I can’t even acknowledge that email until we go back to school. What would I say? What can you say to that in an email that doesn’t sound fake?
Wallace lumbers into homeroom and sits beside me, as usual. He pulls out a paper and a pencil and carefully spells out a message, as usual. He slides it over to my desk, as usual.
Mrs. Grier’s earrings look like actual dildos.
My laugh makes a few heads turn, including Mrs. Grier’s. Her earrings—which are probably supposed to be eggplants but do indeed look like dildos—shake, and that makes me laugh harder.
It takes me a hot second to regain enough composure to write back.
I’d like to think she knows it and is just sticking it to the school administration by wearing them anyway.
Wallace snorts, then falls silent. It’s a heavy, awkward silence, the kind of silence when you know you’re both screaming in your heads and wondering why the other person can’t read your thoughts.
I’m thinking: You’re the kid I read about in the Westcliff Star.
And also: Your dad killed himself and I’m still trying to absorb it, so I can’t imagine what it’s like for you.
And finally: I’m really glad you told me that, but I’m so bad at talking I don’t know how to say it.
Wallace sits quietly with an expression that looks like he must be screaming even louder than I am. He keeps the paper folded under his hands for a minute, gazes around the room, and finally writes, Email?
What would I want someone to say to me after all that? If I lost one of my parents that way? If I was afraid of being like that? If I’d been cut off from what I loved doing and the friends I had? If I was happy, and wanted to tell someone?
I write, Are you okay?
He writes, I think so.
I’m so impossibly out of my depth with this, but damn it, I can learn to keep my head above the water if I try hard enough. I know, then and there, that Wallace needs me to do it. He told me his truth when I couldn’t tell him mine; I can at least muster this much for him. I write lines like this all the time. I draw important, character-changing conversations. Maybe I couldn’t say these things out loud, but I know how to put them on paper.
I write, This doesn’t change us.
He takes the paper back, reads it. Then he rests his forehead on his hands. The paper blocks his face. He sniffs, light, dry, and it could be nothing. No one around us pays any attention. When he lowers his hands to write again, he looks normal except for the slight redness beneath his eyes.
His pencil hovers over the paper. He scribbles—actually scribbles, hard and fast—the word Good. Then hands it back.
I wait a few minutes before writing,
That had quite the subject line.
I can’t not bring it up, and the sooner the better. Wallace’s ears turn red.
Super cheese, right?
Maybe a little.
It was all I had.
It is weird to have someone say to me the second most famous line in my own work, and mean it. It is weirder now that I know why his nose is crooked, and why he doesn’t speak out loud in public. But he doesn’t know who I am. It’s not like he’s using it to flatter me, or mock me.
I have to tell him that I’m LadyConstellation. Everything is unbalanced now, even if he doesn’t feel it. But I have to do it the right way, at the right time.
So I write:
It is kind of a lot to process. Not in a bad way.
He nods.
The first half of the semester quickly becomes an exercise in figuring out how to break it to Wallace that I created Monstrous Sea. I cannot begin to fathom what he’ll do, or how he’ll take it.
Especially after that email. I read it at least once a day.
I know I should stare him straight in the eye and say it, but when I try, my body becomes violently ill. In homeroom, at lunch, on the benches behind the middle school—which has become “in my car behind the middle school,” because January in Indiana is like the pregame cold for February in Indiana—at my house, at his house, at Murphy’s, wherever.
I don’t look at him and see Wellhouse Turn, like I thought I might. I only see Wallace. If he says he’s happy, I trust him. The first time we go by Wellhouse Turn on the way to Murphy’s, I glance over at him and he shakes his head, smiling a little.
“Don’t look at me,” he says.
When I look at Wellhouse Turn, all I see is the drop and the wonder.
We dwell on that email as little as possible. When we hang out, we do homework together to try to buffer each other’s grades. Wallace checks history, English (of course), and about ninety percent of the elective courses; I cover math, the science courses, and the other ten percent of the electives, which means art class. Wallace only takes art because he hates the prompts in the creative writing class; I don’t take art because the art teacher is a notorious snoop who would definitely find the Monstrous Sea panels in my sketchbook.
Because of that time around Christmas and the week of New Year’s when we didn’t hang out in person and I had time to catch up on Monstrous Sea, I have a surplus of pages and the momentum to keep going. Reader numbers climb. I post a few more drawings as MirkerLurker, and Wallace tells me how much people love them. I refuse to look at comments. I compile the next graphic novel for the shop, and almost choke at the sheer number of people who buy it in the first three hours after it goes up. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised with the views the pages get online, and the meteoric popularity of Wallace’s transcription chapters—which have almost matched the page views of the comic itself—but it still gets me. Just like my alarm clock every morning.
I see Max around the forums every once in a while, banning someone or closing old threads under the Forges_of_Risht account, and Emmy stops by for the Dog Days watches, but our messages are few and far between. Usually whenever Emmy has time between classes, and when Max lets himself get online. Sometimes it feels like I see Cole, Megan, Leece, and Chandra more than I talk to Max and Emmy. I like Wallace’s friends, but they still feel like his friends. I want my friends back.
By the time February hits—with some delightful below-zero weather cold enough to give you brain freeze from breathing through your mouth—it feels like I’ve known Wallace for five years instead of only five months. Neither of us ever brings up his email again, and I hope it’s okay, but sometimes trying to read him is like trying to read a brick wall. His neutral expression is flat; when it changes it changes fast, and the change never lasts long.
He said we didn’t need to talk about the email, what he said, his dad. We did, kind of, but not out loud. And now I feel like we should. We are both adept at the internet, at molding our text to mean what we want it to mean and what we think it should mean. I can lie on the internet, where people can’t hear my voice. But with him, alone, I can’t lie—I’m not a good enough actress. I hope he knows that.
“That email,” I say one afternoon, while we lie on the mattress in Wallace’s basement room. I’m tucked in the curve of his arm. His cheek is pressed to my hair. We both wear sweatpants. Our textbooks are scattered around our legs, and Wallace holds my latest English essay in one hand and a red pen in the other. I am now certain that the old football jersey pinned to his wall, the one that says WARLAND and the number 73, once belonged to his father.
I say nothing else, and after a moment he shifts his head. The essay and the pen sink to rest against my leg.
“That email,” he repeats.
“We never really talked about it.”
“I didn’t know if you wanted to.” His voice dwindles away. He can talk about grammatical errors, but not this.
“I wanted to say . . . I’m sorry about your dad. Everything that happened. But I’m happy you’re happy. And I’m glad—I’m really glad—you felt like you could tell me all that. I am too. Happy, I mean.”
His arm tightens around me.
“I thought it might have been . . . too much.”
“It wasn’t. What I said—wrote—in class was true. I mean, I’m . . .” I tap a finger on his rib cage without really thinking about where I’m touching. “I’m still here.”
The essay disappears first, then the thick arm I was using as a pillow. Wallace pushes me onto my back and buries his head in the crook of my neck. I giggle because I can’t help it. My hands find his shoulders. He does this sometimes: one slow, careful kiss gets pressed to my collarbone; another against my neck. The neck one wrecks me. Instant ball of nerves. He can’t know how that one feels, or else he wouldn’t stop. He pushes himself up so we’re eye to eye. Our noses nearly touch. His eyes are downcast. I snap my mouth shut. His fingers run up my sides and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe at all.
“Good,” he says.
I lock my arms around his neck and pull him down so the weight of his torso rests on mine and his forehead presses to the pillow. His breath hitches. Before I can stop myself I run a hand up through his hair. The short, sharp bristles along the base of his skull and the back of his head. The smoother, longer strands on the top. He turns his face toward me, and I trace a finger along the hair that’s fallen over his forehead.
Water rushes through the pipes overhead. A clock ticks in the darkness. One of Wallace’s eyes turns amber in the yellow light of his lamp. Want rises up in me, sharp and fast, and I know in that instant that I can’t hold myself back anymore. I don’t want to be the frozen girl, but I can’t wait for someone else to thaw me.
I tip my head forward. Wallace meets me halfway. Heat rushes through my face and he must be able to feel it in my lips. He must be able to tell I’ve never kissed anyone before. I pull away, ducking my chin. Wallace’s head follows.
“I thought I was supposed to surprise you,” he says.
“You took too long,” I say. I turn my face to the pillow so my hair makes a curtain. He brushes it back and kisses my eyebrow. Then my cheek, then my nose, then he leans over me and nuzzles my ear. Warm shocks race down my spine.
It makes no earthly sense how another person can do this. Not even with words, just touches. Just looks. He just looks at me and I feel simultaneously like myself and someone else, like I’m here and I’m not, like everything and nothing.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
He rests on his side, still partially draped over me, and says, “You know that part in Monstrous Sea where Dallas asks Amity to kiss him once before she leaves, because he’s afraid he won’t live to see her again?”
“Yes.”
“And what he says after she does it?”
Of course I do. I wrote it.
“‘Like I imagined,’” I say. He nods. I know most people would think it’s silly or stupid to explain things this way, in scenes and quotes, but we’re both fluent in the language of Monstrous Sea. This is the way I understand him best.
“I’m bad at this,” I say.
“No you’re not,” he says.
“I’ve never kissed anyone before,” I say, face still hot.
“Yes you have,” he says, with the little smile.
I shove him, which does nothing. “Shut up. You write smutty fanfiction all day.”
“Excuse you, I do not write smut. If I choose to include a sex scene, it is both tasteful and classy.” He leans in so there’s nowhere else to go and nowhere else to look. “Besides, it’s not like you have to have actual experience to write smut. Or even kissing.”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t have any kissing experience.”
“Okay, I won’t.”
I shove him again. He catches my wrists and holds my hands against his chest.
He’s already so close, all I have to do is stick out my chin. Again, he meets me halfway. This kiss is deeper, longer than the last one. My face burns, but I keep myself where I am. I’ve done enough hiding in my life. I hide from my classmates all day long. I hide from my parents, my brothers, even my friends.
I might be hiding LadyConstellation from Wallace under the guise of Eliza Mirk, but it’s not LadyConstellation he’s kissing right now.
It’s Eliza. It’s me.
I don’t want to hide this part of myself anymore.
The first day Amity met her, Kite stood in the middle of the sparring ring, arms crossed over her chest. Her skin was a darker brown than Amity’s.
“Where are you from?” Amity blurted out the moment Kite finished her terse introduction. The older woman turned up her nose and looked vaguely royal.
“The Isles of Light,” Kite replied, “and that’s all you need to know. Sato tells me you have no formal fighting experience.”
“Yes. But I’m fast, and I learn quickly.”
The longer Kite inspected her, the more Amity felt as if Kite didn’t like her. It didn’t come as a surprise. Most people didn’t like her upon meeting her, put off by her orange eyes and white hair and the knowledge that the Watcher lived inside her—but it didn’t make the idea of spending months training with Kite any easier.
“Are you ready?” Kite asked.
Amity couldn’t tell if Kite meant for the sparring, or for hunting Faust.
Though, then again, she really only had one answer.
“Yes.”