Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend by Matthew Green

desk. It’s almost too clean.
    I look from one side of the room to the other and then back again. Graham is not here. I look in the corner behind the bookshelf and in the coatroom. She is not there.
    The children are sitting in their rows, staring at Mrs Pandolfe, who is standing at the front of the classroom. She is pointing at a calendar and talking about the date and the weather. The chart paper with the list of this week’s spelling words is gone.
    I see Meghan. She sits near the back of the classroom. Her hand is raised. She wants to answer Mrs Pandolfe’s question about the number of days in October.
    It’s thirty-one. I know that answer.
    I don’t see Graham.
    I want to walk over to Meghan and ask her if she stopped believing in her imaginary friend last night.
    ‘Did you stop believing in the pointy-haired girl who kept you company when you didn’t know how to talk and everyone made fun of you?’
    ‘Did you forget about your friend when you forgot how to stutter?’
    ‘Did you even notice that she was fading away?’
    ‘Did you kill my friend?’
    Meghan can’t hear me. I’m not her imaginary friend. Graham is.
    Graham was.
    Then I see her. She’s standing just a few steps away from Meghan, near the back of the class, but I can barely see her. I was looking right through her, straight through to the windows, and I didn’t even know it. It’s like someone painted her picture on the window a long time ago and now it’s all faded and worn. I don’t think I would have even noticed her, had she not blinked. It was the movement that I saw first. Not her.
    ‘I didn’t think you’d see me,’ Graham says.
    I don’t know what to say.
    ‘It’s all right,’ Graham says. ‘I know how hard it is to see me. When I opened my eyes this morning, I couldn’t see my own hands at first. I thought I had disappeared.’
    ‘I didn’t know you sleep,’ I said.
    ‘Yeah. Of course I do. You don’t?’
    ‘No,’ I say.
    ‘Then what do you do when Max is asleep?’
    ‘I hang out with his parents until they go to sleep,’ I say. ‘Then I go for walks.’
    I don’t tell her about my visits to the gas station on the corner and Doogies and the hospital and the police station. I have never told any imaginary friends about my visits. I feel like they are mine. My own special thing.
    ‘Wow,’ Graham says, and I notice for the first time that her voice is starting to fade, too. It sounds wispy and thin, like she’s talking through a door. ‘I never knew that you didn’t need to sleep. I feel bad for you.’
    ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘What good is sleep?’
    ‘When you sleep, you dream.’
    ‘ You dream?’ I ask.
    ‘Of course,’ Graham says. ‘Last night I dreamed that Meghan and I were twin sisters. We were playing in the sandbox together, and my fingers could touch the sand. I could hold it in my hands and let it run though my fingers, just like Meghan does.’
    ‘I can’t believe you dream,’ I say.
    ‘I can’t believe you can’t.’
    Neither one of us says anything for a minute.
    There is a boy at the front of the classroom named Norman, and he is talking about his visit to a place called Old Newgate Prison. I know what a prison is, so I know that Norman is lying about his trip. Kids aren’t allowed to visit prisons. But I can’t figure out why Mrs Pandolfe isn’t making Norman tell the truth. If Mrs Gosk heard Norman telling this story, she would say, ‘Shame! Shame! Let all the boys and girls know your name!’ Then Norman would have to tell the truth.
    Norman has a rock in his hand, and he says it came from the prison. He says it came from a mine . That doesn’t make any sense, either. A mine is a bomb that soldiers bury in the ground so that when other soldiers pass by, they will step on it and blow up. Max pretends to dig minefields for his toy soldiers, so that’s how I know. So how could Norman get a rock from a mine?
    But Norman has everyone fooled, because all the kids in the class want