“This is stupid.”
Sully stands in the doorway to my bedroom, arms crossed over his chest. I lie on the bed and stare unblinking at my TV.
“No it’s not,” I say. “It’s my favorite episode.”
“I’m not talking about Dog Days.”
I turn my head to look at him.
“I’m talking about you lying here, not telling Mom and Dad exactly what they did.”
“They know what they did.”
Sully rolls his eyes. “Bullshit. They think they know but they don’t, because you won’t tell them.”
I turn back to the TV. “It doesn’t matter. It’s done.”
He growls. “If you won’t tell them, I will.” He storms off. I ignore him until I hear the door to Mom and Dad’s office downstairs bang open, and Sully yelling out to ask if he can use their laptop.
I spring out of bed and rush downstairs. Church and Sully’s homework is spread over the kitchen table, but both of them stand across from Mom and Dad at the island counter, bringing up something on the laptop.
The post on the Masterminds site. The one I used to look at every day.
“What is this?” Mom asks, setting aside her fitness magazine. Neither she nor Dad has noticed I’m in the room.
“This is the post that made Monstrous Sea popular,” Sully says. “This website, Masterminds, is where people share things. There are a lot of people here, and for a post to get to the top of a forum like this one and to stay at the top for as long as it has is really hard.”
“And look at all the comments on it. And the likes,” says Church. “Those are all real people, and most of them are people who read and liked Monstrous Sea.”
“But they’re only a few of the people who actually read it.” Sully turns the computer around again and navigates to a new website before turning it back to our parents. The Monstrous Sea forums. “This is the website where the fans gather. You would have seen this if you hadn’t stopped looking at her website two years ago. Look at the numbers on the posts. Look at just the people who are online right now.”
They wait while Mom and Dad scroll through the forum threads, reading usernames, post titles, comment numbers. From the door I can see Dad’s brow furrow and Mom put her hand over her mouth. I fist my hands in my sweatshirt and clamp my mouth shut.
“There are millions of these people,” Sully says. “Way more than are just online here. They read the comic pages Eliza puts up every week. They pay for them. Do you know how much she makes from this? She keeps herself logged in to her bank account on her computer, and we saw. It’s ridiculous.”
“It is, actually,” Church says.
“Like, you keep hounding her about college scholarships and stuff, but she doesn’t need it. Did you guys realize that, or did you stop paying attention after you started making her go to the tax guy by herself?”
“But it’s . . . it’s just a hobby,” Mom says.
“No it’s not.” Sully puts both hands flat on the counter on either side of the laptop. “I don’t know what I can show you to make you understand. This is a thing. Eliza is famous. Not like a movie star, or anything, but a lot of people wanted to know who she was. And now, thanks to you, they do.”
“None of these people knew who she was?” Dad says softly.
“No, of course not,” Church says. “Why do you think she never wanted to tell anyone?”
“She’s always been private. We thought she didn’t want the attention.”
“She didn’t,” Sully snaps, “but not for—ah, you don’t get it! You always tell us to be safe and to make good choices, but then you do something like this.” He grabs something from Church—the Westcliff Star graduation issue. “This was not a good choice. This was a very bad choice. You left her wide open for millions of people, and not all of them are nice. She’s never gonna get that safety back again. But you know what the—the most—”
“The most aggravating,” Church says.
“The most aggravating thing is?” Sully spreads his arms, encompassing the Westcliff Star and the computer and all of them. “We could have avoided this if you’d taken half a minute to Google Monstrous Sea. You want to know about every other part of our lives, but you never really cared about this.”
I step back, and a floorboard creaks beneath my foot. All four of them turn to face me. Mom is crying. Dad looks pale.
“Why didn’t you ever tell us?” Mom says. “We thought it was still small. Your bank account never had that much in it . . . the taxes . . .”
“You told him my taxes were my business and you wanted me to handle them on my own.” My voice wobbles.
Dad swallows thickly. “We never would have said what we did in the Westcliff Star if we knew. We thought it was a thing you did for fun. We wanted to show you that we were proud of you. And the Star—the Star is such a small paper, who was going to read it? It would just be for us. Just for us.”
I shrug again. They wait for me to say something, but what am I supposed to say? Am I supposed to be angry? Forgiving? My parents have never apologized like this. They’ve never screwed up so badly. Part of me never thought they would.
Mom starts crying for real. She gets up and leaves through the other door, into the hallway to their office. Church goes after her.
After a moment, I escape back upstairs. I lie curled on my bed, with Dog Days muted on the TV, and feel strangely awake. Like everything is sharper in detail than normal. I don’t feel light-headed, though.
Ten minutes later, Sully knocks on the door and sticks his head in. “Are you okay?”
“I didn’t know you knew so much about Monstrous Sea,” I say.
He shrugs. “We wanted to know what you were doing all the time. You’re our big sister, right? But you’re like . . . in a different world. It’s weird.” He shrugs again. “We read the comic. Me and Church. So do all our friends, but we never told them who you were because we figured something like this might happen. It’s really cool. Not that this is happening, but that you made all this. With the way Mom and Dad acted around you, I figured they didn’t know how important it was.”
“Oh.” And all this time, I thought they hated me. “I just . . . thanks. I probably wouldn’t have told them.”
Sully rolls his eyes. “Mom and Dad are too old to get it. They didn’t even have cell phones when they were younger. Maybe Googling it wouldn’t have helped them.” He rubs his nose. “Anyway, if you need to, like, talk to someone, you know where to find me and Church.”
“That’s—that would be nice, actually.” My voice is small, but Sully’s expression opens up. After a moment’s hesitation, he slips into the room, shuts the door behind him, and sits with his legs curled up on the opposite end of my bed.
“Thanks,” I say.
Sully smiles at me for the first time I can remember.