I was sat at my desk in my poky little bedroom on a Saturday afternoon working on my English project when our apartment buzzer sounded. I jumped up out of my chair at once.

Mom was out so it was just me at home. Must be Ali, I thought as I pelted down the corridor, through the kitchen, to our front door.

I peered through the peep-hole. Yes. She wore a frown but apart from that looked as beautiful as ever: dark curls, tan skin, and dressed in a pair of stylish, tight-fitting jeans and an....Abercrombie and Fitch sweater? Since when did Ali dress like that? Never mind that now. She was carrying something under one arm—it looked like a wad of paper.

I opened the door.

“Bedroom. Now,” Ali said and barged right past me without another word. Intensity shone from her eyes.

“Er, nice to see you too?” I said. She was already out of earshot, making her way through my apartment towards my bedroom.

Why did she want to go to the ‘bedroom’? I mean, we normally hung out in my bedroom when we hung out here, but she had never drawn attention to the fact before. Never as blatantly as she just had, at least.

Ali waited for me to come in, then slammed the door shut after me and flung the pile of paper she had been carrying down on my bed. Sheets flew everywhere.

“What do you call this?” she demanded angrily.

I furrowed my brow and took a page from the pile, most of which was now strewn all over my duvet, some on the floor. I inspected it. A quick scan of the printed typeface confirmed my suspicions. “Er, this is my English project. The one I shared with you online. The one about how I got into Miracle Force and my missions with them and stuff.”

“Gonzalo, this has got to stop!” Ali burst out, putting both her hands on top of her head.

“What’s got to stop?”

“This ridiculous game!” She began to pace my room frantically, like she was afraid to stay still. “I mean, it was fun at first and I played along with it because it was very creative and clever and I know that you’re very fragile and everything, but now it’s just getting downright creepy!”

“I don’t understand.” I genuinely had no idea what she was talking about. “What do you mean? What ‘game’?”

“This game where you pretend that you have superpowers! Where you pretend that you’ve been recruited to some kind of top-secret UN organisation trying to save the world!” She stopped pacing the floor and held out her hands to me in pleading. “You’re not really so messed up that you actually believe it’s all happening, are you? I don’t know if you are or if I’m not meant to say that because it might upset you more and make you even more messed up or if you do know it’s not real and you’re just playing some big demented trick on me to get attention! You know what, I’m sorry, but I don’t actually care anymore! This latest part is just too creepy!”

Ali’s words had come out in a jumbled rush. I picked over them again in my mind, going over what she had just said, searching for some meaning. Then it hit me. She doesn’t believe me! I realised. She doesn’t believe me about my powers, or Abram, or Miracle Force, or any of it! She’s never believed me! She had just been humouring me, stringing me along this whole time...

“Wha…” I started, but fizzled out quickly. “How…” I tried again, but fared no better. “Why are you only saying this to me now?” I settled on. “What exactly is so ‘creepy’ that you can’t go on with it any more?”

“What’s creepy,” said Ali, throwing her hands up into the air, “is you writing me into your weird little multi-ethnic X-men fanfiction!”

“What...?” I lost my words again. I understood that she didn’t believe in my Miracle Force story, but I couldn’t see what was so ‘creepy’ about it. Yet.

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“This ‘Djinn’ character!” Ali said, grabbing a page from my bed and prodding at it with her finger. “She’s clearly meant to be me! Any idiot could see that! Very clever, to dress her in a burqa to hide her identity, then write me into your story. You even drop obvious hints that’s she’s going to turn out to be me—like us having the same colour eyes!”

I looked at her blankly. I didn’t have anything to say.

“Well, it’s too much, Gonzalo,” Ali carried on. “I thought that your story was cute at first. At first. But I also secretly hoped that you weren’t so deluded that you actually thought what you were writing about was real! I mean, who could be that deluded and lost in their own imaginary world?!”

She stared at me then with her big, brown, silver-tinted eyes, as if waiting for a response.

All I could do was look at the floor.

“But it looks like you are,” Ali went on, shaking her head. “You are completely lost in your own weird little world. And now you’ve written me in to your weird little world as well! Well I’m not having it, OK, Gonzalo? The truth is you don’t really know me as well as you think you do. You don’t really know half of my story, or why I came to America, or who I am! I won’t have you inventing this whole persona for me and then falling in love with it! I told you once there were two types of guy in the world: the type that just uses girls for what they can get from them, and the type that treats them like real people. I thought you were the second type, but you’re not, you’re the first!”

When she said that I had to sit down on the bed.

“And don’t pretend that isn’t what’s happening here!” Ali went on. “I’ve seen this before, when a guy invents this whole idea of a girl for himself in his imagination and then falls in love with that instead of the real girl. This doesn’t end well for me—I know it! People who do this kind of thing usually end up turning into stalkers or molesters or rapists! Their ‘love interests’ usually end up dead in a ditch somewhere! Do you know why my Mom and I came over from Syria? Because my Dad was abusive!”

Her words hit me right in the chest, harder than any punch or bullet ever could. Stalker, molester, rapist? How could she say those things about me? Just a poor little nerdy kid with mental health problems...

But it was what she said next that delivered the killing blow.

“So I’m ending it,” Ali said. “Have you got that, Gonzalo? It’s over. I thought I was being kind to you, I really did, but now I realise that I wasn’t being kind to you at all—I was only ever making it worse by pretending to go along with your superpowers fantasy and trying to be a friend to you. It’s over, Gonzalo.”

“...what’s over?” I managed to mumble, tears pooling in my eyes pathetically.

“Our friendship. Oh God, did you actually think we were in some kind of a relationship? Goodbye, Gonzalo. I won’t be coming back here. See you around.”

Ali left my bedroom. After a moment I heard the front door of the apartment slamming.

For a while I just sat where I was, stunned, looking at the scattered pages on the bed and the floor.

Then I knelt down on my bedroom floor, put my head in my hands, hiding it between my knees, took several shuddering breaths, and wept.

The tears came hot and fast, like a bubble around my head had burst and liquid was leaking everywhere; water and mucus just pouring out of my eyes and nose, soaking my hands, soaking my arms, soaking my knees, soaking my Marvel superheroes T-shirt.

I began to bang my fists against the side of my head.

“YOU STUPID WEAKLING!” I shouted at myself. “YOU STUPID, WORTHLESS, PATHETIC, GOOD-FOR-NOTHING WEAKLING! YOU’VE LOST THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO YOU! THE BEST PERSON THAT YOU’VE EVER KNOWN, AND YOU’VE LOST HER! YOU STUPID MORON IDIOT USELESS WEAKLING!”

I’m not telling you this to try to get sympathy from you. I know that I’m not going to get that. I’m only saying this to you because it’s what happened.

I gathered up the pages from the floor, then the ones from the bed, shouting incomprehensibly at myself all the while, then ripped them up one by one.

I kept shouting as I tore them up into tiny pieces and threw them all around my bedroom where they danced in the air like cheap imitation snowflakes.

After a while I ran out of energy and collapsed on my back on the floor with a thud. I looked up at my grubby bedroom ceiling, grey and damp and ugly, for I don’t know how long, thinking nothing.

Eventually I fell asleep.

I don’t know how long I slept for either—I’m not sure what time it was when you visited and dumped the sheets of paper in my room. My word processer says I was last working on this document at 17:30, so I must have slept for about an hour and a half. I’ve heard that people often go to sleep after experiencing a trauma.

I’m not trying to be melodramatic here, honestly.

When I woke up a terrible headache was squeezing my temples. But I managed to hoist myself up into this chair, take some aspirin from a drawer in my desk, and switch on my laptop again.

Then I began typing, and here I am.

Here we are.

What should I say now?

What should I do now?

I’ll come clean.

I’ll set the record straight.

For myself, and for you. To show you that I’m not really crazy.

I’ll tell you everything.

Here we go.