Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia (25)

My parents put me in swimming lessons when I was younger. A pool of thirty little kids forced to float on their backs and tread water. I’d tripped over my feet in soccer and routinely gotten bowled over in basketball, so I guess they were hoping I’d have more luck as a swimmer.

Back then, I still wanted to please my parents. I wanted to be good at something; I just wasn’t. I didn’t particularly like swimming, but if I was good at it, I would do it.

I wasn’t good at it. When the instructor tried to teach us dead man’s float—a move everyone else picked up on instinct—I snorted water up my nose and flailed until they said I could stop. But I kept trying.

On the last day of class, one of the boys dared me to dive to the bottom of the deep end. I did it. Or I tried. My fingers touched the bottom and I started back up, only to realize I was running out of air. Three quarters of the way to the top, oxygen deprivation made my vision black and my arms and legs thrash against the water around me. When I broke the surface, the relief of breathing was spoiled by the intensity of my inhaling and the pain of cold air needling my insides. A headache beat through my skull.

Waking up after the cafeteria is like surfacing from the deep end of the pool. Throbbing head, cold air. A narrow hospital room comes into focus around me. My eyes squeeze shut against the brightness overhead.

“Annie, turn down the light.”

The lights dim.

“Hey, Eggs. Can you hear me?”

I crack my eyes open again. Dad sits beside the bed. Mom moves back over to him from the light switch on the other side of the room. I swallow against the sandpaper in my mouth.

“Yeah.”

They both smile. Mom passes a hand over her face.

“What happened?” I ask.

“You tripped in the cafeteria at school and hit your head on a table.” Dad motions to my forehead. I don’t have to reach up and touch it to know there’s a bandage there. “Bled all over the place, I guess. How do you feel?”

“Head hurts,” I say. “Obviously.”

“Were you feeling okay when you left the house this morning?” Mom asks. “Did you eat your breakfast?”

I don’t say anything, because the reason I passed out finally comes back to me, and that squeezing hand hovers around me again. It threatens. My lungs seize in anticipation.

They told everyone about LadyConstellation. My whole school knows. The whole township knows.

Wallace knows.

“How long has it been?” I ask.

“Since the cafeteria?” Dad looks at his watch. “Maybe an hour and a half? They didn’t want to take a chance with a head injury, so they got you in an ambulance and rushed you over here. The doctor should be back to check on you any time now.”

“You told them. You put it in the paper.” Tears blur my vision. The room spins, but I’m still lying down.

“Told them—what, you mean the graduation issue?” Mom blinks at me, then looks at Dad. “That’s only the Star, Eliza, no one really reads it. We didn’t think it would matter if we mentioned the webcomic. And you love it so much—and we really are proud of you for it. We thought—”

“Millions of people read it, though! The comic!” I struggle to sit up, hoping that will alleviate the dizziness. It doesn’t. “Millions of people! Some of them live here!”

They’re going to find me. They’re going to know who I am and they’re going to find me.

“Eggs.” Dad puts a hand on my shoulder to push me back down, worry etched into his face. I don’t think he heard what I just said.

“Wallace lives here,” I say, shoving his hand off. “Where is he? He didn’t come here, did he?” He can’t see me like this.

Mom frowns. “He didn’t know? I assumed you had already told him.”

“Of course Wallace didn’t know! No one does!”

I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and feel suddenly light-headed, as if seconds away from fainting.

The door opens and a doctor strides in. The name HARRIS is stitched onto his coat. When he sees me there, he drops his file on the desk and hurries over.

“Eliza, are you feeling okay?” Dr. Harris gently pushes me back onto the bed.

“Can’t breathe,” I say. “Dizzy.”

“You can breathe. Breathe deep. In your stomach.” He lifts my legs up and pushes my head between them. I breathe the way he says and after a minute the light-headedness goes away and the room stops spinning. “You’re okay in here. It’s just you and me and your parents. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

The white noise machine hums softly in the corner. The grip on my insides loosens.

“You suffered a pretty nasty cut to your forehead,” Dr. Harris says, “so you might have a little scar once that heals. Is this the same way you felt in the cafeteria, before you fell?”

“Yes. But that was worse.”

“Have you felt like this before today?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me exactly what you felt?”

“I, um . . . I couldn’t breathe. Dizzy. I got tunnel vision, and it felt like I was being squeezed through a little tube. I thought I was dying. I thought I was going to die in front of everyone.”

“She said—well, we put something in the newspaper we probably shouldn’t have, and that might have caused some issues at school,” Mom says, watching me. “Could that have done this?”

Dr. Harris rests a hand on my back. “Possibly. I believe what you suffered was a panic attack. Now, panic attacks can be triggered by extremely stressful circumstances. Big life changes, death of a loved one, things like that.”

I shove my head deeper between my knees. My forehead pulses.

“I can recommend a great therapist who helps a lot of teens with panic and anxiety issues,” Dr. Harris says. “One panic attack doesn’t make a disorder, but if you have more, consistently, that’s what it could become. We want to do our best to avoid that.”

Panic disorder? I don’t have panic disorder. Panic disorder was a thing that came up in my psychology elective last year. I read like half a paragraph on it.

Dr. Harris tells my parents I’m okay to go home, but I shouldn’t go back to school today—not that there’d be enough time—and if I’m not feeling up to it, I shouldn’t go tomorrow, either. Then he ships us off, and I shuffle between Mom and Dad out to the car, where I sit in the back seat beside my recovered backpack for the ride home and try not to think about Monstrous Sea.

Does the fandom know? Have they already been told? Do they believe whoever told them, or do they think it’s another rumor?

Over the years, LadyConstellation has been “found out” many times. Usually someone trying to grab a little popularity before the researchers came and stripped away the fame. But this time it’s true, and the truth has a way of holding on. Truth is the worst monster, because it never really goes away.

The house is empty when we get home. Except for Davy, who trundles over to the door and slowly smashes himself against my legs, buckling my knees. Church and Sully are still at school. Mom and Dad try to get me to lie down on the couch in the living room, but I insist I’d feel better if I slept in my own bed. They help me upstairs, and set to work making chicken noodle soup and ginger ale.

I let Davy into my room and close the door behind him. Sidle to the computer and shake the mouse to wake it. The desktop is so serene, so quiet. I open the browser and head to the forums.

It is chaos.

To the untrained eye, an online forum looks like a bunch of random messages cobbled together. To someone who knows how to navigate them, they tell a story. And the story of the Monstrous Sea forums is “Eliza Mirk: Hoax or Reality?” Without clicking on any of the subforums or any of their threads, I know the consensus is reality. They found the article in the Westcliff Star. They found the MirkerLurker account, and the drawings Wallace wanted me to put up so badly. They found me.

I’m logged in to the LadyConstellation account, and my inbox number is so high the page no longer displays the quick-tip number over the inbox icon. Just an ellipsis. Half a minute after I log in, messages attack the right side of my screen. From people I know, from people I don’t. From friends and from trolls. They come in a trickle at first, and then, as more people realize I’m online, in a flood. There are so many the page begins to lag. They come so quickly I don’t have time to read them.

I log out and log back in under the MirkerLurker account.

This one is even worse. There is another ellipsis next to my inbox, but when I start receiving the messages, I do have time to read them. At least one of them.

A picture comes up in the message window. It’s my yearbook photo from this year. Not even the horrible seventh grade one they included in the graduation article. How did this person get my yearbook photo?

I log out of MirkerLurker and close the browser, my stomach cramping.

I push my chair away from my desk and put my head between my knees again. I’m not light-headed or having trouble breathing like before, but this makes me feel better. Makes the space seem smaller and reminds me that I’m the only one in the room.

I grab my phone and open the messenger on there. All the MirkerLurker messages are still there, but at least the phone app lets me shut them out and look at my conversation with Emmy and Max.

Damage control. They tried running damage control. I let out a short, hysterical laugh. How could anyone run damage control on this? This is it. The fandom won. I lost. Eliza Mirk has been swallowed by the tides of their sea.

I switch to my messages with Wallace. There’s nothing new since the last time we used the messenger. I don’t have any emails from him, either. Or texts. He hasn’t tried to call me.

Why would he? I lied to him for months. For the whole time I knew him. I could say it wasn’t really lying, it was leaving out details, but that itself is a lie. If I was him, I’d hate me.

Footsteps start up the stairs. I flip my phone over, turn off the computer monitor, and curl up on the bed beside Davy, who lies still and lets me use him as a body pillow. My legs shake. Mom knocks softly on the door—I know it’s her because Dad never knocks softly—and comes in with a tray of soup, crackers, and ginger ale.

“Are you feeling any better?” she asks.

“A little.”

She smiles and smooths the hair away from my forehead, being careful of the bandage there. “Good. Try to get some sleep.”

I don’t. I stare at my computer across the room, silent and unmoving, and I wonder what storms brew over the all-knowing internet.

It was only a matter of time. Since that first day I met Wallace in class. Since I hung out with his friends. Since I told myself I would try.

I forgot there’s no air this far down.