The room was just as I’d remembered it—dark in the corners, lit only by the few sconces lining the walls. There was a chilly breeze moving throughout the space, ruffling my hair and causing the candles to flicker, shadows dancing like trees over the moon. Up front was the same large, austere, black podium as when we’d last visited the room. Today it was just a bit different in that I wasn’t depositing a giant, unconscious penguin in here—and there was also a man standing behind the podium.
“Hello. Peter Able, I presume?” the man asked. He was relatively young for a professor—probably in his early thirties—and about my height (which is to say, five eleven), and he wore an old suit and bow tie, brown leather shoes slightly scuffed at the narrow toes, and a beige porkpie hat with a black band. He removed the hat as he spoke, placing it on the podium.
“I’m Gregor Samsa. And this is Person vs. Self.” He gestured widely around the room, not theatrically, though. In fact, Samsa seemed a little nervous and twitchy himself.
“Hi, Professor Samsa.”
“You can just call me Professor S.
“Now as you know, Person vs. Self is not like most classes you’ll be taking this semester. We’ll only actually meet once a week—just you and me. Each student will sign up today for a meeting time with me throughout the semester, so we can check in and monitor your progress on resolving your conflict. Once you do, you’ll be required to turn in a report, detailing your Internal Conflict and the steps you took to recognize it and then ultimately settle it. It may take you just two weeks, two months, or two years. This class is less about your grade and more about your own personal character development.
“Now, any questions?”
I had a lot of questions—the first of which was why had my teacher suddenly transformed into a GIANT BEETLE IN FRONT OF MY EYES? OH MY GOD, WHAT THE F—
“Ah, I suppose you’re wondering about . . . this,” the giant beetle man said, gesturing with one spindly black leg down at his rather round, shiny black body. “It happens from time to time. Just read the books on your reading list.” As he spoke, the little pincers of his mouth moved rapidly, making a slight clicking noise behind the words.
“Do you have any other questions?” Once again, the man Gregor Samsa stood before me, fully clothed, as though no transformation had just occurred. It took me a minute to process what he’d just said, but finally I remembered that I did have another question.
“Oh yeah. What conflict?”
“Your Person vs. Self conflict, of course. You do know what it is, don’t you?”
I nodded as though of course I knew what it was, while quickly trying to figure it out.
“What is it?” he asked, not as though testing me but merely as though asking for the temperature outside.
“Should I . . . get a haircut?” I ventured, a piece of hair flopping ridiculously into my eye as I spoke.
“Yes, you should,” Professor S noted, “but that’s not your conflict.”
I thought some more, and after about two minutes of this, Professor S pulled out a pocket watch with his thankfully still-human fingers and sighed in exasperation.
“This is what happened with the last fellow. Yes, it seems for the gentlemen I’ll just have to tell you all what you’re struggling with internally, or else we’ll be here all day.”
He looked down at a piece of paper on the podium next to his hat and ran his finger down its left side.
“Peter Able, here we are.” He tapped his finger on the page. “You seem to be struggling internally with whether or not to change your destiny.”
I looked at him blankly.
“Do you need more then?” He leaned in, closer to the page, apparently to read some smaller writing. “Ah, okay. It looks like you are torn between your present reality and one that might look very different, if you were to tamper with it.”
This sounded familiar.
“So . . . I shouldn’t get a haircut?”
“Ich kann das nicht glauben . . .” the now agitated giant beetle muttered, closing his shining black eyes and shaking his tiny little head in clear beetle exasperation. “You’re struggling, Peter, with whether or not to alter the planned deaths of your mother and sister in your backstory, hoping this will change your actual story, and yet knowing that if it does, it might also inadvertently change your entire story, including your life, the lives of others, and, in some ways, the entire universe of books and perhaps beyond, as all things are interconnected and must therefore rely on and support one another.”
“Sorry for saying, Professor S, but I’d be really surprised if all of that was going on in my head.”
“Yes, it’s hard for me to believe too, Peter, but somewhere deep, deep down, you are. Now it’s up to you how to resolve this backstory business, and we’ll meet again in one week to discuss it more. First let’s discuss when you’re available to meet weekly . . .”
And so, as you can see with the “ . . . ” we went on to discuss our next meetings, what types of reports I’d need to write about my conflict, and where the best place outside of Sci Fi was for a quick sandwich, as Professor S would have to pass that way to meet his little sister and wouldn’t have time for a sit-down meal. By the time I’d left I had been in his office for twenty minutes, leaving only about an hour for the other students. Luckily, many of them were women and their meetings seemed to take only a few minutes for some odd reason.
For the next hour, Jenny and I sat down to lunch in the cafeteria—a giant room that, no, did not have a magical ceiling or anything too exciting but was pretty in its own, simple way. The floors were a dark polished wood, the walls white and clean, and high above, the ceiling was adorned with modest wooden arches, meeting in the middle like a nave. It was certainly the tallest room in the main building, probably built that way for the giants, one of whom was sitting on the table next to ours.
“Hey!” Randy jogged up with a plate in his hand, bits of lettuce falling from his salad. “I finally got a break. I’m starving.”
I looked at his plate, piled high with lettuce, a few steamed vegetables, and a cube of cheese.
“Looks filling.”
“I’m trying to slim down a bit, fit into my ski gear again for Christmas break.” He dug into the greens with fierce enthusiasm and was finished in about two minutes. “Okay then, back to the office. We’ve had another disappearance report,” he said in a lower voice. “A girl vanished in YA just an hour ago; we haven’t yet identified her.”
“But . . . how couldtherebemoredissapearances?!” Jenny sputtered, mashed potatoes decorating Randy’s glasses. “I thoughtitallhadtodo with?.”
“I’m sorry. Was that a question?” Randy asked, removing his glasses and wiping them on a napkin.
“You know what I mean, Randy!” she said impatiently. “How could there be more disappearances if? disappeared itself!”
“Really, though,” I noted, “you should have ended that one with a?. I’m just saying.” The look she gave me told me I shouldn’t “just say” anything for a while.
“Don’t worry, Jenny. Peter will be okay—he has his backstory safe and secure at home.” He whispered this last part, looking around furtively. “And if anyone knows not to mess with a backstory, it’s the person who owns it.
“As far as this latest disappearance, I suspect it is unrelated. Could be a copycat, could be that? tampered with this girl’s backstory a few days ago and the effects took some time, and it could be that the girl simply disapperated and people, being so on guard as it is, called in immediately. She could have been from Fantasy just passing through YA. Could have been YA Fantasy. We don’t know.”
“Can you really say that?” I asked, looking around for Dach-shund.
“What? That we don’t know? It may not be the most pleasant thing to admit, but a wise man knows not to pretend—”
“No, I meant disapperate.”
“Oh, sure. I put an ‘e’ in it. But like I was saying, this is probably nothing to be worried
about. It would be extremely unlikely that anything, however powerful, could reconfigure its original form in the same space-time location after essentially being blown apart into multidimensional energy. I’ll let you both know more tonight at home.” And with that, Randy jogged toward the cafeteria’s exit.
“What does he mean home?”
I hadn’t yet told Jenny that Randy was actually living in his old room again. Shit.
Bark!!!
“Hey! Look, it’s Dach-shund, Jenny!” The little dog looked utterly out of breath, clearly she’d run very fast and far to get here.
“Little late, Dach-shund, but I appreciate the distraction all the same!”
“What?” Jenny asked, glaring.
“Nothing! Let’s go to class. You’re going to Intro to YA, I’m going to Spellwork. What fun! Okay, bye!” And then I ran straight to my Intro to Spellwork class.
Of course class didn’t start for another twenty minutes, so I sat on a bench in the hall outside, reading Metamorphosis as Professor S had recommended. I could see why he was teaching Person vs. Self.
I was just getting to the part where they decide to send for a doctor, when, suddenly, all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I lifted my head and looked around and saw . . .
Nothing. Just a few students milling about, chatting before class, a rather dull and indistinct girl on the bench across from me, writing in a notebook. But nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe I was just nervous about my next class; it had been a long time since I’d tried to do any magic and even longer since I’d actually done any.
“Hello, Peter!” trilled a rather squat woman with red hair and glasses. Behind her, a stack of about twenty books, two cauldrons, and a basket full of wands floated lazily about a foot from the floor, stopping just a moment after she did, bumping together lightly.
“Mattie, what are you doing here?”
Mattie was a former girl wizard, even though in her series they didn’t exactly call her that, probably because she came about before the whole “wizards school” phenomenon. Still, she was very powerful in her books and remained so today.
“Good to see you too, Peter.” Mattie said, rolling her eyes. “I haven’t seen you in WA recently. Have you been away?”
“No, I’ve just been kind of busy on Saturdays lately . . .”
“Oh?” She arched an eyebrow.
“Baking.”
“Ah.”
We paused awkwardly for a moment so I could tell you this:
I’d originally met Mattie just over a year ago, when I was newly released from my Peter Able: Boy Wizard series. She was—and as far as I know still is—in charge of the Wizards Anonymous meetings, for all ex-series wizards. I hadn’t been in a while (see previous exchange), but since I’d last seen her, Mattie looked shinier, more vibrant. I now noticed that her hair was less of an overall red and more streaked with browns and auburns, her skin was fair but rather pinkish, and beneath her thick glasses, her eyes were the same shade of brown as caramel.
“Right then. Let’s go in, shall we?” She merely looked at the door and it swung inward; she walked into the room, her various items bobbing along behind her.
“Uh, I think we’re supposed to wait until the professor gets here,” I said, walking behind the basket of wands.
“What do you mean? Didn’t you look at your syllabus at all, Peter? Do you listen in our meetings? I am the professor. I’ve been teaching Intro to Spellwork for the past three years!”
“Ah, yes, I knew that.” And somewhere in there, I really did. I remembered her saying that. I was starting to feel uncomfortably the “typical male,” what with not being able to determine my own inner struggle or even listening well enough when Mattie had mentioned her day job in meetings, but then a few of Fiction Academy’s finest walked in and made me feel better. That feeling was fleeting though.
“Dude!” one of the Stereotypical Frat Boys said to the others. “There’s like cauldrons and wands in here. This shit is legit.”
I heard Dach-shund from the other side of the door barking frantically.
“Hello, hello, who might you three be? Are you signed up for Intro to Spellwork?”
The boys—and I use that term loosely, as they all looked to be about twenty-five—stared at Mattie blankly for a minute, before bursting into a round of laughter. Then, to my horror . . .
“I’m Brett, this is Bran, and that’s Jeff.”
They had names! Even as they spoke, they were growing a tiny bit more descriptive—the first one, Brett, had wavy blond hair and blue eyes, wore loafers, khaki shorts, and a pink polo shirt. The second, Bran, had brown hair and brown eyes, wore loafers, khaki shorts, and a yellow polo shirt. And the third, Jeff, had brown hair and gray eyes, and wore . . . well, you get the idea.
They weren’t quite vibrant enough to warrant further description, and I felt pretty sure they’d remain that way. I mean, a developed Stereotypical Frat Boy? That’s almost as absurd as . . .
“Hello, Mattie,” Professor S said, scuttling into the room. When he reached the front of the classroom, he sat upright on his lower abdomen and then once again resumed the form of a rather travel-worn man. They chatted amiably for a minute, as the rest of the students filed into the room—mostly dull former boy and girl wizards, a forest nymph, and two centaurs, who used the standing desks in the back of the room—and then before he departed, he walked over to my desk and handed me a slip of paper with my conflict written out on it.
“Just so you won’t forget,” he said. It was written in large, simple letters too, as though to really emphasize the fact that I was a moron. “See you next Wednesday,” and with that, he walked out of the room.
By the time I finished with Intro to Spellwork, I was feeling decidedly blue. It was bad enough that my professor didn’t think I could even remember my own inner conflict, but I was taking a class with three of Fiction Academy’s dumbest, and the class really was rather basic. We’d just gone over the supplies Mattie brought in and then spent the rest of the class period reading her book. While I was happy to learn a little bit more about my friend’s past, I didn’t feel any more competent in my magic. And to top it off, as I walked toward Detective to meet Jenny and Randy, everyone was staring at me like I had some mark on my forehead or something.
“Peter, are you okay?” Jenny asked as soon as I walked up to Randy’s car. She hopped off the hood and walked over to me. “You’re all blue.”
“Damn literal Fiction.”
“What’s wrong?”
And so I told her all about my meeting with Professor S, about the Intro to Spellwork class, how basically my first day back to school had made me feel like an incompetent loser—and why did I get the feeling that Jenny wasn’t really paying attention to me?
“Jenny?”
“Hm. What? Oh yeah. I’m sorry, Peter. But you know, first day and all. I’m sure it will get better. Frat boys . . . bugs. First day’s always rough . . .”
Before I could ask what was going on with her, Randy walked up to the car and, in typical detective fashion, without saying hello, told us he had some bad news.
“I’ve got some bad news.”
. . .
“Right. The news is, it does look like our friend from YA—name was Sally—she actually disappeared. We can’t tell yet if this is happening retroactively or if someone got ahold of her backstory and changed it just today. But it does indeed look like she’s gone.”
We climbed into the car and spent most of the drive in silence, each clearly somewhere else in our minds. Then something odd happened.
“Oh, Randy, can you let me out here?”
Randy pulled over. We were just down the street from my apartment—I could see my building’s sloped roof, odd mismatched chimneys, and domed red doors from there. I looked out the window and saw Jenny’s hazy street to the right.
“Do you need to get something from your house?” Randy asked.
“No . . . I think I’m going to stay
here tonight. You know, it’s been a long day. I think I just want to be by myself for a little while. I’ll see you in Bio tomorrow, Peter. Bye, Randy.”
And without a kiss, a hug, or even a punch on the shoulder, Jenny got out of the car and slowly disappeared down the indistinct street.
“What were her two classes today?” Randy asked, as he drove the remaining few blocks to our home.
“Person vs. Self and Intro to YA.”
“Hm,” was all he said, but it didn’t take a detective to figure out what he was thinking. What was Jenny’s inner conflict, and what had happened in YA?
CHAPTER SEVEN
I woke up the next morning, my backstory still pressed underneath me, as it had been when I fell asleep the night before. It had been a weird night—and not a lot of it was filled with sleep. I’d dreamed about my sister, who I could still see just as clearly as when she was alive, though in my dreams she was a couple of years older, still alive today. My mother was there too, in some of the dreams, though she was much vaguer. I’d never so much as seen a picture of her in my stories, so I filled in her details with some of Beth’s—her sandy-blonde hair and bright blue eyes, seeing as though my father and I didn’t have these. In some of the dreams, we were living happily as a family. In some of them, they begged me to bring them back.
Needless to say, I was exhausted, depressed, and completely unrested when I woke up, my backstory scrunched underneath me, and the dragon just starting to snore outside of my window. I listened to him breathe in and out for a while, trying to convince myself that today was a new day, all would be well, but then I looked over to the other side of the bed and remembered that Jenny wasn’t there.
The strangest thing, though, was that I couldn’t help but feel like someone had been there, perhaps just moments before. I got up and looked around—under the bed, behind the curtains, in the shower; you know, all of those typical Horror hiding places—but I didn’t see a sign of anyone. So I slipped my backstory into my desk drawer and went into the kitchen for breakfast.
The Timeless Tale of Peter Able Page 8
