Midnight Talks With The Devil

By Oci

Chapter One

I guess it all started out of loneliness. I’m sure nobody believes for a second that I was lonely with all that the people that were always surrounding me. But they were just people, things that moved in and out of my life that I don’t think I cared anything about, kind of like sheep or dust bunnies. I lived for the moment. There was no past, and sometimes there wasn’t even a present. But there was always a future. And once the future had come and gone it was useless. There was never one constant thing in my mind but the future, and Catsy.

Catsy was great. If he were real I’m sure every girl would be dying to get her hands on him. Luckily he isn’t real so he’s all mine. He was what you would call a fantasy boyfriend, or maybe just an imaginary friend. When it slipped to the school counsellor about him she freaked and told my parents who also freaked. So I kept it under my seat and then they forgot about him. No one understands Catsy, not even me sometimes.

He’s there when I eat, he’s there when I sleep, and he never misses the show when I’m changing or taking a bath. Some people might call that stalking but since Catsy is supposedly a figment of my imagination I’m not sure what you’d call is. Besides, most of the time he’s real sweet and caring, not to mention a great conversationalist. Like I said, no one will ever understand him.

It seems funny to me sometimes, and to him, that no one ever cares what he looks like. Sort of like how everyone assumes that the devil is either a dark creature with wings or a little red guy with horns and a tail when I know for sure the looks like the most good looking guy you can imagine. It’s sometimes very hurtful to Catsy when people only want to know about the bad things he’s done rather than anything else. I mean how would you feel if someone was writing a biography on you and only wanted to know the stupid mistakes you made in life rather than your achievements? Again it’s sort of like when the Pharisees in the bible took Jesus as a liberal and radical threat to their conservative ways instead of thinking “Hey, maybe he could be great advertisement for the synagogue!” but let’s try not to get into religion and politics because after a while I’ll just get fed up with it and by then you’ll be crying for my head on a silver platter so you can kick it straight to hell. I’ll just say that there’s a darned good reason that god is god and not us.

However, I can’t completely leave religion out of this because any good Christian anybody would hear one word about Catsy and say I’m either possessed or living knee deep in sin. Which may be true since Catsy isn’t a very religious guy. And speaking of the devil I lost track about what I was saying earlier about his looks. He’s a vain guy sometimes when it comes to his looks, and for good reason I might add. He’ll spend hours in the shower and bathroom doing his hair. Then he’ll just stand stark naked in front of the mirror and admire his absolutely fine body. If ever there was a man named Adonis he would look like shit compared to my Catsy. But like I said ladies he’s not real so you can quit salivating.

There is a slight thing with Catsy though. He’s twenty-three and legally allowed to do just about anything with an age restriction. His latest phrase recently has been ‘Paid, Laid, and out of control!’ although I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do an honest day’s worth of work in the whole year and a half that I’ve known him. That’s a considerable amount of time when you stop to realize that I’m only seventeen and a few months. As I said in the beginning, I was lonely. And once I had Catsy who needs anyone else?

Once I asked myself why I loved him so much. So Catsy played the psychologist and made himself look like another guy and asked me that question.

“Why do you like this…thing, so much? It must be like loving yourself.”

“’Cause he’s perfect! He’s gorgeous and knows exactly what I need when I need it. Partially because he knows everything I’m feeling.”

“Yeah, but I mean what about sex? What do you do, masturbate all the time?”

“No, he takes care of that too. You may not believe it but that man is a beast in bed. We’ve had some fun at night in the past, and the best part about it is that I’m still a virgin. I consider that last part to be a bonus.”

And the conversation doesn’t go much father than that because the Catsy changes back into himself complaining that all this talk about sex and not doing it is a sin. So before we know it we’re both naked and I think you can guess what happens after that.

And before you get the idea that Catsy is just some sex crazed male that follows me around all the time, which actually isn’t too far off the mark, he isn’t. sometimes he’s that sweet, funny, intellectual guy that every girl wants. That is when he’s not running around the house nude or trying to get into my pants, which I must say can get very annoying sometimes. For instance when I’m really tired and I know I have an exam the next day and so I go to bed early. Instead of seeing that maybe I just need some extra rest Catsy sees it as some sort of great opportunity to get busy for longer. The sad thing is that I usually end up giving in at the end and get almost no sleep at all. He’s just so cute and charming sometimes I can’t help myself. And to all of you with the word slut or whore on your lips let me just say that if you saw him you’d probably give in faster than I do. I’m a pretty tough cookie to crack when it comes to love, just ask Catsy. And besides, I am still a virgin so what can you say to that?

When I look back in my mind I still have fuzzy recollections as to when, and how, Catsy became such a huge part of my life. What I do know is that we started getting real close when I started college last year. I was sixteen when I started college so of course everyone who actually knew my age thought I was some sort of child genius, which I for sure am not. I actually had some Cs in high school, pretty bad marks if you ask me. But no one believes me. And apparently a B average is good according to some people.

I was really excited when I first started at the college. I was only allowed to take six credits my first semester because of my under 3.5 GPA but I was cool with that. I was looking forward to spending more time with people who were scholars, intellectuals. I couldn’t wait to be able to have meaningful conversations about important issues that had depth beyond which mall had the best shoes. That and being able to start with a clean slate on the grades. You cannot possibly fathom how disappointed I was when I found out that half of my English class could write a decent paper and were getting almost the same grades as I was. That and it seems everyone was just so darn busy they could never finish reading all their history homework on time. Here I was sixteen and taking two college classes as well as four other, harder, classes at home with my mom and they weren’t able to finish the homework on time while somehow I was. Maybe I did so well because I was quite willing to give up some social life or a shopping spree to get an A, which I got in all but one class that semester.

Unfortunately while my grades were going up my mental stability was going down. I found myself becoming moody and irritable all the time, breaking things and so on. My behaviour was definitely not that of a college student. I also got what you might call a slight case of insomnia for no reason except that my eyes just didn’t want to close and my brain just would shut up. It wasn’t named Catsy at the time; I just called it my brain. And hanging out with kids my own age was bad because I found they were shallow and, dare I say it, sometimes they were stupid about life in general. So after a while I just decided to not hang out with them anymore. Then I met Catsy.

He was like a silent god that liked to play in my dreams, if I ever had the chance to have them. I loved to write and he was always my inspiration. He’d always been there; I’d created him to be this sort of test subject for story ideas. But then he was more than just this imaginary guy that I ran lines with at night. He was a friend, a confidant, that I could talk to about anything and he would sympathize with me when it hurt even when I laid down because I was so tired. He didn’t care what grade I was in or that I wasn’t drop dead gorgeous. At first he was just a creation, I felt like god must’ve felt when he created Adam, the perfect man.

Then one day something changed. It was during finals week and I was feeling a little pressured because I’d never actually had to sit in a class full of kids and take a test in a certain period of time before. I had gone to bed early and had actually slept but I felt no different. My mom assured me I’d do just great and so did all the relatives that had invaded my house just before thanksgiving weekend. I had studied my notes backwards and forwards by the time I had reached that history classroom. I took my usual seat, in the middle of the back row, and the teacher started handing out the test packets. I just about froze, mentally that is. I knew I had a strong B in the class and that this test would make or break my grade.

When I looked at the test it started out okay, map questions I could do those no problem. Then I turned to the back and whizzed through the essay questions with no problem. I was on a roll until I got to the multiple-choice questions. Multiple choice is definitely my weakest spot when it comes to tests. There were about thirty questions and I knew the answer to about ten of them. So I did the ones I knew then went back and started putting all thought gears into remembering mode to try and remember anything that would give me a hint to the right answer.

I put my hand in my hair and bent over the paper in a pose similar to that of the famous Thinker and closed my eyes trying to picture something, anything. But there was nothing. Then suddenly there was Catsy. And this time instead of looking simlar to my pillow he had his own features. A soft face with blonde spikey hair which contrasted with his dark eyes. He wore black leather, not surprising as it was the beginning of December. And in his hands was the text book which he was flipping through randomly.

“The answer to number three is A, it says so right here in chapter twenty.” He said. He put the book in my face and pointed to one of the paragraphs I remember reading the night before. The entire page was a perfect copy of the real thing, I was amazed but put it off till I had finished the test. He knew exactly what pages everything was on and so while I circled the correct answer he would flip around till he found the next one. It’s was great, almost like having two brains.

That night I opened my book and looked at those pages he’d showed me. They were exactly the same. At first I wasn’t sure whether to be congratulating myself over my great memorization skills or to thanks that really hot guy with the text book. About a week later he introduced himself officially as Catsy. And after that we started getting really close.