The Timeless Tale of Peter Able

by Natalie Grigson

  How much damage could be done by simply changing the punctuation?

  How! Much damage could be done by simply changing the punctuation.

  Damn.

  I stuffed the protected pages back into my pocket and raced two more floors up, until panting, I was level with Long John’s office. I jogged down the hall and, without knocking, burst into the room.

  “Oh, hello, Peter,” Long John looked up from buffing his nails over a stack of papers. “Are you back for more cookies? You know, I told you they were addictive! I think I must have gained three pounds this week alone, but you know, bathing suit season’s behind us now, so I say—”

  “Long John, what happened to Bateman?” I asked, still breathing heavily and clutching a stitch in my side.

  “Who’s Bateman? Is he one of the new characters on Times of Our Days?”

  “What? No, he . . . Look, did you ever hire someone named Bateman to teach Person vs. Person?”

  “Of course not; Desdemona has been teaching the class this year—I picked her specially to shed some light on feminist issues in Person vs. Person in Fiction.” He paused and put down the nail buffer. “You know, Peter, I think maybe you’ve been working too hard. I’m writing you a note to take off the rest of the day, say you went home sick. You go home and get some rest, okay? I’ll come by to check on you later.”

  I left the office, a flower petal–covered note in hand to show to both Professor Desdemona and, well, whoever my professor would wind up being for Bio on Thursday, and made my way toward the school’s south entrance. As I walked through the courtyard, I noticed that the grounds looked immaculate—there was a new fountain in its center, with little blue water nymphs sunbathing along its edges. There were freshly planted rosebushes surrounding the entire main square, and beyond, the trees had all been trimmed and were swaying happily, their blues and pinks and purples and yellows showing more vibrantly than I could remember.

  Where once the drop-down to the moat surrounding the Math building had been dangerously unguarded, there was now a charming little white fence to prevent people from falling in. As I kept walking, I noticed that the yellow police tape that had decorated the Detective building had been replaced with a shining silk ribbon, and then I noticed a group of Stereotypical Frat Boys, all huddled together around something. Probably a keg.

  I tried my best to avoid them, as being covered in beer was the last thing I needed, but it was nearly impossible; they were right next to the path going under the south entrance.

  “Excuse me,” one of them said as I did my best to pretend I was invisible. He broke away from the group and approached me, not a beer but a clipboard in his hand. “Hey, Peter, right? I’m Brett.” He pointed at a nametag stuck over the little horse emblem on his shirt.

  “I know that,” I grumbled. “Why are you wearing a nametag, Brett?”

  “Dude, why aren’t you wearing a nametag?” he guffawed, eliciting a group laugh. “No, but seriously, Peter, you should really put your nametag back on. You know, Headmaster LJ said we have to wear them for the first two months this year, until we all get to know each other.”

  I stared at him blankly. Headmaster LJ?

  “So anyway, we were wondering if you could sign our petition?” He thrust the clipboard out toward me. “It’s for Ms. Mulan’s Feminist Studies class. If you’d please, we’re trying to get more funding for the girl’s Quiddi—”

  “Okay, I’ve heard enough,” I said, thrusting the clipboard into a crestfallen Brett’s chest, marching off under the archway. I was all for beautifying the school, for gender equality, and I didn’t even really mind having a beautiful teacher who only spoke Shakespearean English, but a Stereotypical Frat Boy who was polite and socially concerned? This was a world I couldn’t live in.

  As soon as I got home, I threw my backpack onto the couch, picked up a pencil from the coffee table, and took out my backstory.

  “Randy?” I called. There was no answer, but I didn’t expect one; it was before lunchtime on a Tuesday. I removed the backstory from the odd plastic stuff and, without pausing to think or even look around, flipped to the page discussing my acting out. I changed the . back to a?, hoping beyond hope that it would work, and then several things happened at once.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw some things disappear from the living room with a little pop!—a few fluffy pillows, two paintings on the wall, and a small, antique-looking lamp. I didn’t have time to be surprised by this, though, as simultaneously, the halfway-shut front door was thrown open with such force, it bounced off the wall and nearly shut itself again—but there was a foot, a very blurry and amorphous foot, in its way.

  Immediately, I knew I had to put my backstory away; I struggled to slip it into its little protective folder, cursing Randy for making the fit so snug. I settled for haphazardly stuffing it, unprotected, underneath the couch cushion. The blurred outline of someone very small was rushing at me, arms outstretched—a flicker and I could make out a face of a young boy, then a woman, then some sort of animal, teeth bared, a little boy once again, fingers reaching toward my eyes. Then before I could even get my wand out, I stumbled backward onto the couch, landing heavily on the cushion—and he vanished.

  I looked around frantically, knowing that like a cockroach from hell,? never did seem to actually die. When I was sure I was at least alone in the house for now, I slammed the front door closed, restoring Randy’s protective spell, and collapsed onto the couch. I jumped up immediately when I remembered what was underneath the cushion.

  I pulled out my backstory, heart racing as I examined it. It was badly wrinkled, a few of the edges had been torn, and some of the penciled letters had been smudged but not illegibly so. But when I reached the page I’d been looking at before the attack, my heart sank. It was dotted with sticky spots of syrup, and in some places, it had torn through the page itself.

  A vague memory crept sluggishly to mind—a few days ago, in my haze of studying, I was in the living room working on a levitating spell and had accidentally sent my plate of pancakes sailing across the room and crashing onto the couch. I’d tried to clean it but wound up just flipping the cushion over so Randy wouldn’t notice the remaining goop.

  And now there were literally holes in my backstory.

  I stared at the marred page, silently praying that no irreparable damage had been done. Then, on about the third read through, I realized, it had.

  “RANDY!” I screamed again, knowing full well he wasn’t home. I needed to find him—I needed to tell him—the answer we’ve been looking for to getting rid of? may well be on this sticky page of backstory.

  I hesitated for a moment, looking from my backstory to the door, bouncing slightly on my toes. Finally, I very, very carefully slipped the backstory into the little protective encasing—sticky side up—pulled out my wand, and left the apartment.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Randy!” I said, bursting into his office without knocking. A harassed, nameless secretary had followed me down the hall. (“I told him to wait in the lobby!”)

  Randy put down whatever he was working on and told the not-nameless-after-all Cynthia that it was okay. As she closed the door, I walked over to Randy’s desk and pointed to the page, the words slightly glared because of the covering above it, but the damage still apparent.

  “Oh my god, what happened?” Randy gasped, more horrified than I’d thought he would be. He looked immediately around his office, patted himself down, patted me down, and when he seemed satisfied that yes, we were both still there, he picked up his phone. “Cynthia, I need you to do a check. Make sure nobody in the office has gone missing today.” Silence for a moment. “Yes, some BLTs.” He put the phone back on the receiver, and I told him what happened.

  “So he just . . . vanished? But . . .”

  Then Randy gasped again and picked up the protected pages.

  “Of course! The nameless little boy—he’s gone from your backstory! I can’t believe . . . But what does
this mean for the others?” He gestured for me to step aside for a moment, and he started pacing the length of his office. “Maybe, but no . . . It could be that he—well, that’s unlikely, really. I suppose . . . but that would take extraordinary circumstances . . .” He continued on like this, running his fingers through his once finely combed hair until, finally, a knock on the door distracted him. It was Cynthia carrying a tray heavy with sandwiches, cakes, and two mugs of steaming hot chocolate.

  As she closed the door, Randy took a fierce bite from his sandwich.

  “Peter, I’m going to be honest with you, I’m not quite sure what this means.” He took another bite, still thinking.

  “Well . . . I have an idea,” I ventured. “See, he disappeared when he was attacking me, because he was in the form of the nameless kid in my backstory—I don’t think he would have if he’d been some character from someone else’s backstory. Since he was erased, or really, gouged out of my backstory when I fell onto the couch, he disappeared. But I think that just means that version of him is gone.? appears in tons of other backstories.”

  “Which means . . .”

  “Which means we’re going to have to erase him from every backstory we can find.”

  Randy put down his sandwich, suddenly looking a little bit sick.

  “That could take ages.”

  “Well, if you think about it, it’s not as bad as it seems.” This time, I stood up, sandwich in hand, and began pacing the area of the room behind my chair. “We already have the entrance to the other side blocked, and some of the backstories on this side, we already have. We just need to get ahold of the remaining backstories so we can erase him from all of them.”

  “And what about the backstories he’s already in Out There?” Randy asked.

  “We’ll . . . well, we’ll just have to keep someone on guard at the door from now on. I don’t think he has any power unless the backstories are on this side. I mean, some version of? has probably been mentioned in author’s notes since nearly 3200 BC in Sumeria when they couldn’t think of a proper symbol!”

  “Doing a little Nonfiction reading on the side?”

  “Here and there.”

  Randy put his sandwich down and joined me on the other side of the desk, pacing along beside me.

  “Okay, okay . . . So we put a permanent watch on the doorway to Narnia—no one gets in or out without authorization.”

  “Oh! Good call.”

  “Thank you. And on this side of things, we can take care of erasing? from the backstories we already have. Let’s see . . .” At this, Randy pulled his wand from his pants pocket and pointed it at the door; I heard a loud click, then what sounded like a faint electrical buzz. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Then he pointed the wand at the wall behind his desk and among the bricks appeared the small metal safe. He walked over to it and removed a pile of papers—all of which, I could see, had their own separate little encasings.

  “We already have Frog’s, the Gingerbread Man’s, Ms. Wilkinson’s, the mouse’s from Wind in the Willows, and yours, of course. Now all we’ll need are . . .” He turned toward the wall behind him and pointed his wand. Immediately, the bricks disappeared and in their place was the white wall, completely covered with pictures, notes, and little lines connecting characters to one another. “The backstories for Bill the Banana Tree, Gorndalf, the couple from romance, Cinderella, Pinocchio, Aladdin, Peter Pan, the three fairies, and the most recently disappeared girl from YA.

  “What about the people who are just confused? He must have their backstories too, right?”

  “Okay, then, that’s Alice and Daphne the Wizard. So . . . fourteen total.”

  “Whewwww,” I said, because I’d never quite been able to whistle. “That’s more than I thought . . . We’re going to need some help on this, Randy.” Immediately my mind went to Jenny—usually, she’d be the first person I’d go to for a dangerous and slightly insane recon project. She’d love it. But unless she suddenly decided to come to her senses, drop the vampire, and come running back into my arms . . .

  There was a loud banging on the door. Could it be?

  The banging continued, this time a cracking sound, like wood on wood.

  Quickly, Randy wiped away the white wall with his wand. In another movement he brought forth the safe and carefully laid the papers in it. Then a flick of his wrist and the brick wall was back.

  “Coming!” He hurried around the desk and opened the door.

  “All right, who did it?” someone asked gruffly. I couldn’t see him, as Randy was blocking my view, but I knew it was Long John. He barreled past Randy, and I had to laugh—he had several curlers stuck in his slightly less matted than usual beard, his skin bore the remnants of what looked like green face mask goop, and his eyebrows looked very well shaped indeed.

  “I come to in my office an hour ago, and I’m filing my nails and have a bunch of crap on my face! Only thing I could think of is you two—all this meddling with backstories. Did you get hold of my backstory, is that it?” His hand was planted firmly on his hip, and he was tapping his baseball bat leg impatiently. He looked down, saw what he was doing, and stopped.

  “No, we don’t have your backstory. It was a change from my backstory, actually.” Quick as I could, I brought Long John up to speed. Meanwhile, Randy had once again taken the backstories out from the safe and turned the wall into the one that looked like it belonged in a serial killer’s apartment.

  Long John picked up the backstories, skimmed through them, and then tossed them back on the desk.

  “Well, it sounds like you’ll need some help tracking down the ones that are still missing, hm? All right, I’ll help you,” he said resignedly, as though we’d been asking him for the past hour. “But first, you’ve got to help get me out of these curlers.”

  By the time Randy and I got home that evening, we were both tired and bleary-eyed, having spent the rest of the afternoon very carefully erasing all of the?s from the four backstories we had. Nothing apparent happened when we finished, though Randy had a theory that with each erasure,? was getting a bit weaker. We then tried to track down where the others might be. Five hours later, we had several ideas, each as unlikely as the next, and no actual leads. So we called it a night.

  “Glad we were able to take care of that Long John fiasco,” Randy said, yawning. He sat down heavily on the couch, having just poured us both some tea. I nodded sleepily from the armchair across from him, willing my head to clear. I still had homework to do.

  “I mean, really,” Randy went on doggedly, “it just goes to show how tricky meddling with backstories—time, really—can be. Changing one tiny little detail in your past can just change everything else. One tiny little detail . . .”

  “Okay, I get what you’re doing Randy. You want me to say I won’t meddle any more with my backstory. That I’ve learned my lesson and I won’t do anything so stupid again, is that right?”

  Randy shrugged noncommittally.

  “Okay, I won’t do anything so stupid again,” I promised.

  He seemed satisfied and left me to start my homework, while he went into the kitchen to make some dinner. As I pored over my notes from the previous day’s Spellwork class (which honestly, I had no recollection of taking), a pang of guilt hit me. I never lied to Randy. Okay, that’s a lie, but I rarely lied to Randy, and while telling him I wouldn’t do anything so stupid was true, it was only half of the truth.

  A few hours later, I was finished with my homework, full of pizza, and exhausted. Randy had already fallen asleep on the couch, earlier than me for once, so I put away my dishes and quietly crept into my room.

  I sat down on my bed and pulled out my backstory. Before I had time to second-guess myself, I picked up a pencil and flipped to the last page. There it was.

  Beth—murdered?

  And I erased it.

  See, I’d promised Randy I wouldn’t do anything so stupid again, but I didn’t promise him I would leave my backstory alone. After
the Long-John-becomes-mother event, I realized something: if it didn’t work out, I could simply fix it again. Add it back in as I had with the top part of the question mark. And that doesn’t seem very stupid, does it?

  Don’t answer that—I’d had a long day, and despite my excitement, I felt my eyelids drooping and my head falling, quite involuntarily, back toward my pillows.

  The next thing I knew, it was about eleven hours later; the sun was well up and beaming happily through my window. Groggily, I shielded my eyes and realized I hadn’t closed my blinds the night before. I looked down, I hadn’t taken off my shoes, and I looked at the clock on my bedside table and, nope, hadn’t set my alarm either.

  “Damn,” I said. And then I said it again and again—and where was Dach-shund? For a worried moment, I remembered the neighborhood dragon’s recent attack on a local centaur, but almost immediately, the thought zipped from my head.

  “Beth!” I jumped up from the bed and dashed through the door, completely forgetting all else.

  “Beth!” I called again, looking around the living room. Then the cushions and blanket on the couch began to move—

  “Randy? What are you still doing home?” I asked. I had never known Randy to be late for work, and the shock of seeing him still lying there, especially with such a big investigation under way, was enough to make me momentarily forget about my sister.

  But then he turned over and with a sigh of relief, I saw that it wasn’t Randy after all.

  It wasn’t Randy after all.

  “AAAH!” I noted.

  The figure sat up quickly, his yellow eyes darting predatorily around the room, as though ready to pounce. When he saw it was me, he seemed to relax and leaned back against the cushion.

  “Peter, you scared me,” the YA vamp said. “What are you doing?”

  “What are you doing?” I asked. There was no reason, none whatsoever, that Jenny’s new boyfriend should be lying on my couch, under my sister’s blanket, sleeping the morning away like some . . . some . . . layabout!