The Somebodies (2 page)

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE ANNUAL ANYBODIES
Convention, Fern sat on the book-lined stairs of her grandmother’s boardinghouse. She was eavesdropping on the heated argument in the kitchen. It was after dinner and stew smells hung in the air—all beefy and porky and, well, stewy. Fern couldn’t make out every word of the argument. The boardinghouse was like a big ear stuffed with cotton—so crammed with books that sounds were muffled. (In fact, the staircase was like an upward tunnel through a mound of books that someone had dug their way out of.) Making the eavesdropping harder, the hobbits who lived in homes of grassy mounds out in the yard were singing what sounded like sea shanties, and the Indian, who usually
lived in the cupboard, was playing a drum of some sort. Fern could only hear the argument when Dorathea and the Bone raised their voices.

“Fern needs to be among
[muffle, muffle]
Anybodies,” the Bone said. “We must face the fact that she’s royal now!” the Bone shouted.

This was true. Fern balled up her fist and shook it. “I’m royal now,” she whispered urgently. “You tell her!”

Dorathea didn’t like the fact that Fern was royal.
It’s too soon,
her grandmother had told her.
You aren’t ready
. But the Bone was proud and loved the idea of being royal-by-association. He’d grown up quite poor and lonesome, you see—the son of a fat lady in a circus. “What will it hurt her to miss a few days of long division?” the Bone said.

“Yes, yes!” Fern said. “What good is long division?”

Fern could hear dishes rattling in the sink. “She needs to know
[clank, clank]
…live in the real world,” Dorathea was saying. “Royalty
[muffle, muffle]
…it won’t do her any good at this point. It will just
[loud chorus of sea shanty and drumming]
…and spoil her.”

But what if Fern wanted to be spoiled? She kind of did, and who could blame her, really? I want to be spoiled—velvet pillows, and miniature claw-footed bathtubs just for my feet, and chocolates in the shapes of squirrels or porcupines, life-sized, or whatever it is that the rich have nowadays. “Don’t underestimate the importance of long
division, and a real childhood,” Dorathea said.

The argument was about whether or not Dorathea should take Fern to the Annual Anybodies Convention, which was always held at Willy Fattler’s Underground Hotel, located near New York City.

Let me be more accurate: Willy Fattler’s Underground Hotel isn’t
near
New York City as much as it is
under
New York City, which is how it got the “Underground” part of its name.

Everyone knows that New York has a lot going on underground. Its subway cars with their shiny poles are filled with all kinds of people and their hats, shopping bags, umbrellas, schnauzers, and portable massage tables, all jiggering down dark tunnels into their unknowable futures. In fact, as this story starts, I was one of those New Yorkers—in disguise so that I could dodge my insanely jealous creative writing professor’s murderous plots, of course! Imagine me holding on to the shiny subway pole, dressed as a confused bishop in a tall white pointed hat, or an elderly woman feeding Yum-Yums to her pet Chihuahua, its bony head poking out of her black pocketbook, or a sushi chef (which is very hard to say three times fast). I had no idea that, just below, there was a city beneath the city, an Anybody city, a shorter, more bulbously rotund version of New York City. This city beneath the city was warped, because it had to grow around steam pipes, aqueducts, and abandoned
chutes of all sorts, the buildings twisting the way roots grow around water pipes. Its sky was dirt-packed and veined with the undersides of subway tunnels.

Fern had read all about the city beneath the city in
The Art of Being Anybody
—Chapter 16, “Anybody Locales,” which featured a large, leathery foldout map. It wasn’t just a crisscross of street names—6th and Apple, 32nd and Small Change—like a normal map. No, no. It included the names of the shops and buildings: Hoist’s Deli, Melvin’s Laundromat and Dry Cleaner’s, Hyun’s Dollar Fiesta. There were a few squat churches and synagogues, a portly mosque, a row of narrow courthouses, and a castle with a gate and a short pointy spire, which poked right into the dirty underside of Manhattan like a tack on a rumpy teacher’s chair.

Fern was desperate to go to the city beneath the city, mainly because it was chock-full of Anybodies—a whole city of people like her, with her powers. She wanted to see exactly what such a place would be like, especially now that she spent most of her time clamped into a desk, surrounded by kids who didn’t know that Anybodies existed, and taught by the brooding, whirling, yammering Mrs. Fluggery (who’d already accused Fern of having a head stuffed with doilies).

Doilies? Yes, doilies. Mrs. Fluggery was odd. She often didn’t make any sense at all. She stuffed dirty tissues up her sleeves and had hair in the airy shape of
the Washington Monument.

All day long Fern had to forget that she was an Anybody. She hated the rows of desks all shoved together, the kids all poking at one another and being mean, not to mention the gummy underside of everything. The kids were all smiley and do-right in front of the teacher, but then turned on you, ready to pinch or knuckle-punch—especially Lucess Brine (pronounced LOO-sess) or Lulu, as she liked to be called, even though it was a nickname that didn’t fit her and no one ever called her that. Lucess was also a new student that year. She was a strange kid. Fern had never met anyone like her before. She was a bully, but apologetic about it. She sat behind Fern and would pinch her in the back and tattle on Fern for the littlest things, like pulling the eraser out of her pencil or putting the wrong date on her paper. Then sometimes Fern would find a note from Lucess in her pocket later, saying something like:

The notes were always pretty much the same. Sometimes Lucess called Fern a “big-haired freaky nobody,” but that was a rare deviation. It seemed like every time Fern turned around, Lucess Brine’s perky nose was aimed right at her, and Lucess was bragging about something—her glitter lip gloss, her house with its multiple refrigerators, or her mother’s rubber fruit collection. “It’s so real that our tax man nearly choked to death on a blue grape!” Most of her bragging had to do with Lucess’s mother, who, she claimed, was tall, elegant, beautiful, rich. She seemed to like to bring up her mother, and then turn to Fern, saying, “Awww, sorry, I forgot. You don’t have one. Isn’t that a sore spot with you?”

And all of Lucess’s friends would laugh. Lucess seemed to have tons of friends even though she wasn’t particularly nice to them either—at least not in public. Lucess was one of those nasty kids who other kids are attracted to, out of awe or fear.

Lucess made Fern want to brag in other ways. Fern had a lot to brag about. She was a gifted Anybody who’d once turned herself into a grizzly bear! Could Lucess Brine’s rich mother with her rubber fruit collection compete with that? But Fern wasn’t allowed to say anything like this. She just had to nod and say, “Congratulations on almost choking the tax man.”

Fern had to try to be somewhat ordinary again, and Fern wasn’t very good at being ordinary. She’d tried it,
and it always made her feel clamped down, like a bunny in a shoe box. This was frustrating, because she wanted to be a great Anybody. She was royalty, after all. And great Anybodies tended to be their own people. They didn’t fit in. They seemed to get down to what was essential them—their unique core—and build themselves up from there. What if her grandmother had walked around just trying to be ordinary? Would she have become the Great Realdo? What if the hermit, Phoebe, had just tried to fit in? Would she ever have learned how to travel through a teapot to London, where she and Holmquist were now on their honeymoon? Take the great Willy Fattler, genius of Willy Fattler’s Underground Hotel. What if he’d tried to be average? Would he ever have designed the wildest ever-changing Anybody hotel of all time? The answers to these questions were: no, no, and no.

Howard, on the other hand, had been the one to love being ordinary. He was wonderful at it. After the harrowing adventures of camp, he’d requested to spend the rest of the summer with the Drudgers, his biological parents, so that he could get a bellyful of ordinary. He promised not to do any Anybody trickery (he’d once accidentally turned them into monkeys while showing off for a friend), and this time he’d stayed true to his word. He just enjoyed his math books and the bland food and the beige walls and the beige carpeting, and
his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Drudger. He adored listening to them discuss all their favorite things: sod, coupons, desk organizers, the steam function on their new iron, and tax code. They were both accountants working for Beige & Beige. Howard wanted to be an accountant too.

By summer’s end the Drudgers and Dorathea and the Bone had decided that it was important that Howard and Fern continue to have a good brotherly, sisterly relationship. They weren’t brother and sister, but each was an only child, and so it was important, they all agreed, for the two kids to stick together. To keep up the good relationship they’d developed while at camp together, it was best to have them in the same school. Howard sat two rows to Fern’s left, in fact, in Mrs. Fluggery’s classroom.

But this didn’t help much. Just by sitting there in his dullish Howard way—something Fern had grown oddly fond of—Howard reminded Fern of all of the adventures they’d had together: the rhino that had stampeded out of a book, the attack of the vicious mole, the boat ride down the Avenue of the Americas while it was flooded.

And remembering all these adventures only made Fern want to have another adventure. She wanted to go to the Annual Anybodies Convention in the city beneath the city. She needed to go.

But the conversation in the kitchen had grown quieter,
turned to whispering. It had taken on an urgent, serious tone. And even though the hobbits had stopped singing, Fern couldn’t hear anything but hissed bits of speech. She climbed down the stairs and, with her back to the book-covered walls, she slipped toward the kitchen.

“Now isn’t the time,” Dorathea was saying. “Dark things are happening. Anybodies are in danger. Fern will be a target. Dead books
[muffle, hiss, clank]
.”

“Dead books?” the Bone asked.

“Haven’t you heard?” Dorathea asked.

Silence.

“As you well know, books have souls. Writers stitch a bit of their souls into them when they write them.
[Muffle].
Except those books that don’t
[muffle, clank]
…. The ones made to look like all the others. Ghostwritten celebrity books, those fluffy, mushy romances by…
[water running]
, and those sappy books that always want to teach kids a lesson!” Dorathea’s tone had turned sour, and who could blame her? No one wants to be taught a lesson, as if reading were only an opportunity to be scolded.

“What you’re saying though is that someone’s taken the bits of souls out of the books with souls and now they’re dead?”

“Dead as doornails. No life in them at all. It’s completely new. Totally baffling the authorities…
[muffle]
…”

Fern had never heard of dead books. She supposed that she did know, in her own intuitive way, that some books were soulless to begin with, those awful books out there that made people like reading a little less. (And I, too, know dull, boring, windy books—do I even have to mention the beastly work of my creative writing professor and his soulless pontificating?) But Fern had never known that books could die. It was an awful thought.

“Where were the books?” the Bone asked.

“In an abandoned apartment building near Fattler’s Underground Hotel.”

“Who could be responsible?”

“Well, the main suspect has to be the Blue Queen. I don’t know of any other Anybody who would do such a horrible thing. She’s proven herself capable of murder already, and because she was stripped of all her Anybody powers years ago, after
[muffle]
, she has a motive to want to steal souls from books. She’d have to be working with someone, though, someone who is helping her get started.”

“Why, though?”

“Could be that she’s storing up—hoarding the power of all those souls—so that she can use all the might at once. Someone’s got to stop her, but…” There was a lull, like Dorathea didn’t want to go on with her thought, but she did. “The Blue Queen is a good bit younger than I am. I don’t think I can defeat her. I have
to face the fact that I’m getting older now. This will be a battle of brute force.”

“And Fern is too young,” the Bone said.

“Of course she is!”

I am not too young
, Fern thought.
I could do it!
But then in the next breath, she thought,
They’re right. I can’t. I’m too young.
Fern was of that age, you know the one: half the time you’re old enough to do so much more than you’re allowed, and then the other half of the time you’re pushed to do things you aren’t quite old enough to do yet. A frustrating pinch to be in—a sprawl of time that actually lingers for years, and unfortunately, in some adults for decades. Sometimes Fern found herself feeling both ways at the same time:
I’m old enough, but, no, I’m not.
This was one of these times. Her conflicting emotions, however, were overwhelmed by a sense of sadness. Her grandmother being too old to really take command as she once had as the Great Realdo, and Fern being too young…well, it brought up the fact that her mother was missing. Her mother could have defeated the Blue Queen, surely.

Fern slid along the wall and up the staircase as quietly as she could. She walked into her room and shut the door.
Dead books, the Blue Queen
—the words rang in her mind like the awful
gong
of a bell. She opened the bottom drawer of her dresser, dug underneath two stacks of sweaters, and pulled out her crown and
scepter. She had to go to this convention in Willie Fattler’s Underground Hotel. She could help put an end to dead books. She could help defeat the Blue Queen, whoever the Blue Queen was. Fern wanted to be a hero. It was her responsibility, wasn’t it? Her duty.