Archive of Our Own

"Hobbes," Calvin says thoughtfully, perched on the sharply slanted roof outside his bedroom window. "Have you always been around?"

Hobbes looks very wise and takes a large bite of his tuna sandwich. His reply is muffled and incomprehensible around the food.

Calvin takes this to mean that Hobbes doesn't know, either.

The sky looks bigger the closer you get to it, he notices. With the window shut, lying against a gurgling tiger belly, he can pretend that he is up in the stars (like Spaceman Spiff). He almost can't hear Mom calling his name.

---

In the middle of the night Calvin wakes up suddenly from a dream that Mrs. Wormwood has come in alien form to eat his brain. Delicately, with a ruler in place of silverware.

(At least she was neat about it.)

Panicked, he grabs for Hobbes and makes a run for the door, taking care to jump a safe distance from the bed so as to avoid any monsters beneath.

The door is closed, but Calvin doesn't realize this until his face has made violent contact with the doorknob.

(Was he that tall before?)

With all the lights on and his parents clutching his shoulders and pressing bloody Kleenexes to his face, Calvin almost doesn't notice something tiny drop to the floor.

When they are gone and Calvin is sitting up in bed, a washcloth stoppering his bloody nose, Hobbes sidles up to him and offers a paw, upon which sits a tiny tooth.

A tooth! Calvin had heard of this happening. Teeth were supposed to fall out.

Hobbes is not quite as jubilant as he should be.

---

Calvin grows increasingly bored in class. Mrs. Wormwood returns glaring zeros on his assignments, question marks lurking next to multiple choice questions festooned with doodles of krakens. Susie finds tiny eraser shavings and paper scraps in her neatly brushed hair. That kid at the front of the class whose name Calvin has never bothered to learn turns an alarming shade of puce when he discovers his chair has been covered in cafeteria-issue ketchup and peanut butter.

They put him in a different class, with a teacher who clearly wants to get through to him. He endures probing questions and sympathetically graded assignments.

It doesn't matter what he does; he can't seem to get a reaction.

So he stops.

His parents are a little worried, but more relieved than anything else when Calvin ceases to be the terror he once was, bit by bit.

Hobbes tries to interest him in a bit of fun-filled Calvinball, but to no avail.

---

The only mischief Calvin finds any glee in (apart from refusing to go to bed when asked and pushing Roz to the edge of her sanity) is tormenting Susie.

Susie reacts quite vehemently. It's consistent, which he appreciates.

The worst reaction, he thinks, is the time he unloaded a dozen eggs onto Susie's head from the G.R.O.S.S. tree when they were nine. It wasn't his most creative moment, but it garnered a screech he's surprised didn't rouse his mother from wherever she went during daylight hours. (The mothership.)

"You're such a freak, Calvin!" Susie shouted, and then she kidnapped Hobbes from his invisible lookout post beneath the tree and ran home.

He couldn't get down from the tree fast enough.

Calvin found Hobbes in Susie's backyard, saying in an offensively genteel manner, "I'd be delighted to have some more tea, thank you."

"You don't even like tea!" Calvin hissed at him from the bushes.

Hobbes scowled. "It's better than Extra Super Sugar Rush, or whatever it is you drink. And she's cuter."

"Oh, is she?" Calvin growled, and snatched Hobbes up, only to discover, to his horror, that Hobbes wore a tutu beheath the tablecloth.

"I'll get you back," Calvin informed Susie gravely.

"I look forward to it," Susie said. There shouldn't have been a smile on her face, but there was.

"Why are you smiling?" Calvin demanded. Susie only smiled wider. "I won! I got you with the eggs!"

"Mom says boys do these things because they don't know an adequate way to express affection," Susie said primly.

Hobbes chuckled. Calvin's eyes popped. "That's not true! It's not!"

Susie stepped neatly over the tea party debris on the ground and kissed Calvin squarely on the mouth. It felt slimy and invasive. Calvin leaped backwards, using Hobbes as a shield.

"I don't even play tea party anymore," Susie continued alarmingly. "I only did it to get on your nerves."

"Get away from me," Calvin warned her. She stepped back, hurt, and Calvin ran for it.

Susie refrained from retaliating after that, although the screaming didn't stop, and Calvin feels strangely dissatisfied with each new attempt.

---

Hobbes takes up residence in his closet. Calvin makes him a little shrine, complete with a rotting peanut butter sandwich and a smock. ("Smock smock smock," says Hobbes happily, before lapsing into silence.) He talks less and less now, and Calvin ought to be more worried about it than he is.

---

The summer he turns eleven, Calvin opens the closet door to discover emptiness. There's not even any dust.

"Mom?" he shouts. "MOM!"

His mom comes running, certain that she's going to find Calvin hanging from the ceiling fixtures or standing next to a broken window. Instead, he's uncharacteristically still, staring inexplicably into his closet.

"Where's Hobbes?" he asks, eyes swimming with panic.

"I gave him away," she says, confused. "You haven't played with Hobbes in years. And you wouldn't believe the crap I found in there, too--have you been eating in your closet?"

Calvin ignores her. "Gave him away? To who?"

"To whom," she corrects him, and then, "to Susan's cousin Patty. She lives--"

Calvin's gone.

---

Patty's house is eight doors down, and Patty herself is playing in the sandbox in the backyard.

She wears an adorably frilled dress. She looks exactly like Susie herself, sans the pug nose. Same priggish mien, too, even at six years old. "What do you want?" she demands.

Calvin feels overgrown and lumpy. "Give Hobbes back," he says angrily, unprepared to get into an argument with a baby.

"What's Hobbes?" she asks, painstakingly adding a tower to her masterpiece.

"That's Hobbes," Calvin says, pointing at the tiger, who sits at the edge of the sandbox wearing a bonnet. (What's their obsession with dressing Hobbes up? He's a tiger. He doesn't need clothes.)

Patty shakes her head. "That's Tiggeria," she says. "She's a girl tiger."

"No, she's not!" Calvin insists, feeling his face heat up. "He's not! He's a boy, and his name is Hobbes, and he belongs to me!"

Patty abandons the argument in favor of a siren wail. Her parents seem likely to appear at any moment, so Calvin snatches Hobbes from the sandbox and drops the bonnet on top of the tower, which promptly collapses.

Hobbes remains silent all the way back to the house. Calvin hunts around in the back of the closet and discovers a cardboard box labeled "Transmogrifier." It seems too small to have ever fit him, let alone a Hobbes-shaped passenger and snacks for the road.

Nevertheless, he needs the magic. Calvin sits cross-legged on the carpet and puts the cardboard box on his head, feeling a little foolish. It doesn't quite reach the ground. Hobbes he sets on his lap.

"What happened?" he asks, his voice louder in the dusty confines of the box.

Hobbes doesn't answer.

"Hobbes?"

Calvin shakes him, but there's no response. Hobbes remains stuffed and mute, with threadbare button eyes and graying paws. Hobbes has changed, Calvin thinks.

He's eleven years old with a cardboard box on his head, talking to a stuffed animal. Calvin rips the Transmogrifier off and shoves Hobbes under his bed, feeling tears prick at his eyes.

---

On the roof, Hobbes says around his tuna sandwich, "Of course. You're the only one changing."

(He doesn't want Calvin to hear.)