“You just sneezed us out of your head!” replied the tattletale as it re-formed.
“Do you want us to get back in so we can get out again?” the curious one asked.
SLAM SLAM SLAM went the noisy one. I threw the book across the room in frustration and grabbed the purple furry noisemaker by its shoulders and tried to tear it apart. But it just stretched as wide as my arms could pull it and then it snapped back into shape like a rubber band as soon as I let it go.
“Slim! Let’s go. You’re going to miss your bus!” Mom shouted.
Seeing no other option, I threw my backpack on and hurried for the door – but the noisy one was blocking my way. BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH FLUSH FLUSH FLUSH FLUSH SNIKT SNIKT SNIKT SIGH. It made a shampoo-fart noise when I stomped it into the floor.
“He’s freaked out,” told the tattletale as the noisy one re-formed with a slurping sound I hoped against hope it wouldn’t start to imitate. “He’s afraid we’re going with him.”
“Why would he be afraid of us?” asked the curious one as they all followed me out of the door. “What could go wrong?”
As soon as I set foot on the bus, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. The constant noise. The snotty faces. The weird smells. The bus was a travelling circus of potentially irritating things – and I was trapped in the centre ring. The door SWOOSHED shut behind me. The noisy one immediately started SWOOSH SWOOSH SWOOSHING in response. I watched helplessly as Mom pulled away in the other direction to go to her renovation site, our old house. What I wouldn’t have given then to be able to go back to it. Things were so much simpler there. But I had no choice but to face my fate.
“Where are we going? What is this thing? Why are you cringing?” asked the curious creature as the bus driver shot me an impatient look and jerked his thumb towards an empty seat at the front. Lucy was watching me with either disgust or concern. It’s hard to tell with her. But she had already taken a seat in the middle with her new soccer friends. I ducked into my seat, but with my three monsters stuffed in with me, it felt a lot more cramped than sitting alone usually does. “He has no friends,” said the tattletale. “He stepped in gum. He—”
I stuck my fingers in my ears and clenched my eyes shut and I stayed like that all the way to school. When I felt the bus lurch to a stop, I ran off it so fast I actually wondered if I could lose these hallucinations if I just kept moving. But when I dared to look back, there they were, bounding right after me. There was no escape. I came to a dead stop in the middle of the foot traffic herding towards the front door of the school. No one else noticed the three annoying monsters on the sidewalk. How could no one else see these things?!
Maybe I was finally, really going insane.
“Why aren’t you moving?” asked the curious one.
“He doesn’t like us,” responded the tattletale.
The curious one seemed shocked and hurt by this. It looked up at me with its big, wide eyes and asked, “Why don’t you like us?” It sounded so sincere I almost felt bad for it, like it was real. But, as if answering on my behalf, the noisy one went back to BEEP BEEP BEEPING as if it couldn’t not make noise and that was its natural default. I slumped my shoulders and dragged myself into school with everyone else.
Even under the most normal circumstances, school was a challenge. But normally when I had serious anxiety or a full-blown panic attack, the things that triggered it were just temporary – like the booger that Otis flicked on me. Eventually, I could get away. But that wasn’t the case with these furry figments of my imagination.
The noisy one mimicked every locker slam and bag zipping I heard, loudly and proudly.
The curious one bounced around in front of me asking questions without seeming to breathe. “What’s homework? Can I eat that? Why are they staring at you?” The kids in the hall were giving me strange looks as I unsuccessfully tried to swat and kick away the monsters no one else could see.
The tattletale had somehow tapped a whole vein of new secrets and it couldn’t spill them fast enough. “He wet the bed till he was seven. He’s wearing yesterday’s underwear. He hoards Twizzlers.”
Mortified to hear all my shortcomings catalogued at full volume, even though no one else could hear any of this, I swung my backpack off my shoulder, unzipped it, dumped my books out and snatched up the tattletale in one swift motion. Then I zipped it shut, which muffled the blabbermouth enough to make its monologue of my secrets almost bearable. Unfortunately, I did this right on the perfectly trendy shoes of Heather Hu and her clonelike horde, who looked at me like … well, like I was nuts. “Here we have a garden variety dork in its native environment,” said Heather as she recorded my behaviour on her phone like it was some sort of demented nature documentary. The trendoids who followed her were delighted. I was just annoyed.
And then it happened again. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t stop it. I sneezed on her. And I have to admit it felt kind of good. She squealed and cursed and stomped away only to be replaced a moment later by a red-furred, blue-horned creature with an “over it” expression plastered on its face. The snarky-looking monster gave me a long side-eye glance and then rolled its eyes away and said, “Not even worth it.”
BRRRRING! The bell rang, warning me that I had to get to class. Heather’s horde stepped over my books, which I gathered frantically in my other hand as the curious creature wondered, “What’s a dork? Am I a dork? Is dork a bad thing?”
As I stumbled down the hall, I could hear the tattletale trying to comment on the situation, but thankfully its monologue was muffled inside my backpack. BRRRRING! I was already late! I started running past all the other kids who were still walking calmly to class and I tripped over someone’s bag on the floor, face-planting and skidding across the cold tiles to the utter joy of everyone who saw it. I rolled over to find the noisy one climbing onto my chest. It opened its trapdoor mouth and … BRRRRING! I smacked it away, splatting it against a locker. But by the time I got up and gathered my scattered books and dignity, the noisemaker had already peeled free from the lockers and re-formed like an inflating balloon. BRRRRING! But this time it actually was the bell and I actually was late.
I hurried into homeroom while Mrs Bowers’s back was turned and made it to my seat without getting caught for being tardy. I reached into my backpack to get a pen and inadvertently released the tattletale. It scrambled out and joined the other creatures all around my desk. As Mrs Bowers started roll call, I took a deep, cleansing breath, and tried to calm down and focus. I was almost getting used to the chorus of random noises and annoying questions and personal revelations from the monsters when a spine-tingling SNIFFLE cut through the ruckus. I looked at the noisy one accusingly, but its ears were aimed behind me, excited to hear a new noise to mimic.
I turned to glare at Otis Miller, and was surprised to see that this time he looked genuinely sick. He even had a mini-pack of tissues on his desk. Otis looked at me sheepishly. “My mom said without a fever I’m not contagious and can’t stay at home.”
Before I could respond, Mrs Bowers yelled, “MR PICKINGS!” I spun round to face the front and shouted “HERE!” while instantly fearing the use of my last name would inspire someone in this room to start in with the nose-picking taunts again. But Otis was too down with his cold to bother. Instead, he let out another shiver-inducing SNIFFLE SNIFFLE SNEEZE from behind me. I could feel little droplets of stray spittle hit my neck and reflexively spun round again to say something, but I just responded with a massive sneeze of my own.
“I knew I was contagious!” blurted Otis as he raised his hand. “Can I go to the nurse?”
Mrs Bowers dismissed