A childhood belief about imaginary friends

I had two imaginary friends, Tommy and Stacey. Stacey looked the way I wanted to look, with dark hair, brown eyes and freckles. I thought glasses were cool, so Stacey wore glasses. She always did everything right. Tommy looked like me, with blond hair and green eyes - except of course he wasn't me, because he was a boy. He always got in trouble. When my mother said "Don't stand on that chair; you'll fall and crack your head open," I told her "Tommy fell and cracked his head open once."

Tommy and Stacey lived in a big house with lots of other children and no adults. The basement of their house was called the "rooty ground" - growing out of the floor were huge tub-shaped roots filled with bubbly water, like natural hot tubs that the kids could play and swim in (I don't know where I got this idea; I'd never even seen a hot tub).

One day I announced that Tommy and Stacey had died. They sat too close to the fireplace (I was always warned against this but never understood why), and died of "fire sickness". Occasionally after that I wished that Stacey would come back to keep me company, but she never did.

When I grew up, I met the real Tommy and married him.