I agree to meet Wallace’s family on the Friday before Christmas. For dinner.
I wash my nice pair of jeans again so they’ll start at their tightest fit and stretch out as the night goes on, and I steal one of Mom’s lacy shirts. I don’t even pretend to care what people at school think of my clothes, but if Wallace is going to look nice coming over to my house, then I’m going to look nice at his.
Before I leave, Mom hands me a bunch of flyers for her exercise group (“If any of his family is looking for a new workout, I’d be happy to have them. Let them know! Or if they work somewhere with a bulletin board, have them put those up!”) and Dad reminds me with a smile that whatever they eat for dinner is my cheat food for the week. My parents like to assume that anyone who isn’t our family eats terrible, unhealthy food. They also forget that I attend public school and therefore eat French fries five days out of seven.
Sully and Church, thankfully, are attempting to give each other black eyes over a first-person shooter in the living room, and don’t notice me leave.
Wallace lives on the other side of town in a one-story ranch home with a light-up Santa in the yard and a driveway that’s more mud than gravel. Two cars sit in a row, probably neither of them made after the year 2007; the one in the back is Wallace’s, or at least the one he drives everywhere, the same one his sister drives to pick him up from school. I pull in behind it. A warm light comes through the curtains behind the window in the front door.
I take out my phone.
MirkerLurker: So I’m here.
MirkerLurker: At his house.
MirkerLurker: About to go inside.
MirkerLurker: Wanting to puke.
Emmy and Max don’t respond. Emmy’s home for the holidays and Max is off work, so we’re in that relaxed lull where they spend the least time online. I haven’t actually talked to them in the past few days—at least I remembered to send their care packages out. Maybe they’ll see the message while I’m in there.
I rest my head on the steering wheel, pretend I’m doing something in case anyone is watching from the house, count to twenty, then force myself out of the car—leaving my mom’s flyers on the passenger seat—and march up to the front door.
Wallace answers on the first knock. He’s wearing sweatpants and one of his sweaters.
“That is so unfair,” I say.
He smiles. “I thought you’d say that.”
The inside of his house looks straight out of the seventies. Wood-paneled walls, yellow carpet. But it’s warm and cozy as hell, and the smell of sizzling fat drifts out of the kitchen to our right. To our left is a wall that divides the entryway from a living room with a TV on, and a back hallway that must lead to bedrooms.
“So this is La Casa Warland, huh?” I say.
“More like La Casa Keeler,” he replies. His voice is louder than I’ve ever heard it before, almost as loud as Sully and Church, who still haven’t learned the term “inside voice.” He takes my coat and hangs it on the rack beside the door. I stand awkwardly by the door to the living room until someone behind me says, “Oh, you must be Eliza!”
I jump. A middle-aged black woman strides across the living room toward me, arms outstretched. She’s short, plump, and has a smile that looks like it could bludgeon the devil to tears. She gathers me up in a hug. I stare at Wallace.
“Eliza, this is my mom, Vee.”
“Oh, hon, really I’m his stepmother. Don’t want you to get too confused.” Vee releases me and takes my hand instead, pulling me toward the kitchen. Movement in the living room blurs behind us, and then there’s a girl Sully and Church’s age following Wallace, with skin a few shades lighter than Vee’s and about a million thin braids scooped into a thick ponytail that hangs past her shoulders.
“I’m Lucy,” the girl says. “You’re shorter than I thought you’d be.”
Vee sits me down at a small rectangular kitchen table. Wallace sits beside me, and Lucy sits opposite me. Her legs are so long she has to whip her feet back when they accidentally touch mine. The table’s set for six. On the other side of the room, something that smells and sounds suspiciously like bacon cooks in a skillet on the stove.
“I hope you like breakfast for dinner, Eliza,” Vee says, “because it’s Friday night, and you know what Friday night means!”
I don’t, but Lucy shouts, “Eggs and bacon!” and whoops a few times for good measure.
“I don’t understand how anyone is supposed to get any beauty sleep in this house.” Another woman steps into the kitchen, hands on her hips. She has to be in her early twenties, and a thick headband holds a magnificent mane of hair away from her angular face. I think she might burn me alive when her eyes land on me, but after a moment, her features soften and she points at Wallace. “Are you Wally’s girlfriend?”
Wallace’s face flares red. He glances sideways at me. He’s not correcting her.
He’s not correcting her.
“Um,” I say. “I’m Eliza.”
She holds out her hand. Grips like a titan. “I’m Bren. I feel like I’ve seen you around before—do you have a dog?”
“Yeah. Davy. He’s a Great Pyrenees.”
She nods sagely. “I work for the Happy Friends Dog Day Care. We have Davy in there every once in a while.”
“He was there in October for the week-long pack run!”
“Yes, he was!” Bren moves around the table and sits next to Lucy, who immediately tries to stick her finger in Bren’s ear. Bren swats the hand away absentmindedly. “I love those dogs. So does Wally—we pay him to clean the kennels and plays with the dogs at the end of the day.” She huffs. “You know, when I’m in charge of that place, I’m going to feed them in the morning and in the evening, because once a day isn’t enough. Especially not when they’re running around playing. I wish we could have a dog here, but Luce is allergic.” She tugs on Lucy’s braids.
“How do you like your eggs, Eliza?” Vee asks.
“Uh . . . any way. Sunny-side up is fine.”
“Sunny-side up it is.” She finishes with the bacon and starts cracking eggs in the skillet.
Bren and Lucy—but mostly Bren—go through the usual gamut of questions about me. Where I come from, how old I am, how Wallace and I met. Wallace jumps in for that one, talking so loud it doesn’t sound like him at all.
“She had those Monstrous Sea pictures. I told you about that, remember?” He doesn’t mention Travis Stone or Deshawn Johnson, thankfully. I don’t want to have to explain to his sisters how magnificently I failed trying to stand up for him, and I get the feeling he doesn’t want to tell them he kind of sat there and took it until I showed up. But they probably already know how nonconfrontational he is.
“Right, right.” Bren waves a hand in the air. “So you’re into it too, huh? Monstrous Sea?”
I shrug. “Yeah.”
“Do you write fanfiction too?”
“Oh . . . no.”
“She does fan art,” Wallace says. “I keep trying to get her to post it online.”
“Why don’t you?” Lucy asks.
I shrug again. “Never feels right, I guess.”
Wallace runs a finger along the outside edge of his plate, smiling a little. “They’re really great,” he says, voice soft again. “You should post some of them. One or two.”
Every time he talks like this, voice quiet and eyes cast down, smiling, I want to do it. I want to get on my computer right now and upload a few drawings, just to see how he reacts. I know he wants me to be in it with everyone else. A contributor. I know he wants to show off my art, because he told me so behind the middle school one day, and whenever I think about it my stomach flips over and my heart shoots into my throat and I want to kiss him all over his beautiful, dimpled face.
Every time he talks like this, my resolve gets a little weaker.
No one will be able to tell I’m LadyConstellation from a few drawings.
“I was . . . I was thinking about it,” I say finally, and that draws Wallace’s eyes up to mine.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Maybe later.”
“Really?”
I laugh. “Yes. What’s wrong with you? Do you feel okay?”
He sits straight in his seat like a two-hundred-pound ball of energy. Before he can say anything else, the front door opens again. “Tim’s home!” Lucy shouts. A laugh comes from the entryway, and a moment later a tall bald man steps into the kitchen.
“Breakfast for dinner, my favorite!” Tim sweeps by the stove to plant a kiss on the top of Vee’s head, then moves around to the table to plant one on Lucy and Bren too. Then he takes the seat at the end of the table, on Wallace’s right side, and gives me a genial smile. “And you’re Eliza.” He reaches across the table to shake my hand; he has Bren’s titan grip. “We’re so glad to have you for dinner, Eliza.”
“Thank you.” He is very loud, and very confident, and I am shrinking in my seat every second he focuses on me.
“Lucy, hon,” Vee calls, “come help me with the food.”
Lucy gets up to bring the bacon, sausage, and toast to the table. Vee brings the eggs—all sunny-side up—and begins sliding them onto our plates. My stomach rumbles. Wallace nudges me with his elbow, and I can’t tell if it’s on purpose or if it’s because his shoulders are so wide he takes up all my arm space.
“So, Keelers and Warlands,” Tim says, after Vee sits down at the other end of the table. “What’d we accomplish today?”
Vee shares a story about an old high-school friend she ran into at the grocery store while she looked for ingredients to a new recipe she wanted to try. Lucy regales us with the research she did on tennis racquets, and spends five minutes trying to convince Tim to let her buy a restringing machine, which he declines. Bren complains about a young couple who abandoned a puppy at the day care because they got it as an early Christmas gift but didn’t want to keep it. The rest of us eat while the other person talks. Then Tim turns his sights on me.
“Eliza, would you like to share?”
“Oh. Um.” What have I done today? I lay in bed and watched Netflix. I opened up yesterday’s Westcliff Star and read the wrap-up story about the Wellhouse Turn deaths about twelve times. Then I scheduled the single Monstrous Sea page going up tonight—the only one I could finish, considering the damage Wallace had done to my productivity. After that, I spent a few hours sweating. Then I showered. And now I’m here.
“Why don’t I go?” Wallace says. “I’m done eating.” He inhaled his food.
Tim turns to him instead.
“I helped Bren get that retriever that’s had the trust issues to let me give it a bath today,” Wallace says. Then the corners of his lips creep upward. “And, uh . . . I sold two more commissioned stories.”
“Two more?” Vee chirps. “Wally, that’s great!”
“You didn’t tell me that!” Bren says.
Lucy throws her napkin at him. “Are you going to let me read them?”
Tim smiles. “That’s great, Wallace. Are these your fanfiction stories?”
“Yeah. Not Monstrous Sea, but something else.”
“Have you tried selling any of your own?”
Wallace scratches the back of his neck. “That’s not really how it works. People request the stories because they already know the characters, and what they want.”
“Hmm.” Tim goes back to his eggs. “So is this what you’d be doing with your major next year? Writing fanfiction?”
All amusement has left Wallace’s face. “No, they don’t do fanfiction in any creative writing major.”
“So you’d be writing your own work.”
“Yeah.”
“What is that going to get for you, if you can’t make money off your own work?”
“Timothy,” Vee warns. “Not while we have a guest.”
I shrink into Wallace’s side, but Tim’s laser gaze finds me anyway. “Eliza,” he says. “You plan on going to college next year, don’t you? What do you want to major in?”
Art seems like the obvious answer, but I haven’t settled on anything yet because there’s no major for drawing Monstrous Sea. But saying “art” doesn’t seem like it’ll get me many points in Tim’s book. “Graphic design,” I say. “For, like, marketing. And stuff.” Way to stick the landing, Mirk.
“Graphic design,” Tim repeated. “See, Wallace, even that has business appeal. Graphic designers can make good money. I’m not saying you can’t do writing, just do some writing that you can build a career on. Creative writing isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
Wallace clamps his mouth shut and stares at his plate. Lucy shoves a piece of bacon into her mouth, and Bren covers her face with a hand, slowly shaking her head.
“This fanfiction thing is for fun. Your mother and I won’t be paying for a college education that supports a hobby. We want you to do something meaningful.”
Tim keeps going. Wallace’s fist tightens against his thigh. I brush my finger against it, and he grabs my hand. Squeezes hard, like he’s in pain. I squeeze back.
“I know you don’t like listening to this,” Tim says, “but it’s the way the world is.”
A beat of silence falls over the table as Tim goes back to his eggs. Then Wallace says, “May we be excused?”
Tim looks ready to say no, but his mouth is full. Vee shoots him a venomous look from the other end of the table and says, “Yes, hon, you and Eliza are excused. I’ll get your plates.”
Wallace stands and pulls me out of the kitchen.