The Actual Account of Peter Able Read online

  Now, if you’ve been following along in my story thus far, you’ll know exactly why I was dreading my first class. It seemed that each time I received a conflict assignment for the semester, it nearly killed me. In my Basic Conflict class, the assignment sheet flat out said “Assassination.” That’s it. It was a rough semester, and needless to say, I took a break from conflict in the spring. The next year, though, I wound up with two conflicts: a person vs. self and a person vs. person, both of which had the potential to kill me, and nearly did. Last spring, I got lucky. I took a Person vs. Supernatural and merely had to get one of the Ghosts from Christmas Past to stop haunting the school fountain. Probably because I wasn’t being written, and not a lot happens then.

  But this semester I was being written, and I already knew I had a mission. The very next day in fact, I would be—

  “It’s a Top Secret Mission!” Randy shouted as he poked his head into the classroom. With a quick glance around, he drew back and slammed the door.

  “Uh, hi,” I said awkwardly to the class. There were three cute elf girls in the front row, long blond hair and slanted green eyes; behind them sat a middle-aged and rather scruffy hobbit who I’d seen a few times over the years; there was an ill-described girl with ears; a creature that seemed to have the torso of a man and the body of a corgi, and a smattering of other students—all of who’s eyes were on me.

  Except for the professor’s, I realized as I took the seat closest to the door, because where the professors eyes should have been were two gnashed, drooping slits trailed with dried blood.

  “MOTHER OF G—”

  “Hello, Peter,” the man said pleasantly in a strange accent. He was standing calmly at the front of the classroom, his arm resting casually on the podium to his left. He wore a simple, Greek chiton—white linen, flowing elegantly down from his shoulders to his knees, and sandals that tied around his ankles and up his calves. “O Gods, and I’d much hoped to leave mothers out of this.”

  He turned blindly toward the chalk board mounted crookedly on the rough stone wall behind him. The room was dimly lit—the only light came from the sconces lining the walls—but I could just make out his name on the board, scrawled in large, clumsy letters, like a child or blind man had written them. I was willing to bet the latter.

  P ROFE SSOR O. R E

  X

  “Professor Orex?”

  “That’s Rex, ye Peter. Oedipus Rex. If ever was there a man to teach ye scholars o’er the conflicts with fate, ‘tis me. Now, doest thou seest this parchment?” The professor fumbled around for a moment until he picked up a long, rolled up, white piece of paper. Unseeingly, he made his way toward my desk, his arms stretched out in front. And poked me in the eye with it.

  “Pray forgive me, Peter. I cannot seeth quite as well as once I didst.”

  “What happened to your…?”

  “A story for another day, young Peter! The list, we must first, young squires. Thou shalt passeth the parchment which holdeth a word or phrase, foretelling your semester’s conflict. Should not thy conflict resolve before the Solstice of Winter, to thine own peril, be damned!”

  Tentatively, the elf girl next to me raised her hand. After a few moments of awkward silence, she blurted out, “Sir, does that mean if we don’t resolve our conflict assignments by the end of the semester, we’ll… die?”

  Professor Rex swiveled toward her voice, overshot, and ended up addressing the podium at the front of the classroom.

  “Nay, girl. You’ll merely fail, but… at your own (academic) peril!

  “Now, the list. If it please you, Peter, your name do find and thine conflict. Remember it well, as enchanted is the parchment, and so irreplaceable! Also, out is the ink in the copy machine, so you know… tear it not.”

  Carefully, with trembling fingers, I unrolled the thick parchment. From my past experiences with lists like this one, I was expecting something pretty terrible: murder, death, locked in a small room and forced to listen to real world pop music for the rest of my life…

  But as I found my name scrawled on the list, I was relieved—and somewhat confused.

  “Sir, mine just says, ‘Destiny.’”

  The professor cocked his head in confusion and turned to face my voice, but ended up addressing the elf girl next to me. “Destiny is thine destiny, Peter? There lacks a sense in that.” He paused, pursed his lips, and then said, “Once a man named Honor, I knew.”

  “Uh, that’s great, but…”

  “Ho! The scroll, pass it along, Peter! Time is not a friend to dawdlers, they say.”

  Feeling utterly bewildered, I passed the scroll behind me to a woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties, had short blonde hair, eyes as gray as the sea, skin like porcelain, and had the disarming ability to make me think in clichés.

  “Oh, hi, Kiki. You cut your hair.”

  “Oh Peter,” she murmured, looking up at me from under her eyelashes—which meant that she had to tilt her head down at a very strange angle. “I hope your conflict this year is better than yours last fall,” she managed to murmur and mutter at the same time, as only a character from Romance can do.

  “Oh, a conflict to do with an adventure!” she whisper/gasp/breathed, before straightening up and passing the list to the large ogre behind her. The list made its way around the room and the class read their conflicts out loud—there were many students up against prophecies, a few against gods, some had to overcome family legacies; but no one else’s destiny was… destiny itself.

  For the remainder of the class, we went over the syllabus, which consisted of only a few items: “Read Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays,” “Resolve Conflict,” and “Beware of the Sphinx.” By the time the bell rang, I was anxious to talk to someone about my conflict. Of course, my first thought was of Jenny, but I quickly remembered that she wasn’t there.

  Just not right now. I’ll get her back.

  I realized I’d thought almost the exact same thing the year before when she and I had stopped dating briefly; only the circumstances were a bit different. I trudged up the spiral staircase with the throng of other students from conflict classes. I recognized Phil, Willy, and Nilly, triplets with dark brown hair and freckles, but just waved and kept walking. They certainly weren’t the people I wanted to talk to about the conflict.

  “Excuse me,” someone growled just as I turned the corner. I’d just exited the staircase and ran directly into something solid. It turned out, the solid thing was my professor for the next class. Professor Uk was the humongous and horrifying, ex-captain of the Uruk-hai band of Orcs back in his literary life, and not having been written in a while certainly didn’t make him any less menacing. Or solid. I rubbed my forehead.

  “Sorry about that, I was just…”

  “Lost in thought? I know, Peter. Your worry is evident.”

  “I bet it is. I just got this—”

  “No, really,” he growled. He pushed me aside roughly and began batting away at the little words that had trailed up the stairs behind me like gnats.

  Worry worry worry worry worry worry worry

  Worry worry worry worry

  It’s hard to keep your cards close to your chest in Fiction.

  “Oh, dammit,” a spotty teen that looked an awful lot like most other spotty teens, stumbled past, dropping a handful of trading cards on the floor. “Who used an idiom?”

  It’s also hard to say anything figurative here.

  “You have my class next, right?” he growled again. “Walk with me.”

  Now I’d known Professor Uk since my first year and learned that he’s actually a pretty nice guy, but you don’t argue with an Orc, no matter his temperament. So despite my very strong desire to skip his class and run straight to Randy’s office in Detective to talk about my conflict and our increasingly foreboding-seeming plan, I just nodded and followed along in his wake.

  As we walked through the main building and through the courtyard toward the Sciences castle, students parted before Profes
sor Uk. Again, I was struck by just how many of them there were. Nymphs, Fairies, Ogres, Djin: the usual Fantastical Creatures; Cyborgs, aliens, A.I., and others from Sci Fi and Nonfiction (I’ll leave it up to you to decide which.) And of course, people. Fiction is filled with humans—there are YA teens, YA vamps, rom com divas, classic romance couples milling about, knocking people over with their incessant hand-holding; wizards, cops, bankers, lawyers, detectives, wizard detectives (like Randy), and, you know, literally everything else you’ve ever read in Fiction.

  “It’s the Internet,” Professor Uk grumbled, coming to an abrupt stop in front of me. I narrowly missed running into him again.

  “Uh, what?”

  “The Internet. Makes it easier for authors Out There to publish. Once they publish something—they pop up here. That’s why all of… this.” He gestured with a dark-skinned and grotesquely muscular arm. “I tell you, I would not want to go Out There; not for all the gold in Middle Earth. Who comes up with this stuff?”

  Just then, a fat middle-aged man wearing a bear costume and carrying a black leather whip walked by eating an apple.

  “So what is wrong with you, Peter?” Professor Uk turned to me suddenly. “What is the trouble?”

  “Oh, I, uh. I just got a weird conflict in my first class, is all.” My Creatures Teacher was certainly not the person I’d planned on opening up to.

  “Does it have anything to do with your plan with Randy?”

  “I—uh, what? I thought that was supposed to be a Top Secret plan.”

  “He’s been talking about it for months; they just don’t know yet.” He looked up and over the students milling about the courtyard, toward the two green, glowing moons over Sci Fi.

  “The aliens…?”

  “No, Peter. Look, tell me or not. I just thought you might want someone to talk to. We are getting immediately into our lesson today in class and you’ll need to be paying complete attention.”

  I looked at the clock on the side of the main building, and wondered briefly if it was new or if it had just never been described before. Either way, we had about ten minutes until the start of class.

  “Okay, I just came from my Person vs. Destiny class and we got our Conflict assignments for the semester today. And my assignment just said ‘Destiny.’”

  Uk pursed his lips, concentrating.

  “And now that we’re being written again and things are less hazy, I’m going through with the plan to bring the disappeared characters back. And it’s… dangerous. And I’m just worried that my whole destiny might just be, well, screwed.”

  “Hm. Person vs. Destiny. Destiny itself… That is foreboding. And very vague.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Maybe it is not a bad thing. Maybe your destiny is to fail, but perhaps you will not, since it is a conflict after all. If you were to accept your destiny without fighting against it, and perhaps even prevailing, there would be no conflict at all. Do you understand?”

  “Not really. But we better get going; it’s almost 11:00.”

  He glanced at the clock, nodded once, and then turned in the direction of the Science Building. For some reason, the Math and Science Buildings were easily the most beautiful on campus. They each looked like small castles complete with towers and turrets, and the Math Building, a mote.

  We skirted the edge of the water. Along the grassy banks and around the back of the mote, was the Science Building. Its arched double doors were thrown open in welcome, and as we walked in, I was somewhat surprised to see that the lobby was… just a lobby. Not a castle-like entrance or adorned with stained glass windows; it was a simple room that looked rather like a waiting room in an office. There was a frizzy-haired receptionist behind a desk talking on the phone, the walls were stark white and dotted with the occasional watercolor print, and the floors were dark wood. And there in the corner next to a line of chairs and a couch, was Bob.

  “Hullo, Peter!” He waved his leaves in greeting.

  “Hey, Bob! I forgot you’d be in here. I’m surprised at how plain it is in here…”

  “Oh, but surely you’ve been in the Science Building before, haven’t you, Peter?”

  “Yeah, but not in description. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Creatures Class,” and with that, I trotted along behind Professor Uk through the emptying hallway (which was far more castle-like than the lobby). Just like in the conflict hall, the walls were made of rough stone, but brown rather than gray. The sconces were close together and glowed with a honey-colored fire, bathing the halls—and halls, and halls, it turned out as we walked in what seemed to be a labyrinth—in warm light. Finally, we got to a heavy, dark wooden door. Without preamble, Professor Uk threw the door open and stalked inside. I trailed behind him and took the first seat I saw, without bothering to so much as look around, let alone describe the students.

  When I did, though, I noticed that once again, they were all staring at me, probably because I came in with the professor. I must have looked really cool.

  “What a nerd,” a familiar voice whispered from behind me. I turned in my seat and saw Brett, one of Fiction Academy’s Stereotypical Frat Boys. “Oh, hey Peter. How’s it going?”

  “QUIET,” Professor Uk growled from behind a tall wooden podium at the front of the room. “There is no talking in this class while I am talking—not just because I could pulverize you with one hand,” he held up said hand, “but because this is a dangerous class, and I’ll need all of your attention here. Not talking about some silly high school girl drama.”

  Why was he looking at me when he said this?

  “There is a reason that Creatures of Horror can only be taken by third years at the Academy, and that is simply because, it is dangerous. At this point we trust that you have studied enough Literature to know about these creatures.”

  No one said a thing. Two seats behind me, someone dropped a pin to the ground. It pinged around all literally for a moment, until the girl picked it up with a small apology.

  “I will hand out your syllabi and paperwork at the end of class. There are so many creatures in the Horror Genre, though, that we will go ahead and begin first thing. We will be starting with one of our own students, actually. Will you come up?”

  Professor Uk was looking at someone two seats to my right who earlier I’d just skimmed over. I recognized him immediately, though; I’d seen him around campus. It was Dracula.

  He turned toward us and backed toward the front of the room, his arm crooked before him and his cape draped over it, hiding the lower half of his face. What we could see, though, was pale, nearly translucent skin, a sharp widow peak, dark hair, arched, dangerous looking eyebrows, and dark eyes.

  “My name ith Dracula!” he said, flinging his cape away dramatically. “I vant to thuck your blood!”

  He was having a bit of trouble talking around his fangs, which forcibly reminded me of the night the year before when Jenny disappeared. It was at a party at my house to celebrate my safe return home from the hospital. Jenny and I had just made up and officially gotten back together; we had been sitting on the couch, and the next thing I knew… she’d vanished.

  Dr. Jekyll happened to be there at the time and as Mr. Hyde, confessed that he had actually been the one to retrieve Jenny’s backstory for ?. He’d confirmed my worst fear—that she hadn’t merely changed her mind about getting back together and fled or just plain jumped out the window; she’d been Erased.

  All that to say, Mr. Hyde also had a hard time talking around his too-large fangs. It was distracting; and each time Dracula spoke, I was brought right back to that night.

  Which was unfortunate as the rest of the lesson, Dracula told us all about his life. He told us where he was from (Transylvania), what he was into (killing people, drinking blood, ruling their souls, knitting, I think, I was kind of in and out), what his parents were like (probably at work too much and divorced; I don’t know, I was really struggling to keep my mind in class), all in the hopes of further understanding the horrifying
creature before us.

  By the time Professor Uk was guiding Dracula in a mock conversation with his father, in which Uk played old Vlad, I had pretty much checked out. All I could think about was Jenny and how the very next day, I would be doing a trial run of that Top Secret, unmentionable thing I’d be doing to get her back. Oh forget it; this is too complicated. I’d be—

  “DING!” Randy fell through the door to the classroom, red faced and sweating as though he’d run all the way from the Detective Building. When he got to his feet again, the actual school bell rang and the rest of the class gathered their things and left.

  “Top Secret Mission, Peter,” Randy breathed, his hand massaging a stitch in his side. “Man, I miss Dach-shund. Never fully appreciated how fast she’d have to travel from one end of Fiction to the other just to remove expletives.”

  “No shit.”

  Unfortunately, the little dog had vanished from Fiction the moment Jenny did. How they were tied together, I never knew, but clearly she was needed.

  “Are you all done for today?” Randy asked as I grabbed my backpack and waved goodbye to Professor Uk over my shoulder. We made our way out into the bustling hallway and toward the weirdly sterile lobby. Twenty minutes later, we got there.

  “Yeah, I just have Advanced Spellwork and Independent Study Tuesdays and Thursdays with Mattie. Today is Monday.”

  “I know that.”

  “Yeah, but… you know.” I tried to gesture out toward that audience Randy was always going on to, but ended up just smacking someone walking by.

  “Anyway,” I continued as we walked out of the building and into the brightness outside, “I wanted to talk to you about tomorrow, so I’m glad you showed up. I got my conflict today in Person vs. Destiny.”