The Actual Account of Peter Able

by Natalie Grigson

  THE ACTUAL ACCOUNT OF PETER ABLE

  BY NATALIE GRIGSON

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  You know that feeling you get when you’ve just woken up and you know you just had the most incredible dream, but you can’t remember it? You can still feel that slight swooping sensation in your stomach—maybe you were flying in the dream or falling in love. Perhaps you can still taste that cream pie on your tongue, but when you wake up, it’s gone.

  It’s all gone.

  It’s one of the saddest feelings in the world, if you ask me, and in Fiction, it had become the norm for hundreds of characters. They’d lost their loved ones: Aladdin, Cinderella, and several others, including my Jenny, all gone, like a dream that people just couldn’t quite grasp.

  To say it was frustrating was an understatement. I mean, there I was, remembering all the characters and exactly what happened to them. How ? had erased them from existence like it was nothing, and then how I’d ultimately destroyed him… but was unable to bring anyone else back. I remembered it all, because it’s my story. It’s like being the presence behind both the dream and the dreamer—whatever that is. Do you guys have a word for that out in the Real World, or is it as confusing for you as it is here in Fiction?

  Anyway, everyone believes me. Now. It was a rough couple of months, though, after our closing ceremony and, you know, the end of that last book. The longer the characters had been gone, the less their loved ones seemed able to remember them. Like they never were. Dreams, lost to waking. The Lost Boys all but forgot about Peter Pan, their once leader; Geppetto needed constant reminders of what Pinocchio looked like (a real boy, for the record), and Gorndalf’s family didn’t know who the hell I was talking about. And to be honest, no, I didn’t really know who Gorndalf was, either, but the important thing is, he was—before he was erased.

  And since this all happened in my story, it seemed I was the only one left to remember them clearly. To remember the horrible feeling of not being able to do anything at all about them vanishing; about bringing them back. To remember the worst day in my life, when I found out my girlfriend, Jenny, was one of the Erased. And then the real worst day, when I found out I couldn’t just write her back like I thought I could. I was the only one who could possibly remember these things.

  Lucky me.

  I know this is generally the point in the story where you’re looking for some comic relief—after all, this is a humor/fantasy, or so I’ve been told, but to be honest, Fiction has been a pretty dark place since last winter at the Closing Ceremony. Literally—many of the streets within the genres have grown gloomy, the skies a bit darker and overcast; which is only usual for Thriller and Horror, this late in the summer.

  Oh, alright. Fine.

  COMIC RELIEF!

  So anyway, I’ve been going around, telling everyone what happened. Reminding them of their loved ones. And yes, at first people thought I was crazy, but then they’d go home, maybe find something that belonged to the character who went missing. They’d get a flash of memory they couldn’t quite place. And slowly, slowly, people started to remember. Before ? came along and erased them, Aladdin, Daphne the Wizard, Pinocchio, Bill the Banana Tree, Peter Pan, Gorndalf, the three nameless fairies, and Jenny were real characters. As real as I am, anyway.

  So that’s what I’ve been up to while waiting around to be written again. It’s been a blur to me, too, to be honest, because when you’re not being written everything is a little less clear. The colors, the description just sort of…

  I just rather aimlessly reminded everyone every chance I got that their loved ones were real, that they mattered, in a haze. But then one day, in late August, it happened. I walked into the kitchen for breakfast—and there it was.

  The kitchen.

  Not in the dull, hazy, nondescript kitchen-way it was when I wasn’t being written; no, it was shiny again; it was being written, and so was I. The black and white checkered tile gleamed up at me, almost hurting my eyes with its solidity. The seafoam green refrigerator, the light yellow, diaphanous curtains blew inward with a gust of wind. It looked like a kitchen straight of out the 50s, and for a while, I just sat at the round table, soaking it all in. Oh, and catching you guys up too.

  “Peter?” I whipped around and there was Randy, my best friend and roommate. He was wearing red flannel pajamas, worn, pink bunny slippers, and atop his long nose, his familiar thin-rimmed glasses, magnifying his kind, wrinkled eyes. The gray around his temples was now peppered throughout his neatly-parted hair; I guess I just hadn’t noticed it when I wasn’t being written the past several months. But one thing was clear—he was being written too.

  “Oh, good then. It looks like you’re being written too, Peter. You’re looking shiny. Are you about done with the exposition?” He pulled a pocket watch out of his pocket and looked at it for a beat. Because, c’mon, this is Fiction. “We have got a lot of work to do today.”

  “Yeah, I’m almost done. Just one more thing.”

  I turned back toward the refrigerator in deep contemplation, so I could tell you this: Randy, of course, knew all about the characters who went missing. Not just because he had many of their backstories safe and sound in his office, but because Jenny was almost as much a part of his story as she was mine. After all, we’d all lived together for the better part of the last book; he wouldn’t forget her even if she’d vanished ten years ago. (Because I wouldn’t stop talking about her.) See, Jenny and I had met our first year at Fiction Academy, Fiction’s finest university for characters, ex-characters, and characters-to-be. It was love at first sight—

  “Hah!”

  “What?”

  “Love at first sight—Peter, if you’ll recall, you told me that Jenny hated you when you two first met. No offense, she grew to love you, but before she vanished you were the one who came along and made her author decide to stop writing her series. Too many wizard books going on at the same time. Listen, Peter, I’m going to make breakfast and then we’ve got to get going. How many eggs do you want?”

  Randy padded into the kitchen and as he walked by, I could smell soap and a dash of aftershave. Oh, how I’d missed being written.

  “Two. Hey, Randy,” I added as he bustled about, pulling out bowls, silverware, napkins, butter, eggs, bread, at one point, a large magnifying glass and his wand (“Oh, I hate not being written—I leave all sorts of things just lying around!”)—“Are you sure we should get started with all this stuff today? I mean, we’ve only just started being written again; I don’t want to do anything stupid.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, turning toward me with two heaping plates of eggs, toast, and bacon, clearly made with the help of magic. He then walked to the pantry, stooped down and put my plate on the bottom shelf, and closed the door. Because eggs go in the pantry—don’t ask why.

  I got up and got my breakfast and returned to the table. I could hear Randy’s fork tap the plate, then the sound of chewing, swallowing, a slight whizzing noise from his nose and a light pop of his jaw (some things about being written are just gross)—but I couldn’t see him, as he was hidden behind The Fiction Free for All.

  I reached across the table
and grabbed the paper from him.

  “What I mean is, don’t you think we should, you know, let our, you know, get warmed up a bit first, before taking any sort of big plot actions…? Don’t get me wrong—I want to bring Jenny back more than anyone, and the other characters, too, but… Well, we haven’t been written in months; I mean, I’m still all tingly feeling, and you want to just, what, send me off on the most dangerous and possibly lethal recon mission ever written for a character of Fiction, right off the bat?”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Peter! Of course not. We can do that tomorrow. I figure that will give us plenty of time to let our, you know, warm up a bit. Work out the kinks of not writing for so long.”

  “So far, I haven’t really seen any yet, have you?”

  “Nope, not me.”

  “So far, I haven’t really seen any yet, have you?”

  “Nope, not me.”

  …

  “Peter, I wouldn’t be too worried about it. We’ll just start with a test run tomorrow and see how it goes. We’ll have plenty of backup and support, and Terrill and Ivor will be with you the entire time.”

  I snorted into my glass of chocolate milk. Yes, I’m twenty years old and drink chocolate milk, with a swirly straw, what of it?

  “Terrill and Ivor don’t exactly make me feel more confident about the plan,” I grumbled, getting up to clear off my plate. I may have learned in the last story that yes, I was one of the most powerful wizards around town—but still, when it came to clearing plates and simple household spells, someone was bound to get hurt. And at least when we weren’t being written, that someone was bound to be Randy. Though, of course, I hadn’t tried again since being written…

  “Ouch! Dammit, Peter!”

  I quickly crossed the table to help Randy clean the eggs from his hair and pick the pieces of plate up off the floor.

  “Sorry, Randy.”

  “It’s okay, Peter. I know you’re nervous, but tomorrow will be fine. Terrill and Ivor may be crooks but they’re good at what they do, and they know their way around the Other Side better than anyone else I know of.” He caught me by the arm, “I wouldn’t put you in any situation I thought might be dangerous.”

  “Yeah, but what about that one time—”

  “Okay, I wouldn’t put you into in situation that I thought might kill you—”

  “Well, you did, though, that other time—”

  “I meant tomorrow. I wouldn’t put you into a situation that might kill you, at least not tomorrow.”

  He patted my hand and stood up, pushing his chair back from the table. With a swoop of his wand, he cleared the remainder of the egg and plate debris from the floor and his shirt, swept his plate, silverware, and cup into the sink, turned the water on, and set them to cleaning themselves. I watched for a moment as the kitchenware jumped happily in and out of the water, the soap bottle dolloping them, bubbles floating up merrily and popping. Randy was excellent at household magic.

  When I turned, I realized Randy was no longer in the room, but I could hear him padding his way toward his bedroom down the hall to get ready. It was only then that I remembered—it’s crazy how foggy not being written can make you—what exactly he was getting ready for.

  It was the first day of school.

  We arrived on campus in record time that morning—skipping over the journey really speeds things up—only to find that even so, we probably should have left a good twenty minutes earlier. Just after ducking under the campus’s South Entrance (the closest to our apartment in Fantasy), we were just two among a throng of people, creatures, and other sorts of characters, all slowly, slowly, moving toward the university’s center. There were green, smooth-skin southern pixies shoulder-to-shoulder with translucently pale fairies; just beyond them, a group of ogres, all bulbous in strange places, grayish, and looking confused and grumpy at the crowd surrounding them. Classic vampires and YA vampires stood side by side, pressed together, shooting disdainful looks at one another; and there was Ed, Jenny’s ex-boyfriend. They’d dated briefly the year before while Jenny and I were sorting things out (and by sorting things out, I mean Jenny broke up with me because she’d thought we were too young to be in anything so serious and immediately started dating Ed the YA vampire with his stupid, stupid auburn hair and gold eyes and glittery skin and

  “Hey Peter,” Ed shouldered his way through the crowd toward Randy and me.

  “Oh, hey—Ed, is it?”

  “Uh, yeah. Listen, I know it’s just the first day of school and all, and by the looks of it, you’ve only just started being written again, too.”

  “‘Too’?” I looked at him and realized then that no, he wasn’t just sparkly because the idiot was standing in the sun with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel; he was shiny—he’d just started being written again too. “Oh! When did you start being written again, then?”

  “Uh, literally just now. When you saw me in the crowd and made that whole fuss about how Jenny and I had dated and you two had just broken up, and my, stupid, stupid hair.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Oh, you heard that did, you?”

  “Inner monologue,” Randy chimed in from behind me. “I don’t think we’ve ever officially met, Ed.” He reached his arm around my shoulder and shook Ed’s hand, as the crowd jostled us a few steps forward. “I’m Randy Potts.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sir. I’ve heard only good things about you.”

  Stupid, smug, suck up, bast—

  “SO, you’re in your last year at school, too, aren’t you, Ed? Peter and I are, too. As I’m sure you know. Right, so this crowd, huh? I’ve never seen campus so teeming with new characters! There must be hundreds of new characters since even last semester!”

  “Self-publishing,” I said, just remembering. In the hazy days of not being written, I’d stumbled across an article about it; there had been a huge increase in self-published novels Out There over the past several months. Which would explain some of the characters ahead of us…

  “Is that fellow in his underpants wearing a bear mask?”

  “Huh.”

  “Peter, I don’t mean to be pushy here or anything, but are you still going ahead with your plan to rescue Jenny?”

  “Yeah, I think tomorrow we’ll—”

  “Because if you need anything, anything at all. I will help you, Peter. Because I loved her,” he gazed out at the crowd stoically as Fantasy’s friendly jogging centaur herd passed him by. The crowd was finally starting to move. We trekked up the hill.

  “You didn’t even remember her until I reminded you and everyone else that she was a character. And thanks for the offer Ed, but I don’t need your help.”

  “Ho ho! Peter, let’s not be too hasty!” Randy clapped me jovially on the shoulder, as the three of us neared the school’s stone courtyard area. The benches and picnic tables were dotted with students of various shapes, sizes, colors, and shininess—some of them were clearly ex-characters, dull and non-descript; some of them were being written and were much more detailed. Like, Bob, for example, the potted ficus tree. He had a round, clay-colored pot; brilliant, green foliage; and a long, entwined trunk—and was was pivoting across the courtyard toward us. Randy waved an arm in greeting, and then turned back to me, conspiratorially.

  “Peter, we don’t know whose help we might need with this mission. Just because you think Ed is a pompous, arrogant, prat with, ridiculously sparkly skin—”

  “I can hear you.”

  “—doesn’t mean he might not be helpful. We might need everyone’s help.” He gestured toward the courtyard at large, and nearly smacked Bob in what I think would have been his face as he approached; though of course, as a ficus tree, it’s hard to tell.

  “Hullo, Randy. Peter.” Bob made a slight bow forward with his trunk, leaves rustling. He spoke in a slightly British and very polished accent, though from no visible mouth. “What do you need everyone’s help with?”

  “We might need help with a
certain Top Secret Plan.”

  “Oh.” Bob paused for a moment. “Do you mean the one to bring back Jenny and the other disappeared characters by going out into the—?”

  “BRIAR PATCH!”

  “Pardon?”

  Randy looked around uncomfortably, and then lowered his voice so that only Bob and I could hear. “Sorry, Bob, but this is a Top Secret mission—didn’t you see the capital letters? Which means that while you might know the plan, they don’t know.” Again, Randy looked out at some invisible audience.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Ed grumbled.

  “You’re still here?” I asked.

  “Okay, okay,” Randy interjected. “If we don’t get a move on soon, we’ll all be late for our first classes. Ed, we’ll let you know if we need any help. Have a good first day.”

  Recognizing the dismissal, with a final glare in my direction, Ed turned on his heel (which really is only ever done in Fiction. You try it sometime; let me know how that goes.) He stalked off toward the Math Building, a beautiful, miniature castle, surrounded by a tiny mote and a lowered drawbridge.

  “I need to head off to Detective before my Quilting the Classics class, but, Peter, meet me in my office after your classes today.”

  “Okay, see you later,” I grumbled, already dreading my first class. Bob had some decorative sitting to do in the Science Building (which was just behind the Math Building and also looked rather castle-like), so I made my way to the main building on my own. At this point, most of the crowd had disappeared into their classes. Just as I reached the plain, square-shaped, cube of a building, I realized why when the school bell rang. It was already nine o’clock, and I was late for Conflict.

  I ran the rest of the way: down the stairs, down, down, down, into the dungeon of the main building. Here, the walls were dark stone and cave-like. I could hear water-dripping and could see eerie shadows flickering across the hall as the sconces’ blue flames flickered. There were several black iron doors lining the walls. Each was labeled with a type of conflict: Person vs. Person, Person vs. Self, Person vs. Society; then on the other side of the hall, Person vs. Destiny, Person vs. Nature, and Person vs. Supernatural. I stood for a moment catching my breath, and, you know, describing the hallway. Then carefully skirting the trapdoor in the floor, quiet as I could, I let myself into my first class: Person vs. Destiny.