Page 26 of The Imaginary Friend's Obsession

* * *

I startle awake, head spinning. I’m back in the room at the MRF. Ezra has me by both arms and is shaking me as he shouts my name. My head lolls to the side, and I swear I see Dorian at the viewing panel. But when I turn that way, he’s gone again.

“I’m— I— What happened?” I ask, disoriented.

Ezra’s shoulders slump in relief as he lets me go. “Oh, thank God,” he says. “I’ve been trying to wake you up for five minutes. You went completely unresponsive.” He grabs a tissue and holds it out to me. I stare for a moment before I feel the trickle of blood from my nose and take the tissue to dab at it. As I do, I notice that my palms are bleeding too, scraped raw and pockmarked. I must’ve been gripping the edge of the table.

“That hasn’t happened before?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. “You usually talk to me while it’s happening. But this time you were completely gone.”

“It felt different,” I murmur, pressing the tissue against my nose. I almost forgot it was a memory; it was disorienting to jolt back to the present.

And Dorian was different in that memory, too. When we were children, he couldn’t touch my father. But as a teen, he was able to physically drive off those boys. He was so much stronger…yet still trapped on the grounds.

And I was trapped, too. With him and my parents. What a horrible irony that the MRF found a way to free Dorian, only to trap him here instead.

If not for the MRF, we could’ve lived together so happily once my parents were dead…

I jolt out of my thoughts. Ezra is still staring at me, brow furrowed with concern.

“If this is dangerous for you…” he says.

I shake my head. “It doesn’t seem dangerous,” I lie. “I feel like I’m moving forward. Like I’m starting to remember things.” I wipe my nose one last time, see no spots of new blood, and toss the dirty tissue into the wastebasket. “Did Dorian react?”

“I didn’t see him, but the EMF reading was going haywire, and the radio started playing a song.”

“Was it ‘Daisy Bell’?”

Ezra shakes his head. “No. ‘Run, Rabbit, Run!’”

“Hm.” I shrug. “Well… Those are good signs, right?”

Ezra huffs a strained laugh. “I don’t know anymore.”

“But it means Dorian’s getting stronger!”

Ezra still looks hesitant but nods. “I guess so.” He returns to his side of the table and sits down, flipping his notebook open. “Now, describe what you saw.”

As I give him a censored version of the memory—leaving out the fact that Dorian could physically harm people—I stare down at the dried blood on my tissue and return to that guilty thought again and again.

We could’ve been so happy together, once my parents were dead.

Chapter Fourteen

Days pass, and then weeks. Ezra continues to lead me through the endless hall of memories inside of my mind. I remember more of Dorian, both inside of the MRF and outside of it. I begin to put together the puzzle pieces of our past.

The more I remember about our friendship and his protectiveness over me, the lonelier I am every night I climb into bed alone. I stay awake, listening to the creaks and groans of the house and wishing he were here. Sometimes I think I hear the sound of music as I’m drifting to sleep. Sometimes it’s footsteps pacing up and down the hall, or the scrape of something metal dragging against the floorboards. Nightmares plague my sleep, but every time I wake up sweating and gasping, I can’t remember what I dreamed about.

Dorian’s presence in the cell is fleeting, evanescent. Occasionally, he plays a song on the radio, usually “Daisy Bell,” or sometimes flickers through stations. I always strain to hear a whisper of his voice or some hidden message, but I can’t.

Once or twice, I catch a glimpse of him through the window, always out of the corner of my eyes, and he’s gone when I turn my head.

Ezra assures me it’s good news, that the EMF spikes and the temperature drops whenever I’m present and talking. But Dorian is nowhere near as strong as he was in my memories. All I can do is press forward, hoping that something hidden in my mind will help me figure outwhy.

Yet I still haven’t found the courage to open that hatch to the attic in my mind, the one that frightens me so badly. And I can’t stop thinking about Dorian’s one clear message to me: his warning torun.

There must be more to the story that I haven’t remembered yet. The answer must be somewhere in my memories. And I know that eventually I’m going to have to open that hatch.

---