"My Name is Xemby" by Kimberly Loo

My Name is Xemby

            Good day to you, my name is Xemby and I’m from…no…don’t even say it!  Catch your tongue and put it on hold before you even think of saying it.  Let me save you the trouble of asking, and let me explain first before I have to hear that question put to words sixty more times.

            I guess I should start where I always do: with Wendy, that lucky girl.  Wendy was the first person in the history of documented names to bear the name of Wendy.  She made her first appearance in the tale of Peter Pan, which was downright dandy for Wendy, because soon afterwards there were Wendys popping up all over Britain.  And of course, those Yanks, they love to copy the Brits, and soon the US was brimming with teacup-fulls of Wendy Dawsons and Wendy Smiths and Wendy Ophanopolises.  James Barry didn’t know what he was doing when he invented such a name as Wendy.  Wildfire Wendy, I should say.  She was created back when they still sold Heinz ketchup as medicine, and there really were fifty-seven types of tomatoes in every bottle. 

            Do you know anyone by the name of Xemby?  My author says not to even think about it.  His goal is to show old Barry a thing or two about names, so he followed the Wendy formula.  U, V, W, X . . . he thought that X should be as good a letter as any for a name.  It didn’t matter to my author that Cinderella and Galadriel hadn’t exactly caught on, even though they’d been given quite a few decades to simmer.  Oh no, not to my author; X comes after W, and since Xemby comes after Wendy, maybe Xemby would be just as popular.  That’s where he got the M as well, only M comes before N.  Don’t ask about his reasoning there.  Maybe he thought something about his poor little Xemby should come before Wendy.  It’s as if she’s my fairy-godmother-idol, overachieving older sister, and ancient ancestor all rolled into two pigtails and a blue nightgown. 

            I just know that I’m stuck with this name for eternity, and since I’m just a lousy protagonist then I can’t very well be going off to court and getting it legally changed.  You think you have it bad when you have to change the names on your twelve maxed out credit cards and expired driver’s license, but think about poor Xemby, whose name appears in writing at least ten times on every page.  Multiply that by the two-hundred fourteen pages in his novel and you’ll see where the problem is.  At the very least, my name is mentioned two thousand one hundred and forty times in the space of nine cubic inches!  That’s not even counting all the copies printed of the book, of which I can personally tell you there are less than Peter Pan.  Why do you think I had to explain my name to you?  I don’t exactly see many little Xembys popping up, in the UK, US, or otherwise.  Heck, I’ll even take a Xemby doll at this point.  Forget about being a real girl, a Xemby doll will be young and beautiful forever—or at least until the little girl gets tired of me and I get thrown out to Goodwill.  Who am I kidding?  My existence in a novel isn’t exactly chocolates and roses. 

            Wendy had all the luck.  She even got her own motion picture.  Granted, she didn’t make it to the title role, Peter Pan’s ego is much too inflated for that, but she gets to be the envy of mermaids and fairies.  Mermaids and fairies!  What do I get?  I get my nine cubic inches of shelf space pushed into the blue plastic recycle bin along with yesterday’s Times.  Wendy even got a sequel.  To top that off, she a movie sequel, decades and decades later.  I’ll be lucky if my author doesn’t permantly abort me in favor of other, lustier, more scandalous characters.

            Who in this world is interested in another sweet little girl in ringlets?  Well, not so sweet anymore.  It’s been years since he’s dusted off my persona.  All this neglect has had damaging consequences on my psyche, and like all the other muses, I don’t work well when I’m not properly maintained.  I’m an aging idea trapped in a caffeine-buzzed mind with a perpetual eating disorder, made doubly worse since there is no mention of me actually eating anything in all two hundred fourteen pages of single-spaced text.  How he managed to pull that off is beyond me.

            All this neglect has forced me into this frozen state of journalism.  I don’t even have an audience.  However, I do have all those blank pages at the end of each book.  The pages are there for students to take notes in when they study the book in school, but show me one school who actually teaches the likes of me to its students, and I’ll kiss the frog-version of prince charming (who, by the way, was not actually a real prince.  They had an actual frog take his place on set, and made poor Princess kiss those green slimy lips.  Unfortunate Princess, she gets all the hard parts—but she always always always gets her Princey dear in the end.  Bah!)

            At least I can say this for myself: my name is Xemby.  Besides Cinderella, (who really does deserve the title role.  Just think of what she has to go through every time she gets read.  Her name isn’t very popular anyway, just a little less so than Xemby.  Although I do think I heard Tinkerbelle mention that a little girl by the name of Cinderella was born in Brussels some time last year.  Oh well, one out of a few billion is not the worst of odds,) as I was saying, besides Cinderella, no one else has the title role.  Rumplestiltskin, Sleeping Beauty (I have it from a very good source that Beauty is not her real name), The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, The Frog Prince, and even Peter Pan do not give their leading girlies headline space.  And what is the title of my novel, you ask?  My Name is Xemby.