Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend (10 page)

‘Sorry, no masks allowed in the store. It’s a—’

It sounds like Sally wants to say something else but he stops. Something is wrong.

‘I will blow your fucking head off unless you open your register and give me the money now.’

This is the voice of the devil man. He is holding a gun. It’s black and silver and looks heavy. He is pointing it at Sally’s face. I know that the bullet can’t hurt me, but I duck anyway. I’m afraid. The devil man’s voice sounds so loud even though it is not.

As I duck, Dee rises up next to me, tubes of toothpaste in her hand. We pass each other at the halfway point, and as our faces flash by one another, I suddenly want to tell her to stop. To duck.

‘What’s going on?’ she asks, her head rising above the shelves.

Then I hear a crash. A bang that is so loud that it would hurt my ears if they could hurt. It makes me scream. Not a long scream but a quick scream. A surprised scream. Even before I finish my scream, Dee falls. It’s like she is pushed backwards, and she falls into a shelf of potato chips. She falls backwards and turns at the same time, and I see the blood on her shirt as she turns. This is not like television. The blood is on her shirt but tiny drops are on her face and arms, too. Red is everywhere. And Dee doesn’t say anything. She just falls into the potato chips, face first, little tubes of toothpaste landing around her.

‘Fuck!’

This is the man. The devil man. Not Sally. It’s not an angry
fuck.
It is a scared
fuck
.

‘Fuck! Fuck!’

He screams these last two
fucks
. He’s still afraid, but he also sounds like he can’t believe what he is seeing. Like he was suddenly popped into a television show as the bad guy without anyone telling him that this would happen.

‘Get up!’

He shouts these words, too. He is back to angry now. I think he’s talking to me, so I do. I stand up. But he’s not talking to me. Then I think he’s talking to Dee, who has slid off the potato chip shelf and onto the floor. But he’s not talking to Dee, either. He is shouting at the counter, trying to peek over it, but the counter is tall. It is on a stage, and there are three stairs that you have to climb to get behind the counter. Sally is on the other side of the counter, I think. On the floor. But the devil man can’t see him from where he’s standing.

‘Fuck!’

He shouts again and makes a growling sound, and then he turns and runs. He opens the door that he walked through a minute ago before Dee was bleeding and he runs into the dark.

I stand for a minute, watching him run away. Then I hear Dee. She’s on the floor next to my feet, wheezing, like Corey Topper when he’s having an asthma attack. Her eyes are open. It looks like she is looking straight into my eyes, but she can’t see my eyes. But part of me swears that she can. I think she is looking right at me. She looks so afraid. This is not like television. There is so much blood.

‘Dee has been shot,’ I say, and somehow this makes me feel a tiny bit better, because being shot is a lot better than being dead. ‘Sally!’ I yell.

But Sally can’t hear me.

I run over to the counter, climb the three steps, and look behind the counter. Sally is lying on the floor. He is shaking. Shaking even more than Max shakes when Max is stuck. At first I think Sally has been shot, too, but then I remember that I heard only one bang.

Sally is not shot. Sally is stuck. He needs to call the hospital or Dee will die. But Sally is stuck.

‘Get up!’ I shout to Sally. ‘Hurry! Get up!’

Sally is stuck. He is as stuck as Max has ever been. He’s curled up into a ball and he is shaking. Dee is going to die because Sally won’t move and I can only watch. One of my most favorite people in the whole wide world is bleeding and I can’t do a thing.

The door closest to me opens. The devil man is back. I look, expecting to see his gun and his pointy horns, but it is not the devil man. It’s Dan. Big Dan. Another regular. Not as nice as Pauley but more normal. Not so sad. Dan walks in and, for a moment, I think he is looking at me, because he is. He’s looking straight through me, and he looks confused because he sees no one.

‘Dan!’ I shout. ‘Dee’s shot!’

‘Hello?’ Big Dan looks around. ‘Guys?’

Dee makes a sound. Dan can’t see her, because she is on the floor behind the shelves, and for a second I don’t think Dan has heard her. Then he looks in her direction and says, ‘Hello?’

Dee makes another sound, and suddenly I am happy. So happy. Dee is still alive. I shouted that Dee has been shot because it was better than saying that Dee is dead, and now I know that she is not dead. She is making a wheezing sound, and, even better, she’s trying to answer Big Dan. That means she is awake.

Dan walks over to the aisle where Dee has fallen. When he sees Dee on the floor, he says, ‘Oh my God! Dee!’

Big Dan moves fast. He opens his cellphone and presses numbers as he moves into the aisle and kneels down beside Dee. He acts like Big Dan, a guy who stops at the gas station every night for a Doctor Pepper to keep him awake on his ride home to a place called New Haven. Big Dan, who doesn’t linger in the gas station a moment longer than necessary, but who is friendly just the same.

I love Pauley and his scratch tickets and the way he tries to drink his coffee as slowly as possible, but, in an emergency I love Big Dan.

CHAPTER 15

The ambulance people took Dee and Sally away in two separate vans. Dee was taken first, but Sally left right after her, even though he wasn’t hurt at all. I tried to tell the ambulance people that Sally was just stuck, and no one needs to ride in the ambulance van just because they are stuck, but they couldn’t hear me, of course.

An ambulance man with bushy hair used an old-fashioned cellphone with a big antenna to tell someone at the hospital that Dee is in a critical condition. This means that Dee might die, especially if she got a good look at the devil man who shot her. It seems like the more you know about the person who shot you, the more likely you are to die.

The police closed the gas station even though it’s never supposed to close, so after Dee and Sally were taken away, I went home.

Max is still stuck. His dad has to work at five tomorrow morning so he went to bed. Max’s mom is still awake, sitting in a chair next to Max’s bed.

My chair.

But I don’t mind. I want to sit with Max’s mom, too. I want her to stay in Max’s room all night. I just saw my friend get shot with a real gun and a real bullet and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I wish that Max’s mom would stroke my hair back and kiss me on the forehead, too.

Max wakes up on Saturday morning. He is unstuck.

‘Why are you sitting there?’

I think he’s talking to me. I’m sitting on the end of his bed. I’ve been sitting here all night, thinking about Dee and Sally and the devil man, and staring at Max’s mom, because it makes me feel better.

But Max isn’t talking to me. He’s talking to his mother. She fell asleep in my chair, and his voice wakes her. She jumps up like someone pinched her.

‘What?’ she says, looking around like she doesn’t know where she is.

‘Why are you sitting there?’ Max asks again.

‘Max, you’re awake.’

And then the eggs and the rocks and the broken window and Max getting stuck seem to fall out of the sky and fill her up like air in a balloon. She pops up out of the chair, all inflated and awake, and she quickly answers Max.

‘I’m sitting here because you were upset last night, and I didn’t want you to be alone.’

Max looks at the window beside his bed. It’s covered with clear plastic. Max’s dad tacked it up last night.

‘I was stuck?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ his mother says. ‘For a little while.’

Max knows that he was stuck, but he always asks if he was stuck anyway. I don’t know why. It’s not like he has amnesia, which is a disease that turns a person’s brain off so it can’t record what the person sees or does. It happens a lot on television, and I think it’s real, even though I’ve never met anyone with amnesia before. It’s like Max is double-checking, to make sure everything is okay. Max is a big fan of double-checking.

‘Who broke my window?’ he asks, still looking at the plastic.

‘We don’t know,’ his mom says. ‘We think it was an accident.’

‘How could someone break my window by accident?’

‘Kids do crazy things on Halloween,’ his mom says. ‘They threw eggs at our house last night. And rocks, too.’

‘Why?’

From the tone of his voice, I can tell that Max is upset about this. I’m sure that his mom can tell, too.

‘It’s called a prank,’ she says. ‘Some kids think that it’s okay to pull pranks on Halloween.’

‘Pull?’

‘Make pranks. Do pranks,’ she says. ‘People use the expression
pull pranks
sometimes.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you want breakfast?’ his mom asks. Max’s mom is always worried about Max eating enough, even though he eats plenty of food.

‘What time is it?’ Max asks.

Max’s mom looks at her watch. It’s the kind with hands on it, so I can’t read it well.

‘It’s eight-thirty,’ she says, looking relieved.

Max can eat breakfast only before nine. After nine, he must wait until twelve to eat lunch.

This is Max’s rule. Not his mom’s.

‘Okay,’ Max says. ‘I’ll eat.’

His mom leaves to make the pancakes and let Max get dressed. He does not eat breakfast in pajamas. This is also Max’s rule.

‘Did Mom kiss me last night?’ Max asks.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But only on the forehead.’

I want to tell Max that the devil man shot my friend last night, but I can’t. I don’t want Max to know that I go to the gas station and the diner and the police station and the hospital. I don’t think he would like it if he knew I went to those places. He likes to think that I am sitting beside him all night or at least somewhere in the house in case he needs me. I think it would make him mad to know that I have other friends in the world.

‘Was it a long kiss?’ Max asks.

For the first time ever, this question makes me mad. I know how important it is for Max to know that his mom’s kiss was not too long, but the length of a mom’s kiss is not that important. It’s a tiny thing compared to guns and blood and friends in ambulance vans, and he shouldn’t have to ask me every day. Doesn’t he know that a mom’s long kiss is not a bad thing?

‘Nope,’ I say, like I always do. ‘It was super-short.’

But when I say it this time, I do not smile. I frown. I say it through clenched teeth.

Max doesn’t notice. He never notices these things. He’s still looking at the plastic that is covering the window.

‘Do you know who broke my window?’ Max asks.

I do, but I don’t know if I should tell Max. I don’t know if this is like his mom’s long kisses and I should lie. I’m still mad at him for worrying about the long kisses, so even though I want to do the right thing for him, I don’t want to do the right thing, too. I don’t want to hurt Max, but I’m not in the helping mood either.

I take too long to answer.

‘Do you know who broke my window?’ Max asks again.

He hates it when he has to ask me questions twice, so now he is angry, too.

I decide to answer honestly, not because I think it’s the best thing for Max to hear, but because I am mad and don’t want to think about what is right.

‘It was Tommy Swinden,’ I say. ‘I ran outside after I heard your window break and I saw him running away.’

‘It was Tommy Swinden,’ Max says.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It was Tommy Swinden.’

‘Tommy Swinden broke my window and threw eggs at our house.’

Max says this to his mother while he is eating his pancakes. I can’t believe that he told her. I didn’t expect him to say it. How is he going to explain it? Suddenly I’m not angry at Max anymore. I’m worried. Worried about what he will say. Now I’m angry at myself for being so stupid.

‘Who is Tommy Swinden?’ Max’s mom asks.

‘He’s a boy who is mean to me at school. He wants to kill me.’

‘How do you know that?’ His mom doesn’t sound like she believes him.

‘He told me.’

‘What did he say exactly?’ She’s still washing the frying pan, so I know that she still does not believe him.

‘He said he was going to bowl me,’ Max says.

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s bad.’ Max is staring at his pancakes because when Max eats, he stares at his food.

‘How do you know it’s bad?’ his mom asks.

‘Because everything Tommy Swinden says to me is bad.’

His mom doesn’t say anything for a minute, and I think she is going to forget the whole thing. Then she speaks again.

‘How do you know that Tommy threw the eggs and the rocks?’

‘Budo saw him.’

‘Budo saw him.’

This time it is Max’s mom who is saying something that didn’t sound like a question but was still a question.

‘Yes,’ Max says. ‘Budo saw him.’

‘Okay.’

I feel like the elephant in the room. This is an expression that means there is something two people know that is as big as an elephant but no one wants to talk about it. Max’s mom uses this expression a lot when she is talking to Max’s dad about Max and his
diagnosis.

It took me for ever to figure out what the elephant in the room thing meant.

Max and his mom eat for a little while, and then his mom asks, ‘Is Tommy Swinden in your class?’

‘No, he’s in Mrs Parenti’s class.’

‘Third grade?’

‘No,’ Max says. He sounds annoyed. He thinks that his mom should know that Mrs Parenti doesn’t teach third grade, because in Max’s world, knowing who teaches what grade is a big deal. ‘Mrs Parenti is a fifth-grade teacher.’

‘Oh.’

Max’s mom doesn’t say anything else about Tommy Swinden or the eggs or the rocks or getting bowled or me, which is bad. It means she is planning on doing something.

I can feel it.

CHAPTER 16

Dee and Sally are not back on Saturday or Sunday night. A man who Dorothy calls Mr Eisner is working instead. I’ve never seen Mr Eisner before but Dorothy seems nervous around him. They barely speak to each other.