“Not to worry, lad! Just take a seat, try not to hurt yourself,” the professor growled from somewhere hidden.
Behind me, Jenny hopped the last few feet down into the room and stepped around me.
“You found the classroom!” she whispered, giving me a sarcastic thumbs-up before making her way into the seating area. Once I got my breath back, I clumsily navigated my way through the dim room and plunked myself into the seat next to hers. She rolled her eyes in my direction, but when she turned away, I thought I caught a smile . . . or a grimace. Well, let’s just say her face did something.
The previously disembodied voice of the professor grew louder as he made his way from the room’s shadowy recesses to the front.
Step . . .
Drag . . .
Step . . .
Drag . . .
Step . . .
Okay, I could go on like this for a while, as it took some time for him to finally get up to the front. When he did, though, the warm flame overhead cast his features into sharp relief. To be honest, he was less creepy as a ghostly voice.
The man before us looked to be about sixty or six hundred. His long, gray beard was matted with dirt, fungus, and what appeared to be seaweed; his skin was mottled and tinged with green; and his clothes, or what was left of them, were caked in mud and mold. Oh, and where his leg should have been was a thick wooden baseball bat. Yes, a baseball bat.
It was, of course, Long John Silver. And even though I knew he hadn’t been written in years, he was still the “shiniest” person in the room. Well, aside from Jenny.
“Welcome, everyone, to Basic Conflict. I see a few seats are still empty, but we’ll go ahead and get started, and hope the others will drop in shortly.” He har harred heartily, but when nobody joined him, he continued, pacing the front of the room slowly.
Step. . .
Drag. . .
“Now conflict, as you all know, is an important part in any story. I’d argue it is the story in many cases. What would have happened to Romeo and Juliet if not for their conflicting families? What if there’d been no war in War of the Worlds? Even Spot had some trouble when he went to school.
Without conflict, a story . . . has . . . nothing!”
He stomped the Louisville Slugger meaningfully.
“Today I will be handing out your assignment, not for the night, or the week, but for the semester. The grading for the assignment will be simple: pass or fail, and in many of your cases, live . . . or die!”
He did the stomping thing again and then shuffled over to a sturdy wooden desk in the front corner. From a drawer, he pulled out a very large and very disgusting black pirate’s hat, which was full of torn pieces of paper. The room filled with the rotten smell immediately, and I had to fight the urge to gag. Seemingly oblivious to the smell, Long John hobbled back to the center of the room, didn’t have a place to set the hat, made his way back to the desk, set the hat down, and then opted to just hold the hat and went back to the center. The whole ordeal took a few minutes.
“Now, within this hat lies your destiny. Everyone will choose a conflict, you will have one chance to swap at the end of class, and from thereon, the conflict will be yours. Any questions?”
The look he gave the room suggested that nobody had better ask a question, but to my astonishment, Jenny raised her hand.
“Until when?” she asked.
Professor Silver walked over to her desk and put the hat down, slamming the ground with his weird leg yet again. I wondered if he ever worried about cracking it.
“Until you come to a Resolution, Ms. Jenny! You can go first.”
Jenny’s previous pomp seemed to fade, and she reached a shaking hand into the hat, carefully avoiding the brim. With one hand she covered her nose, as the old, rotten hat was just inches away, and with the other she unfolded the piece of paper. Her eyes widened, and I could see her face flush, but I couldn’t see what the note said. The professor looked at the torn paper, nodded once, and moved along to the next student without a word.
“What’d it say, Jenny?” I whispered once he was farther away. She just shook her head, not looking at me. She was clearly mortified, and the red on her cheeks showed vibrantly in the sea of dull faces.
It took nearly the entire class period for Long John to move from desk to desk, leaving some students relieved, others crying, and one student, a Goblin to my left, unconscious and on the floor. Silver gave him a few jabs in the ribs with his faux foot until he woke up and clamored back into his chair. He still looked a little green, though.
“And the last choice for the last one to get seated! Choose wisely, Peter,” he added with a wink. Not that I had much choice; there was only one piece of paper left.
The little strip of paper was fuzzy with a thin coat of algae and smelled like rotting fish and garbage. I turned it gingerly over in my fingers, and Silver looked down and nodded his approval. As soon as I read the small, scribbled words, I was overcome with that tingling feeling of being written, but it was way more intense. From my feet up to my face, my body nearly burned with it, and my heart pounded violently. I was either being written somewhere Out There, and this was a Big Moment, or I was having my first panic attack. Judging by what I’d just read, I was leaning toward the latter. The only thing that kept me from fainting and sliding out of my own chair like the goblin was the small hope that someone might trade conflicts.
But then the bell rang. Six chimes of a dirge.
“Oops! No time to trade, I suppose,” Long John called to the class, as everyone morosely gathered their things. “See you all Wednesday! Or not!” he added happily, shuffling back to the front of the room with the foul empty hat.
I looked down at the piece of paper in my hand again, wondering if Assassination might not have some other meaning.
It turned out Jenny lived just down the street from my apartment, in an undeveloped and vague section of Fantasy. After a few minutes of awkwardly walking in the same direction and ignoring each other, we finally decided to just walk back to the genre together. I was mostly silent on the trip, and honestly, a little uncomfortable. But on the upside, Jenny had an English Energy Bar in her bag, which I ate in about three bites. I immediately felt Better, and could feel the last of my spelling and capitolization issues ebbing away. On the downside, though, this just left me free to brood on my conflict. I was just thinking that the penguin from the coffeeshop must have something to do with my conflict—that the coincidence was just too huge—and I was about to ask Jenny what she thought, when I realized that she was already talking to me. In fact, I seemed to be joining her right in the middle of a conversation she’d been having for quite a while.
“And then I said to Joanne, ‘Why would he ask me to the dance if he really wanted to ask you?’ and she said she didn’t know, but that was just how the story seemed to be going, and then I got this Love Conflict in class today, and I was thinking, what if it is this thing with Joanne? I kind of thought the assignment would be a new conflict, but maybe it is an old conflict, just more conflicting? I don’t feel all that conflicted. Joanne is acting crazy. What do you think, Peter?”
She stopped walking and looked at me earnestly, twisting a strand of hair in between her fingers. We were just on the outskirts of Science Fiction, almost back into Fantasy. She blinked a few times, and I realized I must have been staring again, but she seemed distracted enough not to notice. She just turned away and kept talking and walking. It seemed like someone had swapped the sullen and angry Jenny with a more talkative version. That’s when I realized she was nervous about something.
“What was your conflict anyway?” Jenny asked casually after a long and overdue silence. We were just reaching the bottom of my apartment’s steps where a group of rebellious toads were playing leapfrog.
I told her it was Assassination, and just then, as if to prove my point, something that looked like a baby Pterodactyl on fire made a swift dive for my head, missed me by only inches, and crashed into the
wall of my building.
“Squawk,” the phoenix said petulantly before ambling off, leaving scorch marks on the stone.
“See what I mean?” I said lightly, as though this kind of thing happened to me every day.
In a blur of motion, Jenny’s arms were wrapped around my neck, pulling me closer to her. And then it clicked: Jenny must be my assassin. She hated me for ending her series; she’d been nervously chatting the whole walk home; and she’d probably sent the phoenix to do her dirty work. Since it had failed, she would have to do it herself, apparently by strangling me. Which, by the way, she was still sort of doing. I roughly pushed her away, and we fell apart easily.
I looked down at Jenny, who had landed inelegantly in the grass. She was rubbing her lower back tenderly, and when she looked up at me through her tears, I realized I might have made a little mistake.
“Peter, what the hell?!” she said as she stood up. “Do you attack everyone who tries to give you a hug?” She dusted off some dirt from the back of her pants.
I backed up and held my arms out defensively—not because I really believed anymore that she had been trying to strangle me (come to think of it, her hands had been on the back of my neck), but because she looked angry enough to strangle me now.
“I thought you might be trying to kill me,” I mumbled, which sounded very odd even to me. As she stared at me, I could feel my face heating up, undoubtedly growing as red as the phoenix. Then she did something I’d never seen her do before: she burst out laughing.
“You thought I was your assassin?” she laughed. “You thought I was trying to kill you?” More hilarity. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and smiled at me ruefully.
“You may have ended my series, Peter, but I’m not going to try and kill you over it. What do you think this is, Thriller? Besides, if I killed you, that would make my conflict a little more complicated, I think,” she said, furrowing her brow. I’d no idea what she meant by this, but I was just relieved that she wasn’t trying to kill me . . . for suggesting she’d been trying to kill me.
She opened her arms again, both inviting a hug and, perhaps less intentionally, showing me that she wasn’t armed, and smiled slightly. Still feeling embarrassed and rather confused at not only the change in events but also the change in Jenny, I stepped forward and gave her a hug.
“Just . . . don’t die, okay?” she said into my shoulder. She leaned back, studied me for a long, uncomfortable moment, and then shook her head, still smiling slightly.
“Well, I guess that’s why it’s called conflict,” she mumbled, more to herself than to me. With that, she made her way down the street, glancing back every once in a while. I watched until she disappeared down a side street, wondering if my day could get any weirder.
The answer: Yes, yes it could.
When I got inside all of the lights were off and the apartment was quiet, except for a ragged breathing coming from the couch. The place smelled like something baking, or rather burning a little bit. I could just make out the outline of a man on the couch, wearing a peculiar and very unfashionable hat. His feet were propped up on the table, and on the sole of his shoe was a big, pink wad of bubblegum.
“Randy, what are you doing?” I asked as I flicked on the light with a quick spell I hadn’t practiced in months. He rubbed his eyes blearily and looked at his watch. Evidently he’d been waiting in the dark for me to get home and must have dozed off. After making sure the roast in the oven hadn’t burned too much, he plopped himself back onto the couch and said he had something he needed to talk to me about, and apparently the mood would be grim.
“Well, do you want me to turn off the light again?” I asked tiredly, gesturing to the bright overhead light.
“No, no. It’s ruined now. Listen, Peter. I have something to tell you that may come as sort of a shock . . .” He put his feet on the floor, leaned forward, and set his detective’s hat onto the table. I set my backpack down and sat on the old armchair across from him.
In a torrent of tears, he confessed that, yes, he had been moved into the very secretive Detective genre in order to find his wife. He was making some real progress. So far he had confirmed his suspicions about the woman in my books, but there were still those nagging questions of where she was now and why she’d disappeared in the first place. He told me that he was sorry he hadn’t said anything sooner, but he didn’t want to compromise his position when he felt like he was getting closer and closer to Gail. In the end, though, his guilt had made him “spill his guts.” Several Detective clichés and ten minutes later, Randy was finally winding down his rather lengthy and impressive apology. It probably would have been longer and even more heart-wrenching if not for the sudden explosion in the kitchen.
The boom was deafening. Pieces of plastic, tile, spatulas, and a strange assortment of food debris rained into the living room, knocking over lamps and pictures and spattering the walls. The whole building shook with the blast, and after a few moments, we could hear screams from the neighboring apartments.
“Peter! Are you alright?” Randy coughed through the dust and fragments of descriptive words floating mournfully in the air.
I told him that I was fine, but my kitchen seemed to have been destroyed, and it looked like we’d need to figure out something else for dinner.
My attempt at being lighthearted evaporated as soon as we stepped into the kitchen, or what was left of it anyway. The entire outside wall of the room was gone. Through the swirling remains of the once wonderfully descriptive space—the beautiful bay window, the curtains Randy had bought and hemmed to fit the window himself, and all of those pristine, white cabinets—we could see the neighbors peering up at us from the street below. What was left of the tile floor was black and scorched. The old, rounded, retro refrigerator was in three huge chunks, one of which was in the living room. Where the oven had been, there was now a gaping chasm. Mr. Super, the super, looked up at us accusingly through the hole in the floor. Almost everything was obliterated. Everything but the kitchen sink.
“Well, I guess we should—”
But whatever utter brilliance I was about to suggest went unheard due to the unexpected barrage of arrows zooming toward my face.
With the survival skills of a dodo, I squeezed my eyes shut and hoped for the best. Fortunately, Randy was a bit more proactive, and a moment later, I felt the bulk of his body barrel into mine. We fell to the floor in a heap, ashes flying every which way. The arrows buried themselves with a dull thoop sound into the wall where my head had been. Randy was already scrabbling through the mess and across the floor on his belly.
“Damn,” he announced. He was now peeking around the edge of the gaping hole in the room. “I saw somebody fleeing across the street, but she/he is gone already. It’s probably too late to follow on foot.”
“Who’s S/he?”
“She/He.”
“?”
“That’s just how we do it now,” Randy said in a tired voice, rubbing his eyes and smudging soot into the wrinkles around them. He got up and dusted himself off. I did the same.
“Peter, I don’t know quite how to say this, but . . . it looks like somebody is trying to kill you.”
I agreed. While we pieced the room’s descriptions back together, I told him about my strange encounter with the penguin, my conflict, the phoenix, and, briefly, the awkward moment with Jenny. The kitchen would probably never look the same again, but after a couple of hours and several exhausting spells, at least we had a solid Wall with no arrows, we had a working Refrigerator, and we’d managed to put most of the counter back together. The roast was a loss.
“Well, whoever was running across the street certainly didn’t look like a penguin. Too fast. And human,” Randy said, leaning against the wall.
I really didn’t think Jenny was trying to kill me anymore, but just to be safe . . .
“It wasn’t Jenny either,” he added hastily before I could ask. “I’ve read her books almost as many times as I’ve re
ad yours—they were some of Molly’s favorites. Anyway, she is too petite. The person I saw running was tall.” He held his hand up just over his head to indicate tall, and then dropped his arm as though the effort had exhausted him. He looked older and more worn out than I’d ever seen him. I felt a pang of guilt for not having been there for him. It looked like Detective was really taking its toll.
“Don’t worry, Peter; I’ll find who did this,” he sighed, surveying the blackened wreck of our kitchen. “I’ll find him/her if it’s the last thing I do.”
I thanked him for everything and crawled into bed without a shower or even dinner. I fell asleep immediately, my dreams full of assassins, explosions, Jenny, and gender neutral pronouns.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Despite the little kitchen debacle, or perhaps because of it, Randy and I were back on good terms. I couldn’t very well whine about his initial secrecy, since he now devoted most of his time to investigating the murder attempts against me rather than looking for Gail. And he couldn’t very well keep secrets about Detective from me, since I was his top case. He hadn’t discovered anything odd about a penguin, so for the time being, we just counted that as one of those strange coincidences in Fiction. He spent most evenings at work, and since I really couldn’t do much to help, I found myself hanging out with Jenny more and more. By the second time she’d shown up at my apartment, I was almost positive that even if she’d put on stilts and a disguise, she hadn’t been the person Randy had seen fleeing. First of all, she could have killed me easily while we were together by slipping something into my coffee or probably just muttering a lethal spell—she was a pretty powerful wizard. But second of all, she didn’t seem to hate me all that much anymore. In fact, in a rather dizzying change of attitude, she seemed to kind of like me.
We quickly laughed off that whole shoving-her-to-the-ground-thinking-she-was-an-assassin incident, and after that, didn’t mention it again. I mean, that happens to everyone, right? She also didn’t expand on the Love Conflict she’d received in class, and I tried to steer clear of talk about my probable murder. So we just lived normally, peacefully. As friends, that’s all. And I was fine with it, okay?
The Fantastic Fable of Peter Able Page 7