Everythingland

Caroline of Everythingland


Everythingland, like many great things, began with a story. I was four, standing in my parents’ bedroom as my mother tried to get ready to go to the ballet. My sisters and I liked ballet nights, when my parents would go out and leave my eldest sister in charge. We’d eat pizza and have dance parties downstairs, practicing gymnastics with all the furniture pushed to the sides of the room. Then we’d stay up late watching movies and telling scary stories, watched over the entire time by a baby monitor that kept us connected to our neighbors in case something happened.

But before they could leave, I wanted mom to read me my bedtime story, so I stood beside her as she put her makeup on, bouncing impatiently in my footsie pajamas and clutching my favorite book: The Three Billy Goats Gruff. My mother looked beautiful in her new dress, and my father looked handsome as he straightened his tie. “Jill, I don’t have time to read you a story,” Mom was saying. “Diane and Dave will be here any minute, we’re running really late.” Diane and Dave Sergent always went to the ballet with my parents. They were nice people with a daughter who sometimes babysat for me and a really fun dog named Zephyr. “Get Heather to read it to you.”

“She doesn’t need a bedtime story,” my dad butted in. “She’s too old.”

“She’s four, Don.” Mom gave Dad a look. Dad gave Mom a look. I gave them both looks, but they didn’t notice me. I went to find Heather.

“Not that book again, Jilly Bean! Can’t you find another one?” I shook my head resolutely and held the book out to her. “Alright,” she began to read, but this time, the story was different. Instead of the last billy goat killing the troll, a new character appeared. Her name was Caroline, and she worked things out so that the troll let the goats cross the bridge whenever they wanted so long as they paid the troll a toll in cookies. I loved this new version and begged her to tell me more. From then on, Caroline took center stage in all of Heather’s stories and I would stay up late every night, listening to Heather’s voice whisper of adventures with Caroline in a place called Everythingland.




Heather didn’t tell me that Everythingland was real until I was five. She said I was too young to be trusted until then, and that I would probably blab to Mom and Dad about it. She didn’t want them to know that she was really an alien from a parallel universe, and she said that they didn’t want anyone to know that she wasn’t their real daughter. They’d found her in a dumpster one day and decided to take her home. Heather said that she had been kidnapped by evil monsters called trogglehumphers and left here to grow up in this world, but that she was really a princess of Everythingland, and destined to become its queen.

“Am I from Everythingland, too?”

“Sorry, Jillbea, you’re just a regular human bean, like Mom and Dad.”

“Oh.” I tried not to be too disappointed that it turned out I was normal after all. I wanted to be like Heather, weird and funny and crazy and daring. I wasn’t any of those things. But I wanted to learn more. Before Everythingland, we just had Caroline stories. This was the first time Heather had told me that Caroline was not only real, but actually Heather’s twin sister.

Erin was in on the secret of Everythingland too, and even though she didn’t visit as often as Heather and I did, she was an honorary citizen. Erin and Heather said that while I’d never be anything other than a normal human being, I could earn my place as a princess of Everythingland by meeting its people and passing Everythingland tests. I had to do everything they told me do, whether it was smearing ice cream on my face, or jumping into a swamp. Every test, they told me, was important preparation for becoming a princess of Everythingland.




“The trogglehumphers are coming! The trogglehumphers are coming!”

Dry leaves kicked up from the ground swirl around my feet as I run to catch up with the flash of red-gold hair ahead of me. Heather is already halfway up the old climbing tree at the edge of our woods, her bright purple t-shirt just visible as I launch myself into the branches.

“How tall are these ones?” I ask as I scramble higher into the branches.

“At least ten feet!” she cries, “you’ll only be safe if you get to this branch.” She climbs higher and perches on the branch just above it to give me room. I look down fearfully as I reach the desired height, and imagine that I can see them, the terrible, green monsters who threaten Everythingland. I squint, but I still can’t make out anything beyond a few disturbed squirrels at the base of the tree. Heather says I’ll only be able to see the residents of her world when I pass all of the Everythingland tests and become a princess like her.

“What are they doing?”

“They’re wandering around the tree, and wow! They look confused! One just scratched his head and walked into the trunk!” We laugh, and I brace myself for the impact. Trogglehumphers are heavy, but they haven’t yet tried to knock down our tree. I hope they don’t think of it.

Heather looks at me and smiles. “Don’t worry, they can’t get us up here.”

“I know, I know! Trogglehumphers can’t climb trees.”

She punches me in the shoulder, just a little harder than necessary. “Yup. They’re gone now, wanna climb down?”





Once I asked Heather why her world was called Everythingland. This was after a cold morning spent hopping around outside. Dad had gotten mad again, saying that we were too loud while he was trying to do the bills. He’d kicked us out of the house before we had time to grab our shoes, and locked the door behind us. Later, Mom would throw around words like “bi-polar disorder,” and other phrases I didn’t really understand. I just knew that there were some days when you didn’t talk to Dad, because he’d just be mad no matter what you said.

Anyway, once we were outside, Heather brought us to Everythingland. She said that we were in the Ice Cream Mountains and that we had to step on just the chocolate chips, otherwise our feet would freeze from the cold ground we walked upon. Once we got to the other side of the mountain, to Marmalade Lake, we perched on a big rock in silence for a while. Heather was really quiet, her braids had come undone and her bright orange parka was unzipped. “Everythingland,” she said when I asked her, “stands for everything good. Everything that is good in this world becomes a part of Everythingland. And everything good that anyone can ever imagine goes to Everythingland too, including imaginary friends, and creatures like unicorns and Pegasus. There is nothing bad in Everythingland that we can’t beat in a fair fight.”





My mother wasn’t around very much the summer after I turned six. She was trying to finish her masters degree from Wheelock College, so she was away a lot, and when she was home, she was always doing her homework. She was usually never home in time for dinner, which meant that we had Dinty Moore Beef Stew a lot. I think it was all my dad knew how to cook. After dinner, we’d go outside and play until there was no light left, pretending we were at feasts in Everythingland, where pizza and popcorn were national foods.

We stayed outside all day too, exploring the woods in our backyard and fighting battles against the trogglehumphers. Dad stayed downstairs in the study, and when we tip-toed by his door we pretended that he, too, was a trogglehumpher that we didn’t want to wake. At night, Heather protested less and less about telling me Caroline stories when I begged her to. We began to rely on them as a way to drown out the conversations coming through the wall of our parents’ bedroom, which always sounded the same; our mother’s accusatory voice, our father’s low rumble of defense.

That was the summer that Heather discovered the power of transformation. If someone from Everythingland wanted to talk to me badly enough, Heather would let them take over her body and she would become that person. I got to meet Caroline face to face for the first time, and I started taking lessons from a fighting coach named Wrestling Buddy. My backyard became a wrestling ring, and because Heather and Erin had both decided I needed to learn how to stand up for myself, they worked together to help Wrestling Buddy. Heather would turn into Wrestling Buddy, and Erin would be my opponent. We would spar in matches watched by the citizens of Everythingland and I was almost always victorious. It was due to Wrestling Buddy’s tutelage that I was able to punch Ryan Mullen squarely in the stomach that fall at the bus stop when he wouldn’t stop saying that my family was gay. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded bad and he didn’t shut up when I asked him to. I didn’t get in trouble, the woman in charge of watching our stop pointedly looked the other way and the incident was never repeated.

Sometimes, when Heather tried to turn into somebody, a trogglehumpher, or evil spirit would sneak in. Heather would shriek and try to grab me and I would have to run as fast as I could. I wasn’t allowed to hurt the trogglehumphers when they did this, because Heather said that if I hurt them while they had taken over her body, I’d be hurting her as well, and clearly, if the trogglehumpher punched me, it wasn’t her fault. Instead, I had to remember the banishing charm. Yelling the words “Caroline Story” three times would send the spirit packing, and restore Heather to me. Everythingland existed with a particular set of rules and regulations that were strictly enforced by my sisters. If I ever snitched on them or lied to them, I would be barred from Everythingland for a full 24 hours. That was torturous. In Everythingland I got to be a hero every day. It was like in my favorite chapter books, where kids got transported to different worlds where they could save the day. It was real for me. Going to Everythingland and fighting trogglehumphers, rescuing Everythingland orphans from their evil machinations. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do there, and even scary monsters could be taken care of.

Sometimes I would wonder why it was easier to fight the invisible monsters of Everythingland than it was to speak up to my own dad. My sisters could do it. Erin would yell and Heather would make wise cracks. I would just stand there and try not to cry. I’d re-sweep the kitchen floor, or wipe the counters down again, doing whatever job he had deemed inadequate, and listen to the stream of abuse pouring from his lips. Erin said the words didn’t matter, that he couldn’t possibly mean them. Heather just told me they were lies. It didn’t help.

But when I was insulted in Everythingland, there was always something I could do about it. Wrestling Buddy taught me that it was ok to get mad and fight back, and the Trogglehumphers required courage to vanquish. Evil was simple in Everythingland, where there were only good people and bad people… and sometimes even the Trogglehumphers could become good. Everyone had an equal chance. But if something bad happened, it was up to Heather and me to come to the rescue. I was a hero in Everythingland. I was somebody in Everythingland. That was probably why it broke my heart the day I found out that Everythingland wasn’t real.


Sometimes Erin and Heather would have secret Everythingland conferences that took place in the closet under the stairs, our secret hideout. I wasn’t allowed to attend. Only the citizens of Everythingland were allowed, but they said that once I became a full princess they’d initiate me.

They usually didn’t tell me when these conferences would be held, so I couldn’t eavesdrop, but when I was seven years old and had just read Harriet the Spy, I found that I really did learn something from reading. I heard Erin and Heather enter the closet so I crept as quietly as I could to the door and listened with a water glass pressed to my ear. I felt just like a detective.

“You think we should make her a full princess?” Erin’s voice was incredulous.

“How long do you think she’s gonna keep believing?” Heather asked. “She’s a smart kid, and even as gullible as she is, she’ll have to figure it out soon. I mean, we really only made it up to get her to climb trees with us and stop reading.”

It was then that it happened, that moment of disillusionment when I would stop believing forever. “Liars!” I yelled, stumbling back from the door. I wasn’t sure if I was accusing them of lying about Everythingland being fake, or about it’s being real. I ran up the stairs and outside before they could even force the closet door open.

Of course, their legs were longer than mine, and it didn’t take them long to catch up with me. I sat in the shade under the porch, glaring at them and feeling like I wanted to cry. “It’s not real. None of it’s real,” I accused.

“It is real, you just have to believe in it.” Heather crouched in front of me, her baggy blue jeans covered in grass stains. “You do want to believe in Caroline, don’t you?”

I did. I did want to believe in Caroline, and more than anything I wanted to believe that there was another world I could live in once I proved myself worthy. I wanted to believe so badly. But I’d heard what they said and I could never go back. I could never truly believe in Everythingland again.

I looked at Heather crouching before me, and Erin standing uncertainly behind her. They both wanted me to believe, I think because they wanted to be a part of Everythingland too.

“Alright, it’s real,” I lied, and they led me back inside. I pretended to believe for the next year, while Everythingland slowly faded from our lives. It was still an escape after all, even if I knew it was just imaginary, and it was something to do besides reading books. Now I realize that without my sisters, without Everythingland, that’s all my childhood would have been: a procession of book after book, and the only memories I would have kept would have been of imaginary characters and the smell of ink and paper. And while it’s true, Everythingland and its inhabitants were imaginary, my sisters were real enough, and they certainly were characters.

My parents stayed together until I was twelve years old and my mother claimed that she just couldn’t take it anymore. By then, my sisters and I had found other methods of escape. Erin was almost never home, she was always out with friends or her boyfriend. Heather joined the track team, took scuba diving lessons and learned how to snowboard. I read, and spent as much time as I could at my aunt’s house with my cousin, where the family acted like a family. My father moved out, and since then he has come very far in terms of medicine and psychiatric help. He seems like a different person now, one that I have come to know and love.

Now the only time my sisters and I ever mention Everythingland is when we need something to laugh at over the dinner table. It’s fun to remember the crazy things they made me do, and how gullible I was. Even so, I still find myself thinking about it from time to time, what it was like to believe that I would eventually leave this world, and go to a place made up of everything that is good and happy. And sometimes, when I can’t sleep, or when I just miss my sisters really badly, I remember back to those nights when Heather and I shared a bedroom and my worst fear was that a trogglehumpher would find us in the night. “Once upon a time, there lived a girl named Caroline and her little brother Jimmy, in a place called Everythingland…”