The Somebodies Read online

  They had homing abilities too, but instead of finding their authors by way of books, they took the bolder approach of just trying to find the authors themselves. I was still disguised as a Canadian, and was walking home from my all-night pharmacy with a bottle of aspirin. My pharmacist always suggested aspirin. I’d already uncapped the bottle and pulled out the fluffy cotton. I was standing there, thinking, Who is N. E. Bode? Is his life no more real than this fluff of cotton? Has his fear of being found out by his insanely jealous creative writing professor come to rule his life? And then I let the cotton go and watched it land in the gutter, where it slipped down a grate. Some Canadians were approaching and, afraid that they’d want to talk to me about Canadian things, I turned in the opposite direction.

  I turned quickly, and that’s when I saw the moth for a brief second. It had been following closely, and so there it was right in front of my face. Right in front of my mouth, in fact. I gasped. By which I mean, I swallowed it. Straight down the gullet. It tickled a bit, sure. But as soon as it was down, I felt better. I felt like I’d been missing something without knowing it and now it was back! And, of course, that was exactly what had happened.

  My soul was mended—whole again.

  But! This probably doesn’t answer all your questions.

  Let’s take it from the top.

  Did Dorathea and the Bone and Fern and Howard ever get to grab each other and hug each other as tightly as they could and say all the things they needed to say?

  Yes, yes. Once Fern had hugged Howard there on the front lawn, they turned and looked at Dorathea and the Bone, who’d made it out of the castle as well. And they did heartily grab each other and hug each other, and they started crying, all of them, quite messily.

  “You saved us!” the Bone said to Fern.

  “You’re brave, Fern,” Dorathea said. “You saved the Anybodies because of your good, strong soul—so pure and true! That’s the most royal part of you!”

  Fern and Howard were, at this point, swallowed up in Dorathea’s and the Bone’s arms. Fern’s face was right next to Howard’s face. She smiled at him, and he smiled back. It was one of those moments when you couldn’t hold in a smile if you tried your mightiest to do so.

  The Bone said to Howard, “You were brave, too!”

  Dorathea added, “We’re so proud of you both!”

  Was Dorathea happy to have found that her brother wasn’t dead, that he’d been brought back from the form of a goldfish? She was. Again, there was relief, joy and messy crying. She walked up to her brother, closed her eyes, cupped her hand to his ear and whispered something.

  He smiled, pushed his glasses up his nose and said, “Me too.” Had they said they missed each other, that they loved each other? Probably yes to both.

  The Blue Queen? Yes, yes. You’ll want to know about the Blue Queen. Not dead. She was once again stripped of all of her powers and is now recuperating in an Anybody hospital where she is undergoing treatment by a therapist who specializes in issues about lost love and egomania and soul-swallowing.

  And Fattler. It turns out that he is a genius, but he’s ordinary, too. An ordinary genius. And like all people, he did need help. He made a team—the exploded-bun maid, the wrestler woman, the Brainkeeper—who set up with his own beekeeping apparatus to manufacture Willy Fattler’s Sweet Honey, available in jars for $6.99 in the gift shop.

  What about the Somebodies he turned into rubber statues? The transformations wore off slowly. They turned back into themselves, one at a time. They each looked around, noting the castle with its bottom hanging in the dirt sky, and they decided to brush off their pants, take off their SSS robes, and return to their lives. A little disenchanted, but a little relieved, too.

  Now, one of you wants to know whether the miniature pony made it back to Mrs. Fluggery’s hairdo. No. The miniature humpbacked pony became Fern and Howard’s pet.

  And speaking of those two, did they have to go to Gravers Military Academy?

  Well, did they?

  Gravers Military Academy does have some standards. They draw the line at runaways. Sorry, the officials said, we just won’t take them. Too much of a liability.

  As for all those other people we met along the way?

  Fern thinks of them often. As it turns out, she learned an awful lot from them. If I were the kind of writer to try to teach my readers lessons, I’d say something like: suffer fools gladly, because a bad example can be as valuable as a good one. I’d say something about the importance of sticking with your dreams.

  The elevator operator with his shiny buttons, he’s stopped letting his fears rule him and he’s in engineering school. Here is a photo of him with his slide rule! He’s already designed some new glass elevator lines. And Hyun-Arnold has had success as well. He’s set up a counseling service called Sage Advice in the back of Hyun’s Dollar Fiesta. He can’t hang up the Korean accent—it makes him think more clearly, as it turns out—or the pricing (all advice is one dollar), but he feels like he’s being truer to his talents.

  Now, there’s one more nagging issue, isn’t there?

  You want to know the answer to this question: If you go deep into Central Park to a certain spot, will you find a spire pointing out of the ground and, beneath it, a tower room with broken windows?

  Fattler and Dorathea teamed up to fix this. They went to Central Park the night of the battle with the Blue Queen. They were cloaked in darkness, as they say in those kinds of books where people go about cloaked in darkness. They considered turning the spire into a giant tree with a massive base, but they didn’t want to tamper with the castle. It seemed historic really, this moment of the city beneath the city crossing into the city above the city. And so instead they used their Anybody’s powers to cover the spire and the tower room with the giant hull of a massive tree. If you go to Central Park and find this certain tree, you will recognize it by a ring of knotholes. Inside the knotholes there is the ring of windows around the tower, so that light can still stream inside it.

  In the city beneath the city, on the grounds below, where the uprooted castle dangled, they worded a plaque—THE BATTLE OF FERN AND THE BLUE QUEEN—and they etched in the date. The plaque showed up in Fern’s book The Art of Being Anybody, which, once transformed back into itself, still smelled like apple for quite some time and had a few permanent teeth marks on the binding. It had to regrow the section on Fern’s battle with the Blue Queen, but it did eventually come back—a full account in Henceforthtowith’s confusing prose.

  And what about me? What about N. E. Bode? How is he now? Isn’t someone asking that question?

  Well, no more disguises necessary. Oddly enough, I’ve found the perfect hideout. It has a view of Central Park—some trees, some rocks, a distant bike path. The light streams in through the windows. I think you know the spot I mean. I go to Jubber’s Pork Rind Juke Joint on Wednesdays for their All-U-Can-Eat Pork Rind special. I get my shirts starched at Melvin’s Laundromat and Dry Cleaner’s, and I recently won seventeen dollars playing bingo at Blessed Holy Trinity Church and Bingo Hall. When I’m feeling fancy, I order a duck in blue cream sauce, now available at Willy Fattler’s Undergound Hotel dining room. And I buy my items—invisible flower pots, tins of smelts, musical filing cabinets—at Hyun’s Dollar Fiesta, where I also purchase sage advice, often in bulk.

  If you happen by such a giant tree in Central Park, noting the ring of knotholes, you might want to knock on the bark. If I’m in, I will knock back. In fact, let’s have a secret knocking code. You knock twice fast then three times slow then fifteen times in stutter order, hard, soft, hard, soft. And I’ll knock back the same way. This way you can be sure that you’re communicating with me—and not some other person living beneath a spire in a tower room hidden in a giant tree with knotholes, halfway in the city beneath the city and halfway in the city above.

  On second thought, a normal knock might do.

  Sincerely (and I mean that!),

  About the Author

 
THE ELUSIVE AND CHARMING N. E. Bode doesn’t really want a biographical note detailing the successes of his last books, THE ANYBODIES and THE NOBODIES—afraid that it might lead certain unnamed people to his location, with disastrous results. Instead N. E. Bode wants to mention the books of Julianna Baggott, trusted friend, who has written novels for grown-ups: GIRL TALK, THE MISS AMERICA FAMILY, and THE MADAM, as well as a book of poems, THIS COUNTRY OF MOTHERS.

  You can visit N. E. Bode online at www.theanybodies.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  ALSO BY N. E. BODE

  THE ANYBODIES

  THE NOBODIES

  Credits

  Jacket art © 2006 by Brandon Dorman

  Jacket design by Joel Tippie

  Copyright

  THE SOMEBODIES. Text copyright © 2006 by Julianna Baggott. Illustrations copyright © 2006 by Peter Ferguson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Digital Edition April 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-190602-2

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