The Timeless Tale of Peter Able

by Natalie Grigson

  It continued to discuss my mom’s death, how that lead to my father’s depression and ultimately his demise, and then later, my sister’s. It all seemed to center around my mother. If she hadn’t died, none of that would have happened . . .

  But then, as Randy mentioned, none of that would have happened. Which, yes, I know I just said, but the emphasis makes a difference.

  We’d probably be still living, unwritten, in the murky world of backstories that were never fleshed out. I’d never have gone to Payne Academy and neither of my series would ever have been written. Really, I’d be like?—a question mark of a character, never making it from backstory to story, and searching, ghostlike, for something solid.

  I realized then that as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t possibly bring my mother back. I’d never actually known her as a written character, so it wasn’t the loss you might expect—it was more disappointment at not being able to know her and the normal life we could have had.

  So I continued to read.

  Walter begins drinking heavily—forgets to take kids to school. Loses his job. His mom (Agatha?) steps in, though. His brother & Margaret’s parents & her sister confront him, tell him he needs help. He agrees. Goes to rehab for 6 weeks, leaves Peter and Beth w/his parents.

  Comes back clean, gets new job quickly, and feels much better. Excited to start anew.

  I knew how this ended, and while I didn’t like it, I saw that my dad’s death was also necessary. If it hadn’t happened that way, I wouldn’t have gone to Payne, and again, there would have been no series.

  The only thing I really wanted to change was how my old series ended, with my sister. It couldn’t possibly effect how the rest of the Peter Able: Boy Wizard books were written, as they’d taken place before, and any subsequent books about me could only get better with the addition of a new character—you guys would love her, I promise.

  I found the line.

  Beth—murdered?

  What if I just . . . erased it? If it wasn’t in the backstory, would it disappear from my book?

  I got up and started pacing around my room. I must have looked like a maniac—I was grabbing my hair in fistfuls, shaking my head; I was really distraught. Finally, I decided to do another minor test before erasing something so vital. I’d get rid of another small bit of punctuation, and if that went well, next, I would erase my sister’s fate. Really, it was lucky the whole thing was written in pencil.

  Let’s see. Talking about my dad getting a new job again, things going better for a while, then how I start acting out at school . . .

  Much of acting out comes from Peter’s need for more nurturing, lasting, steady maternal figure in his life—later finds one?

  As I continued to study the sentence, each letter of it, each bit of punctuation, something clicked: What if this could mean . . . Jenny? What if by merely changing the question, again, to be a statement, my relationship with Jenny was changed into something more steady and lasting? After all, it was just a small bit of punctuation, and the first time I’d done it, nothing drastic had happened . . .

  Without thinking about anything else or bothering to read the rest of the page, I picked up the eraser and again eliminated the top part of the question mark. Immediately, I felt better—more in control, safer, and suddenly, simply had to have some dark chocolate.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Remember how after? attacked me and I basically blew up the hallway, Long John had asked me to come by his office sometime to discuss my conflicts? Yeah, I didn’t either. My schoolwork seemed to have picked up tenfold in the past few weeks, especially since Mattie had decided to give me additional lessons in learning to hone and control my magic. The good news was, not only was I becoming a more powerful wizard than I’d ever been in my previous series, but all the extra work was providing a healthy distraction from the fact that even though I changed my backstory again, Jenny was still dating the ridiculous vampire! HA HA. Such good news.

  Unfortunately, I also seemed to be distracted from most everything else. I was sleep-deprived, forgetful, jumping ahead radically and leaving out weeks of story, and stress-eating like never before.

  Needless to say, with so much of my time devoted to simply studying, I totally neglected to go by Long John’s office to discuss my conflicts—not to mention think about or even mention them at all. But then one evening after school, Dach-shund barked outside of my door and when I bent down to pick her up, I saw that she was holding an envelope in her mouth.

  So distracted was I, I didn’t even worry about using a newly relearned spell to see if it was jinxed, cursed, poisoned, an explosive, or, worse, a chain letter, and simply opened it. Luckily, it was none of these, but simply a note from Long John . . . on handmade beige paper, dotted with rose petals.

  For a moment, I thought this was odd. And then my brain decided that no, this was completely ordinary, and I gave the paper a smell—it was divine.

  Dear Peter,

  I know I said to come by my office when you have time, but now I realize that at this point in the semester, you may never find time. I’m well aware that you’re incredibly busy at school—so busy, in fact, that you’ve completely neglected any mention of your conflicts or the goings-on of any other characters over the past few weeks and have decided to simply skip over all of these details. Which is why I have to insist that you come to my office tomorrow morning. We need to clear some things up.

  Don’t worry—I’m not upset. In fact, I’ve made a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies, with just a dash of nutmeg. They’re really something special, particularly with hot chocolate.

  See you in the morning.

  Xoxo

  LJ

  Again, there was a brief moment where something seemed a little bit strange, but then it was replaced with a feeling of rightness and a need to make some hot chocolate to bring to Long John’s office in the morning, as that would be the thoughtful thing to do.

  “Good morning, Peter!” Long John beamed as soon as I walked into his office the next morning. He stood up from the chair behind his desk and walked over to take the two large thermoses of hot chocolate out of my hands. He set them down on the desk and returned to give me a hug, at which point, my brain did an odd little dance that looked something like this:

  That was weird. Long John doesn’t usually hug me in greeting.

  Nope, not weird, not weird at all. He’s always done this.

  Are you sure? Because I don’t remember—

  Yes, you do. Think about it (brain gives virtual crazy eye to other part of brain).

  Oh . . . okay then. Yes, you’re right.

  Good, now let’s have some cookies.

  “Hello, Long John. Er, Headmaster,” I faltered. I hadn’t seen Long John much since he’d become headmaster and I wasn’t sure how formal this was all supposed to be. I gave a little bow.

  “Oh, Peter, don’t be ridiculous.” He waved a recently manicured hand in my direction. (Weird . . . Nope!) “Come in, come in, take a seat.” He gestured toward one of the two overstuffed beige armchairs on this side of the desk. I sat down as he started bustling around, pouring our hot chocolates into two big mugs, and took in my surroundings.

  I’d never been to the headmaster’s office before—believe it or not, I hadn’t had a reason to so far at Fiction Academy. But I had to think Long John must have redecorated since taking over. The room just screamed Long John.

  “Oh, sorry about that.” Long John walked over to a small set of speakers and turned a little nob on one. Immediately, the screaming stopped. “I play this in the mornings sometimes—it gets me motivated for the day.”

  Well, even so, the room looked just his taste. The windows behind his desk were large and round, bigger versions of ship’s windows. Below them along the wall were a few cabinets and a sink. There was netting draped down from the ceiling in one corner of the room, used as storage area for at least a hundred old and dusty books; all along the wall to my left were paintings of the sea, al
l with different types of elaborate frames in a sort of collage covering the entire wall. The walls were light blue like the water; the floor, old strips of rough wood, and on top of it and underneath the desk and chair area, was a large, fluffy white wool rug.

  “Oh, Randy gave this to me as an office warming present,” Long John added as I looked down at the rug. “I think it softens the space up a bit.” He sipped his hot chocolate, one pinky sticking up in the air.

  “Now, Peter, tell me what’s been going on with you. Start from the beginning and leave out no details.”

  As you can see, this would probably take quite a while here, so let’s just say, in between sips of hot chocolate and bites from the silver tray laden with the very best chocolate chip cookies I’d ever had, I regaled him with my story.

  “So now, I’ve just been really busy, partly because I need to do all this extra work for Mattie’s class, but partly because I just don’t want to think about yet another attack on my life, my past, or Jenny . . .”

  Long John nodded sympathetically and reached across the table to lay a hand on mine.

  “You know, Peter, when my Pollyanna, the love of my life, tried to murder me and wound up butchering my leg, forever altering my story, preventing me from ever loving or trusting anyone again, including my own later-written wife or even Jim—”

  “Pollyanna the Parrot,” I added, hiding my snigger behind a cookie.

  “Yes, Pollyanna the Parrot. What of it?!” For a moment, Long John was his old brusque self and the part of my brain that had been so confused seemed to relax a little bit. “What I was saying, Peter, is that even though my Pollyanna hurt me so, it was only because of her actions that any of my story was what it was. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t even be here right now, talking to you.” He tapped me on the nose with a cookie to punctuate this last word.

  I thought for a moment. He was right; if he hadn’t been written in his original series, he certainly wouldn’t be a character in this story.

  “But . . . are you happy?”

  Long John looked thoughtful for a while and then kind of bobbled his head halfway between a nod and a shake. “Yes and no, Peter, yes and no. But I’m going to tell you something that my mother told me when I was about your age—she said, ‘Long John, happiness is like a wave. It’ll be up and down your whole life. You just need to learn to float along with it, because you sure can’t stay on top of it all the time. Now go get the laundry.’”

  At this, Long John paused to take a sip of hot chocolate and bring his voice back down a few octaves. “See, my mother wanted me to be a housemaid just like her mother, and her mother before that. But at that moment, I knew I wanted to go to the sea. So that night, I packed up and left. Took all the guineas I had, made my way to the nearest port, and bought the cheapest boat I could find. For years and years, I pillaged, plundered, and pirated my way through the seas, always trying, against my mother’s advice, to stay on top of that wave. But then a storm hit, Peter.”

  “Is this a metaphor?”

  “Yes. But also, a real storm hit. We tried to sail against the current, you see; fight the storm. I’ll tell you, it sunk my ship and took out nearly half my men. And as I watched the great ship sink beneath the waves, from the safe distance of the safety boat, of course, I realized, sometimes you just need to let the waves take you as they will.”

  “Are we talking about real waves or happiness now?”

  “Happiness, Peter. But real waves too,” he added hastily.

  I sat and contemplated this for a while, beginning to wonder what the point of this little meeting was, when Long John got up and began clearing away the now empty tray and two empty mugs. “You know, you’ve had a hard few weeks, P,” he said from over his shoulder. “Why don’t I write you a note and you can take the day off from school? We can just relax—get some massages, go see the new Matthew McConnell movie, or just talk. What do you say?” He turned around from the sink and put a hand on his hip.

  “Oh my God,” I said, finally getting it. “I’ve turned you into my . . . mother!”

  Long John looked scandalized. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous! I’m not your mother. I’d consider myself more of a . . . I don’t know, lasting, steady maternal figure in your life, but I’m certainly not your mother.” He stepped around the desk and put both hands on my shoulders. “No one can replace her.” And then he pulled me in for an uncomfortably long hug.

  I didn’t take Long John up on his offer but instead decided to go to class and get away from whoever this new Long John was. Clearly, altering my backstory had changed him, and now that I knew this, I could no longer remember a world in which Long John wanting to just talk was anything but wrong. The jig was up.

  I was mulling all of this over, not paying much attention to where I was going or who I was passing, until, abruptly, I found myself in the Conflict Hall outside of the classroom. But it was . . . different.

  Where there were once cold, blue, and slightly eerie flames in the sconces up and down the long corridor, the fires were now glowing a warm caramel color, bathing the dungeon walls like sunshine through a window.

  I supposed this could have been done sometime in the past few weeks, as you know, I hadn’t been paying too much attention, and so I shrugged it off and walked into the classroom. Luckily, it looked exactly the same—the dark wooden desks were arranged in the same neat rows; the large teacher’s desk, along with the same high-backed cherry wood chair, were still tucked into the front left corner of the room; and the wall to its right was still stone, plain and windowless.

  All the same people filed into the class, sat at their same seats, and pulled out their same textbooks. The only thing that was different was . . . there was no Bateman.

  After a few minutes, I started to get a little worried. Bateman was always there before any of the students arrived—he liked to hide in the shadows behind his desk and jump out when the bell rang. One more minute passed, then another . . .

  None of the other students seemed worried at all; in fact, they were all reading silently from their textbooks. Finally, seven minutes after class was supposed to have started, the door burst open and in walked . . .

  A woman I’d never seen before.

  She had fair skin but brown eyes and brown hair, which she wore half pulled away from her face, the rest cascading down her back. Her long dress was lavish—even from where I sat, I could see that it was made from the finest fabrics money could buy in Venice in the late 1500s. (Because that’s what the forgotten sales tag hanging from her waist said—MADE IN VENICE, 1572/25% VELVET/25% SILK/50% WOOL.)

  She was stunning—the only thing that marred her beauty was a thick, sickly purple bruise, like a band along the bottom of her throat.

  “Hunts-up, class. Prithee puteth aroint thy books, and retrieveth thy homew’rk.” The students all closed their books at once, a muffled shot sound bouncing around the walls. I watched as they pulled out their homework—peering over my neighbor’s shoulder, it appeared to be a short essay on the influence of women nemeses on feminism throughout historical literature.

  “No cheating!” snapped the fat little goblin in a nasally voice.

  “Sorry, I just . . .” I rummaged through my backpack, more as something to do so the substitute wouldn’t ask why I hadn’t done my work, and was surprised to find that I had, in fact, done my work. In my hands was an essay titled “Women in Fiction Who Hated Each Other and Thus Made the World a Better Place.”

  I supposed I’d just been so distracted, I hadn’t even properly noticed what homework I was doing. I promised myself I’d take a break from schoolwork over the weekend and put the essay on my desk as she moved around the room collecting them.

  “I am t’rribly s’rry I was late today, but as many of thou wot, mine ex-husband teaches Tragedy above us. He want’d to talketh and worketh things out. I, howev’r, told him to goeth lie with himself.”

  All around me, the class giggled and tittered appreciatively; I, howe
v’r, had no idea what the hell she was saying.

  “As I bespoke to one of the oth’r teach’rs just this morrow, thou all hast cometh a longeth way since the first day of the school year.”

  Well, that was an odd thing for a substitute to say. How should she know?

  “Wherefore, I remembereth when thou, Ned”—she smiled at the goblin next to me, and his blue face got bluer—“thou had nev’r had a duel in thine life, much less a battle with thine own brother. And anon, looketh—thy conflict resolved with a dagger.”

  Ned smiled sheepishly; I scooted my desk to my right.

  “And thou, Joanne!” The teacher pointed at a girl I vaguely recognized as Jenny’s old and poorly described friend (she had red hair). “Thou came in thinking thy conflict was p’rson vs. self, but really, ’twas thy vs. a man. And aye, ’tis much improv’d, for thou can take leave of oth’rs!”

  Joanne beamed. Her smile looked . . . like a smile.

  “And thou.” She stopped in front of my desk. “I remembereth when thou first began, thou hadn’t a careth in the ordinary. Anon thou art not only conflicted within thine own heart but, alas, a struggle with thy enemy! How goes it thus with??” she asked casually.

  Oh no.

  “Can you excuse me? I have to go to the, uh, chamber pot.”

  I left my completed homework on the desk, zipped up my bag, and without waiting for an answer, hurried out of the room.

  As I quickly walked back up the spiral staircase from the dungeon, I pulled my backstory from my pocket. Once I got to the landing at the top, I looked around quickly to make sure I was alone.

  There it was:

  Much of acting out comes from Peter’s need for more nurturing, lasting, steady maternal figure in his life—later finds one.