The Somebodies Read online

  Vice Principal Wattley was saying, “This is serious business…Indeed, indeed! But I am in charge, in full charge!” He repeated all this with relish.

  Howard leaned over to Fern. “Stop it,” he said.

  “Stop what?” Fern asked.

  “Stop humming! You shouldn’t be so happy about this!”

  “I’m not humming!” Fern said, but now she could hear the humming too. Where was it coming from?

  Howard pointed to Fern’s pocket, not the one with the pony in it. No, the pony wasn’t humming. It was the other pocket. Why was her pocket humming? Fern clamped a hand over the pocket. She could feel the sharp edges of something shaped like a square. She didn’t remember having anything in her pocket. Was it another apology from Lucess? No, it was too thick and pointy.

  Vice Principal Wattley pushed a button on his desk intercom and asked his secretary, the wiry Mr. Ingly, to take Mrs. Fluggery to the nurse’s office. “And roll the projector down to her classroom. Show them the inspirational film about the woman with no arms.”

  Fern loved that film. She’d seen it a bunch of times at her old school. It always meant that the teacher was out, and it was quite good. The armless woman could trim her kids’ hair with scissors in her toes. Fern loved the woman because she had so much going against her, but she wasn’t doing things the way we’d expect. She was herself, and miraculous in her own very specific way. (It was the kind of inspirational film that was not shown to the students of my school, the Alton School for the Remarkably Giftless, because it would only have given us hope, and the administration figured: What was the point of that? We were too mediocre to have aspirations.)

  Mr. Ingly shuffled through the ferns and took Mrs. Fluggery by the arm. They shuffled out together, Mrs. Fluggery still huffing, “Doily-, doily-, doily-brains.”

  Once the door shut behind them, Vice Principal Wattley said, “Obviously you two have put a strain on Mrs. Fluggery’s logical mind.”

  They nodded. Fern patted the little pony in her pocket. Don’t wake up, she said to herself. Don’t wake up, little pony! She was afraid that if the pony caught Vice Principal Wattley’s attention, he would confiscate it. Did I mention the enormous steamer trunk under the window filled with the collection of things that Vice Principal Wattley had confiscated in his short time at this school? Its lid was propped up, in a showy fashion. Fern could see two baseball mitts and a clarinet and a pair of crutches. Had he confiscated someone’s crutches?

  She also kept a firm grip on the other pocket, which was now leaking a hum.

  “Expelled!” Vice Principal Wattley said, rubbing his hands together greedily. He opened his filing cabinet with a small silver key and rummaged through alphabetical files. “Erasers, evildoers, exams, expletives, expulsions! Here it is. The paperwork: expulsions!”

  Fern had heard the word “expel” in a number of forms, but not this one: expulsion. It sounded much more awful, as if someone had mixed in the word repulsion to come up with something devilishly new.

  Was the humming getting louder?

  “I didn’t get to expel children while on the old paper-folding circuit. Never. No, no, you had to be nice to the kids. You had to be entertaining.”

  “What’s the old paper-folding circuit?” Fern spoke loudly to drown out the humming.

  “I used to have a different job. I was on the circuit—you know, birthday parties, Easter egg hunts,” Vice Principal Wattley said. He threw one hand in the air and swirled it. “I was an artist.”

  “Really?” Howard said, sounding a little too surprised.

  “Is that so hard to believe?” He shoved two sheets of papers at Fern and Howard. “Sign here and here.”

  “No, no, not hard to believe,” Fern said nervously. The humming was very distinct now. “I bet you were a great artist. What kind of art did you do?”

  “Spontaneous Inspired Abstract Speed Origami.” Vice Principal Wattley cocked his head. “Do you hear something?”

  Fern ignored the question. “Origami? Like folding pieces of paper into swans?”

  “Swans!” Vice Principal Wattley was evidently disgusted by swans. “The kids always wanted swans and poodles and kitties. I was an artist! My work was abstract! They just couldn’t wrap their heads around it!” He paused again. “I hear humming. Are you humming?” He stared at Fern.

  “No,” Fern said. “I’m not humming.”

  He looked at Howard.

  “I’m not either. I don’t even know how to hum.”

  “You’d better not be humming! You’d better be miserable! You’re being expelled and I’m the one expelling you.” He smiled proudly, looking off into the distance. “Who would have guessed that I’d be here? Vice Principal Wattley.” He snatched the papers back, signed them in a huge looping scrawl that took up most of the page, and then he briskly picked up both papers and folded, twisted, mangled, churned, curled, nibbled until he was done, and the papers had taken on odd shapes.

  “Swans?” Fern asked.

  “Poodles?” Howard asked.

  “No. The heart of a young man who has lost his art. Sorry,” said Vice Principal Wattley, suddenly very sad, as if to say you can take the boy out of the Abstract Origami circuit, but you can’t take the Abstract Origami circuit out of the boy. “Bad habit,” he said. He turned away from them in his swivel chair. “Out!” he shouted. “Wait out in the lobby! Go! Leave me alone!”

  And so Fern and Howard took their expulsion papers and made their way out through the ferns. They walked past Principal Sneed’s office with its life-sized photo staring out at them, and they sat down in the empty lobby, where Fern’s backpack and Howard’s briefcase were waiting. Mr. Ingly was gone, perhaps setting up the film projector. And so Howard and Fern were alone—well, aside from the sleeping pony and the hum coming from Fern’s pocket.

  “What is it?” Howard asked. “What’s humming?”

  Fern opened her pocket and pulled out a cream-colored square envelope. It had Fern’s name printed on it in small gold curlicue letters and gold edging. “It’s for me.” She ran her fingers over the lettering. “It’s really fancy. I don’t know where it came from. Or why it’s humming.”

  “It looks like an invitation,” Howard said.

  Fern ripped open the seal. The humming stopped. Fern read the invitation aloud:

  “You are cordially invited to the

  Annual Anybodies Convention

  as the special guest

  of the Secret Society of Somebodies

  (The Triple S).

  Please join us for our

  formal meeting:

  Midnight

  Convention Day Two

  after the motivational speech

  by

  Ubuleen Heet

  (Founder of the Triple S).

  Secret location to be revealed.

  Be there or else!!!

  Don’t tell a soul.”

  “They should have put that last line first,” Howard said. “Don’t you think?”

  “The Secret Society of Somebodies?” Fern said. What would Lucess think of that, huh? Ubuleen Heet? Who’s that? Fern was giddy. This seemed like a royal invitation.

  “I just think that if you don’t want someone to read something out loud, you should say so up front. Right? And I don’t like that ‘or else’ part. Or else what? It sounds awful! Doomed!”

  Fern turned to Howard. “Is that all you can think about? I mean, it’s mysterious! It’s fancy! It has gold lettering and trim! It has a secret location to be revealed!” Fern didn’t want to say anything about it, but this seemed like the first really royal thing to happen to her—an invitation to a secret society written on a fancy invitation! “I’ve never been invited to anything like this ever before!”

  “I still haven’t,” Howard said.

  “It’s for the convention,” Fern said.

  “What convention?”

  Fern stared at Howard. Sure, he didn’t have access to The Art of Being Anybody like she
did, but sometimes it amazed her how little he knew, or even wanted to know, about Anybodies. “The Annual Anybodies Convention,” Fern explained. “It’s in the city beneath the city.”

  “They really should have put that last line first. I don’t need any more information. The city beneath the city? Never heard of it and I don’t want to,” Howard said.

  Fern shut the invitation, knowing she wouldn’t ever make it to the convention, much less to the meeting with the secret location to be revealed. “I can’t accept it anyway. I’m not allowed to go to the convention. Dorathea won’t let me.”

  “You should have thrown it out. Just throw it out now. Pretend you never read the words ‘or else,’” Howard said.

  Fern didn’t want to throw it out. “I think I’ll hold on to it. Don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Humph,” Howard said.

  “Don’t tell a soul,” Fern said. “Promise?”

  “Humph,” Howard said again. “It’s trouble. I can tell. More trouble.”

  “But you promise?”

  He nodded.

  Just then the door opened. Dorathea and the Bone bounded in. They looked alarmed and bewildered. And in that moment right before they bombarded Fern and Howard with questions, Fern heard the tune in her head: up and up and down down down. Up and up and down down down. It was a dark song, Fern thought. It was unsettling the way it had worked its way into her head, and now she couldn’t shake it.

  5

  WHISPERS…AND ANSWERS?

  THE BONE’S CAR, AN ARTHRITIC JALOPY, WAS noisy. It shivered as it rode along. It moaned for no reason. The engine, a wheezy growler, always sounded like it was about to give up completely. And so even though no one was speaking at first, the car was far from silent.

  It was all a little hard for Dorathea and the Bone to take—Fern and Howard expelled. Everyone was just letting it sink in—the blank future, the what now? They were all taking stock of the situation. (Sometimes I do that myself nowadays. Was I once a giftless boy who played the turkey in the Thanksgiving pageant—not a role that is as glamorous as it sounds, as the turkey always gets eaten in the end? And how did I become this enigmatic author, disguised as a Gypsy fishmonger just so that I can walk to the corner and buy a new electric toothbrush?)

  Fern and Howard sat in the backseat, the pony in one of Fern’s pockets, the invitation in the other. They both had their Abstract Origami expulsion papers on their laps. Fern stared at hers. She squinted. It didn’t look like a young man who’d lost his art. It didn’t look like much at all. Dorathea was squinting out her window. The Bone kept his eyes on the dusty road.

  Dorathea broke the silence. “Take it from the top. What really happened?”

  Howard and Fern took turns telling the story. They explained how Lucess Brine had started it all with a pinch in Fern’s back, and how Howard had tried to help and how Fern had turned Mrs. Fluggery’s hair into a small pony, which Fern took out of her pocket and held up for everyone to see.

  The pony frisked its mane and whinnied.

  “But actually I saved Mrs. Fluggery’s life. I didn’t try to kill her.”

  Fern was finished telling the story. Howard nodded secretively toward Fern’s pocket where the invitation was.

  Fern shook her head no. She would have liked to tell Dorathea everything—the humming, the gold trim, the name Ubuleen Heet, the Triple S, and the secret meeting place to be revealed. But she was afraid that Dorathea would take the invitation away, and although Fern was sure that she wouldn’t ever accept, she still wasn’t willing to give up the temptation.

  “Well,” Dorathea said, “I think you handled yourselves very well.”

  Fern sighed. This made her feel a little better.

  “But we got expelled,” Howard said.

  “It goes that way sometimes,” the Bone said. “But if you think about it, you two worked together. You did your best.”

  Fern was relieved. She could tell that Howard was too. He wasn’t petting the pony quite so strenuously. She had a burning question, however. She opened her hand and looked at the name she’d written there the night before: Merton Gretel. She decided to try to steer the conversation toward him. “It was nice to have Howard there with me. He’s like a brother now.”

  Howard looked over at her, a little shocked. They’d been through a lot, sure; and it was true, sure; but it wasn’t the kind of thing that either of them said out loud.

  “I never had a brother. The Miser is as close as I’ve come,” the Bone said. “It’s a nice thing. I miss him.” The Miser and his friend the big-game hunter Good Old Bixie had gone out in search of adventure. This was very good for the Miser, who’d lost much of his boldness and was in need of adventure. They were sailing one of the peach-pit boats that the Bone and the Miser had made that past summer. The Bone looked wistful. “They’ll be back at some point with good tales to tell.”

  Dorathea was quiet. Fern wondered if she’d say a word or if she’d just let the moment pass. But Dorathea let out a sigh. “I miss my younger brother. I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Why not?” Fern asked.

  “Because I should have saved him. That’s why.”

  “Stop,” the Bone said gently. Obviously he knew the story. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You saved so many. And he knew. He did what he could in setting her up.”

  “Setting up who?” Howard asked.

  “He helped take down the Blue Queen,” the Bone said.

  “This was years ago,” Dorathea said. “There are hard things about being royal, Fern.”

  “What do you mean?” Fern asked.

  Dorathea cleared her throat as if she’d lost her voice for a second. “I mean that there was a moment a long time ago in my fight with evil when I had the chance to save my brother or stop evil for the greater good.”

  “What did you do?” Fern asked.

  “I stopped evil. I chose to protect all of the Anybodies.”

  “How?”

  “My brother was married to the Blue Queen, and when he recognized her lust for power, he agreed to help stop her. He set up a time when she would be at ease, her defenses down, when we could easily attack her without hurting her. She was pregnant at the time, you see, with her first, and I knew that the plan put my brother in danger.”

  “He knew that too,” the Bone said gently. “He knew the risks.”

  “What happened?” Fern asked.

  “He disappeared. And the day after the battle, my brother’s name was on the list of those she’d killed…. It isn’t the crown and scepter that make you royal.”

  “What is it?” Fern asked.

  “I’ve had to find my answers for myself, and you’ll have to find your answers for yourself.”

  Fern didn’t want to have to go looking for answers. Why couldn’t being royalty be as simple as the crown and scepter? It was hers. She had it. Why couldn’t that be the end of it?

  “What’s the Blue Queen like?” she asked.

  “She was a number of years ahead of your mother in school,” Dorathea said. “She was the kind of kid who didn’t have much going for her, but then I remember once she won an election for class recorder or something like that, and they gave her a ribbon that someone pinned to her lapel, and from that time on, she wanted more.” Dorathea sighed. “Greed for power can start in the smallest ways and then just grow and grow. Just a little blue ribbon on a lapel. That’s all.”

  “Merton was a good man,” the Bone said. “A gentle soul. Gosh, I remember him at his wedding. He was so happy, this huge smile plastered on his face. But, well, she was already hungry for power then. She’d tried to run for mayor, but she didn’t win. She probably already had her evil plan in store by then. She was faking it, I guess.”

  So Merton had married the Blue Queen without knowing what evil she was capable of. Fern felt sorry for him. She looked at the Abstract Origami expulsion papers and, for a moment, the papers looked sad, distraught, betrayed. The heart of
a young man who’s lost his love. That’s what came to Fern. Merton had loved the Blue Queen. And had she loved him, too? What had gone wrong?

  “I feel a little more sad this time of year. The anniversary of his death is coming up. Anniversaries are strange things,” Dorathea said.

  “For Anybodies especially,” the Bone added.

  “How are they strange?” Fern asked.

  “An anniversary is when you remember the past event. In a way, the past is brought back. During anniversaries there’s a certain weakness and, well, it forms an opportunity for the past to be brought back in a more real way. You know, for Anybodies it’s easier on an anniversary to have the idea of the past come back as something real. Sometimes this is a good thing and sometimes it’s a bad thing. And sometimes both.”

  Fern thought of the date that Merton died, the date when the Blue Queen lost her powers and the date that the invitation in her pocket would fall on. All the same day. Fern was putting it together. If the Blue Queen wanted to come back, she could use the souls of books for power, and she could pick the anniversary of her reign because on the anniversary it would be easier for the past to be not only remembered but brought back. The Blue Queen was planning on winning this time around. She wanted to rewrite history. “You defeated the Blue Queen,” Fern said. “Can I ask the time of day?”

  Dorathea looked at her granddaughter in the rearview mirror. Fern knew that her grandmother was on to the fact that Fern’s mind was churning. “A little after midnight,” Dorathea said. “And it wasn’t easy.”

  Fern patted the invitation in her pocket, the meeting time at midnight. The invitation was related to all this. It was a piece of the puzzle, but Fern wasn’t sure how it fit. She knew why she hadn’t thrown the invitation out. She knew that she was going to accept. She had to. She wasn’t sure when or how it would happen, but she knew it was her destiny. There was no way around it.

  “Sometimes I still talk to him,” Dorathea said. “Merton.”