In the playground, fads come and go consistently, without apparent supervision, like waves on a beach. We had Pokémon, we had Furbies; we had aliens encased in strange plastic eggs. Then at some point, when we were five, imaginary friends took off as a craze. People would save spaces at the lunch table for someone no one else could see. Girls would sit on the climbing frame, plaiting hair that looked like air to those without an imagination.
No one wanted to be that—a child without an imagination. It made you no fun to play with. It meant you got excluded from certain games. Some of those who said they had imaginary friends didn’t really have any specific vision of what this friend might be like, nor did they really care for the craze at all. Desperately dull girls like Claudia couldn’t even make up a good story when playing with a doll’s house; how could they conjure up a whole person?
Some of the die-hard fans, the revolutionaries with sparky minds and endless originality, may have taken their imaginary friends home for dinner, shared a bath with them, and read them bedtime stories. But the majority were probably scattered somewhere between the two extremes. They could imagine something, if not necessarily a fully formed person, but when school ended, that was that. The friend was left behind at the gates, without a thought, until the next morning, when the craze demanded that they reappear. That was why this fad was terrifying; amid a constant onslaught of daily change and childhood adaptation, one thing had stayed weirdly constant in my life. For as long as I could remember, I wasn’t me, I was we.
Two of us sat side by side in my head, woven together, inseparable. She didn’t even have a name; she was just She. Really, it was hard to say where She ended and I began. But food was not shared with her. She did not play tag and never required a seat. She was, by her very essence, nothing like these imaginary friends. She was just there.
One was not proud of her, in the same way as one is not proud of a liver, and there was no need to show her off, nor tell anyone She existed.
But though her differences were concerning (why did other kids insist on parading their friends around? Were they just for show? Couldn’t they see it didn’t have to be a competition?), they were nothing compared to the fad’s main implication. Because a fad demands that something that wasn’t there before come into existence; and that meant only one thing. Normal children didn’t have two people in their heads.
Which meant I must be very different, for mine was not the sort of friend to be left behind at the gates.