Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend (5 page)

I was scared watching that pink girl disappear. Fifteen minutes is nothing.

She never even heard the whole story.

But Graham has been around for so long. She has been my friend for two years. I can’t believe that she is dying.

I want to be mad at her human friend, Meghan, because it is Meghan’s fault that Graham is dying. She doesn’t believe in Graham anymore.

When Graham dies, Meghan’s mother will ask Meghan where her friend has gone, and Meghan will say something like, ‘Graham doesn’t live here anymore,’ or ‘I don’t know where Graham is,’ or ‘Graham went on vacation.’ And her mother will turn and smile, thinking her little girl is growing up.

But no. That is not what’s going to happen. Graham is not going on any vacation. Graham is not moving to another city or country.

Graham is going to die.

You stopped believing, little girl, and now my friend is going to die. Just because you are the only human person who can see and hear Graham doesn’t mean that she is not real. I can see and hear Graham, too. She is my friend.

Sometimes when you and Max are in class, we meet at the swing set to talk.

We used to play tag when you and Max had recess together.

Graham called me a hero once when I stopped Max from running out in front of a moving car, and even though I don’t think I was a hero, it still felt good.

And now she is going to die because you don’t believe in her anymore.

We are sitting in the cafeteria. Max is in music class and Meghan is eating lunch. I can tell by the way that Meghan is talking to the other girls at her lunch table that she doesn’t need Graham like she used to. She is smiling. She is laughing. She is following the conversation with her eyes. She is even talking every now and then. She is part of a group now.

She’s a whole new Meghan.

‘How are you feeling today?’ I ask, hoping this might get Graham to mention the disappearing first.

She does.

‘I know what’s happening if that’s what you mean,’ she says. She sounds so sad, but it also sounds like she has given up, too. Like she has already surrendered.

‘Oh,’ I say, and then I don’t know what to say for a moment. I stare at her, and then I pretend to look around, over my shoulder and to my left, acting as if a sound in the corner of the cafeteria has caught my attention. I can’t look at her because it means I’m looking through her. Finally, I turn back to her. I force myself to look. ‘What does it feel like?’

‘It doesn’t feel like anything.’

She holds up her hands to show me, and I can see her face, no smile this time, on the other side of her hands. It is as if her hands were made of wax paper.

‘I don’t get it,’ I say. ‘What happened? When you talk to Meghan, can she still hear you?’

‘Oh yeah. And she can still see me, too. We just spent the first ten minutes of recess playing hopscotch together.’

‘Then why doesn’t she believe in you anymore?’

Graham sighs. Then she sighs again.

‘It’s not that she doesn’t believe in me. She doesn’t
need
me anymore. She used to be afraid to talk to kids. When she was little, she had a stutter. It’s gone now, but when she stuttered, she missed out on a lot of time talking with kids and making friends. But she’s catching up now. A couple weeks ago she had a play date with Annie. It was her first play date ever. Now she and Annie are talking all the time. They even got in trouble in class yesterday for talking when they were supposed to be reading. And when the girls saw us playing hopscotch today, they came over and played, too.’

‘What’s a stutter?’ I ask. I wonder if Max has a stutter, too.

‘It’s when words don’t come out right. Meghan used to get stuck on words. She knew what the word was but couldn’t make her mouth say it. A lot of times I would say the word really slowly for her, and then she could say it. But now she only stutters when she’s afraid or nervous or surprised.’

‘She was cured?’

‘Sort of,’ Graham says. ‘She worked with Mrs Riner during the week and with Mr Davidoff after school. It took a long time but now she can talk just fine, so she’s making friends.’

Max works with Mrs Riner, too. I wonder if he can be cured. I wonder if Mr Davidoff is the therapist who Max’s mom wants him to see.

‘So what are you going to do?’ I ask. ‘I don’t want you to disappear. How can you stop it?’

I’m worried about Graham, but I feel like I need to ask these questions for me, too, in case she disappears right in front of me. I need to ask them while I still can.

Graham opens her mouth to talk and then she stops. She closes her eyes. She shakes her head and rubs her hands over her eyes. I wonder if she is stuttering now. But then she starts to cry. I try to remember if I have ever seen an imaginary friend cry.

I don’t think so.

I watch as she dips her chin into her chest and sobs. Tears stream down her cheeks, and when one finally drips off her chin, I watch as it falls, splashes on the table and then vanishes completely.

Like Graham will do before long.

I feel like I’m back in the boys’ bathroom. Tommy Swinden is crawling under the stall. Max is standing on top of the toilet, his pants around his legs. And I am standing in the corner, not knowing what to say or what to do.

I wait until Graham’s sobs turn to sniffles. I wait until the tears stop running. I wait until she can open her eyes again.

Then I speak. ‘I have an idea.’ I wait for Graham to say something.

She only sniffles.

‘I have a plan,’ I say again. ‘A plan to save you.’

‘Yeah?’ Graham says, but I can tell that she doesn’t believe me.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘All you need to do is be Meghan’s friend.’

But that’s not right and I know it as soon as I say it.

‘No, wait,’ I say. ‘That’s not right.’

I pause. The idea is there. I just have to find a way to say it right.

Say it without stuttering
, I think.

Then I know.

‘I have a plan,’ I say again. ‘We need to make sure that Meghan still needs you. We have to find a way to make it impossible for Meghan to live without you.’

CHAPTER 9

I can’t believe we didn’t think of this sooner. Meghan’s teacher, Mrs Pandolfe, gives her class a spelling test every Friday, and Meghan does not do well on these tests.

I don’t think that Max has ever spelled a word wrong, but Graham says that Meghan spells about six words wrong each week, which is about half of the words on her test, even though Graham didn’t know that half of twelve is six. I thought it was kind of weird that she didn’t know this, because it seems so obvious. I mean, if six plus six equals twelve, how could you not know that half of twelve is six?

Then again, I probably didn’t know what half of twelve was when Max and me were in first grade together.

But I think I did.

Graham and I spent Meghan’s lunch period making a list of all of Meghan’s problems. I told Graham that we needed to find a problem that she could fix, and then, after she fixed it, Meghan would see how much she still needed Graham.

Graham thought it was a great idea. ‘That might work,’ she said, her eyes wide and bright for the first time since she started disappearing. ‘That’s a great idea. It might really work.’

But I think that Graham would think that any idea is a great idea, because she is fading away more and more by the minute.

I tried to make her laugh by telling her that her ears had already disappeared, since she never had any to begin with, but she didn’t even smile at my joke. She’s scared. She says she feels less real today, like she’s going to fall into the sky and just float away. I started to tell her about satellites in space and how their orbits can decay and they can float away, too, to see if that is how she feels, but then I stopped.

I don’t think she wants to talk about it.

Max taught me about decaying orbits last year. He read about it in a book. I am lucky because Max is smart and reads a lot, so I get to learn a lot, too. That’s why I know that half of twelve is six and that satellites can fall out of orbit and float away for ever.

I am so glad that Max is my friend and not Meghan. Meghan can’t even spell the word
boat
.

So we made a list of Meghan’s problems. Of course, we couldn’t write the list down on paper, since neither one of us can pick up a pencil, but it was short enough that we were able to memorize it.

Stutters when she’s upset.

Afraid of the dark.

Bad speller.

Can’t tie her shoelaces.

Throws a temper tantrum every night before bed.

Can’t zip up her coat.

Can’t kick a ball past the pitcher.

It is not a good list, because Graham can’t help her with a lot of these problems. If Graham could tie shoelaces or zip a zipper, she might be able to tie Meghan’s sneakers or zip her coat, but she can’t. I know only one imaginary friend who could touch and move things in the human world, and he wouldn’t help us even if I begged him.

And I’m too afraid of him to go see him, anyway.

I didn’t know what a temper tantrum was, so Graham had to explain it to me. It sounds a lot like when Max gets stuck. Meghan doesn’t like to go to bed, so when her mom says that it’s time to brush her teeth, she starts screaming and stamping her feet, and sometimes her daddy has to pick her up and carry her into the bathroom.

‘This happens every night?’ I ask Graham.

‘Yeah. She turns red and gets all sweaty and eventually she starts crying. She cries herself to sleep a lot of nights. I feel so bad for her. Nothing that her parents or I say can make it any better.’

‘Wow,’ I say, because I can’t imagine how annoying it must be to listen to someone have a temper tantrum every night.

Max doesn’t get stuck too often, but when he does, it’s like he is throwing a temper tantrum on the inside. He gets quiet and his hands make fists and he shakes a little, but he doesn’t turn red or sweat or scream. I think he is doing all of those things on the inside, but on the outside he just gets stuck. And sometimes it takes a long time before he gets unstuck.

But at least it’s not loud or annoying when it happens. And it never happens just because it’s time to go to bed. Max likes to go to bed as long as it’s the right time.

Eight-thirty.

If it’s too early or too late, he gets upset.

I couldn’t think of a way that Graham could help Meghan with her temper tantrums, so that didn’t leave much else on the list. And that’s what brought us back to the spelling tests.

‘How can I help her with spelling?’ Graham asked.

‘I’ll show you.’

Mrs Pandolfe keeps the weekly spelling words hanging on chart paper in front of the room, just like Mrs Gosk does in her classroom. She takes the list down on Thursday afternoon, so Graham and I spend the last hour of the day standing in front of the chart paper, memorizing each word. I’ve never paid a lot of attention to Max’s spelling tests, and I don’t really listen to Mrs Gosk’s spelling lessons, so it was harder than I thought it would be. A lot harder.

But after an hour, Graham knew how to spell the words perfectly.

Tomorrow she’ll stand next to Meghan as she takes the test, and when Meghan spells a word wrong, Graham will tell her how to spell it right. It’s an especially good plan because Meghan has to take a spelling test every week, so this won’t just be a one-time thing. She can help Meghan every week. Maybe she can even start helping Meghan on other tests, too.

I think this might really work, if Graham doesn’t disappear tonight. An imaginary friend named Mr Finger once told me that most imaginary friends disappear when their human friends are asleep, but I think he was probably making that up to impress me. How could anyone know that? I almost told Graham to try to keep Meghan awake tonight, just in case Mr Finger was telling the truth, but Meghan is only six years old, and little kids like that can’t stay up all night. She would eventually fall asleep no matter what Graham did.

So I’m just hoping that Graham makes it through the night.

CHAPTER 10

Max is mad at me because I have been spending so much time with Graham. He doesn’t actually know that I’ve been with Graham. He just knows that I have been someplace else, and he is mad. I think this is good. I always get a little nervous when I don’t see Max for a while, but if he’s mad at me for not being around enough, that means he’s been thinking about me and misses me.

‘I had to go pee and you weren’t there to check the bathroom,’ Max says. ‘I had to knock on the door.’

We are riding on the bus now, going home, and Max is hunkered down in his seat, whispering to me so the other kids don’t hear us talking. Except they do. They always do. Max can’t see what the other kids can see, but I can. I can see the forest for the trees.

‘I had to go pee and you weren’t there to check the bathroom,’ Max says again.

Max repeats himself if you don’t answer his questions, because he needs an answer before he can say the next thing. Except that Max doesn’t always ask his questions like questions. Lots of times he just says something and expects you to know it’s a question. If he has to repeat himself three or four times, which he never has to do for me but sometimes has to do for his teachers and his dad, he gets really upset. Sometimes this makes him get stuck.

‘I was in Tommy’s classroom,’ I say. ‘I was trying to figure out what he plans on doing next. I wanted to make sure that he wasn’t going to get his revenge this week.’

‘You were spying,’ Max says, and I know that this is a question, too, even if he doesn’t say it like a question.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I was spying.’

‘Okay,’ Max says, but I can tell that he’s still a little mad.

I can’t tell Max that I was with Graham because I don’t want Max to know that other imaginary friends exist. If he thinks that I’m the only imaginary friend in the whole wide world, then he’ll think I’m special. He’ll think that I’m unique. That is good, I think.

It helps me persist.