As it turns out, it’s difficult to keep up a high page count when you spend all your time after school texting the boy you like.
At five p.m. every day, I force myself to turn off my phone, cut my internet connection, and draw. I have to have at least one page a week, and between Thanksgiving and winter break, I average two. It’s the quality. I could get whole chapters out if I didn’t care about the quality, but quality is king. Quality makes this story look on the outside the way I feel about it on the inside. It’s big and colorful and beautiful. The characters are alive. When a page doesn’t look as good as it could, shame worms its way into the marrow of my bones, because I’ve let the story down.
On the weekends, I take breaks. First, so I don’t burn out, and second, so I can draw pictures for Wallace. I still haven’t posted anything online like he said I should—like Cole, Megan, Leece, and Chandra also said I should, after he showed them that picture of Kite Waters. But I like drawing for Wallace because he likes looking at them. I draw him pictures of Dallas: Dallas playing with a seacreeper, Dallas looking into the bioluminescent tide pools in his cave, Dallas walking along the shore beneath the stars. I try not to make them look too much like actual panels of the comic, but every time I hand him one he beams and says how it resembles LadyConstellation’s work.
I know I should stop. I know I shouldn’t give him any more evidence.
I kind of wish he knew.
I don’t tell him what my family said at Thanksgiving, or that my mom took me to see a doctor. Thinking about the birth control has me short of breath and sweating like a pig. I sweated in the doctor’s office, and when the doctor found out that I did that on a daily basis, even she thought something was wrong, and that the birth control might regulate it.
The birth control is not regulating it. The birth control is making me sick to my stomach. It’s a strange feeling to like someone so much and yet be terrified to have them in your space, touching you. It isn’t that I don’t like it when we touch—when we brush arms or when he taps me on the shoulder or when I pick a piece of lint off his shirt. I like it too much. My body gets excited without my permission, and it’s not okay. It’s out of control. I don’t like out of control, but I like Wallace.
So I don’t know if it’s lucky or unlucky that Wallace and I are limited to homeroom, lunch, and a half hour on the bleachers behind the middle school every weekday. We share an English class too, but Wallace sits on the opposite side of the room. On Saturday afternoons we get in his car and head to Murphy’s, where we meet up with Cole. Megan comes if she doesn’t have to work and if Hazel is behaving. Cole brings his laptop and gets Chandra and Leece on video chat, but only if Leece has a break from gymnastics and if Chandra is awake, since she’s ten hours ahead of us.
“Do you ever think it’s weird that we come to a bookstore every week and don’t buy any books?” Cole asks, paused, yet again, over his unfinished geometry homework. At this rate, he’ll be done next July.
“Speak for yourself,” Wallace says. The only reason he speaks is because the bookstore is empty except for us and the one employee stocking books on the far side of the shop. Wallace slumps in the seat beside me, boxing me in, the spine of a book balanced against the table and his eyes moving slowly across the words. I feel like he must be able to absorb everything, know everything about a book, because of how slow he reads. If I like a book, I devour it in one sitting, and then I forget a lot. It’s fine with me, because I read them over and over again. But Wallace will take weeks to read a book—shortened to days, if he really likes it—and he remembers all of it, and then he doesn’t read it again. At least, he said, not for a very long time.
“Have you ever read Children of Hypnos?” I ask. Cole, Wallace, and Chandra all look up. I don’t talk much around them—I prefer listening—but I still like them. I like that they don’t expect me to talk. They don’t mind that I don’t.
“I’ve heard of it,” Wallace says, “but never read it.”
“Wasn’t that the fandom that cannibalized itself after the author went crazy?” Chandra says.
“She didn’t go crazy,” Cole says. “She ran into the mountains and barricaded herself in a cave.”
“Isn’t that covered under ‘going crazy’?” Chandra asks. “She chases people off her property with a shotgun, screaming bloody murder. I heard she has all booby traps set up.”
“She didn’t go crazy,” I say. “She just . . . couldn’t finish.”
The truth is, no one knows the reason Olivia Kane stopped writing. She isn’t in the mountains, and she doesn’t chase people off her property with a shotgun. As far as I know, she just turned into a hermit. Vanished into the countryside of North Carolina one day and never came back. Once she disappeared, reporters couldn’t even get a reason out of her. Plenty of people have heard about the fandom, at least. It ripped itself apart through arguments over speculations about a finale that would never come.
“They’re my favorite books,” I say. “You should read them.”
“Books written by a hermit lady in the mountains?” Cole hops up right away. “Let’s see if someone has them around here. Hey, Abigail!” He trots to the girl stocking books—sushi girl from Halloween—and starts up a conversation. Abigail nods at something Cole says and takes him over to a corner of the store. He comes back with a stack of all four Children of Hypnos books in the original hardback covers, though a little worn from their previous owner. “Check it out,” Cole says. “They had two full shelves of them back there.”
Wallace picks up the top one and reads the inside flap.
“Nightmare hunters, huh?” he says. He closes it again and looks at the front cover. A decorative illustration of a war hammer inlaid with the symbol of Hypnos, a closed eye.
I pick up the second book. On the cover is a great sword. “Yes! So the premise is like, strong dreams and nightmares can cross over into the real world, and we need these people, dreamhunters, to send them back to the dream world. It’s an alternate-universe Earth where this whole nightmare hunting system is embedded in society; there’s a Hypnos government, and the dreamhunters are like special agents, and they’re stronger and faster than normal people but they don’t live as long, and they rarely sleep. They have these cool weapons too, like on the covers—weapons they grow from the dream world, that match their personalities. Oh, and my favorite character—okay, I have a lot of favorites, but the main favorite—he never sleeps, and his dream world is this Frankenstein lab, and his nightmares are huge poisonous monstrosities.”
Wallace cracks open the first book and starts reading. Cole and Chandra stare at me.
“That is the most I have ever heard you say at once,” Chandra says.
I slide a little in my seat, yanking the front of my sweatshirt to get air. I only ever spoke about Children of Hypnos with other fans online. Never anyone in real life. I didn’t know all that would come out.
“I’m buying these,” Wallace announces, and takes the stack of books up to the counter with his wallet.
While he’s paying, Cole asks Chandra what she’s working on and she shows us a picture of Damien and Rory from Monstrous Sea vigorously making out. Cole scowls.
“Why do you have to put my favorite character in gay situations?” he asks.
Chandra rolls her eyes and proceeds to list off all the times in the comic there were very canon undertones to legitimize Damien and Rory’s very fanon gay relationship.
“Damien’s already bisexual, my Damien-Amity ship sank back in August when LadyConstellation said it was never going to happen, and Damien makes eyes at Rory ALL THE TIME. And even if there weren’t legitimate reasons,” she goes on, “being gay doesn’t make them different people. They’re still the same characters. Stop whining.”
I love it when they get in arguments like this. Canon vs. fanon, how they think the story should go, how they think it should end, which characters are the best, which places they’d want to live in. It’s like reading the comments without ever seeing the trolls—instant reader feedback from people who actually like the comic and are active in its fandom.
Wallace comes back with the books and boxes me in again. I put my back to the wall and sink down, pulling my feet up onto the seat. My toes brush Wallace’s thigh. I start to scoot them back when his hand comes down and rests over my shoelaces. The heat from his palm shoots up my ankle, my leg, makes my stomach turn to water. He doesn’t look at my foot when he does it, just like he didn’t look back at me when he took my hand at Halloween. When he releases my foot a moment later, it’s like touching it wasn’t even a big deal in the first place. He’s already back to reading the Children of Hypnos book. Cole and Chandra don’t realize anything has happened. No one else realizes anything has happened. Wallace doesn’t even act like he does.
Just me. This tight feeling in my chest is only me.
Sato stood behind her. He held out his hand, as always, and as always, Amity didn’t shake it. Nocturnians didn’t shake hands; meeting someone’s eye was considered a more than adequate greeting. Sato knew this, of course, and smiled as he lowered his hand.
“Is there someone like me out there?” she asked.
Sato sat across from her, back straight, hands on his legs. He wore Alliance white and green, with the colonel’s gold sword pinned to either shoulder. “I’m honestly surprised it took you so long to ask.”
“Are the stories true? Is he out there murdering and enslaving people with the Scarecrow’s power, and I’m the only one who can stop him?”
Sato took another second to collect himself, then said, “As far as we know, there are no other creatures like the Scarecrow and the Watcher on Orcus. You and Faust are two of a kind. You’ve seen the Watcher’s healing capabilities. It’s an unconscious thing, like breathing, and in the years we’ve been studying Faust, we haven’t found a limit to it. Our best theory, gathered from the Nocturnian stories and from an informant of ours, says only the hosts can mortally wound each other.”