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Larry’s feelings about being imaginary had been very simple B.F. (Before Francis). He’d loved Darwin, of course, but he’d always cultivated other friends. His whole persona --flashy clothes, over-the-top antics, a loud, ringing voice-- was designed to grab the attention of anyone who could see him. He hadn’t been consciously planning his exit from Darwin’s life when he was too old to believe in him, but Larry couldn’t deny that it had crossed his mind. He’d thought that maybe he could be with the little girl with the big red glasses and the feathers she liked to tie in her hair. If she wasn’t looking for a new friend, well, there was the boy he always saw trying to do handstands on the library lawn… or perhaps he would do both, going from house to house like cats sometimes did. Hedge his bets.
He never really believed that he would, though. Larry had always been more attached to Darwin than he should have been.
When Larry had first met her, Zoe’s confident knowledge of their existence had seemed arrogant, but he’d since come to appreciate her expertise. In spite of the patronizing sauce in which it was served, Zoe’s advice was always solid. She’d become the mirror that he bounced his stray thoughts against.
When he tentatively explored the idea that his connection with Darwin might be unusual, she’d raised a surprised and sardonic eyebrow. “That’s why we became Boogies,” Zoe had informed him, her voice calm and cultured. What had been an infuriating mannerism, Larry now found comforting in its steadiness. “We were too attached.”
“Too attached?” Larry had repeated, trying on the concept of being detached from his friend, his creator, his Darwin. It couldn’t be done. “That’s what we’re for. To love them.”
Zoe had laughed, and kept her eyes on the sky. “I’m not criticizing you. I’d be one to talk, really. I’m haunting poor Francis like a ghost, and she’ll never see me again.”
They were relaxing on the roof of the McCausland house, the stars pinwheeling slowly above them as they wait for their kids to wake. Looking at Zoe’s apricot hair, so close to Francis’s, Larry wondered how it felt to be made by someone and then move on from them. If you changed to match a new set of expectations, or just found a child malleable enough to not know the difference between someone else’s dreams and their own.
“Why don’t you get a new friend?” Larry had asked, knowing it was rhetorical even as the words left his mouth. Zoe came with him when he went to the library for story hour to recharge herself, but she never seemed to find anyone special. “New friends keep you young.”
Smiling a little, she finally turned to look at him. “Larry, whatever made you think I want to stay young? I’m just glad not to be a Boogey any longer.” Her voice went slightly softer. “It was amazing, to have Francis see me one last time. I feel… bound to her, still. Even though she can’t see me. Is that strange?”
“I felt connected to Darwin, even when he couldn’t see me.” Larry reminded her, and Zoe had nodded and turned back to the sky.
“So you see what I mean, then,” She’d said, to herself, or the night-- not really to Larry. “We love them too hard.”
Larry realizes that Francis can feel him the day that Darwin gets his first zit.
It’s up behind his ear, near the hairline, and Larry’s positive that Darwin doesn’t even notice it. It’s the thing Larry’s been dreading, the start of the clock.
They’d already made it longer than he’d expected to, especially given how scientifically minded all the McCauslands were. It wasn’t just Darwin’s leukemia and the illusion of control being ‘logical’ gave them; they had always been that way. They liked things to make sense, to have steps you could follow to duplicate results. They liked lists.
Imagination didn’t really do well on an excel spreadsheet.
Larry was walking through the house in some of his casual clothes (a mismatched pair of flip flops, 1970s running shorts in hot pink, and a half open button up shirt covered in flamingos) when he found Francis laying on the carpet in the living room next to an open photo album, talking to herself.
“--drives me nuts. Every time I do anything they don’t approve of, I’m being ‘childish’ and making them ‘question if I’m mature enough for high school’. Newsflash! I’ve been in high school for almost a year, and of course I’m childish, I’m a child!” She had a hand buried in her hair and was tugging at the roots, occasionally drawing her fingers through it to work and loose hairs free. Because he saw her every day, Larry hadn’t noticed how she’d changed, but he couldn’t imagine the Francis he’d met at the start of the school year calling herself a child. She’d had her hair cut in a soccer mom bob, and every outfit she’d worn seemed to incorporate slacks and a vest. It was like she was dressing up as an office worker, aping the mannerisms of an adult so people would treat her like one and not realize how scared she was. Now she was wearing a yellow T-shirt with what looked like a child’s finger painting on the front of it, and her bare knees jutted from holes in her jeans. Her hair had started to grow out, and when she flicked her fingers to shake the errant hairs she’d winnowed out off of her hand, Larry noticed that she’d painted them a bright, glittery green.
Every aspect of her appearance had, objectively, regressed, but Larry found that somehow, her overall impression was more mature. It didn’t feel like she was a little girl playing dress-up anymore. “So what if I want to take some fun classes this semester? ‘You’re being too emotional’,” Francis continued, in a whining imitation of her mother’s voice. “Which, no, I actually do want to take creative writing and art, I don’t need physics to graduate, but even if I was being emotional, I think being upset about being accused of masterminding some kind of vandalism ring by my favorite teacher is a valid reason to be upset.”
Larry dropped down at her head, cross-legged, and examined her face. He could see so much Zoe in her, how Zoe had come to be. Elegant and mature, but theatrical, prone to grand gestures. What Francis had imagined an older girl should be, boiled down to its essence. “They like it when things are predictable. It feels safe,” Larry told her, even though she couldn’t hear him. “They used to be more adventurous, before Darwin got sick.”
Francis sighed, using her breath to blow a lock of hair from her face. “I know, they mean well, blah blah blah, but I feel… put in a box.” She put her hands out to mime a box around her body, and swept one palm against his cheek in a surprisingly loud slap.
They both froze.
Upon impact, Francis’s hand had automatically pulled back, her fingers curled in protectively. Letting out a slow breath, she moved it slowly towards Larry’s face.
There was nothing in his experience like the anticipation that he felt in the moment before she made contact again. There was a strange pressure in his stomach, like excitement, but less buoyant. He couldn’t categorize it.
Then her skin met his, and she breathed in sharply, and the feeling went. He was simply, radiantly happy.
“I can feel you.” She said in a whisper, as if voicing it too loudly might make it stop happening. “You’re smiling.”
Then Francis smiled too, but whatever feeling she was having seemed more complicated than his, because she seemed to be crying at the same time.
When her thumb drags over his lip as she feels his face, Larry felt the same confusing emotion twist in his stomach.
Middleburg had been just the beginning of the Boogey missions the guy in Larry’s head had for him, and they didn’t all end in emotional catharsis and redemption. There were children who couldn’t go back to believing. There were Boogies that were dangerous almost from the start. When Zoe had turned, most of her pranks had been relatively harmless and grown progressively darker as she became more and more jealous of Francis’s other relationships, but this didn’t seem to be the norm. Larry wondered what sort of a Boogey he would have been, if Darwin hadn’t believed in him again-- he feared he would have been much worse than Zoe.
Centerville is worse than most, and it’s where Larry finally puts a name to the feeling that’s been plaguing him. The Boogey they were dealing with had been the friend of a pair of twins, Kelly and Shelly-- one still believed, while the other didn’t, and he’d kept changing back and forth in Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde fashion.
“Don’t leave me,” One of the twins had begged, holding on to her friend’s pant leg as he attached the jumper cables of the tetra-fuse to himself. “Isn’t it enough that I believe in you?”
Her imaginary friend had smiled and pressed a hand to her face fondly. “You are enough for anyone,” He promised, then reached up to touch his mouth, distorted by the sharp, distended Boogey teeth. “But I can’t trust myself.”
She’d dissolved into sobs, and Larry’d turned on the tetra-fuse until her friend had aged almost out of existence. He knew what he’d felt then was sadness-- but when he’d looked at the girl’s face after it was over, anger and hatred writ plain as she stared at her sister, he’d felt that pressure in his stomach.
“Why are you crying?” The unbelieving twin asked, trying to haul her sister to her feet bodily. All she could see in the room was her sister, breaking down for no reason at all. “Get off the floor, you’re acting ridiculous.”
“I despise you,” Her sister had hissed, ripping her arm free, and Larry had believed her. “I will never forgive you for this.”
That was when the pressure came, and Larry knew what it was then. It was fear.
She means it, Larry thought, appalled at what was happening to this family. Afraid this would last forever.
He’d worried that mission like a dog with a bone, circling back in his mind, trying to find a better end than the one they’d ended up at, until Zoe had gotten sick of his ‘drama’ in the way that only a theater kid could.
“You’re becoming a real boy, Pinocchio,” She’d told him in her most condescending, eye-rolling voice. “And reality is messy and devastating. Stop rolling in it.”
“What do you mean, ‘a real boy’?” Larry’d demanded, and she’d smiled enigmatically, and disappeared into Francis’s room.
It only occurred to Larry then to wonder if Francis could feel Zoe, too.
Francis’s art class took over her life so completely that, by the end of the semester, it was difficult to remember the girl who had used the word ‘logical’ like a mantra. Her clothes were constantly glue and paint splattered, her paper crafts extended into the hallway, folded flowers on strings dangling down to bump the heads of everyone over five feet tall, and every wall in her room was hung with failed experiments.
They were failed only because they were unfocused, exploratory, not because she was bad. Larry loved everything she’d done with the loyalty of a mother admiring his child’s drawings on the refrigerator, but he could tell from the way the rest of her family looked at some of her attempts that eventually, Francis might be truly good .
“She was so… scientific,” He father had said almost mournfully, staring at a sketch of a bicycle that Francis had abandoned half-finished on the kitchen table so she could make daisy chains with Darwin on the lawn. Larry wondered if Francis, like him, was living in a new era-- After Larry. It was strange to think of himself that way; as something permanent.
It was impossible to ignore how many of her pieces seemed to be him. Most of them, so many that walking into her bedroom was like walking into a hall of mirrors. So many that Larry started to associate the sight of his own face with the smell of cheap acrylic paint.
She was frowning at the line of his jaw when Larry brushed her shoulder in greeting, and she’d smiled in an automatic, absent way. “My dad still lamenting my lack of STEM ambitions in the kitchen?”
This was a habit they’d fallen into, talking to each other as if the conversation was intelligible on both sides. Mr. McCausland tended to express his emotions through his cooking, and everything he’d made lately had been complex in an oddly chemical way.
“I did see him measuring lemon juice in beaker,” Larry replied, straddling her empty stool. Francis’s eyes tracked the slight movement of its wooden legs on the floor and then smiled at where she thought he was.
“This is all your fault,” She said, turning back to her painting. “If I’d never met you, I’d still be….” She shrugged her shoulders, unwilling to pin down how she saw the version of herself from the year before. “Thank you.”
“I think my eyes are bigger than that,” Larry told her, feeling strange about the way her eyes looked then. Somehow the color was off, skewing more gold than the brown they’d always been.
“Sometimes, I think I can see you,” Francis confessed, echoing his thoughts. “Just out of the corner of my eyes, but…” She shrugged again, and outlined his eyes in black paint. Larry thought that her hair seemed even longer now, and straighter-- that her legs might be longer. Children changed at high speed, but this wasn’t growth as he knew it.
“She’s an artist,” Zoe replied dismissively when Larry expressed his concerns. “She’s just trying to expand her ways of seeing. I’m sure it’ll wear off.”
She was in her most theatrical, Shakespearean clothes, so elegantly layered in lace that Larry felt he could be excused for not immediately noticing that she was-- just ever so slightly-- transparent.
“Oh, it’ll wear off?” Larry asked, jumping to his feet in agitation, “LIKE YOUR OPACITY?”
Zoe didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed. “I’m impressed you knew the noun form of that word.” She said, with all apparent sincerity. Larry scowled at her, and she rolled her eyes. “I told you I didn’t plan on staying young.”
“So you’re… what? Merging with her?” He ran his hands over his head, feeling frantic energy pulse through his body and that now-familiar pressure in his gut, needing to do something but not having anything to do.
“Well, we’re very similar,” Zoe said, her tone a little defensive, as if Larry would argue with her, but he’d always seen the parts of herself that Francis had put into her. “More so now that she’d begun to expand her horizons. Darwin’s starting to grow up…”
Somewhere between the lines, there was the memory of that girl in Centerville, crying her eyes out. “You don’t have to do that. I can make new friends.” Larry promised, because he could, he just… hadn’t.
“It’s what I want.” Zoe insisted calmly. “It’s what she wants.”
Larry blew out a breath and made a sound like a horse. “How do you even know how to do that?”
Zoe shrugged in a mirror image of Francis in front of that painting. “I found a book at the library.”
The day that Zoe disappeared completely, they stayed up all night watching the stars. Larry had been trying to memorize her since he’d found out what she was doing, but it was impossible to tell what parts of her had been like Francis from the start. They’d already begun to bleed together by the time he started really looking at her.
“I don’t want to forget you.” Larry had told her when she’d called him on his staring, and she’d laughed. Being forgotten was what happened to every imaginary person-- that she should be any different was a strange idea. “Her parents think she’s going through a phase,” Zoe confided, clear as a piece of cellophane. “It won’t be.”
Larry grinned, imaging Francis in one of Zoe’s Baroque outfits, and her parents’ reactions. It was hard to be sad to lose Zoe when it seemed like she was going to become something every imaginary friend, in their secret hearts, wanted to be. Permanent.
When Francis woke that morning, she felt like she could see different colors. Her art teacher loved to tell them about the subjectivity of color, and the animals that could see entire spectrums that they couldn’t. Bees and goldfish and a million other animals that probably didn’t appreciate what they had. Or it wasn’t the colors, it was the light itself that seemed different-- warm but fractured like it was filtered through a crystal. Or it was her eyes.
It felt like getting a new prescription for her contacts, like they couldn’t quite focus right, for the first half of the day-- and then they adjusted, and the world opened up before her like a huge, sprawling circus.
Not everything she saw seemed to be a person-- some of them were only outlines, the concept of someone-- but many of them were fully realized, and just as vibrant as Larry and Zoe. Their companion’s staid, jeans and T-shirt ensembles looked positively drab in comparison.
Do I look that frumpy? Francis wondered, stopping in front of a window to assess her puffy shorts and striped tights. She judged herself to be somewhere in the middle, fashion-wise, and found that she liked that concept of herself.
Giving the rest of her body a quick glance, Francis blinked, trying to refocus her eyes, but nothing changed. Her hair was its usual apricot color, but it seemed to have grown two inches overnight, and was as straight as if she had flat ironed it. Francis got dressed in her bedroom and usually only consulted a mirror when trying a particularly adventurous hairstyle-- she simply hadn’t looked at herself that day. Now she examined the lines of her face, her proportions, and found herself somehow older.
“Oh, ” Francis realized, remembering her strange feeling when she’d woken, and the way she’d wanted to wear ribbons in her hair lately. “Zoe…”
Without considering the consequences of cutting the second half of her school day, Francis went home. Everything seemed to be swaying around her, and she found herself questioning every aspect of reality. Had her shadow always stretched so long? Had the grass always been such a violent, stabbing shade of green?
It was hard for her to believe that Larry was sitting on their doorstep. She’d been wanting Larry for so long that he looked like a mirage to her, the reality of his face so different from her recreations. There were a million little details that she’d missed, from the length of his eyelashes to the eye-catching horror of his outfit. That convinced her of his reality as nothing else could-- Her subconscious would never have put him in that powdered wig and lace cravat, for one thing.
She wondered if it was her older body that reacted to him with such strength, her heart pounding in her chest so fiercely it felt like the world was tilting. Francis opened her mouth, then shut it, and walked forward. There was nothing in her head but a buzzing noise, no words. Larry pushed his round blue sunglasses up into his wig to stare at her focused gaze, his expression apprehensive and hopeful.
And it turned out she didn’t have to say anything.
When he’d kissed her before, Francis had just stood there. It had been something so far removed from anything she’d ever imagined or experienced before that she’d had no other option but to just absorb the experience.
Now she leaned into it, trying to impress every aspect of what was happening into her mind, in case-- well. In case. She wanted to remember the warmth of the skin of the back of his neck, the strange way his breath smelled like those candy necklaces… He must have been doing the same, because they were both out of breath when they pulled apart.
Larry blinked in a slightly stunned way before he blinded her with a smile. “You can see me!” He confirmed, and Francis felt her eyes fill even as an answering grin started to crack her face. Having never been an attractive crier, she resigned herself to being blotchy.
“I can.” She confirmed, and felt a sort of sorrow bleed into her joy. “But, Zoe… I’m not sure how to miss someone who is myself.”
Larry’s face dropping from open delight into solemnity so fast he might have strained a muscle in his cheek. “Zoe… She told you she’d always be with you, right?” At her nod, Larry shrugged and tried for a half smile. “Well… She’s with you.”
“I’m half imaginary.” Francis said, just to hear it. She wondered if she could become invisible now. “I feel like a mythical creature.”
“You’re an artist.” Larry told her in mock gravity. “They’re all like that.”
With an elaborate bow he offered her his hand, and Francis bobbed a mock curtsy before taking it, well aware that to the neighbors she seemed to be greeting thin air, and not able to care at all. “Eccentric.” Francis agreed, allowing Larry the honor of kissing her hand. “I shall be eccentric.”
“It’s no imaginary,” He conceded, opening the door for her with a flourish, “But it’s almost as good.”