up some candy wrappers I forgot to hide. “Did you eat these before bed? What did you expect with all that sugar in your system? And what have I told you about leaving food in your room? It attracts pests! This is why I had to have the old house fumigated for the new owners!” she lectured, while the second little creature looked up at me and asked, “Am I a pest? Is she blind? Are you crazy?”
I looked back at Mom as she got to her classic, “I’m not a maid service, Slim.” Lucy popped her head in the room to check out the commotion. I had never been so happy to see her. Surely, she’d be able to see these little creatures and prove I wasn’t losing my mind.
But Lucy just looked at the mess and said, “He actually has a whole candy stash hidden in here.” She’s such a tattletale. Normally I would have snapped at her, but instead I sneezed.
“Lucy, go and get ready for school,” said Mom. Lucy stomped off down the hall as another voice entered the fray.
I turned in horror – yet another furry little creature had formed! This one had a huge trapdoor-like mouth, a pink hue and a smug look as it loudly started saying things as if it had a Twitter feed to my innermost thoughts. It pointed at me and screamed, “He’s lonely. He deletes his internet history!”
My response was a swift kick. The creature flew across the room and splatted against the wall like those goo-filled balls that stick where they splat until you pull them off or they peel off on their own. This furry little thing did just that, taking my life-size Spider-Man poster off the wall with it. The creature landed on the floor, unsplatted and unhurt, right in front of the previously hidden safe space cubbyhole. After it basically reinflated itself, it pointed and shouted, “He hides the candy in there!” as Mom picked the poster up off the floor.
But it didn’t focus on any point for very long. It was too obsessed with cataloguing all my subconscious concerns to even pause. “He’s ugly. He smells weird. He only has two Instagram followers!”
I began to hyperventilate. My face was flushed and the room was spinning a bit. “Why do you change colour?” asked the asking one.
Mom pinned the poster back on the wall and grabbed up the dirty laundry still on the floor, saying, “This room is a disaster.” She saw me breathing heavily and rushed over, sitting me on the bed. “It’s okay, Slim. You’re having a panic attack. Just breathe through it. Do you want me to get your Xanax?” I shook my head no because I knew what a panic attack was and this was not that. I would have preferred a panic attack to whatever this was.
“Just look at me, okay. Focus on me. Everything is fine,” she continued. “None of this is worth getting worked up over. Just breathe.”
I wanted to argue, but Mom was looking at me with her constant frenzied but exhausted concern.
I closed my eyes and breathed slowly and tried to calm my system, but when I opened my eyes, the creatures were still there and still making noises, asking questions and revealing all my worst thoughts about myself. I really wanted someone to see them too. I wanted to shout that there were monsters in the room. But I knew she wouldn’t understand. I knew I’d just get more of that look, and I knew behind it she was thinking, Why can’t you just be normal? So instead what came out was, “There are … there are … there are … more candy wrappers on the nightstand.” She exhaled and her shoulders slumped, and I lied some more. “I’m … okay. You’re right. It’s just a … panic attack.” It was easier that way.
“Okay. Good. You’re okay,” she said as if she were trying to believe it as hard as I was trying to convince her. And with a tired sigh, she got off the bed, still holding my dirty laundry, and picked up the candy wrappers. “It’s time to get ready for school.”
She kissed the top of my head, which I naturally shrank away from, and left me alone with my monsters. “He’s uncomfortable with physical displays of affection!” shouted the tattletale one, pointing at me.
“What’s affection? Can I have some? Why are you staring at us?” asked the curious one. I didn’t want to respond. I didn’t want to indulge them. Hallucinating was new to me. I didn’t want to make it any worse. BEEP CRASH THUD SNIKT added the noisy one, and I realised it was high time to get the heck out of my room.
“Should we come with you?” was the last question I heard as I hurried into the bathroom. I hopped in the shower and turned the hot water way up. Maybe somehow, I could wash away this waking nightmare. But no such luck. “What’s this do?” I could hear the curious one asking from the other side of the shower curtain as it flushed the toilet. Followed by the noisy one going FLUSH FLUSH FLUSH as if it were a symphony of porcelain thrones.
“He pees in it!” shouted the tattletale one. Then I could see its silhouette point in my direction as it added, “And in the shower!”
I shut my eyes and took a deep breath, letting the water run hot enough to hurt a little. “It will all be okay,” I told myself. “They aren’t real. Just ignore them and they’ll go away.” I stood, head bowed, in the rushing water, trying to will these statements to be true. And when I opened my eyes again, their silhouettes were gone. I peeked out nervously from behind the shower curtain, but there were no monsters in the bathroom. I let out a huge sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God,” I said as I turned the water off and grabbed a towel. “I can’t handle a total psychotic break today.”
“What’s God?” came a voice above me. Startled, I slipped and fell out of the shower, onto the floor, pulling the curtain, curtain rod and the creatures that had crawled up onto it down on top of me. The curious one hopped over me into the tub and the other two followed. They squirted shampoo until the bottle was almost empty. It made a fart-like sound, which instantly set off the noisy one. As it blew raspberries at the top of its lungs, the curious one looked up at me and asked, “Are you God?”
But I didn’t have a chance to even try to answer. The tattletale one shouted, “He doesn’t know! Nobody does!” My face dropped as I realised these symptoms wouldn’t be going away any time soon. The tattletale’s round little ears twitched as if tuning into my thoughts like a stethoscope to a heartbeat and then it smiled and said, “Now he’s wondering if there even is a God – and why it hates him.”
I stood up with a heavy sigh of defeat, followed by another SIGH. But this one was from the noisy creature, inflating and deflating its bullfrog throat with the sound of my dismay. They all climbed out of the shower and onto the toilet to get closer to my face. The curious one wondered the exact same thing that I was wondering: “What are you going to do now?” And I surprised it and myself by knocking them all into the toilet, grabbing a plunger, and squishing them down into the bowl, as hard as I could. I slammed the lid, hit the handle and tried to flush them away for good.
I ran out of the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind me for good measure. My mother must have heard me moving because she yelled at me to hurry up. “Breakfast is getting cold!” I got back to my bedroom, got dressed and started gathering my things for school as if on autopilot. When my brain is overloaded and I feel like I’m about to fall apart, I resort to routines. I go through the motions of my normal daily activities as best I can until I start to feel myself even out again.
And that meant going to school. Because school was normal. And even though I was seeing annoying little monsters, that didn’t mean I had to treat them like they were really there. I could ignore them. I had a lifetime of practice ignoring things that bother me. The chaos of bus rides and classes and students and teachers – the daily onslaught of external distractions would erase these delusions from my brain. Yeah, maybe I should have realised that my brain wasn’t necessarily operating at full capacity, and maybe I should have remembered I’m not actually very good at ignoring the things that bother me, and maybe I should have tried to stay home sick or something, but I wasn’t really in a rational, think-things-through headspace.
“He’s trying to get rid of us!” said the tattletale as all three sopping wet monsters sloshed back into my room. I supposed I never really believed I could just flush them away. I took the textbook I’d been busy shoving into my backpack and slammed it down