Imaginary Friend

by Stephen Chbosky

  *

  Ambrose could not see Kate Reese as she read aloud to him like a mother to a child. But after everything she told him about Christopher’s car accident and the sheriff being shot, he imagined this beautiful 110-pound woman looking a little like the last candle flickering in the eye of a hurricane.

  Please protect her, God.

  The prayer came out of nowhere. And it surprised him. But once he confirmed that it was indeed his own voice, he doubled down on it. Because somewhere deep in his soul, he believed that if something happened to Kate Reese, the world would come to an end.

  Chapter 71

  What a fucking year.

  That’s what Jerry thought as he lay awake in bed. He looked outside the window. It was right before dawn. On the twenty-third of December. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been up this early. Not since the last dream. Recently, he had been having these wicked dreams. He was always in his house or his neighborhood or getting some ribs at the Bone Yard, and he would see Kate Reese. She would be a little different every time, but always beautiful. With a key around her neck. And a wicked little smile. She would let him do everything that he ever wanted to her. Violent. Angry. Dirty. Hateful. It didn’t matter. She loved it. She loved him. Every night, he would go to sleep to meet the Kate Reese of his dreams. Then, every morning, Jerry would wake up. He would turn over in bed, and he would see the empty space where the real Kate Reese used to be. And that fucking voice would ring in his ears.

  You miss her, Jerry.

  Every morning, his mind felt like his car parked in the front yard after a bender. The lawn looks like your driveway, and those dreams look like your life. But they aren’t your life. Kate Reese was gone, and she was never coming back. He tried to let her go many times, but then he’d hear some God damn song or see some God damn girl in cutoffs and remember that this one time, he had been able to trick a legitimately good woman into loving him.

  Until she left you in the middle of the night, Jerry.

  Jerry turned over in bed. He didn’t have a shift today, so he thought he’d go down to 8 Mile. The bars weren’t open, but he knew an after-hours club that might let him in the back door. He could have a drink and maybe pick some low-hanging fruit. Sure, it was morning, but fuck it. There was no bitch telling him what he could do anymore. He got paid on Friday. What did he care?

  He threw his jeans on and got in his Chevy. He was at 8 Mile twenty minutes later. He parked his car outside the infamous watering hole and walked inside. The jukebox was playing a great song. Hotel California by the Eagles. The room was covered in cigarette smoke. It was so thick, Jerry felt like he was walking through a cloud. He sat down and ordered a gin and tonic. He looked over at the girl at the bar, and he couldn’t believe his luck.

  Sally.

  He knew Sally from way back in high school. She was always a good Catholic girl until one day, she most decidedly was not. Like most Catholics, she went from zero to sixty in about six seconds once someone put the key in the ignition. A year later, she was caught tag-teaming a couple of football players in the backseat of her daddy’s Ford. She was forever known as “Mustang Sally” after that. Daddy’s car was actually a Focus, but “Ford Focus Sally” just didn’t have the same ring to it. Whatever the model, Sally wasn’t the sharpest knife, but she still loved to have a good time. And he needed a good time. He had a few bucks in his pocket. He was free. He was young-ish. He could grab Sally, get in his old Chevy, and just drive to the casinos in West Virginia to whitewash Kate Reese out of his skull.

  “West Virginia?!” Sally said. “You’re crazy. It’s snowing like hell outside. They have casinos in Detroit. Why the fuck would we drive to West Virginia?”

  Good question.

  Call it his gut. Call it a hunch. Call it a gin and tonic. But something told Jerry that his luck would change in West Virginia. Something told him that today could be his lucky day if he would just listen to the voice inside his head.

  You can’t lose, Jerry.

  “You coming or not?” he asked Sally.

  She was coming.

  An hour later, his Chevy was sliding down a highway coated in snow. It was the worst snowstorm since that blizzard after Thanksgiving. Global warming his lily-white ass. Everywhere he looked, it seemed like one car was stalled out or another car got in an accident. But for him, it was smooth sailing. Sally kept flipping through the dial like a burglar trying to crack a safe. Top 40. Hip hop. An oldies station playing Blue Moon. He started to regret bringing Sally. All she seemed to know how to do was fuck up his radio and talk about how her co-workers were plotting against her. She worked at JCPenney for fuck’s sake. Do women have nothing better to do than pretend the world cares about them?

  “Sally, pick a fucking station already.”

  “Fine. Fine. Dick,” she said.

  She finally landed on a classic rock station outside of Cleveland playing the Eagles’ Hotel California. Twice in one day.

  He took that as a good omen.

  When they reached the casino, he drove past the valet to self-parking. Sally gave him a dirty look for that one. Well, excuuuuse meeeee if he wanted to save a few bucks. They walked across the freezing parking lot, the sky opening up with a furious wind that whipped the snow around their heads like Dorothy’s twister. How many times did he see The Wizard of Oz on those fucking Movie Fridays with Kate Reese and her weird son?

  You miss her, Jerry.

  But she doesn’t miss you.

  That voice. That pain-in-the-ass voice. It told him, go ahead. Drink all night. Gamble. Take road trips. Fish with the guys. Hunt with your cousins. Nothing you do will ever take this thought away.

  She’s the best you’ll ever get, Jerry. And she’s gone.

  He knew that Kate Reese was out there, somewhere. She was probably with some new guy. Letting him have her body. Touching him everywhere. The feeling made him sick. It made his stomach angry. He had to get to the casino floor. Get a real drink. Make it stop.

  “Sally, hurry the fuck up,” he shouted.

  “You try to walk on this shit in heels,” Sally barked.

  The doors opened to a cloud of cigarette smoke hovering over the white noise of slots and video poker. Sally had to pee. Of course. It was barely 10:00 a.m., but Jerry sat at the bar and guzzled a double Tanqueray with a little tonic water. The drink burned like a good workout, but it still wasn’t enough. He needed a distraction to get rid of that voice. He looked around and found that someone had left a newspaper on the bar.

  It was some Pittsburgh newspaper.

  From a couple of months ago.

  Jerry looked for the sports page, but of course, some low-life had already grabbed it. So, he leafed through the rest of the rag. The Middle East crisis was still going on. Jesus. That’s still considered news? Tell me when the crisis stops. Then, I’ll buy a paper. And the refugees? I have an idea. Get on your feet and start walking north. How fucking hard is that to figure out? Who sits still when the world is coming to an end around them? Fucking idiots. That’s who.

  Jerry turned the page to the life section and saw a headline, “Boys Find Skeleton in Woods.” He was about to look down at the picture when Sally walked up with her caked-on face and an empty bladder.

  “God, it smells like hell in there,” she said.

  Jerry threw down the newspaper and threw himself into blackjack. It wasn’t usually his game, but something told him to sit down and start small. Call it a voice. He split two queens and remembered how Kate Reese told him that the queen’s face on a playing card was the portrait of Queen Elizabeth. He got two aces and won a hundred bucks. He ordered another gin and tonic. Kate said that the drink was invented by British soldiers in some war or another. The tonic water prevented malaria somehow.

  You miss her, Jerry.

  She’s fucking somebody else, Jerry.

  Jerry ordered two more drinks over Sally’s objections that it wasn’t even noon, and he was already getting drunk. But he didn’t care
. Because that pain-in-the-ass voice had a different edge to it today. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something that made him feel invincible.

  So, he decided to take it out for a spin.

  He looked at the cards on the table. The dealer gave him a pain-in-the-ass 13. But for some reason, he just knew it would be okay. Fuck it. There’s four 8s in the deck, right? He hit, and he got his 8. Another 21. Another fifty bucks. He did it again with a 12. And again with an 18. A crowd began to gather around him. He knew what they were all thinking. Who is this low-life in the Lions cap with this trashy slut, who looks like she learned how to put on her makeup at a clown college?

  I’ll tell you who I am, assholes.

  I’m the motherfucker who can’t lose today.

  The voice told him to only bet ten bucks on the next hand. Sure enough, he busted. His gut told him to play five hundred on the next. Blackjack. A girl clapped behind him. Some pretty Indian—Squaw, not Bombay—holding her own copy of that same old Pittsburgh newspaper in her sharp red fingernails. He wondered why everyone had all these old newspapers lying around until a voice brought him back.

  “Blackjack!”

  It went on like that for hours. The pit boss changed dealers to make his streak go cold. They shut down the table and made him move. They made it six decks instead of one, thinking maybe he was counting cards. Whatever they did, it didn’t matter.

  You can’t lose, Jerry.

  At 5:00 p.m., Jerry stood up on drunken legs and wandered over to the roulette wheel. Sally told him not to push his luck, but he stopped listening to anything but that voice in his head. The first number he played was 9. When he hit on 9, even Sally shut the fuck up. The guys at the bar had told him about this kind of streak. He had never seen one. Not even from the cheap seats. But right now, he was unbeatable. The voice told him to bet twenty bucks on black. Ten on red. Sit one out. It hit green. The hot Indian girl sidled up next to him. She put her newspaper down on the ground and locked her high heels into the chair for some serious gaming.

  “Mind if I read your paper?” Sally asked, bored as a high school girl watching her boyfriend play video games.

  The hot Indian girl handed it over. Sally looked at the paper. Nothing on Hollywood. Just some boring story about four little boys finding a skeleton in the woods in Western Pennsylvania.

  “Oh, this little boy is so cute,” Sally said, pointing to the picture. “Look, Jerry.”

  “Sally, would you shut the fuck up?” Jerry said, putting his money down on 33.

  “Thirty-three!” the hot Indian girl yelled.

  You can’t lose, Jerry.

  Jerry closed his eyes as the ball ran around the roulette wheel. He saw Kate Reese’s face in his mind. The apartment empty the morning after she snuck away. What did he do that night that was so terrible? He hit her, yes, but he said he was sorry, and he actually meant it. So, fuck her if she didn’t believe him. Fuck that bitch.

  You miss her, Jerry.

  You want to find her.

  “Four!” the hot Indian girl yelled.

  By midnight, the pit boss called over the manager, who comped Jerry a room on the spot with a politician’s smile and a douche’s handshake. The hot Indian girl got up and congratulated him on the streak of all streaks. She had spent the entire time losing, but for some reason, she kept playing right next to him. All day. With a seemingly never-ending supply of chips. Maybe she was another plant of the casino. Maybe she was a prostitute. All he knew was that she was hot as hell. She got up from the table, leaving the old newspaper at his feet. He picked it up and called out to her.

  “Excuse me, miss? You forgot your paper.”

  She walked back to him and flashed him a smile and a dirty little look.

  “Jerry, do you know what the numbers on a roulette table add up to?” she asked.

  “No. Why don’t you tell me over breakfast?” he said.

  He couldn’t believe his balls. But there it was. The invitation hanging in the air like the cloud of cigarette smoke. He thought Sally would claw his eyes out with her press-on nails for saying it. But “Mustang Sally” was oddly quiet. The hot Indian girl smiled at him so wide that he thought she’d run out of teeth.

  You can’t lose, Jerry.

  The three of them went up to the comped suite and opened a bottle of complimentary champagne. The hot Indian girl turned on the television because she said she could be a “little loud.” Around 3:00 a.m., the television station started playing the local news from the tristate area. Jerry could hear the news anchor blah blahing about a terrible traffic accident involving the boy who had won the lottery for his mother back in September and found the skeleton in November, but never turned around to see the actual footage. He was too busy watching the girls licking champagne off each other as the wind pummeled the large windows with the view of downtown Wheeling. Jerry crammed as much sex into one night as he possibly could, but every time he slowed down, even for a moment, the voice returned.

  You miss her, Jerry.

  You have to find her, Jerry.

  Jerry woke up an hour before dawn. He might have had thirty minutes of sleep at most, but for some reason, he was wide awake. He drank the last of the warm, flat champagne to get rid of his splitting headache. He had been hungover before. Sometimes when he was still drunk. But this headache was different somehow. It felt personally pissed at him or something. Like he’d fucked the headache’s wife. He heard Sally in the shower, but the hot Indian girl was long gone. He expected her to have robbed him blind, or maybe taken a thousand bucks for “services rendered” if she was indeed a professional, but she didn’t even steal one poker chip.

  But she did leave her old newspaper behind.

  You miss her, Jerry.

  You want to find her, Jerry.

  She’s fucking some other guy, Jerry.

  The bitch is laughing at you right now, Jerry.

  After the streak of streaks, the voice had come back as mean as a snake. The only thing he could do to get Kate out of his mind was read that old newspaper from the fall. He skimmed through a weather forecast predicting this would be an unseasonably mild winter. Great work, Kreskin. He was about to turn to the life section when he thought to skip ahead to sports. Luckily for him, the hot Indian girl’s newspaper was intact.

  About halfway through a story about the Pittsburgh Steelers’ quest for another Super Bowl (try being a Lions fan, assholes), Sally came out of the shower, crying her eyes out. Jerry realized that when the booze wore off, so did the “Mustang” part of Sally. And whatever part of her was actually bi-curious was no match for her Catholic school upbringing in Flint.

  “It’s Christmas Eve. I need to go home,” she said.

  “Okay, Sally. Let’s go,” he said.

  He left the newspaper in the hotel room. Facedown.

  As he walked through the cloud of cigarette smoke on the casino floor for the last time, he looked around for the hot Indian girl. He realized he didn’t even know her name. Maybe she was a mirage, like in that song, Hotel California. He hummed his own version. Welcome to the Hotel West Virginia. Such a shitty place. Such a shitty face.

  The casino doors opened like a mouth and puked them outside. The fresh air was sweet. Pure, dry, and clean as the moonlight peeking through the clouds.

  He walked slowly through the parking lot. The wind swept across his face. And it smelled like something. He was probably hungover still. But for some reason, he thought of being a little kid going hunting for the first time. That smell of the woods mixed with powder burns and beer. He couldn’t stop thinking about his mom’s old boyfriend who taught him how to shoot. The really bad one who also taught him how not to be afraid of a baseball by throwing them at his head.

  He groaned when he saw his car. Some asshole had put one of those stupid flyers in his windshield wiper. When he got a little closer, he realized it wasn’t a Jiffy Lube coupon or a We-Buy-Junk-Cars ad. It was a set of four index cards. They were attached to some
thing hanging off them with strings. The wind kicked it up, and Jerry saw four colored deflated rubber things slapping the side of his Chevy.

  They were four popped balloons.

  Jerry looked at the cards.

  Sir or Madam:

  You have found balloons for the Mill Grove Elementary School Balloon Derby. Please contact us at your earliest convenience, so our students can see how far their balloons went. Thank you very much.

  Jerry turned the cards over and saw a bunch of names that meant nothing to him. Matt something. Mike something. Eddie who-gives-a-shit. He was about to throw away the cards when the wind whipped a cold snap through his jacket. The hunting smell was all over him. And that little voice inside his head told him to just look at the last card before he threw them all away. His hands shivered as he turned it over and read the last name.

  Christopher Reese

  It’s your lucky day, Jerry.

  Chapter 72

  The nice man led Christopher under a thick knot of trees and down an old path, worn and weathered by time. He moved some dead brush out of the way to reveal a fresh trail hidden behind it. Christopher looked at the clouds above the Mission Street Woods. The moonlight trapped inside them like a lantern. The hissing lady was spreading everywhere. Something terrible was coming.

  It means you’re dying.

  The nice man’s words echoed through Christopher’s mind as they came to the old abandoned refrigerator. Big and white like an “icebox” in the old movies his mother loved. Its rusted chrome reminded Christopher of Jerry’s old Chevy in the driveway.

  Jerry is coming…

  Jerry is coming…to kill my mother.

  Christopher had to get out of the imaginary world. He had to get out and save her.

  “Here we are,” the nice man whispered.

  The nice man opened the refrigerator door with a squeeeak. The refrigerator had no backing. Just a huge patch of dirt.