# An imaginary friend's rules are the real invention > Four pencil rules run down the back of a shirt — where he sits, what he won't eat, how old he is — and the rules turn out to be more interesting than the friend himself. August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-imaginary-friend-had-rules Four rules run down the back in pencil capitals: HE SITS THERE. NOT THAT CHAIR. HE DOESNT LIKE PEAS. HE IS 6. No drawing of him, no name, nothing else on the shirt. Nobody drew a friend here. Somebody wrote four constraints and then agreed to be bound by them. ## Why print the rules instead of drawing what the friend actually looks like? Because the rules are the concrete part — a drawing would just be a guess at an appearance the child never had to settle on, since nobody else ever needed to see him. An imaginary friend rarely gets described in visual detail unprompted; he gets described in what he does and doesn't do. He sits there, not in that chair. He won't touch peas. Those are decisions a child made and kept consistent across weeks, which is a far more specific act than picking a hair colour for an illustration nobody asked for. ## Why does an invented friend need rules at all? Because a friend who behaves differently every day isn't really being invented, he's being made up on the spot each time — and a child seems to want the first kind, not the second. Once the chair rule exists, it gets enforced: an adult who sits in the wrong one gets corrected, sometimes sharply. That's the tell that this isn't a passing game. A rule you enforce against other people is a rule you actually believe, in whatever sense a six-year-old believes something, and it's what separates an imaginary friend from an imaginary anything-else. ## Whose invention is this, and does anybody need to grant permission? The child's and the family's — nothing here is copied from a book, a film or anyone else's character, so there's no licence to chase. The complication is the usual one for this material rather than a legal one: a child grows into an opinion about what gets kept of theirs, and a shirt is a more permanent record than the friend ever was. Ask once they're old enough to have a view, rather than assuming either way. [A set of rules a whole household writes down and pins up](/stories/house-rules-shirt) faces the same question at a bigger scale. ## What makes a good set of rules to print, if my own child's are completely different? Specificity — an arbitrary, oddly particular rule reads as real; a broad or tidy one reads as invented after the fact for the shirt. "He doesn't like peas" is a strange thing to make up for effect; nobody reaches for that detail unless it's actually true of the friend as the child understands him. The instinct to smooth a rule into something more universal — he's picky, say, instead of the specific vegetable — removes the one thing that makes it believable. Keep the exact rule, however small. ## Why does "HE IS 6" work differently from the other three rules? Because it isn't a preference, it's a fact stated with the same authority as the preferences — which says something about how a child relates to facts versus rules. Where he sits and what he eats are choices somebody made about him. His age isn't a choice, and yet it's written in the same hand, in the same list, enforced the same way. That's not a mistake in the design; it's an accurate record of how a six-year-old actually organises what they know: rule and fact sit on the same list because both are things you're not allowed to get wrong. ## Should the missing apostrophe in DOESNT be corrected before it's printed? No — the missing apostrophe is the child's own spelling, and correcting it edits out the one detail that proves who actually wrote this. An adult retyping the rules would add the apostrophe automatically, without noticing they'd changed anything. That's exactly the edit to resist: the same way [a household's own word for something holds no interest once it's tidied into the dictionary spelling](/stories/the-word-only-this-house-uses), DOESNT without the mark is what this particular child wrote, this particular year. ## Does this work when there's more than one imaginary friend in the house? Yes, and siblings' rules don't need to agree with each other for either version to be worth having. Some households end up with one shared friend and a single merged list, argued into existence between two children. Others run two entirely separate friends with contradictory rules — one insists on a specific chair, the other won't touch peas either, for reasons that overlap by coincidence and not by agreement. Both are real records of two different processes, kept as two different shirts. ## Does it print well? Yes — pencil capitals are a flat, single-colour mark with no gradient in them, which is exactly what holds up printed on fabric. Keep the letterforms uneven rather than straightening them into a typeface: the slight pressure change and the odd spacing between words is what makes it read as handwritten rules rather than a printed sign. [A single ink laid down as clean line art](/stories/line-art-single-color-prints) is the whole job here — one colour, no shading, nothing else competing with the four lines. ## How do I get one made? Describe the rules at [JustOG](/) — the exact wording, the exact order, and any spelling worth keeping. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). The chair rule still gets enforced. Nobody has sat in that one for months.