Wallace gets a lot of things.
He gets that the stuffed crust pizza at lunch should be eaten up to the crust, then the crust should be peeled back and eaten, and the cheese inside should be balled up and consumed last as the crowning jewel of the meal. He gets that sweatpants and sweatshirts are infinitely better than any other types of clothing. He gets that talking is easier when there’s a screen or even a piece of paper between you and the person you’re talking to.
The first half of November has passed before I notice it going. Every day I wake up and experience the strange sensation of wanting to go to school. Now I linger at my locker in the mornings, not because it’s too difficult to get my feet to move and start the day, but because Wallace waits for me there, and I like standing in the hallway with him better than sitting in homeroom. Sometimes I go to his locker instead, and we linger there for a while. We don’t talk, because there are too many people around and Wallace doesn’t like writing on vertical surfaces.
In my classes I throw myself into Monstrous Sea sketch pages, cranking them out in the hours before and after lunch, hiding them in the bottom of my backpack so Wallace won’t find them. Not that I think he’d look through my stuff. I don’t. But my sketchbook might fall open, or a wayward Travis Stone might show up and take them and spread them around for the whole school to see. At lunch, Wallace and I sit together—in the courtyard, if it’s warm enough, but usually at one of the tables in the cafeteria—and he forks over new transcribed Monstrous Sea chapters when he finishes them, and I devour them like the hungry beast I am, and he kind of smiles. Wallace gets it.
Wallace gets the feeling of creating things.
“Do you ever have an idea for a story, or a character, or even a line of dialogue or something, and suddenly it seems like the whole world is brighter? Like everything opens up, and everything makes sense?” He looks down at his sheaf of papers—the latest Monstrous Sea transcribed chapter—as he says it. We sit outside the tennis courts behind the middle school. Leaves dance over the empty courts in the chilled breeze. I told Mom I’d pick up Sully and Church after school so I had an excuse to hang out with Wallace. We’re on opposite sides of our bench, turned to face each other.
“I think that’s why they call it a breakthrough. It cracks you open and lets light in.”
He looks up and smiles. “Yeah. Exactly.”
He has dimples. Sweet Jesus, dimples. I want to stick my fingers in them. He looks very cozy in his sweater and coat and knitted hat with the strings hanging down and the little puffball on top. I’m not cold, but I could be warmer.
“Do you ever write your own stuff?” I ask. “Instead of fanfiction?”
“Sometimes,” he says, “but I don’t think it’s as good as my fanfiction. It’s easier with fanfiction. Fanfiction is just playing with someone else’s characters and settings and themes. I don’t worry if it’s any good because it’s fun. But when I try to write something of my own, it’s just . . . constant worry. It never seems good enough.” He picks at his papers. “Do you ever draw anything besides MS fan-art?”
“Sometimes,” I say, and we share another small smile. “Monstrous Sea is all I’m really interested in right now.”
“Could I see some of your pictures? The Monstrous Sea ones, I mean. I glanced at them that one day, but I didn’t get a chance to look.”
I’ve read his fanfiction; it seems unfair not to let him see some of my drawings. The front of my sketchbook, held safely under my hands on my lap, is stuffed with loose-leaf sketches of Monstrous Sea characters and places. It’s concept art, but to Wallace it would look like practice and interpretations. I slide a few of them out, check to make sure none of them are sketches for actual comic pages, and hand them over.
Wallace takes his time. Like everything, his examination is slow and methodical. He scans the picture, lingering on some spots; he slides a finger between that page and the next to separate them, then lifts the top one off; he replaces it carefully on the bottom of the stack, and when all the papers are lined up again, looks at the next one.
“I’m thinking about putting the transcription up on the forums,” he says. “To see what people think.”
“They’d love it.” It won’t be just for me anymore if he does that, but maybe that’s good. Maybe I’ll stop feeling so guilty for not telling him who I am.
He glances up. “You should post these online. You’ve gotten closer to LadyConstellation’s style than anyone I’ve ever seen before. These are amazing.” He turns to the next page. “Oh, wow. I really like this one.”
I sit up on my knees to see over the edge of the paper. It’s a sketch of Kite Waters I did in class the other day because I couldn’t stop thinking about Halloween. Kite wears a torn Alliance uniform, bloodied from battle, holding her saber defiantly at her side.
“You can keep it, if you want,” I say.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m not going to do anything with it.”
“Put it up online.”
I ball my hands in my sleeves. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to. It makes me nervous.”
“You shouldn’t have anything to be nervous about—they’re amazing. Everyone will love them.”
I shake my head. He can’t know, of course, that I’m not nervous about people rejecting them, but about someone linking anything I post as MirkerLurker to LadyConstellation. Plus, I don’t know, these pictures are for me. They’re concepts, half-formed thoughts. They’re not polished and ready for the world, and I don’t want anyone to see them. I’m half convinced the only reason Monstrous Sea has done so well is because I’m a stickler for perfect pages. Plot, lines, colors, characters. My fans deserve the best-quality work I can give them. I know that’s not the whole reason, but it’s got to be at least part.
“Okay.” He hands the other pictures back to me and keeps the one of Kite Waters. Smiles at it again. “Thank you. Do you mind if I show this to Cole and Megan and the others? They won’t share it if I ask them not to, but this is just so cool—I have to show it to someone who gets it.”
“Sure, I guess.” If Wallace says they won’t share it, then I believe him. They’re nice people, anyway. Even I can tell that much.
The buses begin pulling around the middle school to line up for the end of the day.
“Guess I should go back to my car so my brothers can find me.”
“I’ll walk with you.”
We head toward my car, parked at the far end of the tennis courts.
“Doesn’t your sister usually pick you up?”
“Yeah, my stepsister,” he says. “But I have a younger sister who goes here, and my stepsister picks her up too. So Bren said she’d get me when she gets Lucy.”
“Bren and Lucy?”
“Yeah. Yours?”
“Sully and Church.”
“Those are short for . . . ?”
“Sullivan and Churchill. Ed Sullivan, Winston Churchill. Never asked my parents why, never going to ask them why. Just glad I got a normal name.”
“Huh.”
“What?”
“I never asked why my parents named me Wallace.”
“Why don’t you ask them when you get home?”
He looks down, picks at his ear. “I can’t.”
“Why?”
His voice gets quieter. “Both my parents are, uh . . . are gone.”
Gone? Does that mean dead? Or absent? Not knowing exactly what “gone” means makes a strange hollow in my stomach, reminding me I don’t know as much about him as I thought.
“Oh.” Heat floods my face. “Oh, sorry.”
He shakes his head. “It’s okay. My family is kind of weird. Two stepparents, one stepsister, one half sister. They’re all really nice, though. I guess I shouldn’t call Vee my stepmom anymore; she was technically my legal guardian. But I’m eighteen, so maybe it doesn’t matter. . . .”
I’ve never known anyone in real life with stepparents. The fact hits me after several seconds’ delay, followed immediately by a hot wash of shame. I complain about my family all the time—in my head, to Max and Emmy, even a few times to Wallace, in little messages through the forums, or in quick, throwaway sentences in our paper conversations at school. I assumed his family was the same way. I never thought about the fact that while my family bugs the shit out of me, they are my family, my flesh and blood, still working as a whole unit.
Not that his isn’t. He could love his family as much as I love mine. Maybe more, because he never complains about them.
God, I don’t know anything.
We reach my car. The doors of the school fly open and thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds spill out, speed-walking to their buses. Wallace waits by my car with me in semi-awkward silence until we see the brown-haired heads of my two brothers charging toward us.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says.
“See you,” I say.
He heads off toward the front of the school, where his younger sister no doubt waits. Sully and Church reach me, backs bent with the weight of their bags, their sports gear already in hand. They’re talking about some fight that broke out in the cafeteria today, not paying attention to me as they jump into the car and buckle themselves in. I wait at least a full minute to see if they notice they’re not moving, then get into the driver’s seat.
“What took you so long?” Sully says.
I shrug, and turn on the car.