They day he returned was on a warm weekend in Fall, not long before school started. I was walking absentmindedly down a network of winding roads, a subdued suburban neighborhood near my own. I could pass through the woods and walk to school, I thought. Why not?

The towering evergreens seemed to frame the trail entrance nicely, though it might have just been the cul-de-sac centering my attention. What would this area have looked like two hundred years ago, just trees among trees? I tried to imagine the contours beneath the roads and houses covered in the ferns and nettles of the forest. Was the forest not still underneath the asphalt, in the lairs of sediment, the burrowing creatures, the teeming bacteria? How strange, to think that the idea of the road might be more significant than the thing itself.

As I trod along the trail, I stopped in my tracks. There he was, balanced on the stump left behind by a proud old growth. Small and blue, stark against the dried leaves and pine needles that littered the path. The pounding in my head, the rapidly rising swell in my stomach was something inside me crying out that he should not be.

"Mac!" He grinned and spread his arms wide as I drew close, my legs dragged inexorably forward like a puppet's in my trance. "You can see me! Finally! It's been way too long!"

My mouth formed his name a few seconds before I consciously recalled who he was. "Bloo?"

"Miss me much?" He hopped down, his movement as natural to him as it was unnatural to me. How had I never noticed how uncanny he was, what a jarring scar on time and space? Nearly shapeless, yet almost human. Familiar, yet otherworldly.

"I don't understand." I shuddered as he hugged my shins—I could actually _feel_ his arms. _What the Hell?_ "How can you exist?" I asked. "I imagined you. I talked to you and saw you, but that was just pretend. You weren't actually there."

Bloo laughed, the same sound I'd heard so many times before, so long ago. "Of course you imagined me, but that doesn't mean I wasn't there!" I looked uncertainly into his big eyes, that old disarming smile.

As we took a long, roundabout path back home, I found it hard to talk to him without glancing over my shoulder every other sentence to see if anyone would hear me. There were virtually no cars driving, (this place was too isolated) but people might be out on their lawns as we passed by. What would they see? A sketchy teenager, looking at the ground and mumbling to himself. A fully-grown version of the soulless doppelganger from my baby videos.

"I tried to get in touch with you," said Bloo, "but you were always so _busy._ Until today, I thought you'd lost your imagination for good."

"I imagine plenty." Why does my tone sound defensive? I wondered. Those words didn't come out the way they sounded in my head. "I draw," I went on, hopefully more calmly. "I come up with lots of ideas. It's just that I know what's real and what's not... at least, I thought I did."

Bloo blew a raspberry at no one in particular. "Is that so? Let me ask you something: elves—real, or imaginary?"

"Imaginary. But I don't get how…"

"Dinosaurs. Real, or imaginary?"

"Real."

"Wrong. They're imaginary."

"What are you talking about?" I wasn't sure where he was going with this. "Of course dinosaurs were real. There are countless fossils. They've been carbon dated and everything."

I grew stiff as I noticed someone far up ahead, on the same side of the road as me. After some hesitation, I crossed over to the right. Bloo followed close behind.

"Fossil evidence tells us that _something_ was alive back then," he explained. "Our imagination fills in the blanks and creates the creatures that we understand as 'dinosaurs'. You know what I heard they're saying nowadays? That the dinosaurs had _feathers._ You can't possibly tell me that if you saw a drawing of a dinosaur with feathers, your first reaction would be 'Oh, that's _totally_ real, that _must_ have been a thing.'"

I didn't say anything. I glanced over at the woman on the other side of the road, trying not to look too shifty. I was acutely aware of the sound the gravel made beneath my feet. I thought I could near another, different noise from Bloo, but it might have been my imagination.

If he noticed my unease, he didn't show it. "Let's try another one: Thomas Jefferson."

"Imaginary," I said, as quietly as I could.

"Correct. But do you understand why?"

I held silent for a while. With one look over my shoulder, I confirmed that I'd put some distance between myself and the woman. "When we talk about him, we're talking about the legend. He was a founding father who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But he also owned slaves. He did a lot of things that most people don't remember."

Bloo hummed thoughtfully. "E for effort. You're getting at it, I guess. I would've added that when people bring up his name, they're usually trying to win an argument. 'Thomas Jefferson wrote this; therefore, the protests are justified. Thomas Jefferson said this; therefore, the dollar bill shouldn't read "in God we trust".' He's a legend, true, but he's also a tool we use to get what we want when someone disagrees with us."

"How depressing. I wouldn't want to be him."

"At least people remember him. Better an oversimplified legacy than none at all." We started to move uphill. I tried to figure out how Bloo moved without any legs, but the undulating, vibrating motion of the underside of his body was too complex for me to make sense of. Was he some kind of giant slug? Did he have a skeleton?

"Where exactly have you been?" I asked. "It's been, what, ten years?"

"Something like that. I've been following you around, but it was like you couldn't see or hear me. I guess something must have changed."

I shivered slightly. Just how much of my life had he seen? _He must know me better than I know myself,_ I realized.

By the time we got home, I still wasn't sure he was really there. My uncle was still out, so we talked freely as I warmed up some soup.

"Where exactly did you come from, anyway? I remember when I was little, I would always try really hard to imagine you and sort of convince myself I could see you in front of me. Now, it's like you can handle that all on your own."

"We were less separate back then," he explained, grabbing a sandwich from the fridge. "You were still making me. Now, I guess I'm here to stay."

I looked out the window as I ate. The trees waved gently at me in the wind, or maybe they were waving at Bloo. "If no one could see you, does that mean you were able to spy on people?"

"To a limited extent. I was never able to go that far from you."

"You used to help explain things to me, like when I was reading and I didn't understand something."

He shrugged. "I thought you explained things to me, but maybe I'm remembering it wrong. Didn't you teach me to read?"

"Yeah, maybe."

Later, I sat on my bed, trying to think of something to say to Bloo. There should have been years' worth of catching up to do, and I shouldn't have been so uncomfortable around a childhood friend. I felt strangely guilty.

"I remember you played a lot of Pokémon right here, in this spot," said Bloo as he stared at the ceiling from my beanbag chair. "That was after you stopped seeing me, of course. You were so excited about it. You would hear about all these urban legends at school, and then go straight home and play the game to see if they were true."

"I never did find Mew. I knew a guy who got one, but he wouldn't tell me how."

I wondered if Bloo's memory was better than mine. "What was going on right around the time I stopped seeing you?"

"Beats me. You moved into this house, started going to a new school, and… that's it, really."

"That would've been… first, second grade?"

"Mrs. Harrison, Ms. Ledger."

"My uncle would drive me. I listened to Raffi in the car. There was a song called 'Baby Beluga'."

"You never went outside at night because you thought there were werewolves living in the woods."

"There were so many different kinds of tag at school. Regular tag, freeze tag, hotdog tag, French tag."

"There was always a cat hanging around near the playground. No one ever figured out whose it was."

"One Halloween I made a scarecrow with a bunch of my friends. We took turns beating it up."

"Didn't a kid die at school or something?"

"He wasn't dead. He just went to the hospital."

"Yeah, and he never came back."

As I tried to fall asleep, I felt his gaze on me, like a cool breeze from another world. I squinted at him in the darkness to see him standing at the foot of my bed, staring straight at me. Did he think I was asleep? Just in case, I pretended to be. I tried to listen for the smallest movement, but he was completely silent.

When I awoke, he was curled up in a pile of my clothes, snoring softly. I'm still not sure he's really asleep when he does that.