The Somebodies (3 page)

The crown was too big, but it was beautiful: heavy gold lined with velvet. The scepter was heavy too. She picked up
The Art of Being Anybody
, flipped it to Chapter 16, and opened the foldout map. She traced the streets, letting her finger rest a minute on Willy Fattler’s Underground Hotel. She was desperate to see it with her own eyes. She knew from Dorathea that his hotel was always changing in a liquidlike shifting. It was one hotel, and yet at the same time it was all hotels, and no other Anybody had the skill to do such a thing, let alone the large-hearted generosity to open the place to the Anybody world. There was a picture of Fattler, his mouth wide open as if in mid oration, and his waxy moustache, large and upturned, curling at either cheek. He was a genius in a long line of geniuses.

Fern traced the winding roads on the map, and all the shops like Melvin’s Laundromat and Dry Cleaner’s and Hyun’s Dollar Fiesta, the ballpark, the churches and synagogues, the mosque. And then the castle—its filigree gate, its grillwork clock, the grassy mound on the front lawn, and the pointy spire on top gouging the dirt of Manhattan. She pictured them all down there,
oblivious to the return of the Blue Queen. She closed the map and flipped to the back of the book to find the Blue Queen’s listing in the index. She turned to the entry. Like all of Henceforthtowith’s writing, it was hard to read.

This befuddling information was followed by a list of the dead: Ernst Flank, Marilynn Partridge, Carlita Cole, the Borscht Duo (Irv and Todd), Marge “the Boss” Carter, Olaf Chang, Jive McMurtry, Erma Harris, Albert Jones-Jones…Fern’s finger ran down the names, and stopped on the last one: Merton Gretel. This was her grandmother’s very own younger brother. The Blue Queen married and then killed him? Fern had never heard of him. What was he like? How had he died? Fern knotted her brow and tried to think of some sensible thing this could possibly mean. It seemed that the Blue Queen ruled the Anybodies from the Castle like a monarchy, for eleven days, and that the Great Realdo, Fern’s grandmother, defeated her with the help of her younger brother, who was married to the Blue Queen. The Blue Queen was then cast out and stripped
of her powers. Was she using the souls of books to bring herself back?

Fern sat there for a moment, staring off into space. She was thinking of her mother. Would she have let Fern go to the convention? Would she have thought that Fern was ready to really help? To be a hero? She wished that she could ask her these questions. She took out a pen from her nightstand and wrote “Merton Gretel” on her hand. She wanted to remember it.

A strange noise interrupted her. A splash. She turned to the painting of three big goldfish in a pond of lily pads. The painting wasn’t in motion. It was a painting. Fern wasn’t allowed to feed the three goldfish in the painting. Her grandmother didn’t want the fish to become spoiled. Sometimes Fern petted the goldfish, however, reaching into the painting’s cool water and splashing around. But tonight something was different about the painting. Something Fern couldn’t put her finger on until she counted the fish. One, two, three, four.

There was a fourth fish.

It was hovering just below the surface. It was smaller than the others and had a darker orange spot under one of its big eyes, which was now staring at Fern from the side of its head. Another odd thing was that the fish was smiling at her. Fern smiled back. But then the fish smiled wider, showing a mouthful of teeth—a happy, and then very sad, smile. Goldfish aren’t supposed to
have teeth like that. No, they aren’t.

Fern couldn’t look any longer. Something was terribly wrong. The fish was watching her like it knew something she didn’t, something awful. Had it come here to spy on her? To scare her? To bite her with its teeth?

Fern turned back to the book on her lap. She let the pages flip slowly through her fingers. And that was when she saw a name at the top of a page that caught her eye. It was her own: Fern. How could she be in a book written long before she was born?

But there she was in a picture with the caption,
Fern Drudger née Bone from the line of Gretel
. It was, unfortunately, her school picture from earlier that year. She’d squinted into the lens—an old habit that came back when she was trying to seem normal. Her hair was
pinched down with a barrette—another attempt at blending in. A long time ago, before she’d ever seen a picture of her real mother (who had big eyes and kinked hair), she would have thought this was a good picture. But now she hated how fake it seemed.

There was a story alongside the picture. Although Oglethorp Henceforthtowith’s writing was almost impossible to understand, it was easier this time because Fern knew the story. It was her own story: the swapping at birth was accompanied by a date and a picture of the hospital; finding her father had a date and a picture of the Drudgers’ address; defeating the Miser had a date alongside a picture of her grandmother’s house and the abandoned garage, and defeating the evil BORT had a date and a picture of Camp Happy Sunshine Good Times as well as the Fizzy Factory. How could the book have known?

Fern read on and found that the entry didn’t stop when she received the crown and scepter. No. She let her index finger slide down the page to the newest entry. Its title made Fern gasp, and jolt up so fast that the crown slipped off her forehead and landed with a soft thud on the bed behind her.

It read
Fern Battles the Blue Queen.

There was no picture and no date.

At least, not yet.

WHEN MRS. FLUGGERY SAID “MRS. FLUGGERY
,” which she often did—as in,
Mrs. Fluggery doesn’t put up with that business!
and
Mrs. Fluggery is displeased!
and
Your bad behavior has forced Mrs. Fluggery to take one of her nitroglycerin tablets!
—a bit of air would collect behind her lips while she was working on the “F” in “Fluggery.” This bit of air would inflate her cheeks and even her upper lip above her teeth, and for a brief moment, she would look like a lonesome bullfrog. But then the rest of her
name would come tumbling out—“luggery”—and Fern knew that something bad would usually follow. The way Mrs. Fluggery talked about herself in this detached way gave the impression that the real Mrs. Fluggery was someone else standing just in the hall, behind the door, and she was going to come in and chop everyone to bits with some jujitsu if things didn’t change immediately. Mrs. Fluggery only talked about herself as Mrs. Fluggery when she was angry with the class. She was usually angry with the class. And so Fern was nearly always in a wide-eyed state of fear.

I’ve already mentioned Mrs. Fluggery’s monumental hairdo, though Fern preferred the term “hairdon’t” as this was such a horrible concoction, and her habit of storing dirty tissues up her sleeve. I’ve mentioned that she sometimes was forced to take nitroglycerin tablets, because of her heart condition, but I haven’t mentioned that the pills—many different bottles of them—clicked in their little containers, and that Mrs. Fluggery sounded like a living maraca every time she took a step. She kept the pills in secret locations all over her person, but mainly in the bulging pockets of her cardigan sweater that stretched taut around her beefy middle.

Her domed stomach was propped up by two spindly legs. I haven’t yet mentioned her love of herringbone
skirts. Her skirts rode up over her stomach, exposing her bony red knees and, just below them, her knee-high stockings that sagged around her ankles. And did I mention that her gauzy hair was faintly purplish, and n o t in a way that seemed deliberate, like for example, the hair of the girl who serves me cappuccino at my favorite coffee shop, Cup O Java, where I sometimes go disguised as a sumo wrestler? No, no. It was purplish like skim milk, if skim milk could be stiffened and placed on a woman’s head. On Mondays her hair would stand tall, on Tuesdays a little less so, on Wednesdays a little less so, until Thursdays, when it was smaller, lumpy, and shaped like a humpbacked pony. On Fridays her hair collapsed entirely and had to be propped up by a flimsy scaffolding of bobby pins. On Mondays it would stand tall again, unless, of course, she didn’t have time to reconstruct it over the weekend, in which case she’d wear a ski cap.

Mrs. Fluggery had decorated the room with posters explaining her numerous Rules and Regulations. Those on the bulletin board read:

And

And

Fern tried not to read the posters.

This particular day was a Thursday, but the humpbacked pony hadn’t yet shown up in full on Mrs. Fluggery’s head. Fern was just starting to be able to make out his hindquarters above Mrs. Fluggery’s right ear. She was concentrating on this, ignoring her math problems, letting her eyes blur, when the toothy goldfish swam into her mind. It was quickly followed by the other things she’d heard of last night: dead books, the Blue Queen, Merton Gretel, and
The Art of Being Anybody
knowing that she would battle the Blue Queen. Why hadn’t it said that she would
defeat
the Blue Queen? She’d have been more comfortable with that heading. Was it true? Was it about to be historical fact?

This was the moment when Lucess Brine reached
under Fern’s hooded sweatshirt and pinched Fern in the back. Fern could often squelch a yelp, muffle it, but Lucess was a talented and stealthy pincher. This time she’d twisted the skin just so and Fern had already been in a frightened state of mind. She had to yelp.

The yelp startled Mrs. Fluggery, who turned, with her large, purple-tinged hair and her bulky sweater sleeves, and glared. Mrs. Fluggery clutched her chest. You see, she had a medical condition called angina, and she claimed that sudden disturbances stirred it up.

Lucess Brine said, “Mrs. Fluggery, Fern keeps making noise and it’s hard for me to concentrate!”

Lucess had shiny hair that cupped her face. Today was rainy, and she was wearing very expensive galoshes. She’d told everyone that they were the most expensive galoshes her mother could find. Mrs. Fluggery liked Lucess. She said, “When Mrs. F-luggery was a girl, she was much like you, Lucess.” And although Lucess would flinch at the comment, she’d quickly change the flinch to a sweet smile as if this were the best thing she’d ever heard.

“Why do you keep bugging me?” Fern whispered. “What did I do to you?” If Fern could tell anyone in the world that she was really royalty, she would pick Lucess Brine, just to see her shocked expression. But, of course, she couldn’t, and she knew she should be above wanting to. She knew she should ignore Lucess, not get so upset
about her or Mrs. Fluggery. She tried to remain calm.

Lucess whispered quickly, “I’m trying to see what gets to you, what really wears you down.”

Fern wanted to ask Lucess why she would want to find out what got to her, why she wanted to wear her down. But Mrs. Fluggery was there. She said, “Mrs. F-”—her face ballooned momentarily—“luggery hopes that you, doily-brain, have just finished the final equation, number one hundred, and that you were so happy, you had to give a little cheer. True or false?”

Fern was supposed to have been doing a worksheet of complex long division, not searching Mrs. Fluggery’s hair for a pony. Unfortunately, she was only halfway through number seventeen. She looked at her hands as if she might find the answer there, but she only saw her own handwriting on her palm: Merton Gretel. Could she ask her grandmother about her dead brother? Why hadn’t she ever mentioned him before? All these thoughts—all out of place and thrown together—raced through her mind. She stammered a little, closed her hand, and stared down at her nearly vacant paper, dusted with red eraser crumbs.

Mrs. Fluggery said, “Mrs. F-luggery wants the answer to the final question—right now, before Mrs. F-luggery excuses herself to take her heart medication. Do you understand, Little Miss Hampsterhead?”

Howard raised his hand. His hair was freshly
trimmed in the style of a middle-aged accountant. He wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt with a fat collar sticking up over a navy sweater vest—in the style of a middle-aged accountant. He often popped breath mints from a tin on his desk, chewing nervously, checking his wristwatch—in the style of a middle-aged accountant. (No need to mention the briefcase.) Howard’s eagerly raised hand annoyed Fern a little. Howard always knew the answers, but she also realized that he was trying to come to Fern’s rescue. He didn’t like to draw attention to himself, especially not Mrs. Fluggery’s attention. He wagged his hand over his head in order to cause a distraction. He was a good soul, that Howard.

“Not now, Howard,” Mrs. Fluggery said. “Not now!” Mrs. Fluggery walked on her little legs—those sticks that popped out from under the barrel of her belly. “Mrs. F-luggery doesn’t like a doily-brain hampsterhead who can’t answer a simple question!”

“I’m sorry,” Fern said. “I got distracted.”

“Distracted!” Mrs. Fluggery screeched. She spun on her heel and careened around her desk. She threw her arms up and down. “Do you think that Mrs. F-luggery isn’t distracted by the fact that her heart is all tightened up? That you children are trying to kill her?” She stopped and leaned on her desk. “Mrs. F-luggery will
be back in one-point-five minutes. She is going to the restroom to take her nitroglycerin tablet and to use the facilities, and when she returns, everything must be back in order. Or else…”

“Or else what?” Lucess Brine asked.

“Stop it,” Fern hissed just loud enough for Lucess to hear.

“Or else Fern and Mrs. F-luggery will have it out in the coatroom!”

A hush fell over the class.

Mrs. Fluggery eyed them all menacingly and then marched out.

Lucess said, “Charlie Barrett has a crooked leg because and he and Mrs. Fluggery had it out in the coatroom. Everyone knows it.”

Fern glanced around the room. All the students were nodding except Howard, who shook his head. “You’ll be fine, Fern. You’ve handled worse than her.”

“Oh, you have, have you?” Lucess said. “Carson Wilbert won’t talk about her cloudy eye. But she had it out with Mrs. Fluggery too.”

The other kids whispered fiercely among themselves. Fern heard little echoes of “Charlie Barrett” and “Carson Wilbert”—tales of limps and corrective eyeglasses.

When Mrs. Fluggery walked in, the class stood up
and said, in unison, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Fluggery.” Although this happened each time Mrs. Fluggery reappeared from one of her nitroglycerin trips to the facilities, Fern thought it was weird. It was as if they’d all decided to pretend that Mrs. Fluggery had just shown up for the first time. Mrs. Fluggery had taught them this. It was one of her Rules and Regulations.

She cast her steely eyes over the class, but said nothing. She picked up a piece of chalk from the silvery ledge and then turned her back to them and began to write.

What the children saw next is almost too awful to say. It was such a horror that I hesitate to go on. It was so ghastly that some of the kids with really frail constitutions (I was once a kid with a frail constitution) went pale and dizzy and almost passed out. You see, Mrs. Fluggery had mistakenly tucked the bottom of her herringbone skirt into her underpants. And so the children, stricken, horrified, saw in a flash her gigantic white underwear with small lavender flowers. They saw the backs of her pale legs, complete with varicose veins, all purple and snakish. She was naked from there on down to her knee-high nylons. It was a ghastly horror, and the students were so shocked that they couldn’t breathe or move.

Mrs. Fluggery had written the homework on the board—twenty-one pages of it. She sat down on her vinyl seat. That’s when the cold of the vinyl hit her, and
she knew the horrible truth. At first she blanched, and then she flushed a deep red. She stood up with her back to the board and rearranged her skirt so that it flopped back into place.

“Mrs. F-luggery,” she said, “is deeply disappointed in this class. Not one of you had the courage to tell Mrs. F-luggery of this error. Not one of you! Instead you let Mrs. Fluggery make a fool of herself! You all wanted to be better than Mrs. F-luggery. You wanted to humiliate her. Well, you are a poisoned group of children.” She grabbed her chest, pulled out her nitroglycerin tablets and put one under her tongue.

Lucess Brine said ever so quietly—so quietly that Mrs. Fluggery must have imagined it was her very own thought—“Poisoned by…?”

And Mrs. Fluggery’s eyes searched the kids as she finished Lucess Brine’s sentence. “Fern,” Mrs. Fluggery said.

Howard closed his eyes. He couldn’t bear to see it. “No, no,” he muttered. “Not Fern!”

This caught Mrs. Fluggery’s attention. She walked up to Howard, stood before him with her arms crossing her bosom. “And Howard,” she said. “Mrs. F-”—
Mrs. Fluggery held the captured air of the “F” in her mouth for so long that her face was tight and shining. She emitted a high-pitched squeak. But just when Fern was certain that Mrs. Fluggery was going to blow, the rest of her sentence poured out in a breathless heap: “luggery would like to have it out with you and Fern in the coatroom!”