Chapter One

A Flustered Nurse

Fern drudger knew that her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Drudger, were dull.

Ridiculously dull.

Incredibly, tragically dull.

Mr. Drudger enjoyed discussing sod and lawn treatments. Mrs. Drudger collected advertising fliers that came in the mail, bargains on oil changes and mattress clearance sales. They gave Fern birthday gifts like a set of toothpicks or instruction manuals on how to build filing cabinets. They liked only dull things such as toasters (4), sponges (127), and refrigerator magnets (226) -- and not those cute bunny shapes and such, but informative freebies from the plumber, the electrician and many from the firm where they worked, Beige & Beige. The Drudgers were both accountants. They didn't like to take vacations from Beige & Beige, but didn't want to cause a stir by not taking them either. So they loaded up the station wagon each summer and went to a place called Lost Lake. There was no lake, only the murky impression of one from years past. In heavy rains, it became muddy enough to attract mosquitos. And here Fern would suffer, listening to her parents take turns reading their manuals while she sipped bland lemonade (not sweet or sour) and swatted her bitten ankles.

Fern was not dull. (Children usually aren't. They can be a lot of unpleasant things, including nose-picky and stinky, but they are not usually dull. Although there are exceptions -- Mr. and Mrs. Drudger, I'm sorry to say, were never interesting. They were the kind of exceptionally boring children who enjoyed putting their toys in rows and keeping their pencils sharp. When feeling wild, they might have hummed, but that was about it.) However, Fern was not only not dull, she was, in fact, quite unusual.

Here are some examples: as a toddler -- her earliest memory -- Fern had once looked at a picture book about crickets, and every time she opened the book, crickets hopped out. She filled her room with crickets. She thought this would make her mother happy, but when she showed her, the tidy woman had a frozen look of horror. Nothing ever popped out of another one of Fern's picture books.

And when Fern had just learned to read, she caught snow in her mittens and the snow turned into pieces of paper with a word on each piece. She took them to her bedroom and laid them out on her desk, arranging and rearranging them until they made a sentence: Things aren't always what they seem, are they?

When Fern woke up in the morning, the pieces of paper were gone. In their place, there was only a row of beaded water drops.

She'd once seen a perfectly good climbing tree that, on second glance, was really a very tall nun with thick ankles carrying a big, black, half-dented umbrella. Fern, alone, hid behind a big mail box and watched the nun walk to the curb, glancing up and down the street as if lost. A taxi cab rounded the corner and the nun, who seemed befuddled and a little nervous, turned into a lamppost. It was an ordinary lamppost with a loose dented umbrella kicking around it. Fern said, “Hello? Hello?” like you do when you pick up the phone but nobody's there. “Hello?” Fern waited. Nothing happened. So, she picked up the umbrella, a little dazed, and shuffled quickly to her house.

More recently, during the spring before the summer that I'm getting to -- if you're patient! -- Fern had arrived early for swimming lessons at the YWCA's indoor swimming pool and had watched her brand-new swim teacher, Mrs. Lilliopole, run after a small bat flitting madly over the bleachers. Mrs. Lilliopole jogged after it, chubby and awkward, wearing a skirted swimsuit, a plastic nose-pinch, and a flowered bathing cap. She waved a net used for cleaning the pool. The bat rose up to the glass skylight and then turned into a marble, dropping to the tiled floor before rolling quickly under the door to the men's locker room.

Now all of these oddities were fine. They were strange, of course, and made Fern feel a little off-kilter, as you can imagine, but none of them scared her until the cloud appeared the day after Fern's eleventh birthday that spring. It was a persistent ominous dark cloud, about the height of a tall man, that sometimes followed Fern. The cloud looked like a plume of exhaust, but it seemed to hover just above the ground, disappearing around corners when anyone else was around. Once she got close enough to feel its windy presence, and the cloud began to draw her in, pulling on her dress, whipping her hair -- like the strong undercurrent of a draft you feel when you stand on the edge of the curb as a fast bus passes by. Fern was certain something terrible would happen if she got any closer. She ran away.

Now, keeping this kind of thing to yourself isn't easy to do. But Fern had to. The Drudgers had made it clear to Fern that any of the unusual things she's seen -- crickets popping out of picture books and snow notes -- were a result of her “overactive dysfunction,” meaning her imagination. No, Fern, those crickets didn't pop out of the book! We had an infestation! We called an exterminator! Mrs. Drudger had told her time and again. And don't start with that business of getting torn-up notes from snow! Mr. Drudger would add, No, no, no! We won't hear of such AWFUL fibbing! In fact, they'd convinced Fern that she'd misremembered everything. No one else had seen the crickets, or the snow notes or the nun, or the awful dark cloud for that matter. So Fern stopped telling the Drudgers and started keeping a diary instead. She wrote about the nun, and about Mrs. Lilliopole chasing the bat with the swimming pool net. She kept notes on things that seemed a bit off to her about people who didn't seem to be who they claimed to be: a robin that watched her intently from a branch outside her bedroom window, the pizza delivery man and the guy who worked the Good Humor truck, even her swimming instructor, Mrs. Lilliopole -- after that incident with the bat, the woman had kept trying to get Fern's attention with suspiciously stupid discussions about her scissor kick. It all seemed to be leading somewhere, but she wasn't sure where.

---

Excerpted from The Anybodies by N. E. Bode
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.