I Don’t Need You Anymore

Charity Bartlett was too old to have an imaginary friend. Her friends knew it, her parents knew

it, and most of all, she knew it. The extra seat at the dinner table had long since been moved to

the corner of the living room, doomed to suffocate under abandoned winter coats and socks

missing their match. Doting glances from her parents towards tea parties on the lawn had soured

into hushed conversations behind cupped hands. Despite all the signs that told her to move on,

something which she was genuinely trying to do, nothing had changed.

She asked her closest friends years ago what they did to get rid of theirs, as if having an

imaginary friend was equivalent to a particularly bad head cold, but it turned out to be useless.

Most of them claimed that it was a gradual process. First you stopped seeing them every day, and

then only once every month or so. Eventually, Charity’s friends claimed, the storage space within

her brain would fill up with song lyrics, homework, and Dylan’s soccer schedule.

There was just one problem with that plan—Penny hadn’t gone away when Charity

started to grow up. She had already slow danced in a school gymnasium, taken a sip of beer, and

made out with a guy she didn’t even like that much in the parking lot, but none of it seemed to

matter. Penny still showed up at Charity’s bedroom window every morning at 7, ready to walk

with her to the school bus like old times. She always wore an ironed purple dress, rocking back

and forth in a pair of white sneakers caked with dirt, which for as filthy as they were, never left

any tracks.

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 That wasn’t the weirdest thing about Penny though, considering that she never spoke. She

glanced inquisitively, smiled, and sometimes frowned, but she never uttered a single word. So, at

6:58 on the first day of sophomore year, when Charity decided to whisper, “I don’t need you

anymore,” out of her window, she didn’t expect much. If they were truly so well-connected,

Penny would’ve already known. It felt like a freakishly small step in comparison to the

milestones of growing up that she had already hit. But something changed.

The world around her lit up with muddy shoe prints. They were everywhere. She found

them in her white carpet, dark flecks starting to congeal the strands into clumps. Outside of her

window, the ground was wrecked with the evidence of movement. Somewhere deep inside of her

chest, Charity felt a dull ache. If she had the ability to see it, she felt sure that there would be

muddy prints pounded into the flesh of her heart, sloppy and desperate like someone was

running.

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