CAMPFIRE: Knowles

by

Please note: this story was provided by the author and published as is.

Hi Readers,  

I’d like to tell you a story of the first time I introduced someone to my imaginary friend Knowles. It was twenty years ago now, but I still like to keep it fresh in my mind.  

So, gather round… 

My mother left us when I was seven years old without a trace. There was no note, no call, no anything. She was supposed to pick me up from school and when nobody came, the front office called my dad, and he came to get me. When we got home there was no one in the house, mom’s beat up Volkswagen was still sitting in the driveway. Dad called 911 to alert the police.  They searched the house, the town, they put out an APB, they did everything they were supposed to. In the end, they never found anything that could tell them what had happened to her.  

My father never got over it, he pined away over her and whittled down to a twig of a man by the time he died. After a year of hoping she would come back or that her body would at least show up, he decided to get rid of her things. He said it was how we would get some semblance of closure and we would be able to move on. I’d spent a lot of time with her things, her shoes and clothes and makeup. It reminded me of how I used to love to watch her get ready, she’d let me help her pick out her dresses and skirts, and I liked watching how she was always precise in covering up the dark birthmark underneath her chin. I didn’t want any of her things to go and looking back now, I know he really did it for me. No matter how much I wanted to hang on to her things, in the end it all went – or most of it rather.  

My mother’s office was the last thing we went through, it had been a place that both my dad and I never touched in the long year after her disappearance. The initial house search by the police was the last time either of us had gone into her office. We shut the door and left it as some sad memorial to her. I thought it was sacrilege when he said we were going to dispose of its contents. Next to her desk were several boxes of pictures, papers, and notebooks – most of which were filled with her stories. She was an aspiring writer and had carried around notebooks since she was in college, long before I was around. She’d always told me that you never know when a good idea will strike, and you must be ready. 

As dad cleared out her things, he left the box of books for last. The cardboard box was heavy and beginning to tear at the bottom. He’d started to pick them up to see if there were any he wanted to keep, and I watched as he sifted through a litany of journals all different sizes and shapes and thicknesses. Just by looking at them you could see wear on the spines, ruffled pages, and wet marks on the covers (Mom’s desk had been infested with tea and coffee cups when she was still around).  

As he started to go through them, I was sitting on the ground, mournfully watching the discard pile grow larger. What happened next, I can’t really recall for certain this many years later, but I remember hearing just so subtly, a heartbeat. I looked at my father who acted like he hadn’t heard anything; granted he was so wrapped up in my mom’s old books he wouldn’t have noticed a car plowing through the house. I heard the heartbeat again, or rather this time I felt it – stronger on my right side. My breathing shallowed and I had the sensation that I was being watched from behind. I turned around slowly and saw nothing but the office door slightly ajar. 

Rising cautiously, I inched closer to the doorway to get a better look down the hall when I felt that heartbeat tug again. I froze in front of the desk. I cast my eyes downward to see a book splayed open on the seat of the desk chair like it had fallen there. I stared at it a long moment waiting for the throb to come back to me and when it didn’t, I reached out and picked up the journal, wiping off the dust and smoothing out the folded pages. 

It was pristine. The cover was evergreen canvas, and even though it had been sitting open for almost a year the striped gold bindings were hardly creased, and the pages unsoiled by the humidity of the office, which was odd because all the other books were expanding with swollen pages. My father saw me holding it and looked at it curiously, then asked me if I wanted to keep it. Of course, I wanted it; it was beautiful and mysterious, and it was my mother’s! I held it dear and began to write and draw in it as often as I could. It was around that time, after a long year of loneliness, that I met my imaginary friend Knowles. 

It’s easy to see now how she came to be. I was a child in a state of grieving, separated from kids at school by emotional trauma, with a father who was barely holding it together. I’ll spare you the psychology of it all, I’m sure you get the picture.  

I don’t remember exactly how I met Knowles, maybe she walked through the door with us when we got home from the store one day or I woke up and she was playing in my bedroom, but I was glad she was there. I loved drawing her in the notebook and as I did so her features became more and more vivid, clearer to me than an azure sky on a crisp autumn day. We played in my room when I was sad or bored or angry, which was more often than not back then. Knowles always knew the right thing to say to cheer me up and I loved her for that. Another year went by and then another and I held onto her still; some would say for far too long. 

I bet you’d say that too. I bet you’re probably thinking, “God, what adult needs to have an imaginary friend?” But Knowles is far more than that and I think you’ve figured that out by now… 

When I was eleven, I was playing with Knowles in the playground after school while I waited for my dad to pick me up. After I got tired, she sat next to me on a bench, and it was then that she told me she was sad about something. Something had been on her mind for a while now. I of course could tell; she’d been acting odd all day, but I knew she would tell me when she was ready.  

She told me she was going to leave after tonight, that she had fulfilled her purpose. 

I’m sure I looked insane when dad pulled up to the parking lot – a tween girl screaming at an empty park bench. He had been concerned for a while now; my teachers had told him that Knowles was having a big impact on how I interacted with the other children, that I should have grown out of having an imaginary friend by this age.  

When I got home, I went up to my room and Knowles was there waiting. I asked her what could I do – what could I possibly do to keep her with me? I’ll never forget hearing her say, that I needed to write about her. For her to stay with me, I had to make sure I could never forget her because once I did, she would be gone, flung into the universe like a lost angel. I had to write about her somewhere she would never be forgotten, so I dug around in my closet and found my mom’s old journal. I skipped past the melancholy journal entries and cartoons of Knowles that from years ago, right into the heart of the book. I grabbed a pen and began to write.  

I remember a feeling like an electric current was running up my arm. My breathing became rapid, and my body trembled uncontrollably like I was possessed by a fever. I had never written so quickly and cleanly, but by the end I could feel beads of sweat stinging my eyes. I described everything I knew Knowles to be and how I saw her. The sound of her voice, the color of her hair, the softness of her skin, the way we made each other laugh, and I wrote about how she would never leave me. I pressed the pen deep into the pages, almost carving through them. Then I drew her and I as best I could at the end of the journal entry, far better than I had years ago after I’d gotten the notebook. As I shut the journal, the madness broke – I shuffled to my bed and collapsed.   

I cracked my eyes the next morning and looked around my room holding my breath, searching.  

Knowles wasn’t there, my eyes began welling. 

She was always right next to me when I woke up. I sobbed thinking that I hadn’t written enough down, that I hadn’t described her in every detail, and how I had failed. I could hear dad walking around downstairs getting breakfast ready, he would want me to come down soon. I opened the journal to read everything I’d written last night, maybe I missed something, anything, and I could fix it to get my friend back.  

The pages were blank. Not just the pages I wrote yesterday but the years old entries too. My eyes went wide in terror, my pulse pounded in my veins, and a slithering sensation creeped up my spine.

Girl reading a book - artwork.

Created by: Luke Previs

Starting at the back cover I flipped through the pages looking for even a pen mark and saw nothing until I hit the front cover. That was when I saw it. In the top left corner was the same drawing I had made of Knowles last night; except she was winking. Not only did I draw her in a different place in the journal – I had drawn her with both eyes open.   

When you look back on life, it’s so easy to see the turning points from afar but when you’re in the moment you can never tell. It’s part of the beauty and terror of living, I guess. And who would want to see them anyways? Looking back, I’m sure you wouldn’t either.   

I slammed the book shut, dropped it on the ground and kicked it under the bed. I stood there hypnotized unsure of what to do when I heard dad call me down for breakfast. I backed away slowly and then bolted from the room, shutting the door behind me. I was shaken but I refused to let dad see it. The day passed in a blur – I couldn’t stop thinking about the empty pages of the journal and the drawing I didn’t draw. I started to question if maybe I had woken up in the middle of the night and drawn Knowles face on the inside of the cover… but that didn’t explain why everything else in the book had disappeared. My thoughts were somersaulting through my mind, but it all came back to the fact that I felt so alone. I’d lost the best friend I’d ever had. My only true friend. 

  When I got home, I slunk upstairs into my bedroom, worried the book was going to hear me. But it was there, half open, laying atop old toys underneath my bed.   

Blood rushed through my ears, and I had to fight the panic I felt writhing inside of me to inch closer to it. What only took a few seconds felt like hours. Those moments are burned into my memory, I even distinctly remember how the dust tickled my nose, and a pair dirty forgotten socks lying next to the journal made me want to hold my breath. I reached out, fingers trembling, shut my eyes, and felt my fingers grasp the canvas cover. 

I closed my eyes expecting the journal to explode or start shining or spring from my grasp, but nothing happened. 

  I pulled it out and flipped through the pages. The book was completely blank, even the drawing I’d seen this morning was gone. I grabbed a pen from my desk and plopped onto the floor of my bedroom, thinking carefully about what I was going to do next when my eyes widened, and a silent scream clawed its way to my lips.  

  Letters were being written on the page from nothing. It was almost as though there was an invisible pen swiftly jotting along the paper. I stared at the page for a minute before I could calm myself down enough to read it.  

 It said, “Why didn’t you take me to school? I thought you wanted me to go everywhere with you. ” I had written that same line last night, “I will take you everywhere with me.”  It was Knowles.  

  I couldn’t believe it. Slowly, I began to write back that I didn’t know what had happened, I thought it hadn’t worked, and I was sorry for leaving her. Her and I wrote to each other all night and then again in the morning, it was like nothing had changed – other than my wrist getting sore. Each night when I fell asleep our messages filled the pages and each morning, I woke up to every page crisp and inkless. I had my best friend back and she wasn’t imaginary, not anymore. Now she was real.  

  Just like before she came everywhere with me. I told my teachers and dad that I was just writing stories in the journal, that I wanted to be just like my mom. I stopped talking about Knowles which I think made everyone more comfortable. I wasn’t lonely and that was all that mattered.  

A year later dad decided that he wanted to move a few towns over. I had begun to move on from my mother’s death, not forgetting but I had adjusted to life without her. Dad was still having issues staying in the house they’d bought together and then raised me in. He ended up getting a new job that came with a raise, we moved closer to family, and we both got a fresh start. At the time I hated it, I raised hell but there was nothing to be done. I would tell Knowles my frustrations and I would laugh at her responses. She always wanted to know if I wanted help to stop from moving but her being there to talk to me was enough. And what could she do anyways? 

  I started at my new school on October 2nd, it was almost twice the size and I begged my dad to keep letting me go to my old school. I didn’t have many friends per say, but I had people who knew me and would talk to me. At this new school I stuck out like a missing tooth in a wide smile; I was small, quiet, and always carrying a stack of books around. I was an ideal target for teenage tormentors and intimidators. Kids at my last school didn’t want to bully the kid who’d lost a parent, but here I didn’t have that luxury.  

Allister Timmon was the first real bully I’d ever encountered. She was tall, slender, chin length hair cut almost like a boy, and she always wore a loose unbuttoned flannel over her tank tops. When I introduced myself to the class, she snickered to the girls next to her and they all started to laugh.  

When I opened up to Knowles, she said she could hear their cruel laughter when I was talking. She didn’t like that I was here all by myself, that there was no one to help me if I got into trouble. She said she’d protect me if she needed to, but I told her there was nothing she could do for me. Real or not, Knowles was just a friend in a book. But she just kept writing out things she wanted to do to keep me safe from Allister, some of them dark… we were close to running out of paper by the time I got her to stop – there was no reason for her to be concerned anyways.  

…At least not yet…  

Over the next few weeks, I avoided Allister and her click of girls at all costs. I made sure I stayed in sight of the teachers and then I found a quiet group of kids who accepted me at their lunch table, we were defensible in numbers. But no matter how hard I tried, Allister and her friends always found a way to corner me when I was alone, they took that time to push me up against and intimidate me. There were also times in the middle of classes she would trip me, pinch my sides, or get boys attention when she saw me looking at them. 

It was a terrifying time of my life. What made it worse was that Knowles was getting even more aggressive about Allister but the longer it went on… The more I started to take her side. My boiling point was two days before Halloween. I was swapping books out of my locker before my next class when Allister came up behind me and whispered in my ear.  

“Your mom didn’t warn you about getting your period before she died, did she?” 

I looked over my shoulder at her and her friends pointing at my pants. I could feel the heat in my cheeks and sweat start to bead on my forehead from embarrassment.   

“She’s bleeding! So gross – go get a pad!” Allister laughed.  

My stomach had felt like it was like a pincushion all morning. Why did it take until now for all of those health classes to drop on me like a ton of bricks?  

I met Allister’s cruel black eyes, glinting with delight as they moved from mine to the boy at the locker next to me. Her mouth was pulled back in a wide smile but to me it looked like she was baring her teeth. The girls behind her were laughing like banshee’s and chirping to one another, but I couldn’t hear them. Blood was roiling in my veins, and it took every cell in my body not to throw a punch at Allister.  

I’m not an idiot, I knew I wouldn’t win a fight with a girl who was a whole head taller than me. Not to mention she was wiry; I could see the coiled muscles in her arms that had beaten up so many girls and even some boys in school. I stared daggers at her, letting the hate in me flow to stop myself from crying. When their mouths finally stopped moving, Allister smacked the books out of my hands and walked away. I looked down at the floor in embarrassment. Someone handed me my things and a teacher came around the corner, quickly deducing the situation and walked me to the nurse’s office to be sent home. My hands shaking furiously, I ripped open my notebook and wrote, “I’m in, Knowles. What did you have in mind?”.  

Knowles face appeared on the page. She was smiling.  

  We waited until Halloween to execute our plan. Before first period, I walked through the halls, squeezing between lanes of migrating students, and shuffling around crowds looking for Allister. I found her with her gang in the science wing leaning against the lockers eyeing everyone as they walked by. We both had the same first period, so I headed around the corner of a connecting hall halfway between the room and Allister. When the bell rang, I poked my head around the corner and watched the girls dawdle. I rolled my eyes knowing they thought they were so cool being late for class. Two minutes later I saw them start to walk down as the halls cleared out, that was when I struck.   

Quickly I moved around the corner and headed off the girls pulling close to Allister almost running into her. I caught her by surprise, I looked dead into her eyes, a smirk on my face. They all stood there looking at me puzzled. Allister opened her mouth to say something when I screamed and threw myself backwards on the floor. I spun around and landed on my stomach letting my books scatter down the hallway. One of the teachers came out and saw poor defenseless little me lying on the floor starting to cry and Allister and her goons hovering over me. The correction was swift and without question. It was plain to see that a few girls with bad reputations had shoved the small quiet girl on the ground. All the girls were escorted to the principal’s office. I acted like I was shaken up, tears pooling in my eyes as a teacher picked me up off the floor. I snuck a glance at Allister before I headed into first period, she paused at the end of the hall and met my eyes, she looked murderous. I remember walking into my first class of the day thinking about how I loved the power of being in control. 

It was intoxicating. I never stopped loving that feeling. 

The hook was baited and all I had to do now was wait until the last period of the day. Allister would try to corner me after school, either by the buses, in the bathroom, or an empty hall – I didn’t know where she was going to try and get me by myself, but I knew it would happen.  

But of course, nothing ever goes to plan.  

I was sitting down at the end of the lunch table writing to Knowles when someone sat down across from me. I looked up and my breath stopped in my chest. It was Allister.  

As a frequent flyer to the front office, she’d had an extra-long conversation with the principal and instead of sending her back to her classroom, he kept her for a few hours and released her during my lunch block.  

She stared at me with those black eyes that looked like small shards of ebony. Neither of us said anything, we just stared at each other until the bell rang. My mouth was dry, my hands slick with sweat, and finally I grabbed my things and stood up at the behest of whichever teacher was ushering us to the next class. Allister grinned and wrapped her arm around my neck like we were the best of friends. When we left the cafeteria, I tried to run but she wrenched my neck and pulled me down a long empty hallway. She was whispering incessantly to herself, and I began to get scared. This wasn’t a part of the plan. This wasn’t how this was supposed to be happening. I glanced down the hall looking for someone, hell anyone, a student or teacher or janitor.  

The hall was empty.  

She shoved me into a storage room and threw me onto the concrete floor and turned to shut the door. We were right next to the band room; I could hear them playing their numbers through the wall. No one would hear us in here.  

I jumped to my feet and backed into to a folded cafeteria table. The room was filled with broken school things that had been put away to be fixed but had been long forgotten about. Outdated projectors, rusted music stands, desks too rickety to use. The walls almost looked slick from how damp it was and there was a pungent sour smell emanating from everywhere and nowhere. Quickly, I opened my journal to the page I’d dog eared last night and threw the book on the ground face up. Allister looked from me to the book, then back to me.  

Nothing happened. 

As she started forward a lightheadedness washed over me. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. Knowles said she was going to protect me from her. She said she was going to take care of this part. My brain short circuited more and more with every step. She was two steps away when I closed my eyes and waited for the beating I had coming.  

But it never came. 

There was a distorted growl of a voice that sounded familiar, but I hadn’t heard in years. I opened my eyes a sliver and saw Allister frozen in place; she was staring at my journal on the floor. Black lines of light spilled out of the center of the book,  and I shut my eyes again as a rush of wind tousled my hair. I held my breath, waiting and waiting and waiting.  

After what felt like an eternity, I opened my eyes and saw an empty room. I turned my head looking for Allister, but I didn’t see her among the broken school things. I glanced down at the journal, it looked the same as it ever had. With hardly any more coordination than a newborn deer, I wobbled over to the journal, slammed it shut and ran out of the room. I went back to class and the rest of the day passed in a daze. When I finally got home, I took Knowles out of my backpack and just like years earlier I dropped the journal to the floor and kicked it under my bed.  

It’s funny how things always come full circle.  

There was an investigation on the disappearance of Allister Timmon. It seems she had at some point during Halloween decided to play hooky and leave school early. She had disappeared without a trace. There was no note, no call, no anything to her parents. All the things in her bedroom untouched, she was just gone. Her parents called the police, and they searched the house, the town, and put out an APB, but they never found anything that could tell them where she had gone. 

It was a week later when I dug the journal out from under my bed. I held the gold binding in the palm of my hand and let it fall open to a page with two drawings. One was of Knowles, she appeared in a side profile so I could see a dark birthmark under her chin that I hadn’t noticed before. She was grinning gleefully staring at the petrified face of Allister Timmon. Just like she’s staring at your drawing now.  

I’m not sure if you can read this but your eyes look just like hers did in that moment. You can’t see yourself, but your eyes were once mean and cruel. Now they’re fearful and confused like all of the people you’ve terrorized. I take the time to tell this story to new additions you need to know why you’re here, shuffled away like a forgotten bookmark between pages. You could say this journal has become somewhat of a memorial to the bullies I’ve come across. I’m just here to write the obituaries.  

Say “Hi” to Knowles for me.