I take Davy for walks every day. I sit on park benches and listen to birds sing. I watch my brothers’ summer soccer conditioning. I help my parents with chores around the house, because as it turns out, Mom’s clothes-folding yoga is actually really relaxing. Especially when combined with my new anxiety medication.
My therapist calls it a summer of discovery, and the first thing I discover is that I like being outside. In parks, in the woods, at lakesides, out in the country by cornfields. Wallace takes me to this place where his dad used to play football, a big open field in the middle of nowhere, edged by trees. There are no nearby roads or highways, and no electrical structures. The silence is so absolute it’s eerie. I fall in love with it instantly.
Two months pass, and I think of Wellhouse Turn maybe every other day. The thought is still there, but the seriousness of it comes and goes.
I only go back on one of the nonserious days, and only with Wallace. We stand at the top of the hill, next to the cross and the offerings. I move the rock I put there months ago; in exchange, Wallace leaves the football jersey that once hung on his wall. WARLAND 73, shivering on the cross in a gentle summer breeze.
Wallace starts going to his own therapist. He doesn’t tell me much about the visits other than the exercises he’s supposed to do to get himself talking in front of strangers. He must talk to this therapist about his dad, and everything he told me in his email, but we don’t talk about it, and I think that’s okay. Instead we talk about the fact that he’s going to college in the fall for business, with a minor in creative writing. We talk about how we’re going to see each other while he’s gone. And we talk about the new chapters he gives me of an original story of his he’s been thinking about for a while.
We go to see his friends. He’s talked to them plenty since the news came out, but I haven’t. Megan, as I suspected, is the most understanding. Leece is just excited to know me. Chandra takes a bit to warm up, then gets flustered that I’ve seen her artwork. Cole takes the longest. We sit at our table at Murphy’s, and he spends most of the first hour watching Wallace. When Wallace doesn’t kick me out of the building, Cole glances at me and says, “So. Yeah. I guess this is pretty cool.”
I don’t know if they can be my friends too, after all this, but I hope they can.
Wallace convinces my brothers to start playing football with him in the afternoons. Mom and Dad join in, because they’re Mom and Dad, and any form of physical exertion is a small form of happiness. It’s strange, at first, to watch them play and realize for the first time that they do it for fun. This isn’t a punishment for them, and it’s not a way to pass the time. It makes them happy the same way drawing made me happy.
It’s strangest with Wallace, because it’s one thing to hear that he loves playing football, another thing to see it. And he’s good at it too, which seems unfair. How can one person be so good at two drastically different things? How does he have enough love for both football and writing? But with him it seems there is no limit, that it’s not a matter of picking and choosing, that he draws no lines between his sport and his art.
They get some of the neighborhood kids to play, and after a while they have a weekly thing going. One day in August, I walk Davy past the open lot where they play and hear Wallace yelling across the field.
I don’t think it’s him at first. I’ve never heard his voice that loud across so much space. But one hand is cupped to his mouth and the other points directions to some of the players—among them Lucy, who convinced the others to let her play and is now outrunning them all.
I stop to watch. Church runs past and sees me. He meets up with Sully at the other end, nudges him in the ribs, and nods his head my way. I politely pretend not to notice. Then Sully has the ball, and the two of them juggle it between them down the field in a way even I know isn’t legal in football, weaving between the other players until they reach the trash cans—makeshift goalposts—at the other end of the lot. Wallace yells something at them, laughing when they launch into exaggerated touchdown dances.
He pulls them back into line. The other team gets the ball. Their quarterback has it, looking for an open pass. Wallace breaks through the line and charges at him.
I yell, “TAKE HIM DOWN!”
Both Wallace and the quarterback whip around with shock on their faces, but Wallace’s momentum carries him straight into the other boy, and they tumble to the ground.
“Sorry!” I call.
Someone shouts for a time-out. Wallace picks himself up, helps the other boy, then jogs over to me. His shirt is stuck to his chest with sweat, and he smiles when I hold out my bottle of lemonade for him. He chugs half of it. Davy noses at Wallace’s leg until Wallace pets him.
“It’s supposed to be flag football, you know,” he says. “I should ban you from the field for disrupting play.”
“Nah, that would be way less fun.” I reach out and pick at his sleeve. “You smell like hell.”
“You should come play with us,” he says. He hasn’t moved away from me the few times I’ve reached out to touch him like that this week, but he goes still in a way that means he knows it’s happening. He hasn’t made any moves himself. There could be a lot of reasons for that, I guess, but for now I’m letting him keep them to himself.
“I don’t think it’d work out.” If I tried to play, I’d get trampled. It’s good to know your limits, my therapist says. This is mine. “Lucy’s killing them, though.”
“She is.”
“You’re yelling.”
“So are you.”
Lucy appears at the edge of the field. “Hey, dummy! We’re ready again!”
“Coming!” He hands me the lemonade bottle. Only a few dregs swirl at the bottom. I should probably go home and prepare for an empty refrigerator once Wallace and the rest of my family get back to the house.
Wallace stares at the field for a long second, then turns back and, before I can react, leans down to kiss me. He tastes like sweat and lemonade. It’s quick. Easy. He pulls away, eyes down, voice soft.
“Surprise,” he says.
The relief registers. I wrinkle my nose and laugh. “Like hell.”
“Please, you know you love this.” He flaps his sweaty shirt in my direction before turning and jogging back.
“I love you,” I say, but he’s too far away to hear it.
That’s okay. He knows.
I finish Davy’s walk and let him off his leash inside the house so he can trudge after me up to my room and collapse on my bed for a nap. My comforter has been covered in white fur for weeks, so what’s a little more going to hurt? I throw the window open and turn on my oscillating fan to get some air circulating in the room, then push my desk chair out of the way and spend ten minutes doing stretches. Stretching makes everything feel better. My neck, my back, my legs. Everything that always cramped up when I sat at my desk for too long.
My parents have been looking into ergonomic desk chairs. Mom wants to buy me an exercise ball to sit on. I keep telling them I’ll use whatever they get me, because they’ve been trying so hard this whole time to be helpful. They know they’ve done wrong, I can see it in their faces every time they talk to me. I don’t want them to feel bad anymore. It might take a long time to get to that point, but it’s worth it.
When the stretches are done and I feel like my mind is breathing, I climb up into my chair and turn on the computer.
For the past week or so, this has been a daily ritual. Sit. Look at the computer. Turn it on. Every day I try to go a little further, but not so far that it causes me distress. After I turn it on, I look at the desktop for a few minutes, or play a few games. The other day I used it to Google better walking harnesses for dogs. I talk to Max and Emmy again, but not anyone else. No one from the Monstrous Sea forums.
I haven’t been back to the forums. Today I open up the browser and let the cursor hover over the bookmark for the forums, but I don’t click it. I still feel that if I do, I’ll only get upset. So I leave it alone.
I want to go somewhere, though. Somewhere that isn’t a search engine, or a reference website. My attention wanders away from the computer monitor, to the books lined up beside it. The books that are the only things on the desk besides the monitor itself. I moved them there when I got tired of the desk being so empty. Children of Hypnos.
There. There is where I’ll go.
My fingers remember the address like I’m thirteen again and I go to the Children of Hypnos fan forums every day. The page comes up right away. It’s still there, after all this time. All the threads, all the posts. The fans may have fled, but the heart is still here, like a little fandom time capsule.
I only have to glance at the welcome thread and all those old emotions rush back into me. For a few years, this was where I belonged. I was a citizen in the city of the Children of Hypnos fandom, and I woke up every morning excited to talk with my fellow fans. I scroll through a few of the old role-playing threads where I once pretended to be a nightmare hunter in the Children of Hypnos world, wielding an oversized battle axe like one of my favorite characters, Marcia. Then I find the discussions where people argued about the meaning behind the symbols of the books and the pieces of the plot. Then conversations about favorite quotes from the four books. Then the endless speculations about that spectral fifth book and what became of Olivia Kane—the speculations that tore the fandom apart and killed this forum for good.
I don’t want the Monstrous Sea fandom to collapse the same way the Children of Hypnos fandom did. I don’t want my fans to float off the way I did. Not all of them will have the boon of their own creations to tether them down; not all of them will be able to create their own spaces where they can be who they want to be and love what they want to love without the fear of someone judging them. I don’t want them to lose this story or this community. I don’t know who they all are, but I know who I was, and I know what it would have meant to me.
I also know this isn’t a good enough reason to force myself to finish the comic. If I don’t have the motivation for it, it won’t turn out well, and no one will be happy with the result.
But motivation doesn’t come from nowhere. Like any good monster, you have to feed it.
I pick up the first Children of Hypnos book and run my hand along the war hammer embossed on the cover. The books never had the titles or Olivia Kane’s name printed on the front cover. Only the weapons. My fingers graze along the spine and bump over the name KANE, and then, larger, DREAMHUNTER.
I crack the book open. Read the synopsis on the inside front flap. “Emery Ashworth’s nightmares routinely try to kill her. . . .” Then flip inside, to the first chapter. As it always does, the first page entices me to read the next, and the next, and the next, until the front door bangs open and my brothers and Wallace tromp inside and I’ve blown through to the final chapter and sit pages away from finishing the book.
Wallace sticks his head through the doorway. “Hey. Thought you might be in here.”
I look up. “What time is it?”
“Like four thirty. Your parents are making dinner.”
“Oh.”
“You rereading Children of Hypnos?”
“I . . . yeah, I guess.” I didn’t mean to, but now I really want to move on to the second book. “I’m almost done.”
Wallace sits on the floor near the foot of my bed and pets Davy while I finish reading.
That night after dinner, I go back upstairs, get the second book, and start reading again. Then the third. I’ve read them so many times I breeze right through, and by five the next morning I’m halfway through the fourth book. When my parents get up, I’m done, and my emotions have been wrung out like a wet washcloth. Like someone cut me open, scrubbed my insides with a stiff brush, and sewed me back up again.
My brain is in high gear. My blood pumps hard through my veins, and my fingers twitch, and I need something. I need it, I need it, I need it. I need it right now, I need it worse than I’ve ever needed anything before.
I need my pencil.