Calvin by Martine Leavitt

anything good about this whole schizophrenia thing.
    Susie: It will make you more compassionate toward the suffering of others.
    Me: Ack! Tell me you aren’t going to use the platitude torture on me …
    Susie: What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.
    Me: You’re doing it! You’re evil!
    Susie: Everything happens for a reason.
    Me: Stop. I’ll do anything you say if you’ll stop.
    Susie: Keep a stiff upper lip. Good things happen to those who wait. You’ll thank me someday …
    Hobbes: I’d eat her if she weren’t so cute.
    Me: Hobbes says he would eat you if you weren’t so cute.
    Susie:
    Me: Thank you.
    Susie: This is making you really sad. This schizophrenia thing.
    Me: Yeah.
    We kept walking.

 
    We walked for a long time without saying anything. I was afraid Susie would vanish any second, but I wasn’t making the lake up, or how tired I was. I knew I wasn’t making up how badly we needed to keep up our pace if we weren’t going to run out of food and water. I could have out-walked her, but I wasn’t about to leave behind a delusion like Susie.
    I tried to trick her into going a little faster by increasing my pace just a bit, not so as she would notice.
    Susie: You sped up just enough so you thought I wouldn’t notice.
    Me: You noticed.
    Susie: I notice everything.
    Me: So you can’t speed up?
    Susie: Oh, I could. Sure I could. But I’m just enjoying myself so much out in this arctic waste, why would I want it to be over fast? Let’s just take our time and enjoy things, you know?
    Being good at detecting subtle sarcasm, I slowed down to match her pace. I kept talking to keep my mind off the sounds of my boots and my breath and my blistering feet. I talked about how much money we could get if we got a really good picture of South Bay Bessie.
    We were so hangdog tired, staring at our boots, we almost ran into a snow goon.
    There were dozens of them, standing in perfect military lines, row after row of killer snow goons, facing away from us.
    Hobbes growled low.
    Me (whispering): You can’t kill them.
    Susie: What are they?
    Me: Snow goons. If you kill them, they multiply.
    Susie: Orvil never said anything about this. It’s some kind of ice formation. They’re glowing!
    Me: Psycho-killer snow beings who delight in holding you in their stick arms until your blood freezes …
    Susie (turning to me): Calvin, they’re not alive. They don’t have arms. They’re just … strange …
    Hobbes: They’re lethal.
    Spaceman Spiff had crashed on a cold planet, and before him strange sculptures of ice rose from the surface, fluorescent. They were the work of a brutal intelligence, an alien hardened by his existence on such an arctic and unforgiving world. It was a comment on the futility of existence …
    Maybe the loneliest feeling in the world, Bill, is the feeling you get when you see something no one else can see, or hear something no one else can hear, or believe something no one else can believe. Maybe that’s the worst thing about what I have, that alone feeling, knowing that I can’t make anyone really understand about Hobbes.
    Me: I’m telling you, they’re snow goons.
    Susie: Okay. Okay, Calvin. You’re scared. What do you want me to do?
    She was whispering now, too.
    Me: We have to walk around them.
    Susie: True.
    Me: Quietly, so they don’t hear us.
    Susie: Okay.
    Me: Quietly.
    Susie: Okay.
    Me: We can’t kill them.
    We walked around the first one, and I saw it close. It was a glowing pillar reaching straight up into the air out of the ice, like a giant inverted icicle. Some were as high as a two-story building, transparent and gleaming in the sun, as if the lake had bared her teeth.
    Me: They’re just ice formations.
    Susie: I know.
    Me: How does the lake do it? Make the ice formations?
    Susie stared at the one closest to us like it was