Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend (28 page)

‘We do?’ Klute says.

‘Did you find your friend?’ the fairy asks.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘Did you find your friend?’ the fairy asks again. ‘Summer told us that you lost your friend and you were trying to find him.’

‘I told you, too,’ Klute says, bobbling his head up and down. ‘I knew Budo before all of you.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I found him, but I haven’t saved him yet.’

‘Will you?’ the fairy asks. She stands up, but the top of her head still doesn’t reach my shoulders.

I want to tell the fairy that I’m trying to save Max, but instead I say, ‘Yes. I promised Summer I would.’

‘Then why are you here?’ she asks.

‘I need help,’ I say. ‘I need help to save Max.’

‘Our help?’ Klute asks expectantly. Excitedly. His head bobbles again.

‘No,’ I say. ‘But thank you. You can’t help me. I need someone else.’

CHAPTER 47

Here is what I know about Oswald:

1. He is so tall that his head almost touches the ceiling. He is the tallest imaginary friend I have ever seen.
   
2. Oswald looks like a human person. He looks as much like a human person as I do, except he is so tall. Ears and eyebrows and all.
   
3. Oswald is the only imaginary friend I have ever met who has a grown-up for a human friend.
   
4. Oswald is the only imaginary friend I have ever met who can move things in the real world. This is why I am only pretty sure that he is an imaginary friend.
   
5. Oswald is mean and scary.
   
6. Oswald hates me.
   
7. Oswald is the only person who can help me save Max.
   

I met Oswald about a month ago, so I am not sure if he is still in the hospital, but I think he probably is. His human person is on a special floor of the hospital for lunatics, which Max told me is another word for crazy people. That’s what I heard one of the doctors say. Or maybe it was a nurse. She said she hated working on the floor with all the lunatics.

But another nurse person said that it was the floor for head injuries, which I think are people who break their heads. So I’m not sure. Maybe it’s both. Maybe a broken head turns people into lunatics.

Oswald’s human person is also in a coma, which Max said means that he is sleeping for ever.

A coma person is like the opposite of me. I never sleep but a coma person only sleeps.

I was in the grown-up hospital when I first saw Oswald. I like to go there sometimes and listen to the doctors talk about the sick people. Every sick person is different, so every story is different. Sometimes the stories are hard to understand, but they are always exciting. Even better than watching Pauley scratch lottery tickets.

Sometimes I just like to walk around the hospital, because it is so big. Every time I go there, I find a new place to explore.

I was exploring the eighth floor that day, and Oswald was walking down the hall toward me. His head was down and he was looking at his feet. He was tall and wide with a flat face and a thick neck. His cheeks were red, like he had just come in from the cold. He was bald. Not a speck of hair on his big head.

But it was the way he walked that I noticed the most. He threw each leg forward like he wanted to kick the air in front of him. Like nothing in the whole wide world could stop him. He reminded me of a snowplow.

When he got close to me, he looked up and shouted, ‘Get out of my way!’

I turned around to see who was walking behind me, but the hallway was empty.

I turned back around and Oswald said, ‘Get out of my way right now!’

That was when I realized that he was an imaginary friend. He could see me. He was talking to me. So I stepped to the side and he walked right past me. Plowed right past me without even looking up. I turned and followed him. I had never seen an imaginary friend look so real before, and I wanted to talk to him.

‘I’m Budo,’ I said, trying to catch up.

‘Oswald,’ he said. He didn’t look back at me. He just said the word and kept plowing forward.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m Budo.’

He stopped and turned toward me. ‘I’m Oswald. Leave me alone.’

He turned and started walking again.

I was a little nervous, because Oswald was so big and so loud and seemed so mean. I had never met an imaginary friend who was mean before. But I had never seen any imaginary friend look so real before, either, so I couldn’t help myself. I followed him.

He walked down the hallway, turned, walked down another hallway, turned again, and then he stopped at a door. The door wasn’t closed all the way. It was open only a little crack. The doctors keep the doors open a crack a lot so they can sneak into rooms in the middle of the night to check on people without waking them up. The crack in the doorway was too small for Oswald to fit through, so I thought he was going to pass through the door like I would. But instead he reached out and moved the door. He pushed it open with his hand just enough to squeeze through.

When the door moved, I screamed. I couldn’t believe it. I had never seen an imaginary friend move anything in the real world before. Oswald must have heard me scream because he turned. He ran toward me. I was frozen. I didn’t know what to do. I still couldn’t believe what I had seen. As Oswald reached me, he threw his hands out in front of him and he hit me. No one had ever hit me before. I went tumbling to the floor.

It hurt.

I had never really known that I could hurt until then. I had never even known what
hurt
really meant until then.

‘I said to leave me alone!’ he shouted. Then he turned and went back to the room.

Even though Oswald had yelled at me and pushed me and hurt me, I had to know what was in that room. I couldn’t help it. I had just seen an imaginary friend touch a door and move it in the real world. I had to know more.

So I waited. I went to the end of the hallway and stood there, peeking around the corner, never taking my eyes off that door. I waited for ever and finally Oswald came out of the room through the same crack in the doorway that he had made for ever ago. He was walking in my direction, so I went down the hallway a bit and hid inside a closet. I stood in the dark and counted to one hundred and then I came back out.

Oswald was nowhere in sight.

So I went back to the room that Oswald had left and went inside. The lights were off but the light from the hallway gave the room a dull glow. There were two beds in the room. A man was lying in the bed closest to the door. The other bed was empty. No sheets or pillows. I looked around for toys or stuffed animals or little pairs of pants or shoes. Anything that would show me that a little boy or a little girl was staying in this room, too. But I found nothing.

Just this man.

He had a bushy, red beard and bushy eyebrows but his head was completely bald like Oswald’s. There were machines next to his bed and wires and tubes connected to his arms and chest. The machines beeped and hissed. Lights blinked and glowed on tiny television screens attached to the machines.

I looked back at the empty bed again, thinking that maybe I missed something. Maybe there were stuffed animals and little pants hanging in the closet and the little boy was in the bathroom. Or maybe the bald man in the bed was a dad, and Oswald was the imaginary friend of his son or daughter (but probably his son). Maybe the bald man’s son was sitting in the waiting room right now, waiting for his dad to wake up. Maybe the little boy had sent Oswald to check on his dad to make sure he was okay.

Then I thought that maybe the bald man wasn’t anyone’s dad. This could be any person. Maybe Oswald was just resting on the extra bed. Or maybe Oswald was looking for a quiet place to sit. Or maybe Oswald was just curious like me.

Then I thought that maybe Oswald was a human person who could see imaginary friends instead of an imaginary friend who could touch the human person world. I was trying to decide which was more likely when three people turned on the lights and came into the room. One was wearing a white coat and the other two were standing behind her, carrying clipboards. They walked over to the man in the bed and the woman in the white coat said, ‘This is John Hurly. Age fifty-two. Head trauma caused from a fall. Brought to us on 4 August. Non-responsive to all treatment. He has been in a coma since he arrived.’

‘What’s the plan for Mr Hurly?’ one of the clipboard people asked.

The people kept on talking, asking questions and answering questions, but I stopped listening.

That was when Oswald walked back into the room.

His eyes fell upon the white coat and clipboard people first. He looked annoyed but not angry. He rolled his eyes and snorted a little. I think he had seen them before.

But then he noticed me. I was standing between the two beds, my back against the machines, trying not to move. Hoping that if I didn’t move, he might not notice me. His mouth dropped open when he saw me and he froze for a moment. I think he was surprised to see me standing there. As surprised as I had been to see him move that door. He couldn’t believe it.

He took a deep breath, pointed his finger at me and said, ‘You!’

He didn’t run at me, but he was so tall and so quick that he moved from the doorway to the space between the two beds in three or four steps. Before I even had time to think.

I was trapped, and I was scared. I don’t think that one imaginary friend can kill another imaginary friend, but I didn’t think that imaginary friends could hurt each other either, and Oswald had already proven me wrong about that.

Oswald lunged at me, so I hopped onto and over the empty bed. Oswald followed, rolling over the bed and landing on the other side even before I had a chance to get my balance. He pushed me again. His hands were so big that his push lifted me right off the ground. I fell backwards into a small table in the corner of the room. The table didn’t move, of course, but I hit it just the same, and it hurt. The corner of the table dug into my back, and I cried out in pain. The idea of the corner, I mean, but it was just as sharp as the real corner.

I was about to lift myself off the table when Oswald grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me back over the empty bed. I bounced once on the mattress and fell off the edge and onto the floor between the two beds. I hit my head on the way down, on one of the machines, I think, so I was slow getting back up. I just lay there for a second, trying to calm down and think. I looked under the bald man’s bed and saw six feet on the other side. The white coat and the two clipboard people. They were still talking about the coma man. Asking questions and looking at something called a chart. They had no idea that a fight was happening right in front of them, except it wasn’t a fight, because I was not fighting. I was just getting hurt.

I lifted myself onto my hands and knees and was about to stand back up when Oswald’s knee came crashing down on my back. That was the worst pain I have ever felt. It was like something exploded in my back. I cried out and dropped back down to the floor. My face smacked the tile and my nose and forehead blew up in the same kind of pain that was still exploding in my back. I thought I was going to cry, and back then I had never cried before. I didn’t even know that I could cry back then, but I thought I might. It hurt so much.

Little kids who get hurt on the playground call for their mommies a lot. I wanted to call for my mommy but I have no mommy, and not having a mommy hurt the most at that moment. Not having anyone who could help me. The three doctor people were still in the room, still talking, still staring at their clipboards, but they had no idea that someone else in the room was hurt.

I wondered if Oswald could kill me or coma me like the bald man.

Oswald kicked me in the legs. He kicked me in the arms.

I wanted to cry out for my mommy again. Instead I thought about Dee. I called out her name instead.

I think I would have started crying then, but there was no time to cry because Oswald was picking me up and throwing me against the wall on the other side of the room. I bounced off the wall and landed on my still-exploding back. Then he lifted me again and threw me in the direction of the doorway. My head hit the wall next to the door and I saw stars. I couldn’t tell up from down. Then he lifted me one more time and threw me out of the room and into the hallway. I rolled a couple times and then I started to crawl away as fast as I could. I had no idea which direction I was crawling. All I knew was that I was crawling away and that was good. And the whole time that I crawled I was just waiting for Oswald to pick me up again.

But he didn’t.

I crawled for about thirty seconds then I stopped and looked behind me. Oswald was standing in the middle of the hallway, staring at me.

‘Never again,’ he said.

I waited for him to say something else.

When he didn’t, I said, ‘Okay.’

‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘Never again.’

CHAPTER 48

‘Oswald is my only chance,’ I say. ‘He is Max’s only chance. He has to help.’

‘He won’t,’ Klute says.

The robot shakes his head in agreement.

‘He has to,’ I say.

I take the elevator to the tenth floor and then I walk down two flights of stairs to the eighth floor.

The lunatic floor.

I walk to the room where I last saw Oswald. The room with Oswald’s bald lunatic friend. I walk slowly, keeping my eyes peeled as I turn corners and pass by open doors. I do not want to bump into Oswald by mistake. I still have no idea what I will say to him.

The door to the room is open. I walk toward it. I try not to think about the last time I saw Oswald. The sound of his voice. The way he threw me around the room. The way his eyes doubled in size as he said, ‘Never again.’

I agreed with him that day. I promised to stay away for ever. But here I am again.

I step into the doorway, bracing myself for attack.

It comes quickly.

I take in many details before Oswald reaches me.

The curtains are open and the room is bright with sunlight. It surprises me. My memories of this room are dark and scary. In my memory, the room has no corners. Just patches of darkness. The room looks too happy and sunny now for anything bad to ever happen, and yet Oswald is already a few feet away from me and shouting, ‘No! No! No!’