Peeves

The sound was the worst. Every morning. The BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP of my alarm clock ruined my day before I was even awake. Every morning I’d rip my eyes open, annoyed, and swear to destroy it. And every morning I’d totally lose the energy to do so as soon as it was off.

That morning was no different. BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. I shot up in bed and swatted the clock, silencing it by knocking it onto the floor. Then I sneezed really hard – a giant “ACHOO!” that blew my head back onto the pillow, where I was determined to grab a few more minutes of shut-eye anyway.

But before I could even get comfortable, it started again – BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. Without opening my eyes, I lunged for the clock, falling halfway off my bed in the process. I managed to find it and hit the snooze button – but nothing happened. Really annoyed now, I yanked the power cord out, but still, somehow, the BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP kept going. Confused, I gave up on sleeping more and opened my eyes instead.

And there it was. I didn’t know WHAT it was. But it was there at the foot of my bed – a furry little potato sack with two arms, beady little eyes and massive ears that twitched around like satellite dishes. Its big, gaping, froglike mouth was spewing out this horrendous sound – BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.

I fell out of bed, hitting my head on my nightstand when I tried to scramble away. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, desperate for this to be a bad dream, but the little purple creature just sat there, looking up at me with innocent eyes, almost smiling as it rhythmically droned on BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. It was awful. I covered my ears, but the little creature seemed pleased that I did that. As if it had accomplished a goal.

I jumped back up on my bed, grabbed the pillows closest to me, and threw them at it as hard as I could. But the creature seemed oblivious. It hopped up on my desk, happy as can be, and began to explore what seemed like a whole new world. It walked over my keyboard. CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK. It paused and stomped again. CLICK. It smiled.

CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK came out of its mouth as “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU?!” came out of mine. It hopped off the desk and approached the foot of my bed. I panicked and scrambled across the bed to grab my Wolverine gloves off a shelf. SNIKT! The plastic claws popped out with the pre-programmed sound effect.

SNIKT! SNIKT! SNIKT! SNIKT! the creature said, hopping up on my bed as if I’d asked it to follow me. I jumped off the other side, swiping my claws at it, but it just kept coming closer, seemingly excited by the sound of it alone. My foot got tangled in the dirty laundry on the floor and I fell with a THUD.

THUD THUD THUD THUD it said, smiling, as it stepped closer.

“Get back. Get away. STAY AWAY!” I shouted, swatting the air in its general direction.

THUD THUD THUD THUD. It was almost on me. I clenched up and did the only reasonable thing left.

“MOM!” I yelled. What else was I supposed to do?

She came rushing into the room. “What is all the racket up …” and then she stopped short, her eyes wide in horror at what she saw. “I don’t believe this,” she said, stomping in like she was ready to take charge and shut the creature up. “Slim, I’ve told you a hundred times that the floor is not a laundry basket.” And she walked right past the noisy, potato-sack-looking creature and picked up the clothes I had just tripped over.

I must have been in shock because I couldn’t really form another word. I just pointed with a confused and freaked-out look on my face. In response, the creature opened its mouth. BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. “We need to keep this place neat for clients so I can actually afford these clothes you toss on the floor,” she continued, talking right over the noise as if she couldn’t hear anything.

She must have seen the colour drain from my face because she sat me down on the edge of my bed and felt my forehead. “Honey, you look pale. Are you sick? You’re sweating. Do you have chills? It’s not a fever. Did you sleep okay?” Mom never seemed to run out of things to ask me, even though I never have enough answers for her. Especially while staring at an incredibly loud and furry monster that seemed to not exist to her at all. “I really hope you aren’t coming down with something,” she continued. “Is this about yesterday? Are you still worked up over it? Or are you just angling for a mental health day here?” I didn’t feel sick, but I did feel super annoyed at the onslaught of questions when the only relevant question anyone should be asking was, “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!” And then, without warning, I sneezed again.

“Maybe it’s just allergies. Do you think it’s allergies? You don’t usually have allergies, but sometimes they develop,” she pointed out. And as she kept talking, I saw something else develop.

My sneeze had taken me by surprise, so I didn’t have time to cover it up. And right on the floor where it had sprayed, I saw the tiny, clear drops start to pull together into a translucent glob of goo, almost like a booger … but bigger … and it moved! It stretched and expanded and started to form a mosslike film on its surface that quickly turned into a bluish fur. Then a pair of eyes popped through, looking all around like it was fascinated at everything it saw.

“Slim, honey, just breathe. You don’t want a panic attack now,” Mom said, attempting to calm me down. “Remember what your therapist said about breathing through it?” I nodded, trying to breathe, hoping she was right. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the new little monster.

The fur ball with eyes rocked back and forth until POP – a pair of arms sprang from its sides, and it pressed its paws against the floor and pushed itself up, stretching its potato-sack body until it was standing on two little feet. It rubbed its head until a pair of pointy ears flicked out. And now this second furry little creature was looking up at me with the biggest, most curious eyes I’d ever seen – like it wanted to know all it could about every single thing it saw. A few crooked little teeth jutted out from its head as its furry face formed a mouth. When it opened, I was expecting another round of beeping noises, but that’s not what this one did at all; instead, it asked, “Am I an allergy?”

That was enough to send me skittering off the bed and on top of the noisy creature on the other side. I could feel it squish below me, like a deflating air mattress. It was a weird, unpleasant sensation, and when I rolled off, the noisy thing was flattened on the floor. I crab-crawled away as far as I could get from the creatures I had somehow sneezed into existence. As I tried to gain control of my breathing, the flattened one re-formed, seemingly unharmed, and started beeping again. I tried to get away but I was pinned against my dresser. My one-thousand-and-forty-seven piece Lego Batman set that took me three days to assemble fell off the top and shattered on the floor. I’d never get it back together again. Mom had thrown out the directions in the move. I wanted to scream. The noisy one’s satellite-like ears twitched in my direction. CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH it repeated like my Lego masterpiece would never stop breaking, while the other creature picked up my scattered Lego pieces, asking rapid-fire, “What are these? Why did you do that? Where are you going?”

I backed away from the mess and over towards Mom, who was visibly frustrated by my freak-out. “Slim, for heaven’s sake, what are you so upset about?” she asked.

“You don’t see them?!” I shouted.

She looked around and her eyes finally landed on the creatures. “Oh, I sure do,” she said. She walked right over to the creatures this time, bent down between them, and picked up some candy wrappers I forgot to hide. “Did you eat these before bed? What did you expect with all that sugar in your system? And what have I told you about leaving food in your room? It attracts pests! This is why I had to have the old house fumigated for the new owners!” she lectured, while the second little creature looked up at me and asked, “Am I a pest? Is she blind? Are you crazy?”

I looked back at Mom as she got to her classic, “I’m not a maid service, Slim.” Lucy popped her head in the room to check out the commotion. I had never been so happy to see her. Surely, she’d be able to see these little creatures and prove I wasn’t losing my mind.

But Lucy just looked at the mess and said, “He actually has a whole candy stash hidden in here.” She’s such a tattletale. Normally I would have snapped at her, but instead I sneezed.

“Lucy, go and get ready for school,” said Mom. Lucy stomped off down the hall as another voice entered the fray.

I turned in horror – yet another furry little creature had formed! This one had a huge trapdoor-like mouth, a pink hue and a smug look as it loudly started saying things as if it had a Twitter feed to my innermost thoughts. It pointed at me and screamed, “He’s lonely. He deletes his internet history!”

My response was a swift kick. The creature flew across the room and splatted against the wall like those goo-filled balls that stick where they splat until you pull them off or they peel off on their own. This furry little thing did just that, taking my life-size Spider-Man poster off the wall with it. The creature landed on the floor, unsplatted and unhurt, right in front of the previously hidden safe space cubbyhole. After it basically reinflated itself, it pointed and shouted, “He hides the candy in there!” as Mom picked the poster up off the floor.

But it didn’t focus on any point for very long. It was too obsessed with cataloguing all my subconscious concerns to even pause. “He’s ugly. He smells weird. He only has two Instagram followers!”

I began to hyperventilate. My face was flushed and the room was spinning a bit. “Why do you change colour?” asked the asking one.

Mom pinned the poster back on the wall and grabbed up the dirty laundry still on the floor, saying, “This room is a disaster.” She saw me breathing heavily and rushed over, sitting me on the bed. “It’s okay, Slim. You’re having a panic attack. Just breathe through it. Do you want me to get your Xanax?” I shook my head no because I knew what a panic attack was and this was not that. I would have preferred a panic attack to whatever this was.

“Just look at me, okay. Focus on me. Everything is fine,” she continued. “None of this is worth getting worked up over. Just breathe.”

I wanted to argue, but Mom was looking at me with her constant frenzied but exhausted concern.

I closed my eyes and breathed slowly and tried to calm my system, but when I opened my eyes, the creatures were still there and still making noises, asking questions and revealing all my worst thoughts about myself. I really wanted someone to see them too. I wanted to shout that there were monsters in the room. But I knew she wouldn’t understand. I knew I’d just get more of that look, and I knew behind it she was thinking, Why can’t you just be normal? So instead what came out was, “There are … there are … there are … more candy wrappers on the nightstand.” She exhaled and her shoulders slumped, and I lied some more. “I’m … okay. You’re right. It’s just a … panic attack.” It was easier that way.

“Okay. Good. You’re okay,” she said as if she were trying to believe it as hard as I was trying to convince her. And with a tired sigh, she got off the bed, still holding my dirty laundry, and picked up the candy wrappers. “It’s time to get ready for school.”

She kissed the top of my head, which I naturally shrank away from, and left me alone with my monsters. “He’s uncomfortable 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 doesn’t like us,” responded the tattletale.

The curious one seemed shocked and hurt by this. It looked up at me with its big, wide eyes and asked, “Why don’t you like us?” It sounded so sincere I almost felt bad for it, like it was real. But, as if answering on my behalf, the noisy one went back to BEEP BEEP BEEPING as if it couldn’t not make noise and that was its natural default. I slumped my shoulders and dragged myself into school with everyone else.

Even under the most normal circumstances, school was a challenge. But normally when I had serious anxiety or a full-blown panic attack, the things that triggered it were just temporary – like the booger that Otis flicked on me. Eventually, I could get away. But that wasn’t the case with these furry figments of my imagination.

The noisy one mimicked every locker slam and bag zipping I heard, loudly and proudly.

The curious one bounced around in front of me asking questions without seeming to breathe. “What’s homework? Can I eat that? Why are they staring at you?” The kids in the hall were giving me strange looks as I unsuccessfully tried to swat and kick away the monsters no one else could see.

The tattletale had somehow tapped a whole vein of new secrets and it couldn’t spill them fast enough. “He wet the bed till he was seven. He’s wearing yesterday’s underwear. He hoards Twizzlers.”

Mortified to hear all my shortcomings catalogued at full volume, even though no one else could hear any of this, I swung my backpack off my shoulder, unzipped it, dumped my books out and snatched up the tattletale in one swift motion. Then I zipped it shut, which muffled the blabbermouth enough to make its monologue of my secrets almost bearable. Unfortunately, I did this right on the perfectly trendy shoes of Heather Hu and her clonelike horde, who looked at me like … well, like I was nuts. “Here we have a garden variety dork in its native environment,” said Heather as she recorded my behaviour on her phone like it was some sort of demented nature documentary. The trendoids who followed her were delighted. I was just annoyed.

And then it happened again. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t stop it. I sneezed on her. And I have to admit it felt kind of good. She squealed and cursed and stomped away only to be replaced a moment later by a red-furred, blue-horned creature with an “over it” expression plastered on its face. The snarky-looking monster gave me a long side-eye glance and then rolled its eyes away and said, “Not even worth it.”

BRRRRING! The bell rang, warning me that I had to get to class. Heather’s horde stepped over my books, which I gathered frantically in my other hand as the curious creature wondered, “What’s a dork? Am I a dork? Is dork a bad thing?”

As I stumbled down the hall, I could hear the tattletale trying to comment on the situation, but thankfully its monologue was muffled inside my backpack. BRRRRING! I was already late! I started running past all the other kids who were still walking calmly to class and I tripped over someone’s bag on the floor, face-planting and skidding across the cold tiles to the utter joy of everyone who saw it. I rolled over to find the noisy one climbing onto my chest. It opened its trapdoor mouth and … BRRRRING! I smacked it away, splatting it against a locker. But by the time I got up and gathered my scattered books and dignity, the noisemaker had already peeled free from the lockers and re-formed like an inflating balloon. BRRRRING! But this time it actually was the bell and I actually was late.

I hurried into homeroom while Mrs Bowers’s back was turned and made it to my seat without getting caught for being tardy. I reached into my backpack to get a pen and inadvertently released the tattletale. It scrambled out and joined the other creatures all around my desk. As Mrs Bowers started roll call, I took a deep, cleansing breath, and tried to calm down and focus. I was almost getting used to the chorus of random noises and annoying questions and personal revelations from the monsters when a spine-tingling SNIFFLE cut through the ruckus. I looked at the noisy one accusingly, but its ears were aimed behind me, excited to hear a new noise to mimic.

I turned to glare at Otis Miller, and was surprised to see that this time he looked genuinely sick. He even had a mini-pack of tissues on his desk. Otis looked at me sheepishly. “My mom said without a fever I’m not contagious and can’t stay at home.”

Before I could respond, Mrs Bowers yelled, “MR PICKINGS!” I spun round to face the front and shouted “HERE!” while instantly fearing the use of my last name would inspire someone in this room to start in with the nose-picking taunts again. But Otis was too down with his cold to bother. Instead, he let out another shiver-inducing SNIFFLE SNIFFLE SNEEZE from behind me. I could feel little droplets of stray spittle hit my neck and reflexively spun round again to say something, but I just responded with a massive sneeze of my own.