I first became aware of James when I was three. Other children had a monster in the closet or an imaginary friend. I had an angel who lounged on top of my dresser, played Barbies, and read me bedtime stories in the morning.

When I was about six, I started asking him questions. How could he be an angel if he didn’t have wings? Weren’t angels supposed to be blond and play harps? With his dark, scruffy hair and black eyes, he looked nothing like the angels in my children’s Bible books.

I remember him cracking his knuckles and raising his eyebrows. “I never said I was just an angel.”

I frowned at him, six-year-old logic coming through. “You never said you were anything else.”

“I’ll say it now, then. I’m an angel. I’m a demon. I’m also human. I bleed.” A knife appeared in his hand, and he raked the tip across his palm. A red line oozed. He frowned, and the knife and wound vanished.

“I’m air, and water, and fire, and all of that elemental mystical junk you humans think is magical. And everything else besides.”

I never understood what he was, and I asked him that question over and over. He always gave me the same answer. As I got older, I learned to try to ask around his responses. I can remember being twelve, and talking to him as we swung on the hammock in my back yard. “You say you’re human, but then you say ‘you humans.’ What are you?”

He rolled off the hammock and onto the ground, making it swing wildly. I clung to it as it settled. James stood in front of me, grinning, his arms outstretched. “What do you think I look like?”

I studied him. He was tall, slender, and dark-skinned. Everything about him was dark, hair and eyes, except for the white teeth that showed in his crooked, impish grin. He looked normal. “A person.”

“Exactly.” An apple appeared in his hand and he bit into it, speaking with his mouth full. “You are what you look like, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “No. Humans can’t do that.” I pointed at the apple.

“No.” He smiled happily. “But angels can.”

My asking James questions was by far not out only pastime. He was my best friend, and more of a parent than my mother ever was. Whenever she was out or just locked in her room, James would be with me, talking or playing games. He loved to play games.

His favorite was hide-and-seek. When it was my turn to hide, he’d find me in minutes, no matter how well I’d concealed myself. But when I was It, I could search for hours and not find him. He would never come out, either, so giving up wasn’t an option. I would have to comb through every room in the house, looking in all the places nobody could ever hide in, and finally find him in a cupboard that should have been too small or on a shelf that should have been too high.

Once I found him in the garden outside. He was smelling roses; they were his favorite flowers. (“Ah, the romanticism!” he’d say, stroking their petals.) I came up to him, feeling annoyed and dusty from an hour spent searching closets. “You cheated.”

He blew a petal at me. “How so?”

“You weren’t supposed to go outside,” I told him. “It was in the rules.”

He stood and stretched, then grinned down at me. “There were no rules.”

“Yes, there were. I said them.”

“Just because you said them doesn’t mean they were true,” he said. “If they were true, would I be out here?”

“Probably.” He was beginning to confuse me, as always.

His smile quirked at the edges. “I don’t like rules,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean you can change them.”

“Why not?” He bent and picked another rose.

James was my friend, my parent, my brother, but he also isolated me in a way. I never made friends at school, because I knew James would be there when I got home, and he was all the friend I needed. I was quiet when I wasn’t with him. I sat silently at my desk, just listening and watching, saving up the little things that people around me said or did. When I arrived home, I’d tell James everything, and he would lie on my bedroom floor an laugh. He grew to know my teachers and classmates as well as I did, if not better.

I learned more from him that I did at school. At school, I learned mundane things like science and math. From James, I learned how to play poker and win, how to speak Latin, and, most importantly, I learned about people. James knew people. From him, I knew why Billy chased George on the playground, and why Jessica cried in the girls’ bathroom when she thought nobody was there.

James also had a passion for history, because he was there when history happened.

He would sit at my desk and rifle through my history textbook, chuckling and rolling his eyes as he scanned through the chapters. Sometimes he would call me over and point to a paragraph, explaining haughtily why it was wrong and what had really happened, in his experience. On the few occasions when the book was right, he was amazed.

Whenever this happened, I would ask him, “How old are you?”

He shrugged. “I’m not.”

Frustrated when he didn’t make sense, I said, “You aren’t what?”

“An age. I’m not an age. I’m just here.” He closed the textbook.

“If you were alive when the stuff in that book happened, then you have to be at least as old as when it happened,” I pointed out.

He smiled brilliantly. “You would think so. But no. I’m not an age. I’ve always been, but I’m not as old as being either. All that time stuff is just bull. It doesn’t affect me.”

“Time affects everything.”

“That’s a rule,” James answered. He cracked his knuckles. “I don’t like rules.”

I never knew where James lived. He didn’t live with me. He was with me at home from the moment I woke to the moment I feel asleep, but when I was at school or had finally slipped into sleep in his comforting presence, he went Somewhere Else.

He never told me where he went and I never thought to ask him in between questions. I just knew that he would never stay at home and wait for me, and if I woke in the middle of the night he wouldn’t be there.

As I got older, he went Somewhere Else more often, even when I was home and awake. He’d wander out for an hour or so, and come back as normal as ever, without a word an explanation. By the time I’d reached the age of seventeen, he’d started leaving for days at a time. He would always come back, and things would be like they always were, easy conversation and games and questions.

I liked to think that he was weaning me off of him, making me used to being without him because he knew I’d have to leave soon, but I knew James better than that. He was probably bored of this new older, more mature me, who didn’t always want to play games and who was more interested thinking about the future than in talking about the past. If James was an angel, he was a rather self-centered one.

By the time I was ready for college, he would leave for weeks, stay for a day or two, and then disappear again.

James was Somewhere Else during my last week at home. That week stretched unpleasantly, the minutes tense and slow, me pushing to get from one day to the next. He was still gone on the day I had planned to leave for school. I had known that I wouldn’t be able to say good-bye to him, and a large part of me hated to leave like that. He’d always been with me; I couldn’t remember a day of my childhood without him. I loved him.

Another part of me wanted to leave, to go to school and be on my own, to start a life with real people instead of a tall, tricky imp who told me he was an angel. I wanted to be a whole me for the first time, not half myself and half James. But even that part needed to say good-bye.

I stayed in my room for that entire morning. It was empty, bare except for the furniture, all of my belongings waiting in the car or packed away in boxes and shut in the closet. I was already gone. I sat on the uncovered mattress of my bed, not thinking anything, just feeling the largeness of the room without stuffed animals in the corners or James on the desk.

I was surprised when the handle on the door turned and James strolled in. His dark eyes flashed black as he smiled at me and made his leisurely way to where I was sitting. He plopped down beside me.

“You don’t have to leave, you know,” he said, his voice the same as it had always been, light and teasing and humorous. “You could stay.”

He knew that I couldn’t, and I told him so.

“I could take you somewhere else. You don’t need to leave for good.” He was reclined on the bed, relaxed as always, and his voice never changed as he continued. “You don’t have to grow old, you know. You don’t need to die.”

“You aren’t making sense, James.”

He slid off the bed abruptly and stood in the center of the room. He spread his hands, his smile ironic. “You’re really leaving then.”

I nodded, and something changed in his face, slightly – a darkening of his already black eyes, a downward curve to the corners of his smiling mouth. But then the change vanished and the playful glimmer was back in his expression as he crossed the distance between us and bent to press a warm kiss to my forehead. He patted me on the top of the head, turned, and walked away. The door closed with a gentle click behind him.

I shut my eyes then. I was happy, but no smile formed on my mouth. I was sad, but no tears formed in my eyes. I had never cried for James, and I never would.

I followed his steps into the hallway. It was empty; nothing was changed. I looked toward the window. I saw that the then-neglected flowerbeds had bloomed into a riot of color and flowers, and lying on the windowsill was a single red rose.