‘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 to
o 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.
But if Max knew that there were other imaginary friends, and he was mad at me, like he is now, then maybe he would just forget about me and imagine a new imaginary friend. And then I would disappear like Graham is disappearing right now.
It’s been hard, because I want to tell Max about Graham. At first I wanted to tell him because I thought he could help. I thought that maybe Max could give me a good idea to help Graham because Max is so smart. Or maybe he could help us solve one of Meghan’s problems, like teaching her to tie her own shoes, and then he could tell Meghan that it was Graham’s idea, so Graham would get all of the credit.
But now I want to tell Max about Graham because I’m scared. I’m afraid that I might lose my friend and I don’t have anyone to talk to about it. I guess I could talk to Puppy, but I don’t know Puppy very well, and definitely not as well as I know Max or Graham. And even if Puppy can talk, talking to a dog is weird. Max is my friend, and he should be the one I talk to when I’m sad or afraid, but I can’t.
I just hope that Graham comes to school tomorrow and we aren’t too late.
Max’s father likes to tell people that he and Max play catch every night in the backyard, like they are doing tonight. He tells everyone he can, sometimes more than once, but he usually waits until Max’s mom isn’t around before he says it. Sometimes he says it just after she leaves the room if he knows that she’s coming right back.
But he and Max don’t really play catch. Max’s dad throws the ball to Max, and Max lets it hit the ground and roll, and when it stops moving, he picks it up and tries to throw it back. Except Max’s dad never stands close enough for Max to reach him, even though he tells Max to ‘Step into it!’ and ‘Throw with your body!’ and ‘Give it your all, son!’
Whenever they play catch, Max’s dad calls Max son instead of Max.
But even if Max steps into it or gives it his all (I don’t know what either of those things mean, and I don’t think Max does either), the ball never reaches his dad.
If Max’s dad wants the ball to reach him, why doesn’t he just stand closer?
Max is in bed now. He is sleeping. No temper tantrum, of course. He brushed his teeth, put on his Thursday-night pajamas, read one chapter in his book, and laid his head down on the pillow at exactly eight-thirty. Max’s mom is at a meeting tonight so Max’s dad gave Max a kiss on the forehead and said good night. Then he turned out the light in Max’s room and switched on the nightlights.
There are three.
I sit in the dark beside Max’s bed, thinking about Graham. Wondering if there is anything left to think about. Wondering if there is anything else I can do.
Max’s mom comes home a little later. She sneaks into the room, tiptoes over to Max’s bed, and kisses him on the forehead. Max allows his mom and dad to kiss him, but it has to be quick and always on the cheek or forehead, and Max always cringes whenever they do it. But when Max is asleep like this, his mom can give him a longer kiss, usually on the forehead but sometimes on the cheek, too. Sometimes she goes to his room to kiss him two or three times a night before she goes to bed, even if she was the one who put him to bed and kissed him already.
One morning at breakfast, Max’s mom told Max that she had given him a kiss good night after he was asleep. She said, ‘You looked like such an angel last night when I went to kiss you good night.’
‘Dad put me to bed,’ Max said. ‘Not you.’
This was one of Max’s questions-that’s-not-a-question, and I knew it. So did Max’s mom. She always knows. She knows even better than me.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was visiting Grandpa at the hospital, but when I came home, I tiptoed into your bedroom and gave you a kiss good night.’
‘You gave me a kiss good night,’ Max said.
‘Yes,’ his mom said.
Later on, while we were riding the bus to school, Max hunkered down and said, ‘Did Mom kiss me on the lips?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘On the forehead.’
Max touched his forehead, rubbed it with his fingers and then looked at his fingers. ‘Was it a long kiss?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It was super-short.’
But that wasn’t the truth. I don’t lie to Max very often, but I lied that time because I thought it would be
better for Max and better for his mother if I did.
Max still asks me if his mom gives him a long kiss on the nights when she is not home to put him to bed. I always say, ‘Nope. Super-short.’
And I’ve never told Max about all the extra kisses his mom gives him before she goes to bed.
But that’s not a lie, because Max has never asked me if she gives him extra kisses.
Max’s mom is eating dinner. She heated the plate of food that Max’s dad made for her from the leftovers. Max’s dad is sitting at the table across from her, reading a magazine. I am not a very good reader but I know this magazine is called Sports Illustrated because Max’s dad gets it from the envelope and magazine delivery man every week.
I’m annoyed because it doesn’t look like Max’s mom and dad are going to watch television soon, and I want to watch television. I like to sit on the couch next to Max’s mom and watch the television show and listen to them talk about the show during the commercials.
Commercials are tiny little shows in between the big show, but most of them are stupid and boring, so no one really watches them. People use the commercials to talk or go to the bathroom or fill their glass with more soda.
Max’s dad likes to complain about the television shows. He thinks that they are never good enough. He says the stories are ridiculous and that there were too many missed opportunities. I’m not really sure what this means, but I think it means that the television shows would be better if he was allowed to tell the people on the show what to do.
Max’s mom sometimes gets annoyed at the complaining because she just likes to watch the shows and not look for the missed opportunities.
‘I just want to take a break from the day,’ she says, and I agree. I don’t watch the shows to find a way to make them better. I just like the stories. But most of the time Max’s mom and dad just laugh at the shows that are funny and bite their nails when the shows are scary or suspenseful. I don’t think Max’s mom and dad know that they both bite their nails at the exact same time when they watch television.