She found the egg on her thirteenth birthday.

She was sulking down by the creek bank at the edge of her family’s property.  Her parents were fighting, again; too busy yelling at each other to worry about what day it was.  She threw another rock into the water, watching as it plopped into the shallow stream.  A bright object in the water caught her attention.  It was white and, impossibly, it was gleaming under the water, right near the edge of the bank.

The girl wriggled down to the where the water began and leaned over as far as she dared, carefully balanced so as not to fall in.  She reached down into the stream to pick up the luminous object.  It was heavier than she expected, but she managed to roll it up along the bottom of the streambed and onto the bank with one hand.  It was the size of a football, slightly warm to touch, and its shell was opalescent.  But it was, very clearly, an egg.

It didn’t matter to the girl where it came from, because clearly it had been meant for her to find.  She took it home and put it in her dresser, making a little nest of sorts out of loose socks.

At first she took the egg out every day, held it, and made sure that it was okay.  It always seemed to be the same, yet it was ever changing in her eyes; she was convinced it was going to hatch at any moment.

First a week went by, and then a month.  Eventually she missed a day checking on it, and then another, until she rarely thought about the egg at all.  An entire year passed, and still the egg didn’t hatch.

On her fourteenth birthday, the girl took the egg back to where she’d found it.  She hurried, so as not to be late for dinner with her parents.  Carefully, she unwrapped her once prized possession and laid it gently below the surface of the water.

She heard her mother’s distant cry, calling her.  Perhaps, she thought, as she made her way back to the house, it had just been an odd rock after all.

Below the water the egg shuddered, paused, and then shook violently.  A tiny crack appeared, and suddenly half of the shell pushed outward and was washed away by the current.  The animal uncurled itself and pushed out of the remainder of the egg.  It swam straight for the bank, and pulled itself onto the land with tiny razor sharp claws.  The creature cried once, a strange lizard-like hiss, and then spread its thin scale-covered wings and launched itself into the sky.