The Otherworldlies (3 page)

“Fern McAllister,” she said. She tried to keep her voice from trembling, but failed miserably.

Chapter 3
the emergency conference

“S
amuel, where is your sister?” Mrs. Stonyfield said, interrupting her discussion of
The Giver
.

“I don’t know.”

Sam had been wondering the same thing for almost a half hour. His stomach convulsed, as if it had been invaded by dozens of worms.

Although Sam had noticed his sister’s absence from English class immediately, it took Mrs. Stonyfield a full twenty minutes before she was aware of the fact that her most challenging student’s chair was empty. Sam, though terribly worried, had decided not to say anything for fear of getting Fern into trouble.

“Did anyone see Fern leave?” Mrs. Stonyfield inquired, growing more agitated by the second.

“Well, who is going to speak up?”

The class responded with a collective blank stare. Mrs. Stonyfield pursed her lips so they extended out like two soggy pieces of watermelon. Her mouth was always so overdrawn with lipstick that her students had been calling her Clownface for more than a decade.

“Are you trying to tell me not one of you saw her leave—that Fern just disappeared into thin air?”

“Maybe she went
poof
,” Blythe Conrad cracked. The class erupted with laughter.

“Fern thinks she’s magic,” Lee Phillips said, as the chorus of laughter grew louder.

“This is not a laughing matter.” Clownface’s reading glasses were slipping down her face, giving the students an all-access pass to their teacher’s menacing eyes.

Sam wished he knew why his sister had vanished—or where—but he had no clue. His anxiety grew with each passing moment. Soon the bell rang, causing an outbreak of movement.

“Wait! Just! One! Moment!”

Sam would have rushed out the door if it weren’t for the fact that he could’ve sworn steam was actually coming out of Clownface’s ears.

“No one is leaving this room until Fern returns.” Mrs. Stonyfield paced from one end of the chalkboard to the other, never turning her attention away from her students. Her large posterior, which bounced back and forth with each step, made her pacing comical. Sam thought she looked like a hippo. Her voice was now shrill.

“Has she gone to the nurse complaining of a stomachache once again? I’ve never known any girl to have as many stomachaches as Fern McAllister in all of my years of teaching!”

It was against school policy for a teacher to discuss a student’s health problems in front of her class, but Mrs. Stonyfield charged full speed ahead, her rump swaying like a pendulum.

“Or has her face turned into one huge blister again? Or is it that she
just
knows
there will be a hailstorm at recess, so she went to get her protective hail gear? Why, maybe it’s another one of her fainting spells, only this time she’s trained herself to faint right out of her seat and out the door.”

Mrs. Stonyfield’s whole face was now the color of a stop sign.

“I knew that girl was going to be a problem the day she arrived with her sunglasses on, like she was walking the red carpet in Hollywood!”

The teacher stalked dramatically over to the telephone attached to the wall. She dialed the office.

“Yes, I need to speak to Headmaster Mooney. . . . Yes, we have a problem . . . Fern McAllister has disappeared. . . . If I had seen her
leave
, Ralph, I wouldn’t have said she
disappeared.
. . . Yes. No, I understand. Well, if Mr. Bing finds her, I’d like to have some words with her as well,” Mrs. Stonyfield said, hanging up the phone.

“Now,” Mrs. Stonyfield said, turning around to direct her comments to the class. “Headmaster Mooney is on his way here. He will be instructing all teachers to allow NO ONE to leave their classrooms,” she said, looking grimly satisfied when several of her students let out gasps.

The entire school was in lockdown.

After considerable conferencing by Mrs. Stonyfield and Headmaster Mooney at the front of the classroom and increasing restlessness on the part of the students, information of Fern’s whereabouts reached the school. Fern had called her mother from a pay phone by the outdoor showers at Big Corona. Mr. Bing, the custodian who had searched every hallway and bathroom and was now in the cafeteria, nearly shed tears of joy when he heard the news, but knew he could not do so without raising suspicion.

Fern McAllister was safe!
Class was immediately dismissed. Sam stuffed his textbooks into his backpack and ran home by himself for the first time, anxious to find out what’d happened to his sister.

When Fern had placed the call to her mother, Mary Lou McAllister’s reaction was loud and immediate.

“YOU’RE WHERE?”

Her mother’s voice was so thunderous that the words were still rattling around in Fern’s head an hour later. After retrieving Fern, making it from San Juan’s Ortega Highway to Pacific Coast Highway in eight minutes (nearly a land-speed record), an irate but relieved Mrs. McAllister gave her daughter one chance to explain herself. Fern did her best, but without much to tell, she found it hard to convince even herself.

Her mother said simply, “I don’t believe you,” and nothing more for the remainder of the ride home. Of course, had Mary Lou McAllister realized that Fern was just as traumatized by the day’s events as she herself was, she might have been a little easier on her only daughter. Instead Fern spent the entire afternoon and night grounded in her room. She wanted to ask her mother about the man and the initials, but with her mother still seething, she didn’t dare. There was no way she’d get any answers now. Her thoughts turned from questions about the cave and the man to questions about her immediate fate at school.

Things as they stood were pretty grim for Fern. It wasn’t long before her name was being mentioned in the same breath as “Emergency Conference.” This all by itself was enough to ruin any student’s day.

The Emergency Conference was a meeting between senior staff members and parents and usually meant serious trouble. Only two such conferences had been called in St. Gregory’s history. The first one had taken place so long ago, the specifics had been long forgotten. The last one, nearly twelve years ago, had concerned Tucker Snude. St. Gregory’s most legendary problem child, Tucker had unleashed three hundred crickets and an estimated forty rats into the school’s chapel. This particular prank, viewed by Headmaster Mooney as an offense against God himself, resulted in one expulsion and two days of school closure for fumigation purposes. It was the last in a long line of Tucker Snude’s escapades, several of which left teachers stranded on rooftops or afraid for their lives or both.

Rumors that a third Emergency Conference had been scheduled were making the rounds. So were exotic theories of how Fern had escaped detection and ditched school.

“I hear Headmaster Mooney and the Freak Doctor are meeting to figure out if Fern needs to be sent away,” Lee Phillips said, loud enough for Sam to hear.

“Mrs. Larkey’s in on it? Think Fern’ll get expelled?” Frank Gambon asked.

“I’d love it if she did—serve her right. She’s always doing the most ridiculous things to get attention,” Lee responded.

“She can’t possibly get away with it this time,” Blythe Conrad added.

“I think she crawled out on her hands and knees; that’s why we didn’t notice,” Gregory Skinner volunteered.

“I’m not even sure she was
in
class in the first place,” Matt McGraw said, joining the spontaneous roundtable discussion.

One thing was certain: Fern was not in school that particular morning. Because Sam lived with two of the participants, he knew the conference was scheduled for today. But there was no way he was going to reveal this information—it would be cycled to the upper grades by the time they said the pledge in first period. Sam told anyone who asked that Fern was at home, sick. The speculation over Fern’s future only intensified as the day wore on.

Meanwhile, at the McAllister household, tension was growing. Mrs. McAllister had joined Fern at home, taking a day off from the real estate firm she had founded a year ago. Fern had skipped breakfast, and by midmorning was up in her favorite tree, a giant jacaranda in the backyard, trying to distract herself by reading. She was plagued by questions of how she had vanished. Her mind replayed the sequence before the disappearance in a continuous loop. So Fern decided to start something she had read before—
Island of the Blue Dolphins
—mainly because she had not ruled out the possibility that her copy of
Lord of the Flies
was somehow cursed. After her terrifying vanishing act, she could leave nothing to chance.

She also knew she would have to wait until later if she wanted to do research on her disappearance. After all, there must be an explanation for what happened to her, right? If she began sherlocking around the Internet right now, her mother would surely catch her.

Mary Lou had come out to the backyard to talk to Fern. She caught sight of her daughter sitting up in the tree reading, just as she’d seen her doing countless times before. Mrs. McAllister could tell Fern had her sunglasses on, which she always wore if she was going to be outside for long. She held a book with her right hand and rested her left on Byron, the family dog, who slept next to her on the wide branch. Fern had somehow managed to coax the dog up the tree again. Mrs. McAllister shook her head, aware that many people would be startled at the sight of a girl in a tree, let alone a girl
and
a dog in a tree. In the McAllister backyard, it was commonplace.

Mary Lou wanted nothing more than to reach out to her daughter, to connect with her in some way, but she had no idea what to say.

“Fern?”

Fern lowered her book and looked over her sunglasses down at her mother. Her pale eyes brimmed with tears. Mrs. McAllister paused for a moment. Not knowing what else to do, Mrs. McAllister settled for tough love.

“Make sure you’re not falling behind on your schoolwork,” she admonished. “This is not a day off for you.” She backed through the screen door with a heavy sigh, though she had not said anything she’d wanted to.

Banishing it from her mind, Mrs. McAllister was soon in the master bathroom battling with her hair, curly blond locks that rarely cooperated. She stared in the mirror, hoping to arrive at an answer or a course of action.

Choosing St. Gregory’s for her children had primarily been a preventative measure to protect Fern. Nearly four years ago, Fern had come home from school in tears. When Mrs. McAllister asked what was wrong, Fern’s response was simple.

“Do you believe me when I say I can talk to Byron?”

Mrs. McAllister had to think for a moment. “I definitely think he understands you better than anyone else,” she replied. That particular day at school, after some ruthless teasing about Fern’s constant stomachaches by Curtis Bumble, who claimed that Fern was a zombie who was “rotting on the inside,” Fern blurted out that Curtis Bumble’s father liked to wear dresses and look at himself in the mirror when he was all alone in the Bumble house. When everyone in class asked her how she knew this, she responded that her dog, Byron, had found it out from the Bumbles’ dog, a German long-haired pointer (who, apparently, was very loose-lipped about Bumble family secrets). Mrs. McAllister had told Fern that revenge was never a good idea and left it at that. But the larger issue—Fern’s behavior—had Mrs. McAllister at a total loss.

As Fern grew older, her mother knew her odd personality traits would be less easily forgiven, less overlooked. Mary Lou’s worst fear was that her daughter was in for a lifetime of teasing—or worse, rejection. Despite some serious reservations, she transferred her three children to St. Gregory’s, her own alma mater, a few weeks later.

Mary Lou was sure that moving her daughter to the private Episcopalian school a few blocks away would help—that there Fern would get the attention and care she needed. There her odd way of dressing would be masked by school uniforms, and her strange habits would be appreciated. Or at the very least, thought Mary Lou, they would be tolerated.

Mrs. McAllister sighed loudly, even though she was the only one listening.

“Fern,” she called, “are you almost ready?”

The McAllister females met in the kitchen, prepared for battle. Both sat focused at the table until the time came for them to make their way to the school. They were soon in the car, snaking toward St. Gregory’s. Mary Lou drove past the upper campus, where seniors and juniors were filing out of the parking lot as they left for lunch. Fern tried to spot her older brother, Eddie, a junior football star, in the crowd. Her mother put the car in park and got out.

“I don’t want you to answer a single question unless I tell you to.”

“Okay,” Fern said.

Today Mrs. McAllister was dressed in a pink St. John’s knit with gold threading and had decided to control her flaxen hair in a bun. Several years ago, Mary Lou had worked for a nonprofit organization, Project Smile, which provided dental care for underprivileged children. Back then she’d rarely worn anything dressier than jeans and a T-shirt. Tired of struggling to provide for her children, she had gotten her real estate license and was now a San Juan Capistrano area housing specialist.

Mr. McAllister had been out of the picture for a long while now.
Out of the picture.
That was always the phrase Fern’s mother used around other people. Fern didn’t like it because it implied that family members, like dead flowers, could be snipped off with a pair of kitchen shears. She knew it was never that simple. Their father had left before the twins were born, and Eddie, totally closed off on the subject, never talked about him.

Single motherhood, though, had given Mary Lou McAllister an edge, a hardness that her children grudgingly admired. Behind her back, they called her “the Commander.” The nickname had, over time, become mostly affectionate, though not entirely inappropriate.

Today, Fern thought as she followed her mother marching through the parking lot, the Commander was in control, taking no prisoners. Her mother did not slow down, nearly dragging Fern up the stairs to the second-story administration office. Mrs. McAllister was just over 5'8" and although she’d inherited her mother’s hearty Irish frame, it wasn’t her stature that intimidated. It was the look on her face, which made it seem as if she could breathe fire and ice at the same time, all while ironing the creases out of a silk blouse.