The Anybodies

  The Anybodies

  by N. E. Bode

  Illustrated by Peter Ferguson

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED to you. Yes, you. Don’t be so shocked. Haven’t you always secretly thought that you deserved a book dedicated to you and to you only? Well, here it is. Enjoy it. I worked hard, you know, getting all the details just right, just so. Go ahead, start reading. Don’t linger here all day. I mean, I know you’re pleased and all about the dedication, but you need to get on with it. Turn the page!

  Contents

  Part 1

  The Swap and the Unswap

  1 A Flustered Nurse

  2 The Dinner Party

  3 Howard and the Bone

  4 The Photograph

  5 The Scar

  Part 2

  Things Aren’t Always What They Seem

  1 The Art of Being Anybody

  2 The Bad Hypnotist

  3 Dehypnotizing Mr. Harton

  4 Spies

  Part 3

  The House of Books

  1 The Nose

  2 Unexpected Guests

  3 The Wink

  4 The Test

  5 The Spider

  6 Goldfish

  Part 4

  The Diary

  1 Decoding

  2 Ssssssssssss!

  3 The Uprising

  4 Wild Drudgers on Tamed Hedge Road

  5 The Limp

  Part 5

  Sweet, Sweet

  1 The Kidnapping (actually, The Adultnapping, right?)

  2 Armed with a Book

  3 The Duel

  4 The Great Realdo

  5 The End or Just the Beginning

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by N. E. Bode

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART 1

  THE SWAP AND THE UNSWAP

  1

  A FLUSTERED NURSE

  FERN DRUDGER KNEW THAT HER PARENTS, MR. and Mrs. Drudger, were dull.

  Ridiculously dull.

  Incredibly, tragically dull.

  Mr. Drudger enjoyed discussing sod and lawn treatments. Mrs. Drudger collected advertising fliers that came in the mail, bargains on oil changes and mattress clearance sales. They gave Fern birthday gifts like a set of toothpicks or instruction manuals on how to build filing cabinets. They liked only dull things such as toasters (4), sponges (127), and refrigerator magnets (226)—and not those cute bunny shapes and such, but informative freebies from the plumber, the electrician and many from the firm where they worked, Beige & Beige. The Drudgers were both accountants. They didn’t like to take vacations from Beige & Beige, but didn’t want to cause a stir by not taking them either. So they loaded up the station wagon each summer and went to a place called Lost Lake. There was no lake, only the murky impression of one from years past. In heavy rains, it became muddy enough to attract mosquitos. And here Fern would suffer, listening to her parents take turns reading their manuals while she sipped bland lemonade (not sweet or sour) and swatted her bitten ankles.

  Fern was not dull. (Children usually aren’t. They can be a lot of unpleasant things, including nose-picky and stinky, but they are not usually dull. Although there are exceptions—Mr. and Mrs. Drudger, I’m sorry to say, were never interesting. They were the kind of exceptionally boring children who enjoyed putting their toys in rows and keeping their pencils sharp. When feeling wild, they might have hummed, but that was about it.) However, Fern was not only not dull, she was, in fact, quite unusual.

  Here are some examples: as a toddler—her earliest memory—Fern had once looked at a picture book about crickets, and every time she opened the book, crickets hopped out. She filled her room with crickets. She thought this would make her mother happy, but when she showed her, the tidy woman had a frozen look of horror. Nothing ever popped out of another one of Fern’s picture books.

  And when Fern had just learned to read, she caught snow in her mittens and the snow turned into pieces of paper with a word on each piece. She took them to her bedroom and laid them out on her desk, arranging and rearranging them until they made a sentence: Things aren’t always what they seem, are they?

  When Fern woke up in the morning, the pieces of paper were gone. In their place, there was only a row of beaded water drops.

  She’d once seen a perfectly good climbing tree that, on second glance, was really a very tall nun with thick ankles carrying a big, black, half-dented umbrella. Fern, alone, hid behind a big mail box and watched the nun walk to the curb, glancing up and down the street as if lost. A taxi cab rounded the corner and the nun, who seemed befuddled and a little nervous, turned into a lamppost. It was an ordinary lamppost with a loose dented umbrella kicking around it. Fern said, “Hello? Hello?” like you do when you pick up the phone but nobody’s there. “Hello?” Fern waited. Nothing happened. So, she picked up the umbrella, a little dazed, and shuffled quickly to her house.

  More recently, during the spring before the summer that I’m getting to—if you’re patient!—Fern had arrived early for swimming lessons at the YWCA’s indoor swimming pool and had watched her brand-new swim teacher, Mrs. Lilliopole, run after a small bat flitting madly over the bleachers. Mrs. Lilliopole jogged after it, chubby and awkward, wearing a skirted swimsuit, a plastic nose-pinch, and a flowered bathing cap. She waved a net used for cleaning the pool. The bat rose up to the glass skylight and then turned into a marble, dropping to the tiled floor before rolling quickly under the door to the men’s locker room.

  Now all of these oddities were fine. They were strange, of course, and made Fern feel a little off-kilter, as you can imagine, but none of them scared her until the cloud appeared the day after Fern’s eleventh birthday that spring. It was a persistent ominous dark cloud, about the height of a tall man, that sometimes followed Fern. The cloud looked like a plume of exhaust, but it seemed to hover just above the ground, disappearing around corners when anyone else was around. Once she got close enough to feel its windy presence, and the cloud began to draw her in, pulling on her dress, whipping her hair—like the strong undercurrent of a draft you feel when you stand on the edge of the curb as a fast bus passes by. Fern was certain something terrible would happen if she got any closer. She ran away.

  Now, keeping this kind of thing to yourself isn’t easy to do. But Fern had to. The Drudgers had made it clear to Fern that any of the unusual things she’s seen—crickets popping out of picture books and snow notes—were a result of her “overactive dysfunction,” meaning her imagination. No, Fern, those crickets didn’t pop out of the book! We had an infestation! We called an exterminator! Mrs. Drudger had told her time and again. And don’t start with that business of getting torn-up notes from snow! Mr. Drudger would add, No, no, no! We won’t hear of such AWFUL fibbing! In fact, they’d convinced Fern that she’d misremembered everything. No one else had seen the crickets, or the snow notes or the nun, or the awful dark cloud for that matter. So Fern stopped telling the Drudgers and started keeping a diary instead. She wrote about the nun, and about Mrs. Lilliopole chasing the bat with the swimming pool net. She kept notes on things that seemed a bit off to her about people who didn’t seem to be who they claimed to be: a robin that watched her intently from a branch outside her bedroom window, the pizza delivery man and the guy who worked the Good Humor truck, even her swimming instructor, Mrs. Lilliopole—after that incident with the bat, the woman had kept trying to get Fern’s attention with suspiciously stupid discussions about her scissor kick. It all seemed to be leading somewhere, but she wasn’t sure where.

  Here’s one entry:

  I’m keeping the nun’s umbrella propped up in my bedroom closet. It’s some sort of evidence. Evidence of what, I don’t know, but I like it. I’m pre
tty sure that I’m on the edge of something, something like the whole world turning inside out. I will keep you posted.

  But this book doesn’t really start with a diary or confused nuns turning themselves into lampposts or bats becoming marbles or evil-seeming, low-flying dark clouds. No, no. That’s nowhere to begin. (I’ll get to all of that soon enough!) One should begin at the beginning. That’s what a writing teacher once told me. Begin at the beginning. And end—yes, that’s right—at the end. He was a very good writing instructor, the best in these United States of America, many awards and such. So I’ll follow his advice.

  When Mr. and Mrs. Drudger were still newly married and young (although I doubt that Mr. and Mrs. Drudger were ever REALLY young—in their hearts. Even in their baby pictures, they look like miniature accountants, pale, serious, and joyless), they decided to have a baby. They’d decided it would be a fine idea, a right and worthy idea. Not because they liked children. Neither of them had liked children even when they were children! Mainly they decided to have a child because this is what other people did. And so they did, with passionless accuracy.

  This would, in fact, have been fine.

  This would have been altogether unremarkable, if not for a flustered nurse: Mary Curtain.

  Nurse Curtain was new to the maternity ward of the hospital. The morning of Mrs. Drudger’s labor, she had seen a mouse in the nurses’ room. Although plump and not usually very agile, Nurse Curtain, as soon as she saw the mouse, had hoisted her rump half onto the counter, half into the sink. She bumped her head on the cabinet, and then the second half of her rump tumbled into the sink with the first half. The mouse scurried on. The nurse began to titter, embarrassed. She uncorked her bottom from the sink and flopped back onto the linoleum.

  She said to herself, “Tsk, tsk. You’re a woman of science. You should know better.” Her white nurse’s uniform was damp in the rear now from the sink. A small knot was growing on the back of her head from the bump. She looked down at the long run in her thick white stockings, and she began to cry. She didn’t feel much like a nurse, or at least not a very good one. She thought of her mother, who’d encouraged her to stay at home and settle down. “You don’t have much going for you, Mary, but you’re a good cook,” her mother had said. “A man can appreciate a good cook.”

  Had the elder Mrs. Curtain been more supportive, had she encouraged her daughter’s medical dreams, would the rest of this story have happened? Like most things that go a bit awry in the world, we could blame much of the following mayhem on a mother. But, in all fairness, couldn’t the janitor have done more to keep mice out of the hospital? Wasn’t he feeling especially lazy and porkish that summer, doing almost nothing about the rodent population? And, honestly, as far as my research goes, his mother had been encouraging of his desire to sing opera, despite his lack of talent. But maybe she shouldn’t have supported him; he sang so badly. So maybe this whole story is partly his mother’s fault, too. It’s impossible to say. In any case, we could go on blaming people and their mothers all day. We can’t start second-guessing it all now. It’s too complicated, and we have to get back to Fern, as this is about her and not about the janitor’s mother.

  And so, once upon a time…(And I do know that you usually say this in the first line. I have written before, stories and such! Do I have to remind you of the literary genius with whom I’ve studied? And I know, too, that “once upon a time” is usually reserved for fairy tales, but I like the phrase and you’ll just have to take my word that this is not a fairy tale—despite the fact that a fairy or two might show up. I can’t say that one won’t. I refuse to make promises like that! This is a story, not a contract that I’ve got to sign! But the undeniable truth is that this is a true story! Honest! And my prestigious writing teacher once said that true stories nearly write themselves, so you can pretend I’m not even here writing this, because I may not be!)

  AND SO, ONCE UPON A TIME, two women gave birth in the same room. And a flustered nurse with a run in her stocking and a wet bottom and the nagging feeling she wasn’t really very good at this nursing business confused the two babies. A boy and a girl, no less.

  After the doctor had said, “It’s a boy! It’s a girl!” Nurse Curtain found herself a little breathless from zipping around the room. She was holding one hefty baby under one arm and another under the other. She cleaned them up and got them dressed and then swapped them—plopping one girl baby belonging to the Bone family into the hospital crib clearly marked DRUDGER and one boy baby Drudger into a hospital crib clearly marked BONE. It was a moment of panic. Regrettable. She had no idea she’d even done it.

  The only two who could have recalled for us which baby went to which mother were the mothers themselves. And neither of them would ever know. One was unconscious: Mrs. Drudger had opted for anesthesia.

  And the other mother, with large brown eyes, wet as pools, lashes soft as moth wings, began to lose blood. She would lose so much, in fact, that she would die.

  2

  THE DINNER PARTY

  THE DRUDGERS NAMED THEIR DAUGHTER FERN. Mr. Drudger had been in the waiting room while his wife was giving birth. He’d had cigars in his pockets, but he’d felt too awkward handing them out to strangers. He wasn’t the type to clap other men on the back. He’d spent hours shifting next to a fern, and that’s how his daughter got her name. It wasn’t even a real fern. It was a fake fern made in China.

  By the time Fern was eleven, during that summer I’m getting to right now, she knew this story well, but every time she asked the Drudgers to go over it, she hoped it would change, somehow magically transform into a better story.

  “Are you sure that’s the whole story?” Fern asked them again one evening in their pale kitchen with all of its accouterments—neatly stacked sponges, lined-up toasters and magnet-covered refrigerator. Fern knew of a very famous Fern, a girl in a book about a pig, and a spider named Charlotte. She’d lied to friends at school that she was named after the Fern in the book. (Frankly, they hadn’t been impressed at all.) Fern now begged the Drudgers, “Is that it? Isn’t there something…more?”

  “No,” they assured her. “That’s it.” Mrs. Drudger was polishing one of the toasters with a yellow sponge. Mr. Drudger was jiggling the coins in his pocket. He knew exactly how many were in each pocket because he was a very good accountant.

  They were expecting company to arrive any minute at the front door of their house, number nine Tamed Hedge Road. (Tamed Hedge Road? Yes, that was its name, as if hedges in these parts had once been wild and vicious before brave pioneers like the Drudgers wrastled them into the boxy, subservient hedges they are today.) Fern couldn’t smell dinner cooking. Mrs. Drudger made meals so odorless they went undetected. Her dinners were so bland that Fern was the only kid in her school who praised the cafeteria cook, Mrs. Bullfinch, for her seasoning. “What’s your secret?” Fern would ask. “What’s your secret ingredient?”

  “Salt,” said Mrs. Bullfinch. “And sometimes more salt.”

  “Mmmm, I like it,” Fern would tell her. “Very clever. You’re quite a cook!”

  Fern only knew that Mrs. Drudger was cooking something now because the kitchen was a little warmer than usual. Fern, you see, is a very ingenious eleven-year-old girl. She has very keen senses. To put it simply: she’s smart.

  This was a special meal. It wasn’t just any company: the Beiges were coming for dinner. The Beiges were the Drudgers’ bosses. Mr. and Mrs. Drudger wanted the Beiges’ son, Milton, to meet Fern. They were hoping that Fern and Milton would hit it off, bond, and one day marry.

  Mrs. Drudger had told Fern that morning, “One day it won’t be just Beige & Beige Accounting. Milton will join the team. Then it will be Beige, Beige & Beige, and maybe you can be Mrs. Milton Beige!” It was shocking really, this language from Fern’s mother. First of all, the exclamation mark isn’t exaggerated. Mrs. Drudger was actually exclaiming, which was extremely rare. It also showed that Mrs. Drudger had an inch of imagination. She’d been p
eeking into a possible future. It took Fern by such surprise that she promised to be on her best behavior.

  But her promise had grown thin. Fern had already had an odd day. That morning when she picked up the newspaper at the end of the driveway, she saw the dark cloud hiding behind the neighbor’s hedgerow. She dodged back inside, her heart beating hard in her chest. Then at lunch a man from the census bureau knocked at the door. While Mrs. Drudger answered a few questions about the family’s dates of birth, places of birth, exact times of birth on the front stoop, Fern listened from her bedroom window—always interested in the details of her origins—and, when it was over, she watched the man walk to the sidewalk, where he turned sharply and glared at her. Fern couldn’t help staring at the man’s left hand, which was gray, see-through, one could say: cloudy. He followed her gaze to his left hand, then shoved it in his pocket and shuffled quickly down the street.

  One would think that that would be enough for one day. (In fact, my esteemed writing teacher would have scribbled in the margin, “A bit too much.” But if I wrote less, he would make a note like: “A bit too thin.” And if I wrote about sad things, he’d jot, “A bit too depressing!” and if I wrote about being happy, he’d return with: “Too breezy!” At some point, you have to give up on trying to please and just tell it like it is. And so…) But, in fact, that wasn’t all.