The Timeless Tale of Peter Able

by Natalie Grigson

  “How long’s he been out now?”

  This time the voice was perfectly clear. I could hear Long John pull up a chair—the scratch of wood on tile, then the soft thud of him sitting down.

  “Two days now,” Randy said. “The nurse said the longer he sleeps, the better.? managed to touch him, so he stole some of his description. Of course it came back once? was gone. But still, very painful, apparently.”

  “So he really is gone, then???”

  “It looks that way. It wasn’t without a price, though.”

  “I heard about Daphne,” Long John said quietly.

  Again, the images began to fill my head. The creature. The girl. Jenny’s sister. The monster. The man. The girl. Daphne’s cousin. Daphne . . . I closed my eyes tighter, but it only seemed to make it worse.

  “Peter, you’re awake!” Randy jumped up and in an instant was standing next to my bed as I sat up. My head was still feeling very foggy indeed, and I could see about two of him and then two of Long John behind him.

  “How you doing there, Peter?” Long John growled.

  “Feeli—ahem. AHEM. Do you have any water?” I croaked, pointing at my throat.

  Randy walked across the room to a counter, which I could see was covered in flowers (very blurry flowers, at the moment) and returned with a large plastic cup of water. I gulped the whole thing down and immediately felt my headache subside a little, and my throat felt like a desert under its first rain.

  “I put a little Nonfiction extract in there. Whoops,” he said, looking down at the glass vial in his hand. “There’s some Simile Swill in this one too. Sorry, it’s just a pinch. Should fade in a moment.”

  “So, Peter, how are you?” Long John said again. They were both standing beside my bed, watching me warily.

  “My brain feels like it’s surrounded by fog, my head feels like a ringing bell, and my mouth, wrist, and leg feel like they’re”—I stopped and thought for a moment—“well, they hurt.”

  “The Swill must have worn off,” Randy murmured.

  I looked around. Clearly I could skip the clichéd “Where am I?” question—I was surrounded by blinking and beeping monitors, I was wearing a gown made of some unknown but unnecessarily scratchy material, and across from me, I could now clearly see a sign that said “West Thriller Hospital” hanging above the sink. So I asked the next, slightly less clichéd question on my mind:

  “How did I get here?”

  “Well, I took you,” Randy said. “Mr. Super from downstairs called me—said he heard ‘another explosion’ from upstairs and assumed you were in trouble. Luckily, The and I were already on our way back toward Fantasy, so I put on the siren and got there as fast as I could. We found you passed out in the bathroom, with the sink overflowing . . .”

  “I had to do it!” I said immediately. “It was coming at me, and I didn’t have time to erase all the question marks on her backstory; there were like thirty of them, and, and—”

  “We know,” growled Long John. “You wouldn’t’ve done something like that unless you had to.”

  “So, he’s gone?”

  Randy and Long John both nodded, Randy beaming with pride, Long John watching me as though sizing me up. Slowly, from a deep pocket in his traveling coat, Randy pulled out a rubber chicken.

  “Whoops, that’s not what I was looking for. Can you?” He held the bird out to Long John who took it and looked at it shrewdly instead. “We traveled through Humor earlier today; I’d forgotten that was in there.

  “Ah, here they are,” Randy said, reaching up to his elbow in his, clearly, magically enhanced pocket. From it, he pulled a very thick manila folder, the front of which was labeled “BACKSTORIES” in thick, black writing.

  “These are all of them, Peter. All of the backstories where he managed to erase the characters.”

  “Except for one,” I said, looking suddenly away.

  “Daphne wouldn’t have had it any other way,” Long John said harshly, interrupting my Moment. “I had her in my conflict class last semester, and she was tough. I imagine she would have done the same as you, Peter. She would be happier that her disappearance meant the safety of the rest of Fiction.”

  “Which it has,” Randy added kindly.

  “So, can I . . . Or, do you want me to . . .” I gestured at the folder of backstories in his arms. He and Long John exchanged glances, and then Randy, brow furrowed, looked back at me.

  “Only if you think you’re ready. I imagine that this will take a great deal of concentration, so if you’re still feeling weak or that you still need to rest, I—”

  “I’m ready,” I interrupted. To emphasize the point, I held out my hand, said the word “pencil,” and one appeared.

  Long John ogled at me, and Randy blinked a few times before saying, “Very well, then. Let’s give it a shot.”

  He handed over the thick folder, and I peered inside—there were pages and pages within, of varying shapes and colors. From the torn-out notebook pages to the scraps of napkins, though, all of these backstories emitted that same, otherworldly weirdness. I imagined that each was growing a bit fainter the longer it spent in Fiction, but having them all together like this made me feel a little queasy. Again, I shuddered at the thought of actually having to go Out There, before pulling out the first backstory in the folder—three sheets of legal yellow paper, all clipped together. I put it down on top of the thick folder in my lap.

  “It’s Bill the Banana Tree’s,” I said, reading over the notes. For a character whose picture book ended up having a total of less than ten words, it seemed a little over the top to have a three-page backstory, and as I scanned the page, it looked like his name had been erased no less than twenty times. Nothing else was erased—just his name.

  “Okay, here goes,” I muttered. I heard Randy breathe in deeply as I closed my eyes and, just as I had done before, saw with perfectly clarity the author’s handwriting. And then, once again, my magic moved my hand across the page, filling in his name, over . . .

  Bill the Banana Tree was planted by a man named Paul in the south of the country, where it was warm and sunny all the days long . . .

  And over . . .

  Bill the Banana Tree does not like ice cream.

  And over . . .

  Bill the Banana Tree’s favorite color is indigo!

  Until I felt my hand stop and put the pencil down on top of the folder, quite of its own accord. I opened my eyes and for just one moment, saw Randy and Long John, looking like I felt, like they were waiting for something, and then quite suddenly—

  “What in the hell did you do?!” Long John gasped, as the scene resolved just as suddenly as it had left. I looked down at my hand and found that I was holding the eraser shakily over the last Bill the Banana Tree I’d just filled in. It, along with the others I’d just rewritten, was gone.

  Randy was clutching the edge of the hospital bed as though he expected the room to drop away at any moment—which was not entirely inaccurate. It had been and then simply hadn’t been, just seconds before.

  “I-I don’t know!” I stammered. “I filled in his name all over again and then everything was just gone! I, me, well, I just wasn’t anymore. But a part of me still was . . . I couldn’t see it or anything; I just felt like I was still there. And then there was this voice—but nothing I could hear, I could more just feel it—and I knew I had a choice to either move on someplace or come back. I wanted to come back. And look.” I held up the backstory, “I must have erased them all again.”

  Randy still looked rather green and didn’t say anything. Long John, however, said something very rude.

  “Something very rude!” he bellowed. “Don’t ever do that again, Peter!”

  I looked at Randy pleadingly. Finally, he seemed to regain some of his composure and stood up a little straighter. “I uh, I imagine Bill the Banana Tree was mentioned too close to the beginning,” he said. He took his glasses off, polished them on the bottom of his shirt, and replaced them, looking
at me carefully. “I think putting the names back in will change too much of the story we have already, Peter. Too much that’s happened has been because of their disappearances. It’s basically what all this”—he gestured widely—“has been about.”

  “But . . . but what about Jenny? She only just disappeared! Randy? Long John?” I looked back and forth between the two; they were both wearing very pained expressions.

  “Peter, I . . .” Randy reached out as if to grab my hand and then seemed to think better of it. He turned around and, for a long while, seemed very interested in looking outside of the window, in order to let me weep unashamedly. Long John didn’t turn away, but he didn’t say anything to try to make me feel better, which I appreciated.

  So I just cried. I cried until I had no more tears and my throat felt hollow and my whole body ached with the pain. Because I knew Randy was right—too much of the story was based around the disappearances. If I wrote Jenny’s name back in, the whole thing might go away again, and from what I’d read in Theology, you don’t often get two second chances.

  I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder and looked up and saw that Randy’s eyes were very red, his face still streaked with tears.

  “I’m sorry,” he said simply. Next to him, Long John jerked his head in a nod, his doleful eyes glistening.

  “Me too.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I was allowed to go home from the hospital after three days; they said I could leave after two, but I couldn’t really be bothered. Home, hospital. It didn’t make much of a difference.

  Somehow or another, I managed to plow through my semester exams the next week and actually did all right. In Mattie’s class we had a practical exam, by the end of which, the classroom was littered with small objects we’d sent flying around the room. Frogs and salamanders were trying to jump out of the windows, rather than be levitated one more time. And large, mismatched cushions had been positioned here and there, as many students missed their marks completely and sent their classmates flying through the air. For me, it was by far the easiest exam.

  Bio, however, was a different story. Not only was it my least mentioned class, but I kept being distracted by the thought that Jenny should have been there. I glanced at Ed, who was two tables over and seemed utterly depressed, so often that it must have looked like I had an odd twitch. Finally, Professor Uk stomped over to me, his heavy feet shaking the desks and sending a few students’ papers and pencils toppling onto the floor. He loomed over me, arms crossed, for the remainder of the hour. When I finally finished—and by finished, I mean, gave up and ran out of time—Professor Uk patted me roughly on the shoulder. He was looking down at me in what was supposed to be sympathy but really looked more like a wicked leer (on an orc, everything looks terrifying). He opened his mouth to say something, which I was sure would be condolences, but I snatched up my bag and ran from the room. I didn’t want to think about it.

  Of course there wasn’t much escaping that the next day—I had my Person vs. Self exam and had to come face to face with my “inner beetle,” as Professor S called it. This was the oddest exam yet in my one and a half years at Fiction Academy, as it consisted solely of me lying on a rather large couch (I supposed to account for some of the taller, nonhuman students) and talking. I could hear Professor S muttering at times, his pencil scratching away against the clipboard in his lap. And I didn’t just tell him about my inner struggle to change my backstory; I told him about my struggles at Payne Academy in my first series, my worries about being unwritten yet again, and of course, how much blame I placed on myself for the disappearances. After two hours, my voice was hoarse and I had gone through an entire box of tissue (I’d been making little ghosts out of them with my fingers). As I got up from the couch to leave the dungeon, I think he smiled rather sadly at me. Though it was hard to tell, as he was once again a beetle.

  The last exam was the one I dreaded most—even more so than Bio. Bateman hadn’t told us beforehand what we’d be doing for our Person vs. Person tests, but rumors had been floating around the school of the possibilities: an oral report, student-to-student combat, a written exam on his comics. So when I walked into the dungeon classroom, I was surprised to see . . . nothing out of the ordinary at all. Most of the class was already seated, staring expectantly and rather tensely at the front of the room; Bateman was, as usual, standing in the shadowy corner, sniggering quietly. As soon as I sat down, though, he jumped from the shadows, holding his cape over his face, and then whipped it back, revealing himself.

  “Good morning,” he growled menacingly. “I’m sure you’ve all been wondering about the format of this exam. Well, maybe I’ll tell you—and maybe I WON’T!”

  “Sir, we have an hour,” a girl with bushy brown hair said from the desk to my left.

  “Right then!” Bateman said, once again pulling his cape before his face with the crook of his arm. “Let’s get started.”

  And so he called up each student individually and asked him or her to reenact the final scene that resolved their Person vs. Person conflict. Bateman played the nemesis each time—fastening his cape around his waist like a skirt for a few characters’ mothers, sisters, and other female roles; trying but failing to raise his gruff voice an octave. Twice, he galloped around whinnying, playing the role of two unicorns; once he pretended he was a giant frog, jumping around the front of the classroom and knocking over several desks. Mostly he played an ominous male villain, which seemed to be the most common trope. But when he got to my name, he paused thoughtfully. He resolved to merely hold his cape over his face (“I’m an ENIGMA!”) and dart around the room pretending to attack me, as I halfheartedly played along, feeling all the while like I might throw up. As soon as I was finished, I left the room, left the school, and walked home, hoping for some way to forget about it all.

  “Peter, what are you doing?” Randy asked me a few days later when I thought I’d finally found the solution. I was standing outside of our little apartment building holding a large slab of dinosaur meat over my shoulder and down my back, about three feet away from the neighborhood dragon.

  “He won’t even eat me!” I wailed in frustration as the dragon sniffed the meat and stuck out his forked tongue in disgust. “It’s not dragon meat, you idiot! It’s a dinosaur! It’s totally different!”

  I felt a jerk as Randy pulled me backward by the waist of my pants and crumpled onto the grass. It was crunchy with frost and cold against my bare arms.

  “And you’re out in shorts and a T-shirt, Peter? It’s December!”

  “I can’t go on!” I cried, causing a family of passing ducks to stop and stare, then waddle along hurriedly. “That’s right! You keep moving! You just quack somewhere else! And—and thank you for sending over that delicious quiche the other day. It was LOVELY!”

  “Peter,” Randy said, looking a little embarrassed, “Come on. Get ahold of yourself.”

  “Why? Why should I? Jenny’s gone, Randy. This story’s about to be over, and I don’t have anything to look forward to.”

  Randy settled himself down on the ground next to me and removed the green, dripping slab of meat from my back. I hadn’t realized how heavy it was until it was gone; my arm had fallen asleep holding it over my shoulder.

  “I know how hard it is to lose someone you love, Peter.” He plucked a crunchy blade of grass from the earth and idly began picking the ice from its edges. “I’m going to miss Jenny too. But, Peter, just think”—he looked at me, his eyes shining beneath his spectacles—“just think about how many characters out there won’t have to feel this pain of loss, all because of you. You stopped? once and for all. I think Jenny would have—”

  “What? She would have understood? She would have been okay with it? She would have been a good zookeeper one day? Well, hate to say it Randy, but I disagree. She didn’t want to vanish; she was only eighteen. And she was allergic to cats,” I said savagely.

  With that, I got up and turned away from my confused-looking friend and wal
ked up the stairs to our apartment, my green-soaked T-shirt clinging to my back and tears streaming down my face.

  Randy came inside about an hour later, and with him, the smell of freshly baked pie filled the apartment. I looked up from the couch—he was holding a white box and regarded me warily before walking straight into the kitchen. I heard him walk back into the living room a few minutes later, probably with a plate of steaming pie and a cold glass of milk. I immediately felt guilty.

  “Listen, Randy—”

  But my words were drowned out, quite literally, as Randy emptied a bucket of ice-cold water over my face and chest. I sat up, sputtering.

  “Wh-wha-what the HELL did you do that for?!” I blinked until I could see him standing over me, the back of the couch separating us. He looked angry.

  “Peter, if you think Jenny would want you to mope around and try to force the neighborhood dragon to eat you—who, by the way, has gone vegetarian for the holidays—you are not only being stupid, but you’re not giving Jenny enough credit. She was tough, Peter. But more than that, she was smart and she loved you. She would know that you can’t change her backstory to bring her back—it would change too much of all this.” He gestured angrily around the living room, as though bringing Jenny back would change its decor. But I knew what he meant; he meant this story.

  “Now do you think that she would want to see you like this? Not wanting to live without her? Or do you think she’d want you to appreciate what a wonderful thing you’ve done, ridding Fiction of such an evil?”

  “The second one,” I muttered, still dripping in freezing water.

  “That’s right,” Randy said, a little less forcefully. “Now go get dried off, why don’t you. Dripping water all over the couch . . .” (As if I had been the one to pour it.) “We need to be at the assembly in an hour.”

  “What assembly?”

  “The closing assembly, Peter. I’ve been telling you all about it for the past three days.”

  I racked my brain. I must have skipped over that part.