lit in the waning daylight. The campus was humming with excitement — the parents, eager to see their children’s accomplishments, and the students thrilled with the special opportunity to show off.

Her final test was just beginning.

She strode down the crowded hallway a few minutes before her demonstration. Some of her reading students had already filed in and were sitting at their desks, showing their reading logs to appropriately pleased parents.

She set her book bag on the chair, checked her appearance in the cabinet mirror — ran quick fingers through her windblown hair — and took a deep breath.

She let it out. She took another deep breath. She let it out.

Amy should be using this time to set up her colors lesson. But she couldn’t get the image of Pyro tied to a chair while Kyan carried him from the shed out of her mind.

No. Pyro was safe. He’d had a hole carved in his chest. But it was fixed now.

She let her breath out slowly and pulled in another deep breath.

He was fine. Joking about it like it was no big deal, even though the amazing skin-stuff they put on him and then covered with a thick, foamy bandage looked far too serious.

And he was going to be here, even. To support her.

The way she needed to support him.

Yes. She needed him to know just how important he was to her. Because the dismissive attitude of Sard, her parents, even his own siblings was something he’d had to live with his whole life. Never being taken seriously, he’d lived up — or, in his case, lived down — to their expectations.

Anyone could crush a child. And after enough people did it — parents, friends, teachers — it took dedication to lift that person up again.

That’s why she wanted to make a difference. She wanted to be a teacher who inspired. Empowered. Uplifted.

Made the world a better place.

Not everyone is how they appear.

Corinne caught her as she closed the cabinet. “I’ve been trying to reach you. You left in the middle of a class. You’re going to have to speak with the administration.”

“It was a family emergency,” she said.

“I heard.” Corinne turned and waved at the vice principal standing in the hallway with two board members, then turned back to Amy and lowered her voice. “I told them. They’re going to want to see a note.”

“Will a police report do?” Amy asked, unable to keep the dry tone out of her voice. She’d made an appointment to go to the station the next day. “Otherwise they can watch the nightly news.”

Corinne’s eyes widened. “What?”

“I think they follow police scanners. It was barely over and I saw reporters and cameras.”

The bell chimed for class to begin. Her students straightened in their seats attentively and parents filed to the back of the class, taking the extra chairs provided, or standing, while the administrators and others out in the hall approached the open windows to watch.

“Let’s talk about it after class.” Corinne squeezed her shoulder. “Good luck.”

“Thanks.” Amy turned to her lesson plan book, opened it to the colors material, and rested her fingers on the folder.

Corinne took her place out in the hallway next to Pyro.

He’d been waiting a few minutes. At her notice, he smiled proudly.

Her heart thumped. Not from fear. But because she finally realized what she needed to do.

He’d made it. After everything they’d gone through. The ways he’d misjudged her, the ways she’d misjudged him back. And how, in the end, they were both fighting to be together. Be there for each other. Do the right thing.

A little bit of empathy went a long way.

And so did fearlessness.

She set the color lesson aside and pulled out the file beneath. Turning to the board, she fixed profile photos.

“I was going to do a lesson on figurative language and a color poem. And it was very nice. But,” she turned to face the attentive class, who was extra silent and still, “as some of you already know, I had to leave our afternoon class on a family emergency. My husband went missing. We had to find him and then call the police. He’s okay now. It was a very frightening few hours.”

The room went absolutely still. Even the administrators in the hallway and the ventilation system seemed to drop silent.

“He was kidnapped by a person who feared his differences. But, like all of us, he’s much more than he seems.”

Pyro watched her with rapt attention.

Amy turned and pointed at the photos on the board behind her. “What are some differences between these people?”

Her students, super determined to be good, raised their hands and called out differences in eye color, skin tone, hair, age, clothing, and the small flags on the lower right of each picture.

She stopped them there. “Great. Those are careful observations. Now, what things are the same? What commonalities unite them?”

That took a little more effort, but soon her students were talking about how the photos were of people from Earth breathing air and were alive.

“It’s easier to see the differences, isn’t it? But, if you think about it, we have many more commonalities.” She tapped the board. “Let’s think about differences again. This will require using your imagination. What could be some invisible differences between these people? These are differences that aren’t obvious from looking, but that we would realize are differences when they told us.”

No one had a guess, so she prompted them. “Do you think their families might be different? One might be a father, and another is a grandmother, and another one might not have any brothers or sisters, and another might have many?”

“Pets,” one of her students said.

“Yes, exactly, pets. Some might have pets and others possibly don’t. What else?”

The students came up with their homes might be different. What they ate. Their likes and dislikes. She wrote the potential invisible differences on the electronic whiteboard and then moved on to her next point.

“Of course these are possible differences, but it’s also possible that they could be invisible similarities, too.” She tapped the food. “Maybe they like the same breakfast cereal or maybe they have pet cats. Right? We don’t know without investigation.”

The class nodded. This was clearly true.

“And here is one invisible similarity that is the reason I selected these particular people: They all, despite their visible and invisible differences, won the Nobel Peace Prize for working hard to bring peace, empathy, and understanding to the world.”

She let that sink in for a minute and then passed out personal narratives from the prize winners about how they had overcome differences. Turning their desks, her students read the narratives, looked up vocabulary, and reported out summaries of the visible and invisible differences each prize winner had overcome.

“Now, for ourselves, we’re going to investigate our invisible similarities.”

She passed out a worksheet to answer questions like, “What makes me angry is… What makes me happy is… My favorite thing is… My greatest fear is…” and then she instructed them to add a question from the board at the bottom: “My pet is…”

“After you fill out the worksheet, count up your similarities with the other classmates in your group.” Mentally, Amy ticked the learning outcomes for the lesson as she doled out the instructions. “Which group do you predict will have the most invisible similarities? Let’s find out.”

They shared in groups and she went around listening to the investigation. The groups also filled in pie charts of their similarities and translated the charts to percentages.

One of the parents stopped her. “Is your husband okay?”

“Yes.” She caught Pyro’s eye, still watching with interest from outside the class, resting his palms on the window. “He came to support me tonight.”

The parents were quite surprised.

“If no one objects, I’ll introduce him at the end of class.”

They were obviously curious to see the person who had survived kidnapping and torture.

She brought the class back together for their final report.

Her students predicted that the group composed of three best friends or same sports players would have the most invisible similarities, but after reporting out, a more creative group won. In the pet example, for instance, three had pet hamsters and the fourth had a pet rat, so they counted it as “We all have pet rodents” and got the most similarity points.

“I like how you worked together,” she said, silencing grumbles, “because it shows how differences might actually be similarities after you widen your view. If we did this activity again, I bet every group would discover even more similarities.”

Everyone immediately wanted to redo the activity, but she just had to time for them to get out their reflection journals and write a paragraph of what they thought.

While they were writing, she approached Pyro.

He studied the class with avid curiosity, like every single thing they were doing was completely new to him.

She rested her hands on his. “Do you mind doing a little show and tell?”

He glanced behind him at the administrators. “You don’t mind?”

“I want to introduce you to everyone I know.”

One corner of his mouth quirked.

That gorgeous lopsided smile made her heart flip. He had been rejected, discounted, and relegated to the unworthy shadows so long he’d put up a reckless front to protect himself. Even she had been fooled.

But Pyro was more than worthy to step into the light and be recognized for the smart, confident, caring male inside.

Yes, he was reckless. Yes, he ran headlong into danger and flirted with the edges of what was right. But that roughness only made his strengths shine with more beauty. He’d known true injustice in his lifetime and he had overcome it with fiery charm.

Amy recognized this as she walked him to the front of the class. “This is my husband, Pyro.”

Pyro waved.

“He’s a businessman. He has five brothers and one sister. He has no pets. He plays video games and pinball. And he came here to class today to watch me teach and meet all of you.”

They studied him intently. He grinned.

“He has many similarities to you, but one difference caused him to get hurt earlier tonight. Can you guess what the difference is by looking at him?”

Most everyone shook their heads or remained politely silent, but one of the students said, “Maybe.”

Pyro blinked. “You can? How?”

The student turned red and played with her fingers shyly. “You’re wearing a suit.”

A rumble of laughter came from the parents because many of them wore suits also, and so did the administrators.

The student squirmed.

Amy stepped in. “That was a brave guess. He’s very brave also, so that’s actually an invisible similarity you both have.”

The student straightened, pleased to be called brave.

“My husband has one difference that made him a target.” To Pyro, she lowered her voice and tapped his hand. “You want to show them?”

“The whole thing?”

Wasn’t he not supposed to shift? Trust Pyro to show off for her and hurt himself. “Just do your hand. No claws.”

He held up his hand and his skin shimmered to red.

Everyone leaned forward with an audible, “Whoah!”

“My husband is not human.” She wrapped one hand around his shoulder and leaned against him in support. “He’s a dragon.”

“Most people can’t tell.” Pyro rotated his hand to show the kids who were practically leaning sideways out of their seats to get a close look. “Unless I do this.”

One of her students looked at her. “Can we touch?”

“That’s up to Pyro.”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

The kids poured out of their seats and swarmed him. Exclamations of “It feels like my pet snake!” and “Ooh, my pet lizard,” floated above the chaos, along with one bright, odd observation, “It feels like my cat.”

What kind of cat did her students own?

“His other hand feels normal!” one of them exclaimed, and then everyone went back to feel both hands.

She stopped them before they got ideas to feel up anything else.

“I want to write in my reflection journal more about what I learned today,” one of her students said.

“That’s the mark of a careful scholar,” she said, and the entire class elected to stay after the bell and write more in their journals.

Meanwhile, the parents lined up to meet Pyro. He had well-earned cynicism about his fame, but the conversations were about normal, respectful, “adult” topics: the school, his business, and his pinball machines. One parent asked if the school would be sponsoring a field trip to the dragon shifter’s business; another wanted to know if future study abroad trips for high schoolers might include Draconis.

As the last parents filtered out of the room, Pyro spoke to her out of the corner of his mouth with a cheery twinkle. “Great lesson, teacher.”

She appreciated his compliment. At least he had enjoyed it, and she had too. “I may have just torched my job opportunities.”

“I was riveted.”

An administrator walked up to Pyro. “I didn’t realize you were Amy’s husband. We’ll need to get you a badge and take your photo for security so there won’t be any more questions. Do please stop by the office whenever you visit. We have candy for visitors.”

He looked at Amy with wide eyes. That was a change. “Now?”

“Yes, if you have a moment.”

The administrator dragged Pyro away.

Amy packed up her Nobel Prize portraits. The excitement and tension of the day drained out of her and a slight headache twinged.

Corinne stood close by.

Amy filed away the photos, unsure of what to say. She’d done the one lesson Corinne had told her not to. There was no easy way to apologize.

“Amy,” Corinne said.

She couldn’t run. She had to be fearless and face the consequences.

Amy closed her folder and faced her mentor, who’d taken her under her wing and given her so many opportunities and unending support, and affirmed her desire to be a teacher. And who she’d just betrayed. “Yes?”

“That was beautiful.” Corinne smiled whole-heartedly and squeezed Amy’s forearm. “You taught from the heart. Watching you, I felt reinvigorated about the whole profession.”

A lump formed in her throat. She swallowed. “Even though I did the wrong lesson?”

“Sometimes the best thing is to ignore your elders and go your own way.” Corinne’s smile changed to determination. “This school has the chance to hire an exceptional teacher. Wherever you land, you’ll do fine.”

The lump swelled. “Thank you.”

“And, if the administrators are smart, they’ll keep their once-in-lifetime chance to advertise dragon shifter study abroads and field trips.” Her cynical smiled lit on the unusually jovial administrators surrounding Pyro in the hallway.

Pyro’s smile looked forced as though he were hitting the end of his endurance.

Amy strode forward, finding a good place to insert herself, and told him, “Let’s go home.”

He perked up. Bidding the administrators farewell, he walked with her out to the beautiful courtyard and twined her arms around his neck. “Your home?”

“Our home.” She rested her forehead against his shoulder. “In Vegas.”