Imaginary Friend (ARC)

by Stephen Chbosky

  Brady was silent.

  “You still hate her, though, don’t you, Brady?”

  Brady nodded.

  “I know. It’s hard. But she’s trying to make you strong. So, try not to hate her too much, okay? Hating is really dangerous. It’s like that boy. What’s his name? The boy you were fighting with at the Christmas Pageant.”

  “Special Ed.”

  “Yes. He’s a hateful boy, isn’t he?”

  Brady nodded. Mrs. Keizer looked into the hallway, and when she knew no one was coming in, she whispered,

  “Special Ed’s going to try to kill you. You know that, right?”

  “Not if I kill him first,” the little boy said.

  “That’s smart, Brady,” she said proudly. “You see, that’s what your mother has done for you. She’s made you very strong and brave. Let him be the hateful one. You be the good one. That goes double for Christopher and his friends.”

  Brady smiled. The heat on their hands was warm like a campfire.

  “Grandma,” he said. “Do you remember things now?”

  “Yes, Brady. I remember everything except my name.”

  “What do you mean? You’re Grandma.”

  She laughed, revealing her toothless grin.

  “I know I’m Grandma to you, but that’s not my name. When I got married, I changed it to Mrs. Joseph Keizer. But I can’t remember what it was before that. Your grandfather stole my real name. He hid it somewhere in the woods. But I’m going to get it back. Will you help me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good, Brady. You’re a good, strong boy.”

  Brady smiled. The old woman put in her dentures and smiled back.

  “We are going to win this war, Brady. Listen to Grandma.”

  Chapter 77

  Matt, they’re going to kill your brother,” the voice whispered.

  Matt opened his eyes. It was right before dawn on Christmas Eve. And his body was shaking. He had been having terrible nightmares recently, but this one was the worst. He didn’t know if he ever wanted to sleep again. Matt started to panic that maybe he was still having the nightmare. He didn’t want those deer to come back.

  “Hello?” he said to the darkness. “Mike?”

  There was only silence. Matt sat up in bed. He was covered in sweat. All weekend, it didn’t matter how many times he turned the pillow over. He could feel that horrible fever on his forehead. But his fever had finally broken. There was only sweat and that sweet baby aspirin smell. Matt had wet the bed again.

  “Mike?” he said.

  He heard nothing. Matt got out of bed and looked at the sheets. They were covered in urine. He felt so embarrassed. He couldn’t let his big brother see him like this. So, Matt peeled off his pajamas and underwear, cold and clingy, and went to the bathroom to wash himself with a towel. When he got clean and dry, he went down the hallway to his big brother’s room. He opened the door and tiptoed over to the bed.

  “Mike?” he whispered.

  His brother did not move under the covers.

  “Mike? I had a nightmare. Can I sleep in your bed?”

  There was no sound. Matt slowly pulled the blanket back, but all he found was a rolled-up sleeping bag and a baseball glove.

  Mike was gone.

  Matt looked around the room to see if something was wrong. There was a poster of the Avengers including Mike’s favorite, Thor. The closet was messy. The floor was littered with balls from Nerf to Wiffle. Nothing was under the bed. Nothing was out of place. But it still didn’t feel right. It felt like the street he saw in his nightmare. It just wasn’t right.

  Matt left the room and tiptoed down the hall to his mothers’ room. He thought maybe Mike had his own nightmare and asked to sleep between them. But they were sleeping on opposite sides of the bed. Mike was nowhere to be seen.

  Matt crept downstairs. When he reached the kitchen, he saw the carton of milk on the counter. Matt went over and touched it. The carton was warm. It had been left out for at least an hour. Matt looked at the picture of the missing girl. Emily Bertovich. For some reason, he could have sworn she was looking back at him.

  He left the kitchen and went to the living room. He saw a half-eaten bowl of cereal on the coffee table. The spoon was still in the bowl. The TV was on, playing an old Avengers cartoon. Thor was speaking.

  “Iron Man is in trouble, Captain America,” he said.

  Matt moved out of the living room and went to the entry hall. He looked up at the coat-tree and noticed that Mike’s jacket was missing. The dead bolt on the front door was unlocked. Matt couldn’t believe his brother would have left the house. They were still on punishment for getting in the fight at the Christmas Pageant. If Mike was caught outside, their mothers would have grounded him forever. Something was terribly wrong.

  Matt opened the door.

  The air was still and quiet. There had been a massive snowfall overnight, and from the looks of the clouds overhead, there was going to be an even bigger storm coming for Christmas.

  “Mike?” he whispered. “Are you out here?”

  Again, there was no sound. Just a deer staring at him from the lawn across the street. Matt started to feel a deep unease. He quickly threw on his coat and boots, noticing that his brother’s shoes had been left behind. So, he tied them together and threw them over his shoulder. Then, right before he left their house, something inside him told him to go back to the kitchen and grab a knife.

  Call it a voice.

  Matt started walking down the street. He looked down and even with the dusting of snow covering it like powdered sugar on a doughnut, he thought he could see the slightest impression of his brother’s bare feet. Normally, he wouldn’t have been able to see very well because of his lazy eye. But ever since Christopher had touched his arm, his eye had been getting better. After a week, it was all healed. But it didn’t stop at 20/20. It kept getting stronger and stronger. He could see for miles with it. The way that his grandmother said she was farsighted and could take off her glasses and watch drive-in movies a mile away from the back porch. She could never hear them. But she saw all the great movies. Then, they closed the theater. And she died of bladder cancer. Matt didn’t know why he was thinking about his grandmother now. He followed the footprints all the way down the long hill.

  Toward the Mission Street Woods.

  They were covered in a slight morning fog. Like a cloud in the sky. Matt put his head down and kept walking on the street toward the woods. Following his brother’s footprints. His eye began to itch and twitch the closer he got.

  Matt gripped the knife tightly as he entered the Mission Street Woods. He followed the trail down the footpath. Past the billy goat bridge and the creek, which wasn’t frozen anymore for some reason. He walked into the clearing. He could feel the deer looking at him through the spaces in the evergreens, their breath rising like steam from a manhole. Matt walked through the coal mine. All the way to the other side. He passed the abandoned refrigerator, which felt warm like a campfire. He finally came to the bulldozers and Collins Construction vehicles parked on the far side of the woods.

  That’s where he saw Mike.

  His brother was crouched down in the mud with his bare feet and a knife. Matt watched as his brother slashed the rear tire of the bulldozer. Then, he moved to the front tire and unscrewed the cap. He slowly let the air out of the front tire with the knife. Matt silently approached his brother, who was turned away from him.

  “Mike,” Matt whispered.

  Mike took the knife out of the tire.

  “Mike, what are you doing?”

  Mike didn’t answer. For a long moment.

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” Mike finally said. “The bulldozers will reach the tree house today.”

  “So?”

  “If Mr. Collins tears down the tree house, Christopher will never be able to get out. So, we have to save him.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “You did.”

  Matt turned his bro
ther around and realized that Mike’s eyes were closed. He was sleepwalking.

  Matt gently took the knife out of his hand.

  “Matt, we have to finish,” Mike protested in his sleep.

  “Don’t worry. Lie down on my coat. I’ll finish,” Matt said.

  Mike did as he was told. He lay his head down on Matt’s coat and began to snore. Matt grabbed the shoes and covered his brother’s freezing feet. Then, he took both knives to the Collins Construction Company fleet, and within minutes, the vehicles were rendered useless. On any other night, they probably would have been caught.

  Luckily, the security guard was out with that terrible flu.

  Chapter 78

  Motherfuckers!”

  Mrs. Collins watched her husband slam his cell phone down on the cafeteria table. Her mother was still unconscious upstairs in her hospital room, and somehow, his business had crept back into their lives. Even on Christmas Eve.

  “What happened?” Mrs. Collins heard herself asking.

  Mrs. Collins maintained a concerned, dutiful look on her face as she pretended to listen to her husband rant about how some “motherfuckers” destroyed the tires on his trucks and bulldozers. She vaguely heard him say that he should have broken ground on this “fucking Mission Street Woods project” a month ago, but someone was out to get him. He couldn’t afford all the delays. They were leveraged to the breaking point. The loans were coming due. She better stop spending so much God damn money.

  Blah blah blah blah blah.

  How many times did he start this fight? Five times a month? Ten during the audit? She could have played a tape recorder and saved herself the time. “Kathleen, who do you think pays for all this because it’s not your God damn charity work!” “But Brad, I turned Shady Pines from a tax shelter into a thriving business.” “A thriving business?! That old folks home couldn’t keep you in shoes!” When did the make-up sex stop? How can he stand the sound of his own voice all day? God, is he still talking? He is. He’s still talking.

  Mrs. Collins just nodded and scratched the skin underneath her diamond necklace. That itch just wouldn’t go away. Mrs. Collins blamed the itch on being stuck in this hospital waiting for her mother to wake up. She was sweaty and sticky and could do nothing with her hair in that horrible hospital bathroom even if it were private. And she didn’t know how much longer she could pretend that she didn’t hate this man.

  “Are you even listing to me?!” he barked.

  “Of course, Brad. It’s awful. Go on,” she said.

  As her husband continued to rant, Mrs. Collins looked over his shoulder and saw a room packed with people on gurneys. They had started moving the sick into the cafeteria like the dying soldiers in Gone with the Wind. She thought about her mother basking in comfort in the private room upstairs that could easily fit two more beds. She wondered why the poor people didn’t get off those gurneys and just kill them. That’s what she’d do. She wouldn’t stand for this bullshit for five minutes. And she supposed that’s what made her rich and poor people so hopelessly stupid.

  For a moment, Mrs. Collins fantasized about the people on the gurneys standing up and marching into the cafeteria and tearing her husband’s tongue out of his mouth. God, Mrs. Collins wanted it to happen. She quietly prayed for them to get up and just kill this man already, so she could stop humoring him that the world was out to screw him even though a casual glance at the facts and his numerous bank accounts would prove the opposite was 100 percent the case.

  Then, when the mob was done with him, it could go into her mother’s comfortable private room and rip her mother out of that bed with the thousand-thread-count sheets and hang her with them. Hang her for losing the memories that Mrs. Collins could never forget. The water bottle filled with vodka. The debt and the poverty. The brutal man who doused his own daughter with a hose and threw her in the backyard in December. And the mousy little mother who never did anything to stop it despite being given the opportunity dozens of times.

  “If you want to be a dog, you’ll stay out there like a dog,” he’d say.

  And from her mother? Nothing.

  Thanks for the memories.

  For eight years, Mrs. Collins watched each of her mother’s memories follow the last down the rabbit hole. For eight years, Mrs. Collins worked that nursing home to give her mother a level of care that her mother never gave her. Why? Because that’s what a Collins does. Not a Keizer. Keizers rot on gurneys in the hallway while the Collins family basks in private rooms. Keizers drink themselves to death with vodka while the Collins family gets rich selling it to them. She was a Collins now. So, for eight years, Mrs. Collins did everything for her mother, and all she asked in return is for the old woman to just die already. Just die so that she could stop remembering everything for her. Just die so that she could stop sitting next to her mother in the parlor, watching endless daytime talk shows with endless parades of victims being interviewed by every sex color or creed of talk-show host about their abuse while studio audience psychologists babbled on about how their parents must have been abused themselves. Just die so she could stop watching silly tears spilling from silly people.

  If these yokels had done three months of hard time being Kathy Keizer, they would have something to cry about. Try being your father’s ashtray for a day. Try being called ugly every day. Try being called fat when you’re anorexic. Try standing wet in the freezing cold, staring at the aluminum siding of the back of your little house every night. Then, see if you can bend your mind to turn that aluminum siding into a beautiful future.

  See the house, Kathy. You’re going to live in a bigger house someday.

  The biggest house in town, Kathy. With a diamond necklace.

  And a powerful husband. See the good husband. See the beautiful son.

  You try digging your nails into your hands every night to keep from freezing to death in the backyard. You watch your father drinking in his warm kitchen. And then tell me about how that drunk bastard was abused himself. Because guess what? Some parents abused their kids who weren’t abused themselves. Even in the grand design of chickens and eggs, not everyone has an excuse. Somebody had to be first. And just once. Just one time in the last eight years, she would have given a million dollars if one of those endlessly pointless talk shows had an honest father on the couch.

  “I woke up and said, ‘I’m going to burn her with cigarettes.’”

  “Why? Because you were abused?” the talk-show host would ask.

  “No. Because I was bored.”

  Mrs. Collins would send a check to that man to thank him for his honesty and another check to his children because they might understand what Kathy Keizer’s life was really like. Everyone else, go ahead and try being Kathy Keizer for a day. And you see if by the end of it, you aren’t a puddle on the God damn floor.

  “Kathleen? What the hell is wrong with you?” her husband asked.

  Mrs. Collins checked the clock on the cafeteria wall. Somehow, ten minutes had passed.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I’m just feeling a little under the weather. Could you repeat that last thing?”

  “I said I need to go to the Mission Street Woods to deal with this nightmare. I know it’s Christmas Eve, but we’re on a deadline.”

  He braced himself as if she would rip him a new polo chute for even suggesting he leave the family on Christmas Eve. But she just smiled.

  “Of course, honey,” she said. “I’ll make you the best Christmas Eve dinner when you get back from work.”

  “Are you all right, Kathleen?” he asked.

  “Of course I am,” she said with a measured smile.

  “You sure?”

  “Go to work. I’ll be waiting for you when you get back.”

  With that, she gave him a kiss on the lips. He couldn’t have been more confused if she had given him a blow job without the minimum three glasses of Chardonnay on their anniversary. Mrs. Collins was many things to her husband. Understanding wasn’t one of them.
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  “Okay,” he said. “Call me if you need anything.”

  She nodded, and he left. The minute he was out of sight, Mrs. Collins looked down and realized she had dug her fingers so deeply into her palms that they were bleeding. She hadn’t even known she was doing it. She looked into the cafeteria at all the unwashed patients on their gurneys.

  They were all staring at her.

  She knew that without her husband there, these people might be coming for her instead. She had studied enough history to know what happens to rich men’s wives during a revolution. Mrs. Collins knew that all these people were trying to intimidate her with their staring, but they didn’t understand.

  They were aluminum siding to her.

  The staring contest lasted the better part of a minute. When the last person in the cafeteria blinked and looked down, Mrs. Collins moved out of the room. Call it common sense. Call it a voice inside her head. But something told her that she had to get her son back home. She needed a glass of white wine and a long hot bath. She couldn’t wash herself off in her mother’s private hospital bathroom again. So, she went back to the room and found her mother still unconscious and her son reading to her.

  “All the better to see you with, my dear,” he said.

  “Brady, we have to go,” she whispered.

  “I want to stay with Grandma,” he whispered back.

  “Grandma is still asleep,” she said.

  Brady dug his heels in.

  “No. Grandma is awake. We were just talking,” he said.

  “Stop lying. Get your coat.”

  “I’m not lying,” he said.

  Mrs. Collins looked at her mother, sleeping soundly on the bed. She had known her son to play some cruel jokes, but this was a new low.

  “Brady Collins, I’m counting to three. At three, you sit in the doghouse.”

  But Brady wouldn’t move.

  “I swear we were talking,” he said.

  “ONE,” she said.

  “Grandma, wake up,” he said.