When I was nine or so, Mom washed Hobbes to death. She threw him into the washing machine with a few towels like she’d done lots of times before, but this time he busted up in there. When the wash was over, the towels were gummed up with tiger guts and tiger fur. Mom slowly pulled the mess out and into a basket, saying they were old towels anyway and maybe she’d just chuck the whole thing into the garbage and sorry, Calvin, I guess he just wore out.

Before Hobbes died I was one way, and after, I was different.

Before Hobbes died I wanted to win the Change the World Lottery. I wanted to be that person who does one thing that makes the world better. The world only spits up one of them every hundred years or so, and the odds were six billion to one that I’d win. Einstein won it with the theory of relativity, but given the lower population of the world, the odds when he was alive were slightly higher.

Before Hobbes died, I thought I could win that lottery. After Hobbes died, I started to see how dumb that was. I realized you have to be a freak of nature to win that lottery, I mean to really win. I wondered if it was worth it. Freakdom is a high price to pay for a ticket. I also began to wonder why I wanted to Change the World in the first place. Fame? Money? Was that any reason to want to Change the World?

Before Hobbes died, a cardboard box could be a time travel machine or a transmogrifier. After, it was just a cardboard box.

I noticed other things, too. After Hobbes died, I got scared of careening down steep hills in my wagon and on my sled. After Hobbes died, I wasn’t scared of the monsters under the bed anymore. I started to be afraid of climate change and nuclear bombs and all the things I heard on the news that didn’t go shrinking away when you turned on the light or your mom walked into the room.

Now I was seventeen and a tiger was talking to me and I wasn’t scared of the monsters under the bed. I was scared of the monster in the bed, which was me.

*   *   *

It took a while, but somehow I fell asleep that night.

The next morning I stepped out of bed and fell to my death and found out why people scream on their way down.

Then I woke up for real and put my feet on the floor and fell to my death and found out that even when you’ve done it before you still scream on the way down.

Mom yelled through the door.

Mom: Calvin, what’s going on? I called you three times. Hurry, you’re going to be late!

So I got out of bed and I could see atoms. No, for real. I could see all the atoms that make up the world, and when I stood on the floor it was like a trillion billion ball bearings were under my feet.

I showered and felt hydrogen and oxygen hitting in alternate streams of molecules and when I sat down to shovel in scrambled eggs I could almost hear the baby chicken atoms saying don’t eat me, but I ate them anyway and left for the bus.

Waiting with me at the bus stop in the rain, just out of my line of vision, was my buddy the man-eating tiger, Hobbes.

It was freaky in one way to have Hobbes there, but in another way it wasn’t horrible. Since my only friend, Susie, had made new friends, I hadn’t had anyone to hang out with for a long time. Now I had somebody to talk to, even if it was an imaginary tiger.

Hobbes started talking again clear as could be.

Hobbes: Lemme tell you what it was like to be washed to death. First you get a hole in you, and your guts start stretching out of you, and the hole gets bigger and the guts get longer, and soon you’re swirling in soapy water and your own guts and fur, and you turn inside out, and your eyeballs sink to the bottom of the washing machine, each eyeball all alone, and you can’t even see your other eyeball. And that’s it until your best friend is laughing at your lonely eyeballs.

Me: It did look kind of funny.

It had, but I’d still been pretty choked up about it at the time.

Hobbes: I think you should make it up to me. Skip school. Let’s play!

Me: Go away.

Hobbes: C’mon, buddy. We had good times. We will again. All the sled rides and the snowmen and the snowball fights and the forts.

Me: Remember I broke my arm and my leg last time we went sledding?

Hobbes: Remember all the adventures?

Me: All the fights.

Hobbes: All the exploring and climbing trees?

Me: All the trouble we got into.

Hobbes: Let’s run away.

Me: People will think I’m insane because you talk to me.

Hobbes: Since when did we care what people think?

Me: There’s more of them. The definition of sanity is a democratic thing. They get to decide.

Hobbes: We’ll have our own reality.

Me: You can’t have a reality all by yourself.

Hobbes: Why not?

Me: Because … because it’s like playing Calvinball. If you make up the rules as you go, nobody else gets it, nobody else can play with you, you never know when the game is over or if you won … It’s sort of pointless. And lonely.

Hobbes: You gave up on trying to win the Change the World Lottery.

Me: I could never win.

Hobbes: You should never give up on that.

Me: It’s too hard. Besides, now I have to figure out how to deal with my problem.

Hobbes: What problem?

Me: You. You are my problem.

Hobbes: Your imagination is a transmogrifier.

Me: The transmogrifier was just a cardboard box. I want you to leave me alone. Go away.

Hobbes: No.

Me: I made you up. I can make you go away.

But he didn’t go away, Bill. He stayed.