“I don’t know how I’d ever catch up with my studies if it wasn’t for her help,” I went on. “I have to admit feeling a little guilty, taking up her time the way I have, because I certainly wouldn’t want her grades to suffer, but she’s assured me that helping me keeps the material fresh for her as well.” Her mother nodded. “There’s nothing like teaching to help you learn better yourself.”
“That’s exactly what she said. And she’s obviously so smart that she doesn’t need my help, but she seems to think I can be useful quizzing her on what we’re learning.”
“Well, I’m just glad that she’s finally found herself a friend with some decent values.”
I smiled at her, my hands folded primly on my lap. Oh, I really am good, I thought. But then it helps when the other person is seeing what they hope to see, rather than what they fear.
Maxine arrived with the tea, and we made small talk while we drank. I think I was the only one who was even remotely relaxed and I was tense—well, at least tense for me.
* * *
“I can’t believe you,” Maxine said later when we were in her room. “You should be an actress.”
It was such a girly room, all frills and lace—straight out of the Proper Girl Handbook, chapter four, “The Bedroom.” The lower part of the walls was a dark, dusty rose, the upper a lighter shade, the edging a border of vines and roses. The comforter had the same pattern, and so did the lace bedskirt and the pillows heaped at the headboard. The furniture was all white—bed, night table, dresser, bookcase, and a desk and chair set—while a rose throw rug picked up the color from the walls.
Lined up on the back of the dresser, with a few more on the windowsill, was a collection of what I could only call prissy dolls .You know the kind, all ringlets and lacy dresses and too-perfect porcelain faces. They were immaculate, as though they’d just come out of their packaging and had never been played with. Though I guess I was being unfair. Just because I like scruffy things, doesn’t mean everyone has to.
“I didn’t know you collected dolls,” I said.
Maxine pulled a face. “I don’t. This whole room’s my mom’s creation.”
She went to a corner of the room and pried up a loose floorboard. Reaching into the space that was revealed, she pulled out a battered plush toy cat, all lanky, droopy limbs. I could see it had been a calico once, but the plush was so worn away that only the memory of color remained.
“This was my only real toy,” she added.
“God, that’s so sad.”
She got a hurt look.
“Not the cat,” I said. “I mean what your mom’s done to your room.”
“It happened the first weekend I went to stay with my dad. I came back and it looked like this. She’d even boxed my books and put them in the basement storage, but I managed to convince her I needed them for my studies.”
I looked at the bookcase and could see how the mismatched spines of the books would drive her mom crazy.
“So I guess it wasn’t like this when your dad was here,” I said.
“Just not as much. She talks about him like he’s dead.”
“I noticed. Why don’t you live with him?”
“He’s always out of town for work, or I would. It’s not that I hate my mom, it’s just ... hard.”
“It’d sure drive me crazy.”
I picked up one of the dolls from the dresser, then put it back down.
“You don’t mind me snooping?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“I just have this insatiable curiosity about other people’s stuff,” I said. I sat beside her on the floor. “So what else do you have stashed away?”
“Nothing much. Pictures of my dad. Some CDs that Mom’d hate. My journal.”
I made no move to take a closer look and got up when she returned the plush cat to its hiding place, sliding the floorboard back into place. I liked the idea of a hidden stash but would hate having to use it like she did.
“That’s one of the doors into hell,” she said when I wandered over to her closet.
I laughed. “What do you mean?”
“Just take a look.”
I opened the door to an array of clothes, all neatly arranged on their hangers, blouses on one end, dresses on the other, skirts in the middle. I fingered the nearest skirt. Of course, it was good quality material. I tried to think of something nice to say about them, but we’d already been through the whole business about her clothes.
“I hate that everything I own has been picked out for me,” she said.
“That bad, huh?”
She nodded. “Except for my books and what I’ve got stashed away. But the rest of my life is all focused on making me into the dork I already look like.”
“I don’t think you look like a dork.”
“How can you say that? If we’re going to be friends, you have to be honest with me.”
I shrugged. “I don’t judge my friends by the clothes they wear.”
“Oh, come on. You do the casual punk thing, but you have to be spending time planning it out.”
“I do. But clothes are only for fun. They don’t say who I am—not really, not inside. I don’t think I’ve ever had an original look. I just see somebody wearing something I like—in a magazine, on the street—and I think, that’d be fun.”
“Fun.”
“Mm-hmm. And my idea of fun changes from day to day. For instance,” I added, giving my pleated skirl a swirl, “today, this is fun.”
Maxine shook her head. “God, I wish I could be like you. You are so sure of yourself”
“It just seems like that,” I told her.
“How’d you ever get to be that way?”
“That’s kind of a long story.”
“I suppose,” she said with a glum look, “you’re going to tell me it’s the same way you got to be brave.”
“Not really.”
I came and sat on the bed with her. Opening one of the textbooks I’d brought, I laid it on the comforter between us, just in case her mom came to check up.
“There was this girl back at my old school,” I said. “Her name was Emmy Jean Haggerty, and she was this real hillbilly who got bussed in from the hills up around the old coal mines north of town. People’d rag on her mercilessly because of her raggedy hand-me-down clothes and her thick hill-country drawl, but she’d just ignore them all.
“I was getting my own fair share of hard times and bullying in those days—I mean, I was the little hippie chick who grew up on a commune, and everybody knew it. It didn’t matter how much I tried to dress like them and be like them. So one afternoon I went up to Emmy Jean in the library, where she was sitting by herself as usual, and asked her how she coped so well. You know what she told me?” Maxine shook her head.
“She said, ‘My granny told me to be happy inside myself. That while I can’t do the first damn thing about what other folks think on me, leastways I can be whatever I want to be, inside me. So I choose to be happy. I know the other kids call me “the Hag” and think I’m simple in the head, but I don’t care. I don’t even hear them anymore. Time was, they’d make me cry every day, but not no more.’ “ ‘How can you be that strong?’ I asked her, because I couldn’t imagine being able to do that.
“ ‘Well, you think on it,’ she said. ‘Do you really want to count folks like that as your friends? Do you really care ’bout what they think?’
“That’s when I realized that I did. I wanted to be just like them, but maybe I didn’t have to. But I also wanted to be just like Emmy Jean, and I told her so.”
“ ‘Oh, you don’t want that, neither,’ she said in that slow drawl of hers. ‘What you want is to be yourself, hard as that can seem.’ Then she smiled. ‘But let me tell you something else Granny told me ’round ’bout the same time. She said it didn’t matter how good I got at being myself, for myself, because sooner or later I was going to meet me some boy and I’d be throwing all my hard-earned considerations out the window, just
for a smile from that boy’s handsome lips.’ “ ‘You think?’ I said.
“Emmy Jean laughed. ‘Well, I’m sure not letting it happen to me,’ she told me. ‘Not after spending all this time learning how to be happy with myself. You think on that, Imogene, when they come courting you.’ ”
I gave Maxine a grin. “Like they ever would, I thought. But the rest of the stuff she was telling me made sense. Maybe it was because she was just repeating what I heard all the time at home. Like I said, Jared and I grew up in the original laid-back household, where we were taught from the moment we could sit up in our high chair not to care what ‘the Man’ or anybody else thought about us.”
“So why was it different coming from her?” Maxine asked.
“I don’t know. I guess because she wasn’t some stoned old hippie, and I could see how it worked. She was by herself pretty much all the time, but she wasn’t unhappy And the mean things the other kids said just rolled right off her. So I taught myself to be like that, too. And you know what the funny thing is? Once they saw I didn’t care, I started having all these little cliques wanting me to be their friend.”
“And did you?”
I shook my head. “No, I ended up hanging with the dropouts and punks who didn’t bother going to school.”
“But you still did.”
I nodded. “Which is funny, because of all the kids going to Willingham, I probably had the only parents who would have supported my dropping out to ‘do my own thing.’ ” I made quotation marks with my fingers. “And I guess that’s why I stuck it out—because I didn’t have to. I skipped a lot of days, but I didn’t totally blow my tests and exams.”
“You make it all sound so simple,” Maxine said. “Especially the part about not caring what other people think.”
“It’s not,” I told her. “But it gets easier. And the thing is, people like Valerie and Brent really can’t hurt me anymore. Only someone like you could. Or Jared. Because I really care about what you guys think.”
That was more than I’d meant to say, so I shut up. I’d barely known her a week and I didn’t want to scare her off by being too intense. I really wanted a best friend, a sister. And I wanted it to be her. I couldn’t even tell you why, exactly. It just snuck up on me that first time we talked and now it felt like anything else wouldn’t be right.
But maybe I’d already scared her off, because Maxine went silent as well. The two of us sat there, staring down at the open textbook for a while, neither of us turning the page, but neither of us really seeing it either. Or at least I know I didn’t.
“So did the thing with the boy happen to you?” Maxine asked after a while. “Because I know I just want to crawl into a crack in the floor every time I see Jimmy Meron walking down the hall.”
“Who’s he?”
“I pointed him out to you on Friday. The guy on the track team.”
“Oh, right. He is cute. Have you talked to him?”
“God, no. He doesn’t even know I exist.” She paused a moment, then said, “You never answered me.”
“About the boy thing?”
She nodded.
“Not really,” I lied.
I wasn’t sure why, exactly. I guess I just wanted her to like me and I figured the best way for that to happen was for me to pretend that most of the stuff I’d done in Tyson had just never happened.
Before she could press me on it, I asked her, “So have you ever been kissed—like for real?”
She shook her head. “Have you?”
I nodded. This I could talk about.
“Sure,” I said. “The first time was by Johnny Tait. I was twelve, and we were at a bonfire near the sand pits outside of Tyson. It was nice, but I didn’t love him or anything.” But that didn’t matter to Maxine. She still had to know everything about it.
We’re sitting on the library steps on a spring morning, sharing an apple and watching the pigeons, when Imogene turns to me.
“Do you remember the first day we met?” she asks.
“Of course. You were determined to make friends with someone no one else liked so that you could be sure of at least one friend in your new school.”
“Is that how it seemed?”
I smile and shake my head. “No. I’m just teasing.” I have another bite of the apple and pass it back to her. “Why were you asking?”
“Remember I told you about my imaginary friend?”
I nod. “It was the first thing you said. He had a monkey face or something.”
“Tail, actually. With rabbit ears and a body like a skinny hedgehog.”
“I can’t imagine a skinny hedgehog.”
“Many people can’t.”
“So what about him?”
“Well, he’s back.”
“What do you mean ‘he’s back’?”
She shrugs. “I keep dreaming about him and these ... other things. Little root-and-twig creatures made up out of fairy tales and nursery rhymes.”
I look for the smile that’s usually in her eyes when she’s spinning one of her stories, but it’s not there.
“And he keeps saying these weird things to me,” she says. “Like ‘I’ve missed you sideways’ and ‘Be careful. Once you open the door, it can’t be closed.’ ”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. Maybe that once you’ve imagined an imaginary friend, you can’t unimagine him again.”
“Okay, that’s creepy.”
“I know.”
“But it’s just a dream, right?”
She nods. “Except it’s freaking me out a little because first, I never remember my dreams, and second, I keep having it. There’s even a soundtrack.”
“Trust you to have a soundtrack.”
“I guess. Except it’s not a very good one.”
“Dream soundtracks never are,” I say, trying to lighten her mood.
It doesn’t work.
“The funny thing is,” she says, “in my head he is real.”
“I’m not following you.”
“I mean, the memories I have of him and the memories I have of things that really happened are all mixed up. Like they’re all real. But I know they can’t be. Like the time we went chasing the Clock Man to try and get back some of Jared’s spare time.”
I smile. “Because everybody knows that the very concept of spare time is a made-up thing.”
That got me the smallest twitch of a smile in the corner of her mouth.
“Some people do have it,” Imogene says.
I nod. “Except none of them have a dragon mom like I do, overseeing every part of their life except when I get away with you.”
“Point taken.”
“Thank you.”
“But I was talking about Pelly and the Clock Man,” she says. “Things like them can’t be real. The Clock Man was ... well, he was all made of clocks. A big old-fashioned alarm clock for a head, and then the rest of him was cobbled together from all sorts of bits and pieces of other kinds of clocks.”
“And Pelly?” I ask.
“That was my imaginary friend. It’s short for Pell-mell.”
“That figures.”
She gives me a look. “What do you mean?”
“Well, being who you are, he’d have to have a name like that. Or Chaos. Maybe Pandemonium.”
“But the real thing that’s so weird,” she says, “is that it’s all scary now. Pelly never scared me before, but he does now.”
It’s so odd seeing her like this. She’s a great listener—she really is, especially for someone who talks as much as she does. But she’s also kind of like a boy who has an answer for everything. She told me once that it was because of the way she and Jared grew up, wild and free on the commune, gender traits mixing. She was always a tomboy, and Jared ended up being way more sensitive than a lot of guys are.
That tomboy part of her is what makes her so sure of herself and so fearless. It’s what makes her Imogene. So to see her like this, nervous an
d so at a loss, it’s ... well, just weird. It makes me feel like I should have the answers for her, the way she always does for me.
I think back to something she said near the beginning of this very strange conversation we’re having.
“Maybe he’s here to warn you,” I say.
“By scaring me.”
“I don’t know about that. Sometimes things that don’t scare us at all as kids totally freak us out when we get older. And vice versa.”
“Well, what would he be warning me about?”
“Didn’t you say that he said something about doors? About how once they’re open, they can’t be closed? Maybe the door’s got nothing to do with him coming back. Maybe it’s something else you did—some other door you opened back when you knew him.”
Imogene shakes her head. “Now you’re getting as bad as me. Talking about him like he really exists. Like he ever existed.”
“It’s just ...”
“I know. I’m making him sound like he’s real.”
I nod, but don’t bother saying that she’s always like this. She’s forever making the implausible seem real. I’m not saying she lies to me—at least I don’t think she does, though she does get evasive sometimes about parts of her life before she met me. She just likes to make sure that life stays interesting. Whenever it’s not, she seems compelled to say or do something to get it back on an oddball track.
“By the time I was nine or ten,” she says now, “I realized what he was, I wasn’t playing with him anymore. I knew he wasn’t real. But I’d tell stories in my head—mostly at night, staring up at the ceiling as I was falling asleep—and he’d be in all of them.”
“Your point being?”
“That I used to know the difference. I’m not so sure anymore.” She gives me a look that’s as much amused as unhappy. “I’ve even got you half believing in him. Or at least talking like you do.”
I shake my head. “I’m just going with the flow like I always do.”
“Well, I need you to be the hardheaded, rational-brain part of our friendship right now.”
I give her a slow nod. “Okay. Except, even big brainy me isn’t entirely unconvinced that dreams aren’t messages of some sort, if only from our subconscious.”