I still say Kellyanne could do with some real-live mates,' went on my dad, as if he was talking to someone inside his beer.Mum had stomped off into the kitchen. 'Maybe they are real!' she shouted back at him after rattling a few plates together. 'Ever thought about that, ye of little bloody imagination?

The creature who lives inside my brain suggested I do it,” I offered tentatively. “It was very convincing.

Kellyanne opened the car door and crawled into my bedroom. Her face was puffy and pale and fuzzed-over. She just came in and said: 'Ashmol, Pobby and Dingan are maybe-dead.' That's how she said it.

I might be tempted to socialize more if the conversations taking place around me were half as interesting as the dialogue going on inside my head.

If I could have one friend,just one in all the world,I know that I would not seek outa boy or pretty girl.The friend I’d dare to chooseto stand by me each daywould be a dragon fierce enoughto scare the world away.

The happiest adults are those who never buried old toys or abandoned imaginary friends.

I realized at that moment - observing his form move further away without once turning back - that I’d already begun to rebuild the imaginary wall between us. I was shielding my heart with stone cold feelings again, the only way I knew to protect it. I still planned to try my hand at prayer. If God would grant me this one request, if I could keep my only friend, I would give anything in return, even the treasured books trapped beneath my arm. I’d tasted enough of a dismal life to know that a real, true friend was of greater worth than the collection of every imagined fairytale in the world.