Peeves. Mike Waes Van

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 on the closest one, squashing it over and over again.

      “GET. OUT. OF. MY. HEAD!!!” I shouted in between slams.

      “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 СКАЧАТЬ