On Monday, I stand at my locker and imagine the floor shaking as Wallace stalks down the hallway toward me, parting a sea of students who scramble to get out of his way. He doesn’t look angry. He never looks angry at school. He just looks impassive. Irish Spring wafts over me when he stops two feet away and thrusts a piece of paper under my nose. On it is a single line of his machine-print handwriting.
Are you done?
“Yes, I’m done,” I say.
He nods, shoves the paper in his pocket, and leans against the locker next to mine. His gaze settles somewhere on the other side of the hallway. I know he’s right, and I get too intense about my work sometimes. I also know that I wasn’t wrong, even if I wasn’t very nice when I said he should be seeing someone. Apologizing seems right, but also like if I say I’m sorry that means I don’t think there’s something wrong and that he should go on never talking to anyone.
By the end of homeroom, he seems to have forgiven me at least a little bit, because he texts me a link to what he says is the best Children of Hypnos fifth-book fanfiction ever. By lunch, he hands over a new chapter of his Monstrous Sea transcription. He says he’s getting close to the end of what would be the first book in the series, and he would’ve had it done sooner if so much school stuff hadn’t gotten in the way.
I inhale the new chapter. I never get enough of his writing, and I don’t know if it’s because he’s writing something I made or if he’s just that good. I like to think he’s just that good. He doesn’t volunteer to show me any of his original work, and I never ask to see it. I don’t know what I’d say to him if I didn’t like it.
He never asks to see any of my original work, either. Sometimes I’m sure it’s for the same reason, but other times I wonder if he doesn’t care. If, like most of the Monstrous Sea fans, he doesn’t care if I have anything else in me.
Production of Monstrous Sea is up. Five pages a week minimum, a whole chapter if I’m really on my game. Max, when he’s online, has plenty of trolls to keep him busy on the Forges_of_Risht account. Emmy has to hang around every Friday night to monitor the website and make sure it doesn’t crash. Mondays and Wednesdays at three are reserved for our biweekly mandatory chat sessions, where we don’t speak a word about Monstrous Sea and instead talk about how Emmy’s faring at the end of her freshman year (“Im not dead yet”), and how Max feels about his new boss (actual demon).
Weekends are for Wallace. We spend Saturdays with Cole and Megan, when she can join, and Leece and Chandra on the computer, if they’re around. Not always at Murphy’s. Sometimes we go to the Blue Lane for bowling. One week we go to the park behind the high school, where Wallace and Cole teach me how to throw a spiral, then take turns running around with Hazel on their shoulders while I show Megan how to sketch a landscape using the long field and the trees of the woods in the distance. After a while I hand over the paper and pencil and give pointers while she tries it.
“You’re really good at this,” she says, tucking a hair behind her ear and squinting at the tree line. “Teaching, I mean.”
“You think so? I tried teaching my brothers to draw a few years ago and they said I was mean.”
“No, not mean.” Megan laughed. “Just blunt. But that’s a good thing.”
Hazel squeals. Wallace has hoisted her over his head in an airplane, and Cole is pretending to be the enemy jet she has to shoot down.
I don’t call them “Wallace’s friends” anymore. They’re our friends. His first, and still mostly his, but now also mine. I talk to them on the forums through my MirkerLurker account even when Wallace isn’t around. That may not seem like much to some people, but it’s a lot to me.
When I’m not with them or talking to Emmy and Max or hanging out with Wallace, I’m watching myself. Making sure I don’t get too focused on working. But with five pages a week, that’s easier said than done. Especially because the comic is so close to the end. If I space it out right, Monstrous Sea will end when I graduate. I may not even go to graduation. I’ll sit at my computer and post the final Monstrous Sea pages myself, no scheduling required.
I know how this ends. The story. The fan reactions.
It will be glorious.
Then the graduation issue of the Westcliff Star shows up at school.
The Westcliff Star focuses on only two stories every year. The first, obviously, is the Wellhouse Turn memorial. The second is the graduation of the seniors from Westcliff High. This is the issue where all the parents in the township write short blurbs about their graduating seniors and send them in, and the paper prints them with the ugliest student pictures they can find, and everyone in school reads through them and laughs at the humiliating things everyone else’s parents said about them.
My parents have been looking forward to this since we got back from the spring break camping trip. They said I’d love it. Absolutely love it.
There’s a whole stack of Westcliff Stars in Mrs. Grier’s room when I arrive that morning, and everyone is reading. I grab one, dread flooding me, sweat building on my back. Yes, let’s see what traumatizing thing my parents said about me, and everyone can read about Creepy Eliza. I head to my seat.
Mrs. Grier’s gaze follows me across the room. She sits stick straight at her desk, eyes wide, the newspaper spread open in front of her. She doesn’t normally watch me like that, so either I have something on my face or my parents really said something they shouldn’t have. God, they put a baby picture of me in here. Or they told the story about the time I tried to kick the ball in soccer and missed so badly the momentum threw me on the ground.
I hurry to my desk, sit without taking my backpack off, and tear the paper open. My hands shake as I flip past picture after picture, paragraphs of stories about childhood, broken arms and baseball games, school plays and birthdays. It’s in alphabetical order, and I skip past my name and have to backtrack. There it is, a terrible school picture of me from seventh grade, with greasy hair and braces and an actual turtleneck, did-I-come-out-of-the-fucking-sixties a turtleneck. My parents have never been great writers, but they managed a full paragraph for this one.
Eliza Mirk
We’re so proud of our Eliza. She’s our firstborn, and she’s as stubborn and passionate now as she always has been. These eighteen years have been a long road, full of lots of twists and turns, but she’s taught us so much about being parents—and about being people. She loves hard-boiled eggs, thick socks, and listening to her music maybe a little too loud (but what teenager doesn’t?). Best of all, she’s an artist, and what she loves more than anything else is her webcomic, Monstrous Sea. She has spent so much of her time working on this story, poured so much of herself into it, and built something for herself from the ground up. We know that no matter where she goes or what she does after this, she’ll be successful. Eliza, we love you.
Peter and Anna Mirk
I look up and the room is silent. Not because everyone stopped talking, but because there is a ringing in my ears so loud nothing can penetrate it. The room expands and I shrink, the walls exploding away from me, the light dimming. My heart stutters in my chest.
Mrs. Grier walks down my row, newspaper in hand. She kneels next to my desk. Her voice comes out too slow.
“Eliza. Is this true?” She holds up the paper. It’s turned to my paragraph and my stupid face. “Did . . . did you create Monstrous Sea?”
My stomach heaves violently. I clap a hand over my mouth.
“Because I—well, I probably shouldn’t show you this, but . . .” Mrs. Grier pulls back her sleeve. She always wears long sleeves, cardigans over her sundresses, sweaters, even in the summer, and now I know why: in thick black ink up her arm are the words THERE ARE MONSTERS IN THE SEA.
My most famous quote is tattooed on my homeroom teacher’s arm.
Behind Mrs. Grier, Wallace walks into the room. Big, lumbering Wallace. Normally he moves slow, but today, in this slow-motion world, he moves far too fast. He reaches the front table where the newspapers are stacked up. Takes one. Opens it. I know he’ll look for my name first because mine comes before his. He’ll see it. He reads slow, but not that slow.
I shove myself out of my seat, knock Mrs. Grier over, and reach Wallace in time to rip the newspaper out of his hands.
“Don’t read it!”
I hold it to my chest, panting, unable to get enough air. Heads turn. Look up from their papers. Wallace stares at me. Confusion and possibly fear flit over his face.
“Don’t—don’t read it,” I say again. Several people are already flipping through pages at their desks, looking for mine. Wallace looks at them, at me, at the paper. Then he reaches for another one. I try to stop him, but his big hand grabs first one wrist and then the other, holding me off like I’m a child. He spreads the newspaper out on the table and flips it open.
“No—Wallace, don’t read it—please, please don’t read it—”
I press against his arm, trying to push him away from the table, the papers, but he’s so solid. I whisper now. The others can’t hear me beg like this. Wallace’s brow furrows as he finds my picture, my paragraph, and begins reading. True dread squeezes around me like a second, larger hand. I know when he reaches the end because the color drains from his face like someone chopped off his head and let the blood run out. He looks at me. Jabs a finger on the paper hard enough to crinkle the page. Jabs it again. Pointing. Is it true. Is it true, is it true.
“I wanted to tell you.” I can’t even tell if sound is coming out anymore. “I wanted to tell you, I did, but I didn’t know how—”
He drops my wrists like they’re poisonous, steps back, then turns and walks out of the room. I try to follow him, but Mrs. Grier’s hand lands on my shoulder. She says something. I shrug her off. Someone from the back of the room says, “Holy shit, you made Monstrous Sea?”
I stumble into the hallway. Wallace is gone. The floor sways back and forth, and blackness creeps on the edges of my vision.
After a moment or two, it passes.
At least, it seems like a moment or two. Maybe a few minutes. Maybe half an hour, because by the time I snap out of it, the bell is ringing and students pour into the hallways.
I wander to first period without my backpack.
With each passing class, more and more stares find me in the hallway. People talk, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. I don’t see Wallace again, which is some kind of feat considering his size. My body is a teacup and all my organs have been stuffed inside. Must be my allergies. It is spring, after all.
Wallace will have to talk to me at lunch. He wouldn’t sit without me at lunch.
I hang on the fringes of the herd of students surging for the cafeteria and let them pull me through the doors. On the other side I fall away like a leaf flung out on a stray current. I stand for a moment, unsure of the cafeteria’s exact orientation, then stagger toward the lunch lines. If I can get some food and find Wallace, it will be okay.
A body steps in front of me. Tall. Deshawn Johnson. He’s holding something out. A folded paper. My hand reaches out to take it like this is some kind of dream and my body is responding without my permission. I unfold the paper.
It’s my drawing. The one Travis stole in October.
“. . . really sorry,” Deshawn says. “Travis was being an asshole . . . meant to give it back sooner, but never got the chance . . . it’s really cool that you draw Monstrous Sea . . . my brother got me into it—”
I might throw up on his shoes if I stand here any longer, so I stumble past him. Wallace has to be here somewhere. At our table. Obviously. By the windows. I look. He’s not there.
I get in line and stare at the purse of the girl in front of me. I don’t know what I put on my tray until I get to the end, and the lunch lady rings me up for two bowls of tomato soup, a vegetable tray, a handful of mustard packets, and a Drumstick. The Drumstick is for Wallace. Wallace loves Drumsticks.
I wander out of the lines and look at the table again. He’s still not there. I scan the cafeteria. He’s not in any of the lines. Not at the tables near the door, or by the wall. Is he in the courtyard? It’s too cold for that today.
Heads turn. Eyes watch me. So many eyes. I head toward our table. The world tips again. It’s like I’m a mustard packet and some baby’s hand is squeezing all the condiment out of me. Squeezing my heart, my lungs, squeezing my eyes so my vision narrows to a little point in front of me. Hair sticks to my face. One of the bowls of tomato soup falls off my tray and splatters the white tile floor.
Someone calls my name. I think.
They might have said LadyConstellation.
I walk through the soup. Where is he? He should be here.
Have I gotten this week’s Monstrous Sea pages done? I can’t remember. I must have. I’m so ahead.
Mom and Dad really shouldn’t have written that about me in the paper.
It is so hot in here. Why is it so hot?
I am going to die if my lungs don’t get out of this teacup.
Where is Wallace?
I am one hundred percent going to die.
He’s supposed to be here so I can give him this fucking Drumstick.
Jesus, I’m dying.
My tray knocks the edge of the table. Catches it, then catches my stomach. Crunches out of my hands. My legs buckle.
Darkness slams down.