By a quarter till four I am holding Wallace’s hand unapologetically in my lap and thinking I definitely should have let him kiss me. It’s always that first hurdle that proves the problem—talking, hand-holding, whatever—and as soon as I get used to it, as soon as I know it’s okay, I need more. Logic says I will have to let go of Wallace’s hand at some point after leaving my bedroom, if not to drive my car, then at the very least to hide it from my mom. But logic is not around right now, and I do not care.
I sandwich Wallace’s hand against my stomach and put my other hand on his wrist, holding him in place. We lean fully against each other now. I nudge his foot with my Wookiee sock. He nudges back. This is a thing. We are doing a thing. I don’t have to wonder if it’s okay because it’s totally okay. He’s going along with it. I take a breath and rest my head on his shoulder. He nuzzles his cheek in my hair. I giggle. He nuzzles harder.
I’ve never been so aware of my body. The way it moves. The space I fill. It isn’t good or bad, just different, forced to venture outside my head and explore the strange and mysterious world of physicality. His fingers twitch against mine, against my stomach, and set off another round of involuntary giggles. Thank God I have his hand secured in mine; I can’t trust or predict what my body might do if he touches anywhere else.
“Oh, dang it,” I say when I finally look at the clock. “It’s almost four. They have to be there by four thirty.”
I push myself off the bed to stand, expecting him to move with me or at least let go of my hand. He does neither. His grip jerks me back. He slouches against the wall, smiling that little smile, refusing to let go.
“Come on.” I laugh, trying to pull him up. “We have to go.”
He lets me use all my body weight to tug on him. I end up almost sitting on the floor, and he hasn’t budged. He flexes his arm and yanks me up, back to the bed. Laughing.
“Seriously, though!”
“Okay, okay.” He lets go.
“I need to change too.”
“I’ll wait outside.”
He does. I change into my best-fitting pair of jeans and an actual non-logoed shirt. Sweatshirt over the top, of course. Sully and Church are already waiting by the front door with their practice bags in tow. Wallace has ambled to the bottom of the stairs, and they’ve struck up some kind of conversation. When I head down, Sully raises his arms and glares at me. “Come on, Eggs Benedict! We don’t have all day!”
“Shut up.”
Sully and Church stuff their gangly selves in the backseat of my car so Wallace can sit in the passenger seat.
“No hanky panky up there,” Sully says.
“Yeah,” Church adds. “If I see a hand cross those seats, it will get smacked.”
“Smacked?” Sully says. “If I see a hand cross those seats, I’ll chop it off and burn it.”
“Shut up.” I pray my hair covers the heat in my cheeks. I am not going to get into an argument with my brothers over their stupid inappropriate mouths while Wallace is in my car. I turn the radio to some of the garbage alt-rock they like so much, and pretty soon they forget about us.
Wallace and I walk the perimeter of the sports complex during the two hours of Sully and Church’s practice. It’s empty enough that Wallace doesn’t have an issue talking, though he does speak softer. We don’t hold hands, but his knuckles tap the back of mine like he’s trying to send me a message in Morse code.
“My sister comes to this place,” he says. “For tennis.”
“Younger or older sister?”
“Oh, definitely younger. The only exercise Bren gets is playing with the dogs in her obedience classes. Lucy loves tennis, though. And basketball. And most sports.”
“Your family seems nice.”
“I like them. They want to meet you.”
“Is that a thing we’re doing now? Meeting each other’s families?”
He shrugs. “Only if you want.”
“I don’t know. I guess that would be fair. You’ve been subjected to mine.”
“You don’t like them?”
Now I shrug. “It’s weird. Like, I know they love me, and I know I have nothing to complain about, but they’re always trying to get me to do things I don’t want to do. Every time we come here, my mom and dad try to convince me to sign up for a new club sport or intramural team. If I have my phone out talking to you or my online friends, they think I’m ignoring them, or being disrespectful, or whatever. And it’s like, no, I’m in the middle of a conversation. If you saw two people talking to each other face-to-face, you wouldn’t interrupt them and call it disrespectful, would you?”
“No, of course not.”
“No. I understand that it’s a teenage thing to say parents don’t get it, but they don’t get it. It’s not their fault they were born two and a half decades before me, but would it kill them to ask me what I’m doing on the phone before they assume it’s something pointless?”
“Maybe they’re worried you’ll snap at them if they ask what you’re doing,” Wallace says.
I open my mouth to argue but remember that I have actually done that to my parents before.
“Do yours ever do that to you?” I ask.
“Sometimes. Not as often as they used to. We’ve . . . moved past that, and into other issues.”
Before I can ask what issues, he says, “Why did your brother call you Eggs Benedict?”
“Because I eat hard-boiled eggs for breakfast. Dad calls me Eggs, and Sully and Church just kind of tack on whatever egg type they can think of that day.”
“Cute.”
“I think my brothers hate me.”
It must sound too real, because Wallace actually looks concerned. “Why?”
My gaze fixes on my feet, Mom’s worn Nikes scuffing the ground. “I don’t know. Because I don’t try to hang out with them more, or get invested in what they like doing. According to Dad, they’re really good at soccer, but I wouldn’t know because I never pay attention when we go to their games.”
“So hang out with them more.”
“But I don’t like doing what they do, because all they do is play soccer. Or video games. I don’t like sports. They make fun of me for being bad at them anyway, so what’s the point?”
“Of course they’re going to make fun of you. They’re middle-school boys raised in a highly competitive, testosterone-fueled environment. That’s how they psych each other up.”
“And you know this how?”
“I watch the sportball on the television. Also I played peewee football when I was younger.”
“You did play football!”
He laughs. “Yeah, when I was like a quarter the size I am now. They had me as a running back.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I ran real fast.”
“You? Move fast?”
“I know. One of life’s great mysteries.” His knuckles rap the back of my hand. My resistance meets its end, and I grab his fingers, holding them in mine. He smiles and says, “I don’t think your brothers hate you. I think you don’t like the same things. It’s not a bad thing, it just is what it is. They do sports. You do art.”
I do Monstrous Sea. That is what I do, and all I need from Sully and Church is their silence about it to their friends at school. We don’t have to get along. They just have to keep their mouths shut. They’ve stayed quiet this long; they must have some idea how important it is. So maybe Wallace is right. Maybe they don’t hate me.
“So where’s your house at?” I ask, swinging our hands between us. “I want to properly Google Maps creeper-stalk you before agreeing to meet your family.”
He laughs again.
The walk home that Amity normally found meditative now teemed with her own unquenchable thoughts. Her guilt. If she was the only one who could stop Faust, didn’t that mean she had to? Even if it meant danger to her? It was easy to think of him in the abstract when he was only terrorizing faraway places, but what if he came to Nocturne Island?
What if, instead of strangers, he attacked Faren?