Confessions of an Imaginary Friend Page 3

  That’s when I had to place my head between my legs. “I’m having a heart attack!” I yelled between wheezing breaths. “Call a hospital! Call the police! Get me a defibrillator!”

  “Don’t get your spurs in a tangle,” said the cowgirl in an effort to calm me. She rubbed my back. “Just breathe. It’s really not so bad, you know.”

  “Not so bad?” I asked, raising my red face to hers. “Yesterday I thought I was a boy. Now I’m, what? Ethereal? Intangible? Invisible?”

  “The truth is,” she replied, “you’re only as invisible as you feel, imaginary or not.”

  “Well,” I said, my voice small, “I feel like air. I feel like wind. I feel like I’m made of sand, and the tide’s rolling in.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  IN WHICH I, JACQUES PAPIER, SUFFER AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

  I became very blue.

  Okay, I’ll be honest, that’s an understatement. I was way beyond blue. I moved into shades of navy and indigo and midnight. I got so low, my insides must have turned the color of deep space, of burned campfire, of the dark up a dragon’s nose in a dungeon.

  I took to my bed. I didn’t move. I didn’t bathe. I didn’t even bother to eat, or drink, or join the family for origami craft night. What was the point? Imaginary people can only fold imaginary paper swans.

  Fleur was, of course, concerned.

  “I don’t care what anybody thinks,” said Fleur. “You’re real to me.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “But what am I made of, Fleur? Not anything you can touch. Not anything you can see.”

  “There are lots of real things you can’t touch or see,” replied Fleur. “There’s music, and wishes, and gravity. There’s electricity! And feelings. And silence.”

  “Oh!” I said. “How wonderful. Happy day, everything is solved. I mean, sure, you’re made of the same stuff as flowers and the moon and dinosaurs. And I’m the same as gravity? Perfect. Stupendous. What was I worried about?”

  Fleur stared at me, biting her lower lip the way she did when she was scared, or confused, or about to cry.

  “We should do something today to cheer you up,” she said softly. “We could work on your bucket list.”

  She went over to the desk, opened a drawer, and took out my list.

  “Like this one,” she said, pointing to the paper. “We could put a trained ninja scorpion in François’ food bowl.”

  I groaned and put a blanket over my head in reply.

  “Or,” she said, continuing to read, “we could put François’ dog house in a tree while he’s sleeping and see how confused he is when he wakes up. Or number three seems fun: We could dress François as a baby and leave him on the steps of an orphanage. Though I’m not sure where to find lengthy enough baby clothes. . .”

  “Fleur!” I shouted. “Just forget it, okay? Nothing’s going to help. I’d tell you my heart is broken, and that it’s unfixable, but I can’t.”

  “Why not?” asked Fleur.

  “Because,” I said, “I’m not so sure imaginary things even have hearts.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE POTS, THE PANS, AND OUR WHOLE SILLY LIVES

  I tried to picture how my imaginary heart would break, if I did in fact have one. Would it look like a slow leak in a snow globe, or like a popped balloon? Like a finish line ribbon the day after a race, or the hands of a broken clock that can no longer tell time? Like a snapped banjo string, or a key that breaks in a lock?

  To get away from my own thoughts, I spied on Fleur and our parents in the kitchen. Fleur, it seemed, was dealing with some distressing issues as well. Her voice sounded odd, like she was an acrobat balancing words on her nose, worried they would crash to the ground at any moment and shatter.

  “If Jacques is imaginary,” said Fleur, “but he never knew, and now he does, then maybe I’m imaginary too. Or you, Mom. Or Dad. Or all of us. The pots, the pans, the ceiling, the sky, the weather, the grass, our whole silly lives!”

  Fleur pointed to François the wiener dog.

  “Is that dog an imaginary dog?”

  She got down on all fours and pressed her nose to François’.

  “Are you real?” Fleur shouted at François. “Well, are you? Answer me!”

  Fleur seemed to be going insane. And over nothing. I mean, who in their right mind would imagine something as unpleasant as a wiener dog?

  That night our parents took us to a musical, a funny one, which they thought might cheer us up. But then, right in the middle of a rather silly can-can number involving exotic animals, Fleur got out of her seat, walked up the aisle, and climbed onto the stage.

  “Is that our daughter?” gasped our mother. “What in the world is she doing?”

  “How should I know?” whispered our father.

  Fleur planted herself like a tree in the center of the stage, legs wide, arms crossed. Luckily, the actors playing hippos and monkeys and alligators were true professionals, and knew that the show must go on. So they ignored Fleur, and simply danced around her.

  “You see,” said Fleur in the car on the way home. “I am imaginary. I walked right onstage, and nobody even noticed.”

  Our mother popped two pills for her headache. “No more of this, Fleur,” she said sternly.

  Fleur agreed. But the very next day our father had to leave work to respond to a call from the police. While I was watching the chameleons camouflage themselves in the reptile house, Fleur had climbed into the gorilla pit across the zoo.

  “Was she hurt?” asked our panicked parents when they arrived at the zoo offices. They found Fleur there, wrapped in a blanket and sipping hot cocoa.

  “Hurt?” shouted Fleur. “The gorilla didn’t even notice me! Because I’m clearly invisible.” She stomped out of the office and toward the car.

  “Lucky kid,” said the zookeeper, shaking his head and handing my parents some paperwork to sign. “She climbed into the cage of Penelope, the blind and deaf gorilla.”

  Chapter Twenty

  THE MERMAID AND THE HORSE

  “What are these puppets doing here at the house?” asked Fleur. “Shouldn’t they be at the shop?”

  “Well,” said our father, his arms full of dolls and strings, “our parenting book said sometimes it’s helpful to use toys for us to talk to one another.”

  “Talk about what?” asked Fleur.

  “Oh, anything,” replied our father. “School, hobbies, obsessive and irrational fears that you or your loved ones are imaginary. Stuff like that.”

  Our mother rolled her eyes. Clearly this had been our father’s idea. We watched as he put a horse puppet on his hand and gave Fleur a puppet dressed like a mermaid.

  “Hello,” said our father in his best horse voice. “How are you? How are you feeling today?”

  Fleur begrudgingly put the mermaid onto her hand.

  “I feel good. Today I swam through a shipwreck where I met a fish living in a teapot. I made a wish on a starfish. I used some squid ink to write a letter.”

  “Uh, no,” said our father, back to his father voice. “You’re not pretending to be the mermaid. You’re you. Fleur. The puppet is just . . . uh . . . hold on.”

  Our father took off the horse puppet and began flipping through his parenting book, mumbling and skimming dog-eared pages.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” said our mother.

  She knelt down to eye level with Fleur. “Sweetie, we made you an appointment with a psychiatrist. There’s no exam or shots or anything like that. You just talk. And we’ll be right there too.”

  Fleur considered this.

  “Can Jacques come?”

  Our mother spoke through gritted teeth. “Of course. I’m sure the therapist would love to meet him.”

  “Can he bring his imaginary friend?” asked Fleur. “The Great Dragon Herring?”

&
nbsp; Our mother closed her eyes. “Sure. Fine. Whatever. I’m just going to lie down.”

  “Great,” said Fleur. “But for the record, this all seems like a waste of time. I mean, we’ve seen pretty convincing evidence that I’m imaginary. Why, I bet . . .”

  Fleur used her mermaid hand to pick up a frying pan.

  “I bet if this mermaid hit me over the head with this frying pan,” she continued, “I wouldn’t even feel it. Ready?”

  Our father was absorbed in his parenting book and our mother’s eyes were closed.

  “One,” said Fleur. “Two . . . three . . .”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  MR. PITIFUL

  And that is how we ended up in the emergency room, followed the next day by a trip for the whole family—myself included—to a psychiatrist’s office.

  Dr. Stéphane specialized in children and, it seemed, especially specialized in children with imaginary friends. I made a mental note to ask to see his credentials. But I didn’t get a chance because when Fleur’s name was called, the doctor had the nerve to ask me to stay outside in the waiting room.

  After they had gone, a bespectacled, spaghetti-armed superhero looked me over.

  “First time?” he asked. He sat beside a nervous, small boy who clutched the hero’s cape like a security blanket. “I’m Mr. Pitiful, mediocre, not-quite-super-enough-to-be-a-superhero hero. I’m the imaginary friend of Arnold, my sidekick.”

  Mr. Pitiful pointed to the boy beside him. The boy, in turn, mumbled something unintelligible.

  “Arnold was wondering,” said Mr. Pitiful, “why the girl you’re with is here.”

  “Actually,” I replied, “she’s my sister. And we’re here because she thinks she’s imaginary too.” I paused, and added quickly, “Also, she recently went onstage during a musical, jumped into a gorilla cage, and hit herself over the head with a frying pan.”

  “I understand,” said Mr. Pitiful knowingly. “We started coming when Arnold thought he wasn’t brave enough, so he tried to fly off the garage roof with me. As the brilliant Dr. Stéphane says: ‘Sometimes imaginary troubles are harder to bear than actual ones.’”

  I looked around at the other imaginary friends in the waiting room. These were the only ones I’d ever seen other than the roller-skating cowgirl. There was a large, furry blob of a creature reading a magazine with a small girl, a ninja in the corner practicing moves with a boy, and there was—at least, I was pretty sure there was—an imaginary friend shaped like a red sock. He sat at a distance from everyone else with a dirty boy and two very tidy, anxious-looking parents.

  “Psssst,” I said, leaning toward the sock, who, I realized, smelled like old cats and ogre feet. Like slug slime and minnow breath.

  “Are you . . . an imaginary sock?” I asked.

  “No, kid,” replied the sock, rolling his eyes. “I’m a meatball sandwich.”

  “What are you here for?” I asked.

  The stinky sock seemed surprised. “You really wanna hear my story?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  And so, from that pungent seat, the stinky sock told me his brief but odiferous tale.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  STINKY SOCK’S BRIEF BUT ODIFEROUS TALE

  “I am,” said the sock proudly, “the imaginary friend to the world’s messiest little boy. And he, unfortunately, is the child of the world’s tidiest parents.

  “You’ve never seen anything like it. His mother doesn’t just dust dust bunnies. She hunts them. She kills them. And his father? He only allows food to be served that matches the family wardrobe. Green on Mondays. Red on Wednesdays. And, least popular of all, blechy brown Sundays. The only songs allowed are marches—no be-bopping to offbeat tunes, or messy drum solo surprises. The boy, my friend, is constantly making messes, and constantly being yelled at. Why, sometimes I think that’s why we get along so well.

  “Once we met,” continued the sock, “there was no stopping us. We’d make disgusting, stinky, garbage-filled messes, the likes of which you’ve never seen—messes under the dinner table, buried in the clean laundry, even at the bottom of his mother’s purse. ‘What is that smell!?’ they would shout over and over. ‘It smells like whale belches and mustache crumbs. Like stale dreams and moldy milk stew. It smells . . . like dirty socks!’ And the boy and I would just laugh and laugh. For I may be invisible to the eye, but the messes we made were certainly noticeable to any nose.

  “Alas, in the end, it was our stinky shenanigans that separated me from the little boy. His parents, tidy as they were, just couldn’t live in a house with the residue of such smells. So they packed up their bags, and their boy, and they drove away so fast I was left behind. There I was, standing in the stinky house, a condemned sign nailed to the door. And my boy? He waved back, sadly, from the rear window of the glossiest, most perfectly polished car in the entire world.

  “They thought I was gone, those parents, and they were overjoyed. You could have eaten sticky buns off the floors of that new house and not picked up a speck. But then, one day, I arrived. I made it. It took me months, but I was back, stinkier than ever from the road. And that, you see, is how we all ended up here at the psychiatrist: just a boy, his imaginary sock, and two obsessively hygienic parents at their wits’ end.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  AN INVITATION

  When I went to the shelf to get a magazine, I realized I could hear Fleur’s therapy session through the door. Was it wrong of me to listen? Yes. It was both unethical and invasive. It was like reading someone’s diary, or pawing through their dirty laundry, or eating their trash (a boundary frequently violated by François). But did I press my ear to the door and listen anyhow?

  You bet I did.

  “Fleur, why don’t you describe Jacques?” It was the voice of the (alleged) medical professional, Dr. Stéphane.

  “Where to start?” replied Fleur. “He can draw all the kinds of dragons. He can type almost twelve words per minute. He knows the names of all the presidential pets. He’s never had the hiccups. He taught me how to lie on the lawn, press my nose into the grass, and look around. It’s like looking at a whole other planet full of alien bugs and weird smells when you do that.” Fleur paused. “And also, he doesn’t really have any other friends besides me. I guess that must be hard on him.”

  “Is that why you wished to be imaginary also?” asked Dr. Stéphane. “So Jacques wouldn’t feel so alone?”

  I took my ear away from the door. I was pretty sure I already knew the answer to that question.

  “Hey, new guy,” said Mr. Pitiful. “You should come to our group.”

  “What kind of group?” I asked.

  “It’s called Imaginaries Anonymous,” replied Mr. Pitiful.

  “Imaginaries Anonymous,” I repeated. “Isn’t that a pretty redundant name?”

  “It’s a support group,” explained Stinky Sock. “For troubled imaginary friends. Sometimes it’s nice to be surrounded by things like yourself.”

  I’d never really been around things like me—things that couldn’t be seen or heard, not in the traditional way. Maybe they could understand. Hey, even dead leaves curl together under the blankets of snow in the winter. Even the dark crowds together at daybreak in the corners and backs of drawers.

  “I’m in,” I said. “Where do we meet?”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  IMAGINARIES ANONYMOUS

  “I’m only as invisible as I feel, imaginary or not.”

  I was sitting in a pink playhouse in a backyard, holding hands with an array of group members, and repeating the mantra of Imaginaries Anonymous.

  “Who would like to start the share?” asked Stinky Sock.

  A giant imaginary raised his hand sheepishly.

  “Hi. My name is The Everything. I’ve been imaginary for about two years now.”

 
; “Hi, Everything,” said the group in unison.

  The Everything was just as he said—made up of buttons and old shoes, a kite, a banana peel, and just about everything else.

  “I realized I was imaginary last year,” continued The Everything. “It was when I was being blamed for shaving the family cat. My best friend blamed me, which was okay by me since I couldn’t get grounded like he could. But then his parents got real mad, and said that it wasn’t my fault Mr. Tickles was nude, because I was imaginary and imaginary things can’t shave cats.”

  “And how did that make you feel?” asked Stinky Sock.

  “Bad,” said The Everything. “And sad. Like I’m not in control of my own fate. It’s not like I want to shave cats. But I’d still like the option, ya know?”

  Everyone nodded with understanding. There were other imaginaries at the meeting—a fat orange bird with the head of a hippo, and a purple furry monster with teeny-tiny wings on its back. There was also a shadowy figure who hid in the corner, plus Mr. Pitiful and, to my delight, the roller-skating cowgirl.

  “So we meet again, pardner,” said the cowgirl, smiling. “I see you’ve finally skated on round to the truth, no defibrillator necessary.”

  The cowgirl turned toward the group.

  “My name is the Roller-Skating Cowgirl, and I’ve been imaginary for as long as I can remember. I guess lately I’ve been thinking a lot about, well . . . the end.”

  A murmur went through the crowd.

  “She’s growing up,” continued the cowgirl. “The little girl I live with. We used to pretend to skate all around the world together. We were good too. We’d skate through fields of yellow flowers and pick bouquets without having to stop. We’d skate up volcanoes, and down to the bottom of the ocean, where we’d roll through miles of canyons and algae forests, and come up skating on the back of a whale. But then, things changed. We stopped skating so much, and then lately not at all. Yesterday, her mother was donating a bunch of old toys and said, ‘Dear, do you need these skates? They’re getting pretty rusty.’ And my little buckaroo said, ‘No, I’m too big for skates.’ She threw them away! And poof, just like that, our trip around the world was over.”