Calvin (2 page)

I showered and felt hydrogen and oxygen hitting in alternate streams of molecules and when I sat down to shovel in scrambled eggs I could almost hear the baby chicken atoms saying don't eat me, but I ate them anyway and left for the bus.

Waiting with me at the bus stop in the rain, just out of my line of vision, was my buddy the man-eating tiger, Hobbes.

It was freaky in one way to have Hobbes there, but in another way it wasn't horrible. Since my only friend, Susie, had made new friends, I hadn't had anyone to hang out with for a long time. Now I had somebody to talk to, even if it was an imaginary tiger.

Hobbes started talking again clear as could be.

Hobbes: Lemme tell you what it was like to be washed to death. First you get a hole in you, and your guts start stretching out of you, and the hole gets bigger and the guts get longer, and soon you're swirling in soapy water and your own guts and fur, and you turn inside out, and your eyeballs sink to the bottom of the washing machine, each eyeball all alone, and you can't even see your other eyeball. And that's it until your best friend is laughing at your lonely eyeballs.

Me: It did look kind of funny.

It had, but I'd still been pretty choked up about it at the time.

Hobbes: I think you should make it up to me. Skip school. Let's play!

Me: Go away.

Hobbes: C'mon, buddy. We had good times. We will again. All the sled rides and the snowmen and the snowball fights and the forts.

Me: Remember I broke my arm
and
my leg last time we went sledding?

Hobbes: Remember all the adventures?

Me: All the fights.

Hobbes: All the exploring and climbing trees?

Me: All the trouble we got into.

Hobbes: Let's run away.

Me: People will think I'm insane because you talk to me.

Hobbes: Since when did we care what people think?

Me: There's more of them. The definition of sanity is a democratic thing. They get to decide.

Hobbes: We'll have our own reality.

Me: You can't have a reality all by yourself.

Hobbes: Why not?

Me: Because … because it's like playing Calvinball. If you make up the rules as you go, nobody else gets it, nobody else can play with you, you never know when the game is over or if you won … It's sort of pointless. And lonely.

Hobbes: You gave up on trying to win the Change the World Lottery.

Me: I could never win.

Hobbes: You should never give up on that.

Me: It's too hard. Besides, now I have to figure out how to deal with my problem.

Hobbes: What problem?

Me: You. You are my problem.

Hobbes: Your imagination is a transmogrifier.

Me: The transmogrifier was just a cardboard box. I want you to leave me alone. Go away.

Hobbes: No.

Me: I made you up. I can make you go away.

But he didn't go away, Bill. He stayed.

 

School's always been pretty bad. Mom said they were going to keep me back at the end of first grade, but when they tested me they found out I was in the ninety-sixth percentile for intelligence and they figured I was just bored. Dad gave me lectures explaining how all the brains in the world wouldn't do me any good if I didn't know how to work. But as it turns out, all the lectures in the world don't make things any less boring, and they don't make you work harder either. So I aced classes where all I had to do was show up and take tests. I didn't do as well in classes that required projects.

It always bugged me that I went to school but I didn't seem to learn anything really useful. Like birds. I saw the same kinds of birds every day and there I was in my last year of high school and I didn't know what kinds they were. Except robins. Shouldn't there be a class called Basic Birds? What about flowers? Shouldn't there be a course called Common Flowers You Will See in Your Typical Day? And what about stuff like how the financial world works? How about How to Get into the Stock Market Without Losing Your Shirt, or even What That Information Sheet They Give You When You Open a Bank Account Means. I had to read
Lord of the Flies
in English class just to learn that all teenagers are animals at heart and thank you civilization for keeping us from ripping each other's throats out. But
Lord of the Flies
was written in 1954—haven't they written any good books since then? Maybe we would evolve if the curriculum did. How about a course called Marriage 101 or Mortgages 101 or Parenting 101? Some of the biggest things in your life and you don't get taught how to do them. But hey, I know the molecular difference between an acid and a base. I've got nothing against knowing the molecular difference between an acid and a base, but how about something practical once in a while? I just want to look around in the world and not be totally baffled by it, even as I recite the periodic table, you know?

So yeah, Bill, I've always had a problem with school.

All morning Hobbes followed me around in the hallways and in my classes, never in full view, always just behind me and to my right. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of the end of his tail. All morning I thought

the English project

the biology project

Hobbes

the English project

the biology project

Hobbes.

They were like mantras in my head.

They were like canker sores in my mouth.

They were like little rocks in my shoes.

I thought, I should go home. No, I can't go home. I should run away.

Hobbes: Hard to win the Change the World Lottery if you're a high school dropout.

Me: Or if you talk to imaginary tigers.

My parents didn't know that I was about to become the first ninety-sixth percentile to flunk. My dad had told me over and over again to do well in school so I wouldn't have to grow up to be a ditchdigger, and now that I was about to resign myself to a lifetime of ditchdigging, I realized I had never seen a ditchdigger anywhere ever and probably they had machines for that.

Hobbes: There's always McDonald's. I wonder if you worked there for, say, twenty years, you could afford to move out of your parents' house. I wonder if a guy whose great ambition is to be promoted from french fries to hamburgers could get a girlfriend.

*   *   *

On a day like this, of course, I couldn't get lucky enough to avoid Maurice.

Maurice: What do I have for lunch today, Timbit?

Hobbes growled.

Maurice grabbed my lunch bag and reached his huge hand into it. He threw the apple at me.

Maurice: You can have that.

He looked at me like he hated me for letting him get away with this every time he forgot his lunch, which was a lot.

Hobbes: Can I eat him?

Maurice: You're looking skinny, man. Tell your mom you need a bigger lunch.

He unwrapped my sandwich.

Hobbes: Not much to him.

Me: Eat him anyway.

Maurice leaned into me, slamming me against my locker.

Maurice: What was that?

Hobbes might have jumped him if Susie hadn't suddenly been standing there.

Susie: Everything okay, Calvin?

She glared at Maurice.

Hobbes: Babe!

Me: Your boyfriend is a bonehead bully.

I could say that because I knew Maurice wouldn't do a thing to me if Susie was there.

Susie: He's not my boyfriend.

Maurice: Bully? Strong word. I thought we were friends.

Maurice threw his arm around Susie's shoulders, grinned at me, and took a big bite of my sandwich.

She slid out from under his arm.

Maurice: Hey, where's your sense of humor, McLean? This is the way men show our affection. Right, Timbit? We're buddies, right?

Susie looked from me to Maurice and back again.

Me: Sure, Maurice. Buddies. Since first grade.

Maurice: Susie, you want half my sandwich?

She took it absently, and they walked away enjoying my peanut butter and banana sandwich. Susie looked back at me as if she was hoping I'd say something to Maurice, but I didn't. I never did.

Hobbes: I can't believe you're still putting up with that.

Me: Depends on what you mean by putting up with.

Hobbes: No wonder you brought me back.

Me: I didn't. I want you gone.

But at that moment I sort of didn't, Bill. I sort of liked him beside me in a corner of my mind, growling at Maurice and calling Susie babe.

The kids in the hallway were looking at me funny, possibly because it appeared I was arguing with myself, so I headed to English to eat my apple and wait for class to start. I don't know why I went to class—my life was over as far as school went. The project didn't have to be handed in until the end of class, and maybe I thought one would float down out of space and land on my desk.

All during class I was suffering the pains of the Damned Who Don't Do Their Semester Projects, and I thought I could hear the tiny screams of my brain cells as they died of grammar-review boredom. They started to get so loud I almost couldn't hear the teacher. She was looking at me, bending into that look, like she was seeing how repulsive I was for the first time, and suddenly she was revealed as the globular-faced alien she really was, and I understood that she was slowly turning the brains of young humans into a kind of gray smoothie and one day she'd stick straws up our noses and sip our brains out.

Teacher: Calvin?

I hadn't heard her question, but I sensed that under those buggy eyes was a subtle mind.

Me (politely): Could you rephrase the question, please?

She paused. Was she onto me?

Teacher: Where is the prepositional phrase in this sentence? I'm not sure how I could phrase it better.

Me:
In this sentence
. That's the prepositional phrase.

She stared at me. I thought I could see her jaw bubbling, as if her mandibles would break free of her human disguise any moment.

Teacher: Clever. But I was talking about the sentence on the board, not the one I was saying.

I looked at the sentence on the board. By now about a million of my brain cells had gone to their deaths, victims of grammar, but I tried to summon the survivors. I said something, but only nonsense came out.

Susie was looking at me like I'd sprouted a cancerous growth.

Susie: Calvin—?

All the colors in the room were a little too bright, the edges too black. Couldn't she see the evil intent of the so-called teacher? Hobbes was growling, low and deadly.

I stood up, but I felt wobbly.

Me: Run, Susie. I'll cover for you …

Teacher: Calvin? Calvin, are you all right?

But I wasn't, Bill. Something was wrong and Hobbes was roaring in my ears and the teacher had morphed into her true alien self and I could see Maurice laughing, and that's all I remember until I came to my senses in the hospital.

 

Calvin's alter ego
Spaceman
Spiff wakes up and discovers that he has been abducted by aliens and is now restrained in a sterile laboratory in their ship. It is obviously an interrogation room, but Spiff is stoic and defiant. They have assumed the thin guise of humanoids, and this, Spiff decides, has been done to trick him into being docile as they perform their hideous experiments.

They poke needles into him and draw blood and ask him questions about the workings of his mind. At first Spiff refuses to give them what they want. He sees them conferring, deciding on the torture best suited to making him speak, and eventually they make him confess to everything.

Spiff despairs of his plan to save the world from a hostile takeover.

*   *   *

That's how it was, Bill. One minute I was this normal kid who uses his mind, and the next minute I was transmogrified into a kid whose mind uses
him
. I tried to figure it out, but how do you use your mind to figure something out if your mind is the problem?

I just kept thinking, me my name is Calvin, and why do I have a tiger purring in the corner of my room? I kept thinking this over and over until it occurred to me that it was possible something cosmic was happening here. Maybe Calvin was so real to so many people that on the day I was born, which was the day the last
Calvin and Hobbes
comic came out, maybe all that love and sadness people felt … I opened up my mouth to get my first breath, and I just sucked it in.

I wasn't sick. I was Calvin come to life!

Thinking about it like that, it was like all these pieces came together.

Of course, people probably wouldn't believe me. But hey, anytime something amazing happens in the universe we should pay attention, shouldn't we? When something is hard to believe, maybe it's the universe shaking things up a bit. Maybe it's saying, you haven't got me all figured out by a long shot. It's saying, I have a sense of humor, too.

*   *   *

I was lying there thinking about that, Bill, when my mom came in looking like she forgot to wear makeup and brush her hair. I knew she looked like crap because she was worried about me. Dad was right behind her, looking like he did at tax time, sort of tight and spooked.

Mom: Hi, Calvin.

Me: Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.

Dad: Son.

Mom: I love you, Calvin.

Mom wasn't the gushy type, so I knew things were pretty bad when she said she loved me so early in the conversation and it wasn't even my birthday or anything.

Mom sat down on my bed. Dad didn't say anything, just kind of smiled, ruffled my hair.

Me: Dad, don't be sad. You were a good dad. Sometimes the polls were pretty low, but you weren't about the popular vote—you were about building character.

He bent down and put his forehead on top of my head.

Dad: My boy.

Me: Maybe if you weren't so strict. Maybe if you'd gotten me all the Christmas presents I asked for every year.

Dad: That must have been it.

Me: And TV—if you'd let me watch more TV.