The Boy I Always Imagined

Somewhere between the words she swallowed and the words she never said, he began to exist.

The first thing people noticed about me was that I was quiet.

The second was that I was always fine.

I had become rather good at making those two things seem connected.

At school, I knew when to smile, when to laugh at a joke I hadn't entirely understood, and when to nod as though I agreed with something I hadn't really been listening to. I knew how to sit among a group of people without making anyone wonder whether I belonged there. I knew how to answer How are you? without accidentally telling the truth.

I'm good.

Two words. A little smile. Conversation over.

It was almost embarrassingly easy.

The difficult part came afterward, when I got home, shut my bedroom door, and no longer had anyone to convince.

That was when the day returned to me in pieces.

A teacher's disappointed expression. Someone else's marks announced to the entire class. A careless comparison that had probably been forgotten by the person who made it before the final bell even rang.

And, inevitably, the things I wished I had said.

I had a talent for thinking of the perfect response three hours too late.

Sometimes I imagined going back in time just to say one sentence differently. Sometimes I replayed an entire conversation, correcting my words until everyone reacted exactly as I wished they had.

In my head, I was braver.

Funnier, occasionally.

Much better at explaining why something hurt.

In real life, I usually shrugged and said, "It's okay."

I hated that sentence.

I used it anyway.

---

On the afternoon everything began, I came home with a result folded into the smallest possible square inside my schoolbag.

It wasn't the worst result in the world. I knew that. Somewhere, someone had probably scored lower and was currently sitting in a classroom, wishing they had done better.

But knowing that didn't make me feel better about my own marks.

I had tried. That was the part nobody seemed to understand.

I had sat with my books open long after I stopped absorbing the words. I had promised myself that the next test would be different. I had imagined handing over my answer sheet with the quiet confidence of someone who knew she had done well.

Instead, I had spent the final minutes staring at a question I had revised twice.

When I entered my room, I dropped my bag beside the desk and took out the result.

For a while, I simply looked at it.

Then I turned it facedown.

There. Problem solved.

Except it wasn't.

I sat on the edge of my bed and listened to the ordinary sounds of the house. Someone moved around in another room. A door closed somewhere down the hallway. Outside my window, the afternoon carried on as if nothing important had happened.

I wished I could do that.

Just carry on.

Instead, I picked up my phone, opened a chat with a friend, typed I think I messed up my test, and stared at the message.

What if she was busy?

What if she told me it wasn't a big deal?

What if she asked how badly I'd done, and I'd have to explain the number out loud?

I deleted the message.

I could talk about nearly anything when it didn't matter too much. A funny video, a ridiculous thing someone had said in class, a song I couldn't stop listening to.

But when something mattered enough to make my throat tighten, the words seemed to disappear.

I put my phone down.

"Great," I muttered to nobody. "Excellent communication skills."

The silence did not offer an opinion.

I pulled my knees up onto the bed and rested my chin against them.

And then, because I had run out of distractions, I began to imagine someone sitting beside me.

Not someone who would fix the result. Not someone who would promise that my next test would be perfect or tell me that marks didn't matter at all.

Someone who would understand that they mattered to me, even if they weren't the only thing that mattered.

Someone who wouldn't make me feel foolish for caring.

In my mind, he appeared gradually.

First, the shape of a shoulder beside mine.

Then a face I could never quite describe afterward, although I knew it perfectly whenever I imagined him.

Dark hair, I think. A thoughtful expression. The sort of eyes that seemed to listen even before the person spoke.

He sat at a comfortable distance, his hands resting loosely in his lap.

He didn't look at my result.

He looked at me.

"You've been quiet," he said.

I frowned at him.

"I'm always quiet."

"Not like this."

I stared.

There was something irritating about being understood by someone who didn't even exist.

"You're not supposed to notice things," I told him.

"Then stop making them so noticeable."

I almost laughed.

Almost.

"You're annoying."

"I've been told."

"By whom?"

He considered that.

"Excellent question."

And just like that, the room felt a little less heavy.

I knew I was imagining him. I wasn't confused about that. I could make him disappear simply by turning my attention to something else, and his words came from the same place as the conversations I had rehearsed a hundred times in my head.

But I didn't want him to disappear yet.

So I stayed.

He stayed, too.

After a while, I told him about the test.

I told him about the question I couldn't answer, the marks I had hoped to get, and the awful little voice in my head that had started turning one disappointing result into a prediction about every test that would follow.

I told him things I hadn't managed to put into a message.

When I finally stopped talking, he tilted his head.

"Are you finished?"

"Probably."

"Good."

I narrowed my eyes.

"Good?"

"Because you've been holding all that in for hours. You must be tired."

I looked down at my hands.

Nobody had said it quite like that before.

They usually asked what I had scored, what had gone wrong, or what I planned to do differently next time.

Those questions weren't necessarily unfair. I knew people wanted me to do well.

But sometimes I didn't want a solution.

Sometimes I wanted someone to acknowledge that trying hard and feeling disappointed could happen at the same time.

He seemed to understand that without requiring an explanation.

"You don't have to pretend with me," he said.

The sentence settled between us.

I looked at him for a long moment.

Then I let out a breath I hadn't realised I was holding.

"What's your name?" I asked.

He looked almost surprised.

"You tell me."

"Why would I tell you?"

"You're the one who imagined me."

I blinked.

Then I laughed, properly this time.

"That's a terrible answer."

"It's the only one you've got."

I thought about it.

Names were important. They made things easier to call back, easier to remember. And if I was going to keep talking to this boy in my head, I couldn't continue thinking of him as the imaginary person sitting on my bed.

That would be ridiculous.

Even by my standards.

"Liam," I said at last.

He repeated it thoughtfully.

"Liam."

"Do you like it?"

"I suppose I'll have to."

"You could be more grateful."

"For a name I didn't choose?"

"For a name I gave you."

He smiled.

And I decided, right then, that Liam suited him.

---

Over the next few days, I began returning to that conversation.

Not constantly. Not even every day at first.

Sometimes I remembered something funny I wanted to tell him. Sometimes I had a bad day and needed somewhere to put the thoughts that wouldn't leave me alone.

I would sit at my desk, stare at a half-finished assignment, and imagine him leaning against the wall beside the window.

He had a habit of appearing whenever I was stuck between wanting to talk and being afraid to start.

He never demanded the whole story.

He waited for me to tell it.

When I complained about homework, he listened.

When I told him about a classmate who had made a thoughtless comment, he helped me find the words I wished I had used.

And when I started talking about my dreams, the ones I kept carefully folded away because saying them aloud made them seem easier to laugh at, he didn't laugh.

That was what I liked most about him.

I could be ambitious with Liam.

I could admit that I wanted things I didn't know how to reach yet. I could imagine a future that was bigger than my current circumstances without immediately hearing all the reasons it might not happen.

He never told me that everything would work out exactly as I wanted.

Instead, he asked what I wanted to do next.

It was a small difference.

It mattered.

Of course, there were moments when I felt ridiculous.

Once, while brushing my hair, I caught myself pausing as though Liam might have an opinion about whether I should tie it up.

I stared at my reflection.

"Seriously?"

My reflection stared back.

I burst out laughing.

I wasn't losing my mind. I knew Liam was a creation of my imagination, a character who had somehow become more familiar than some people I saw every day.

Knowing that didn't make the conversations meaningless.

At least, that was what I told myself.

And because I had nobody else to explain it to, I let that be enough.

---

A few weeks later, I had almost forgotten the afternoon he first appeared.

It had become an ordinary part of my life to imagine him beside me when the world felt difficult to understand.

He was there when I worried about the future.

He was there when I felt left behind.

He was there when I looked at other people and wondered why being confident seemed so effortless for them.

Liam never told me I was better than anyone else.

He never promised that I would be the smartest person in the room or the most successful or the one everyone admired.

He simply reminded me that I was allowed to be a person who was still learning.

Somehow, I believed him.

One evening, I was sitting cross-legged on my bed, trying to convince myself to open a textbook, when he appeared beside the window.

"You've been staring at that book for twenty minutes," he observed.

"I've been mentally preparing."

"For twenty minutes?"

"It's a complicated process."

"Clearly."

I threw a pillow at him.

It passed through the empty space where I imagined he was sitting and landed on the floor.

We both looked at it.

Then I covered my face with my hands.

"I hate that you don't have to pick that up."

"I have many advantages."

"You have no responsibilities."

"Another excellent advantage."

I laughed until my stomach hurt a little.

When the laughter faded, I picked up the textbook and opened it.

Liam didn't congratulate me. He didn't make a speech about productivity or tell me that this was the beginning of a new, more disciplined version of myself.

He just stayed in the corner of my imagination while I read the first page.

For once, beginning felt easier than it had before.

I didn't know then how much I would come to depend on those quiet afternoons, or how difficult it would eventually become to imagine a room without him.

I didn't know that someone real would one day sit beside me without asking for an explanation.

I didn't know that I would learn the difference between missing a person and missing the version of myself I could only seem to find when I imagined him.

All I knew was that the boy beside my window had a name.

Liam.

And whenever the world became too loud, I knew where to find him.

For a long time, I thought that was the same thing as knowing where I belonged.

I would learn otherwise.

But not yet.

For now, Liam was there.

And I was not alone.