Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend (22 page)

I know that this is ridiculous, too.

I watch as she opens the refrigerator and removes some chicken. She places a pan on the stove and begins cooking the chicken. While it sizzles, she starts making rice.

Chicken and rice. Max’s favorite meal. Max does not eat many things, but he always eats chicken and white rice. He likes foods that don’t have bright colors.

I want to go into the basement again and find the closet or staircase that I must have missed. Maybe Mrs Patterson has a basement under the basement. Maybe there is a door in the floor that I did not see because I don’t usually look for doors in the floor.

But I’m afraid to leave Mrs Patterson again. I will wait. She is making dinner for Max. I know it. I will follow her when she is done.

Mrs Patterson does not make a mess when she cooks. When she is finished with the cutting board, she rinses it and puts it in the dishwasher. When she is done pouring the rice into a glass bowl, she puts the box away in the pantry. Max’s mom would like Mrs Patterson if she had not stolen Max. They both like things neat. Max’s mom says, ‘Clean as you go.’ But Max’s dad still piles dishes in the sink and leaves them there overnight.

Mrs Patterson slides a red tray on the counter. She wipes it with a paper towel even though it looks clean. She puts two paper plates and two plastic forks and two paper cups on the tray.

Max likes to eat from paper plates and paper cups because he knows that they are clean. Max does not trust people or dishwashers to get his plates and forks and cups clean. Max’s mom and dad don’t always let Max eat from paper and plastic stuff, but sometimes they do, especially if Max’s mom is trying to get Max to try something new.

But how does Mrs Patterson know that Max likes paper plates and plastic forks? She has never come over for dinner. Then I realize that Mrs Patterson has been with Max for three days. She has learned that Max does not trust dishwashers.

Mrs Patterson puts rice and chicken on both plates and then pours apple juice into both cups.

Max’s favorite drink is apple juice.

She lifts the tray and heads down the stairs to the basement. I follow.

At the bottom of the stairs, Mrs Patterson turns left into the part of the basement with the carpeting and the green table with the net and the television.

There is a door under the carpet somewhere. I know it. Max is probably right underneath me. In a basement’s basement.

Then Mrs Patterson walks across the room, past the green table and to a wall with a painting of flowers hanging from it and a shelf stretching across the top. I wait for her to bend over to pull back the carpet but instead she reaches up and pushes a little piece of the shelf into the wall. It clicks and then a part of the wall moves. Mrs Patterson pushes it until there is space enough for her to enter. She does and then a second later the wall slides back and the shelf clicks again. It has popped back into place. The parts of the wall where the secret door and the wall are are invisible. There is wallpaper on the wall and the place where a tiny space between the wall and the door might be is hidden by the design in the wallpaper. It is camouflaged. Even though I know the door is there, I cannot see the outline of the door anymore. It is a super-secret door.

Max is behind that super-secret door.

I walk across the room. I am finally going to see Max. I step into the door but I do not pass through. I bump into the door and fall backwards onto the floor. The door in the wall is impossible to see so I must have missed it. I move to the left and try again, walking slower this time in case I miss it again. I bump into the wall again. I try this three more times but bump into the wall each time.

There is a door here, but it is like the elevator doors at the hospital. When Max imagined me, he did not imagine super-secret-doors-that-look-like-walls were also doors, so I cannot pass through.

Max is on the other side of this door that is not a door. The only way I can get in is if Mrs Patterson opens the door again.

I must wait.

I sit on the green table and stare at the wall. I cannot step away and cannot daydream. When Mrs Patterson opens that door, there will be just enough space for her to exit, which means I have to squeeze into that space as soon as she is clear of it. If I am too slow, I will not be able to get through.

I wait.

I stare at the painting of the flowers, waiting for it to move. I try to only think about the door that is a wall but I start to wonder what it is like behind the wall. There must be a room behind the wall, and it must be big enough for Mrs Patterson and Max to eat dinner together. But it is underground and has no windows and is probably locked so Max must feel trapped, too. And that means that he might be stuck. Or maybe he was stuck but now he is unstuck.

I want to see Max but I am afraid to see what he looks like after three days behind a wall. Even if he is unstuck, he cannot be good.

I wait.

The wall finally moves. I jump off the edge of the table and step over to it. The wall opens and Mrs Patterson steps through the opening. She looks back after passing through, giving me plenty of time to pass through the opening.

I think she is looking back to make sure that Max is not trying to follow her, but I am wrong. I take one look at the room behind the wall and know that I am wrong.

Max is not trying to escape.

I cannot believe my eyes.

CHAPTER 36

The light is blinding. Maybe it is just because I have been standing in the dimly lit basement for a long time, waiting for the wall to move, but the room is brighter than any underground room I could have ever imagined.

As my eyes adjust to the light, I can see that the room is painted in yellow and green and red and blue. It reminds me of Mr Michaud’s kindergarten classroom, with his giant caterpillar crawling over the white board and his students’ finger-painting spread all over the walls. It reminds me of a box of crayons. The boxes with just eight or ten different colors inside. The room is an explosion of color.

There is a bed in the shape of a race car. It is painted red and gold. It even has a steering wheel sticking out of the headboard. There is a dresser with every drawer painted a different color. There is a door on the far side of the room with the word
Boys
written on it in red, squiggly letters. There is a desk with a tall pile of drawing paper and an even taller pile of graph paper, which is Max’s favorite kind of paper. Good for drawing maps and planning battles. There are model airplanes hanging from the ceiling on wires. There are toy soldiers and tanks and army trucks and airplanes everywhere. Snipers on a shelf over the bed. A line of tanks on top of a beanbag chair. Columns of soldiers marching across the center of the room. An airfield on the bed with anti-aircraft guns on the pillows surrounding it. A battle has taken place recently. I can tell by the way the soldiers and tanks are spaced out.

Green has defeated gray, I think. It doesn’t look like gray stood a chance.

The room is bigger than I thought. Much bigger. There are train tracks running all the way around the room, disappearing under the bed and popping out on the other side. I do not see a train. Probably parked underneath the bed.

There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of
Star Wars
figures standing on the dresser, and
Star Wars
spaceships on one side of the room, organized like Max would like them organized. The X-wing fighters need a runway to take off, so there are no other spaceships parked in front of them. The
Millennium Falcon
can fly straight up, so it is surrounded by TIE fighters and twin-pod cloud cars. There are stormtroopers and Cloud City troopers standing next to each spaceship, waiting for Max’s orders to launch.

I’ve never seen so much
Star Wars
stuff in one place except at the toy store. Neither has Max. He probably has the biggest collection of
Star Wars
stuff of anyone in his class, but this collection makes his collection at home look puny.

There are enough stormtroopers here to make a small army.

There are
six X-wing fighters
. Max has two, and even that is a lot.

There is a television hanging on the wall across from the bed and a pile of DVDs underneath it. A stack almost as tall as Max. It is so tall that it looks like it could fall at any second. There are three green helicopters parked on top of it with snipers guarding the perimeter. The DVD that the snipers are standing on is
Starship Troopers
. Max loves that movie.

There is a carpet on the floor. It is dark blue with stars and planets and moons everywhere. It is new and thick and I wish I could sink my toes into it like Max can. But my feet only touch the idea of the carpet, so they do not sink in. They stay on top.

There is a gumball machine by the bed.

The blue backpack from Mrs Patterson’s car is sitting on the bed. It is open. I can see Lego peeking out from underneath the flap.

Lego to keep Max
engaged
while he was in the back seat of the car. To distract him until she got him home.

And in the center of the room, there’s more Lego. Thousands of Lego in sizes and shapes that even I have never even seen before. There’s large Lego and small Lego and mechanical Lego, the kind that needs batteries and the kind that Max loves the most. There is more here than Max could ever dream of. It has been sorted into piles according to size and shape, and I know right away that Max has made those piles. They look like the kind of piles that Max makes. Lined up like the soldiers on the floor, all the same distance from one another.

And sitting in front of those piles like a Lego general, with his back to me, is Max.

I found him.

CHAPTER 37

I can’t believe it. I am standing in the same room as Max. I wait one more second before saying his name, just staring at him like his mom does at night when he is asleep after she has sneaked her kisses. I never understood why she just stares at him like that, but now I do.

I never want to stop staring.

I missed Max but I did not know how much I missed Max until now. Now I know what it feels like to miss someone so much that you can’t describe it. I would have to invent new words to describe it.

Finally, I say his name. ‘Max,’ I say. ‘I’m here.’

Max screams louder than I have ever heard him scream before.

His scream doesn’t last long. Just a couple seconds. But I am sure that Mrs Patterson will come running in any second to see what is wrong but then I realize that I could not hear Mrs Patterson and Max while I was waiting on the other side of the wall. And Max couldn’t hear me when I was screaming his name earlier.

I think this room is soundproof.

There are lots of soundproof rooms on television. Mostly in movies but sometimes in TV shows, too.

Max does not turn around to look at me as he screams, and this is a bad sign. It means he might get stuck. It means that he is getting stuck right now. I walk over to Max but I do not touch him. As his scream starts to fade, I say, ‘Max, I’m here.’ I say exactly the same thing that I said before he started to scream. I speak softly and quickly. I move as I speak so that I am standing in front of him, with his army of Lego piles between us. I can see that he has been building a submarine, and it looks like the propeller might actually move on its own when it is finished.

‘Max,’ I say again. ‘I’m here.’

Max is no longer screaming. He is breathing hard now. Max’s mom calls this hyperventilating. It sounds like he has just finished running a thousand-mile race and now he is trying to catch his breath. Sometimes this will end with Max getting stuck.

I say again, ‘Max. I’m here. It’s okay. I’m here. It’s okay.’

Touching Max would be the worst thing that I could do. Yelling at Max would be bad, too. It would be like pushing him into his inside stuck world. Instead, I speak softly and quickly again and again. I reach for him with my voice. It is like throwing him a rope and begging him to grab on. Sometimes it works and I can pull him out before he ends up stuck, and sometimes it doesn’t. But it is the only thing I know that helps.

And it works.

I can tell.

His breathing is slowing down, but his breathing would slow down even if he was getting stuck. I can tell by his eyes that he is not stuck. They see me. His eyes see my eyes. He is not disappearing. He is reappearing. Coming back to the world. His eyes smile at me and I know that he is back.

‘Budo,’ he says. He sounds happy, and this makes me happy.

‘Max,’ I say back.

I suddenly feel like Max’s mom. I want to leap over the piles of Lego and grab Max by the neck and squeeze him tight. But I cannot. Max is probably happy that the Lego piles are separating us. They let his eyes smile at me without him having to worry that I might touch him.

Max knows that I would normally never touch him, but he might think this is different. We have never been separated for three days.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask, sitting down on the floor in front of Max, keeping the Lego between us.

‘Yes,’ Max says. ‘You scared me. I didn’t think I would see you anymore. I am building a submarine.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I saw.’

I don’t know what to say next. I try to think about the best thing to say. The thing that will save Max. I feel like I should be sneaky and try to find out how tricked he is, but then I think that I should just find out what is going on no matter what. This is serious business. Not lies about lost homework or throwing chicken nuggets in the cafeteria.

This is even more serious than Tommy Swinden.

I decide not to be sneaky. I decide not to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight. This is something Mrs Gosk says when she thinks that a student is lying. She says, ‘You are dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight, Mr Woods. Watch yourself.’

I am dancing with a real devil in the pale moonlight now and I have no time to waste.