"Aaiii!" shrieked Calvin, in a terrible imitation of a Native American war cry he had seen on TV. Water gun in hand, he dove towards the tiger, attacking with all the strength of a samurai warrior. Well... if a samurai warrior happened to be a six-year-old hyperactive self-proclaimed genius. The tiger hefted a large Nerf gun on his shoulder and began shooting at Calvin with perfect aim.
After the eighth Nerf bullet pegged Calvin in the face, he sprinted off in the opposite direction and entered the old, beat-up garage. The tiger frowned. The garage was where they kept Calvin's bike; Calvin would never go near it if he could help it. This could only mean...
"Yah!" yelped the tiger as a volleyball hit him in the ear. Calvin appeared, a black mask covering his face.
"Calvinball!" he shouted gleefully.
The tiger grinned and dashed up a tree. Hiding in the treehouse, he pulled up the ladder that was the only way Calvin could get up. "Tough," he said. "You need to hit me with the ball to score a point and I'm all the way up here!"
"Hey, that's not a rule!"
"It is now!"
"Cheater!" Calvin scowled viciously and crossed his arms.
The tiger grinned and the two began hurling insults at each other. "Noodle brain!" "Loser" "Dumb animal!" "Stupid head!"
It was already shaping up to be a great summer.
"What do you mean, he's not real?" shouted Calvin into the phone. He turned to Hobbes and mouthed, "Can you believe it?" Hobbes shook his head. "He's a vicious killing machine and when you wake up in the morning... or don't, rather... you'll regret it!" He slammed the telephone down on the desk and turned to look at Hobbes. "Doctor Smith says you're not real."
"That's stupid. Don't they have eyes?"
"He says it's cute that an eight-year-old still pretends to have a live tiger but that I should just accept your unreality."
"He must be blind." Hobbes seemed unconcerned as he doodled nonchalantly in one of Calvin's favorite comic books. "I'm giving Mister Mastermind a curly moustache."
"He says that I just need to accept that I'm growing up and don't need to rely on a stuffed tiger to help me with my homework."
"It's a green moustache."
"He says that I need to start having some real friends because imaginary ones go away."
"Now I'm giving Femme Fatale a purple beard."
Calvin snapped back to reality, shaking away the horrified haze he had been in and glared at Hobbes. "Hey, furball! That's my comic book!" Hobbes tumbled off the bed, taking the comic book with him. This resulted in a very intense game of tug-of-war.
"You broke it! You big lunk!" shouted Calvin once the comic book had finally given way and torn in half. He collapsed on his bed and scowled at the sky. But his anger with Hobbes, as always, was short-lived, and he turned to help Hobbes back on the bed.
He blinked. For a moment, just a short moment, a stuffed tiger with glass eyes stared back at him. But the strange sight soon disappeared and Calvin found Hobbes scowling evilly at his best friend.
"Come on," said Calvin, tugging on his arms and pulling him onto the bed. "I updated the Transmogrifier. Now with the newest addition- superhero mode!" The two ran off to try out the invention.
"No!" cried Calvin, opening the box of garage sale stuff that his mom had set out. "Why is Hobbes in here!" The disgruntled tiger frowned.
"This isn't very comfy, you know," he said, untangling himself from an old Little People house that Calvin had never touched.
"You're ten years old, you don't need that stuffed tiger anymore," called his father from behind another teetering stack of boxes.
"You can't get rid of him!" Tears were already building inside Calvin. His father gave in.
"Oh, alright. One more year." He had been saying the same thing for three years now.
When Calvin woke up on the eve of the first day of ninth grade, he sensed immediately that something was wrong.
The warm furball that always slept next to him wasn't moving, not even in breath.
A scream burst out from Calvin as he saw the lifeless stuffed tiger next to him, staring at the ceiling with glass eyes. "Hobbes!"
The tiger stayed, unmoving. Tears streamed from Calvin's face onto the plush tiger. No matter how hard he tried to imagine, the tiger stayed stuffed.
College, and the tiger stayed stuffed. Finally, Calvin, unable to bear it any longer, put him in a cardboard box in the attic.
A wife and three kids later, Calvin is searching through the attic of his old house, looking for a dollhouse that had belonged to his grandmother. His daughter, Susanne, wants a dollhouse for her birthday and Calvin thinks that the antique, pink-gabled Victorian would be perfect for his over-imaginative child.
He comes across an old cardboard box. The word "Transmogrifier" is written in choppy six-year-old handwriting along the side. Frowning, he opens it, and a tiger glares back at him.
Surprised, Calvin stumbles back, knocking over a stack of books as tall as he. The tiger crawls out of the box grumpily.
"Okay, how long have I been in here?!" says the tiger, looking around.
Calvin hardly dares to speak. "Twenty years?"
"Twenty? Twenty-" the tiger shakes his head in disbelief.
"You stopped moving. You were fake!" says Calvin, tears welling in his eyes. The tiger sighs, shakes his head.
"I tried to talk to you. For years I tried to talk to you. You wouldn't listen to me!" The tiger looks hurt.
"I didn't hear you!" Calvin is openly crying now, a thirty-something year old man sobbing about an old stuffed tiger.
"You grew up," says the tiger, sadly. "I knew you would."
"So how come I can see you now?"
The tiger looks at him for a long time. Finally he says, "I guess it took you a long time to
figure out that you're never too old to imagine."
That day, Calvin introduces his childhood friend to his family. Hobbes is greeted with much satisfaction from his children- cries of joy and lots of hugs- and some "Tsk"ing from his wife.
Calvin never tries to get rid of Hobbes, never says to his children that Hobbes is just a stuffed tiger. When Susanne comes home scratched up and insists that Hobbes attacked her when she entered the house, he says that Hobbes always did the same to him. He tells stories of their time together. He laughs.
Hobbes loves his new family, but Calvin will always be special. One night, when the house is asleep, Hobbes goes up to Calvin and whispers in his ear.
"You know, we never finished that game of Calvinball."
The neighbors would always wonder what their grown, Ph.D-earning neighbor was doing that night, running about with a volleyball, a black mask, and a stuffed tiger. They would always wonder what Susanne and Calvin were doing with the cardboard box that said "Transmogrifier". They would always wonder why the stuffed tiger seemed to move from place to place without anyone touching it, and why the entire family spoke to it as if it were real.
I suppose no one will ever know.