Eliza and Her Monsters

  rainmaker: Real people don’t have concise character arcs.

  MirkerLurker: Yes, exactly.

  rainmaker: I like the characters, but I like what the story means too. I like how everything comes together. Characters and meaning.

  MirkerLurker: You must be a pretty big fan of endings, then. Everything getting wrapped up together.

  rainmaker: Haha, good ones, sure. Please tell me Children of Hypnos has a good ending.

  MirkerLurker: Um.

  CHAPTER 19

  Wallace finishes reading the Children of Hypnos series on the second day of winter break. I know, because I get this text:

  I NEED TO SPEAK TO YOU RIGHT AWAY ARE YOU BUSY

  I am lying on my bed holding Davy like a body pillow and watching reruns of Dog Days. So I say no, I’m not doing anything right now, but wow, it’s too cold to go outside and my bedroom is too warm. Wallace says that’s fine, he’ll come to me.

  Which means he’s coming to my house.

  He’s coming to my house right now.

  I fall off my bed, startling Davy bad enough that he falls off too. Then I scramble up to begin detaching my pen display from my computer. It’s too expensive for a normal high-school student, and way too advanced a piece of technology for someone who supposedly just does fan art she never posts online. Unfortunately, it’s also too big to hide in a drawer, and beneath my bed is a war zone of childhood toys. I put it carefully in the corner of my closet and toss some old sweatshirts over the top of it.

  Then I scan through my desktop and make sure there aren’t any Monstrous Sea comic pages sitting out in the open. I sign out of my LadyConstellation account on the forums and into the MirkerLurker account. Tear down all the sticky notes on my monitor relating to what pages I need to get done and what plot points I need to work into the story, and I throw those in the closet with the pen display. Davy climbs back up on the bed and watches me like when am I going to come back and hold him like a stuffed animal again?

  I throw the door open and hurry downstairs.

  “Mom.”

  “What, honey?” Mom asks. She’s in the living room, simultaneously planking and looking at a catalog of carpet swatches. She calls this “home decor calisthenics,” and she is a champion. She once redid the entire kitchen while doing pull-ups on the bar across the door to the front hallway.

  “We don’t have anything to do today, right?”

  “Sully and Church have practice later. Are you still available to take them?”

  She says it like I have a choice. “I . . . well . . . what time is that at?”

  “Four. Why?” She finally looks up. “Is something else happening today?”

  “Um. Is it okay if Wallace comes over?”

  She’s up and at the door in a second. Excitement fills her eyes, but that could be left over from the plank. “Of course. Does he want lunch? I can make lunch. Will you be spending the time in your room?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Is he coming now? Is that what you’re wearing?”

  I look down. I’m wearing a T-shirt from one of Dad’s intramural baseball teams, so it’s about five sizes too big; a pair of ragged Harlem Globetrotters sweatpants, rolled up to just below my knees; and my thickest, warmest pair of socks. The socks are made out of Wookiee fur or something.

  “And you should probably take a shower, don’t you think?” Mom says. “Your hair is a little greasy.”

  I wish she wouldn’t point it out, but also she’s right. I rush upstairs, lock myself in the bathroom, and hop into the shower. I don’t know where Wallace lives, but it usually takes him fifteen minutes to get here. I’ve already spent ten of those, and I shower in five, and as I’m wrapping my hair up in a towel and pulling on a slightly better-fitting pair of sweatpants, a T-shirt, and my Wookiee socks, the doorbell rings.

  “Eliza! Wallace is here!”

  I shove the Wookiee socks back on my feet, and when I get to the top of the stairs, Mom is letting Wallace in through the front door.

  “Hi there,” she says in her normal voice, holding out her hand for him to shake. “It’s so nice to finally meet you! I’m Eliza’s mom.”

  Wallace says something back, but it’s so quiet I can’t hear it. I’m surprised he said anything to her at all. Mom must be satisfied, because she turns around and smiles at me with her eyebrows raised. “Have fun, you two! I’ll get some lunch ready.”

  She disappears into the kitchen. Wallace glances up at me. He’s wearing jeans, a sweater, and a fat brown corduroy jacket. All four Children of Hypnos books are tucked under one thick arm.

  I jerk my thumb over my shoulder. “You can come up to my room, if you want.”

  Wallace climbs the stairs. I remember the towel wrapped around my hair and rip it off, chucking it back into the bathroom. I might as well embrace the drowned-rat look, because that’s as good as it’s getting today. At least I’ll smell nice.

  Wallace stops beside me, holds up the fourth Children of Hypnos book—the one with a battle axe on the cover—and says softly, “You are joking.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I was a little worried about that. Okay, come on. . . .”

  I bring him to my room. Inside, Davy sits up on the bed, tail thumping against the wall.

  “You have a dog?” Wallace forgets the books and stands by the bed for Davy to sniff him. Half a second later they’re cuddling on the bed, and Davy is doing his best to climb into Wallace’s lap.

  I glance around the room to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I have a lot of Monstrous Sea stuff lying around, but all of it could’ve been bought by a fan. I turn down the volume on the television but don’t turn it completely off—I can’t handle Wallace being in my room without Dog Days to back me up. “That’s Davy. If he gets annoying, shove him onto the floor.”

  “Davy?” Wallace lets Davy lick his face. “Like Dallas’s sea monster Davy?”

  Crap. “Hah, yes, like that. I got to name him.” Lies. I named the sea monster Davy after the dog Davy, not the other way around. The dog Davy is big and white and happy. The sea monster Davy could crush most cities, sheds clumps of fur that get mistaken for icebergs, and has a long neck and a tiny head with two little round eyes and a perpetual vacant smile. Sea monster Davy came to life when I was very little, and dog Davy dwarfed me.

  Wallace looks around the room at the decorations on my walls. “What is that?”

  He motions to Mr. Greatbody, who has made his rounds across the walls of my room and now sits above my computer. One of his paper eyes has fallen off, lost forever to the vent in the floor. “Something one of my online friends made for me. It’s her kind of joke.”

  “I won’t ask, then.”

  “So. Children of Hypnos. I’m guessing this means you finished?”

  Wallace levels a stare at me the likes of which I’ve never seen before. Except in the mirror, every freaking time I read through Children of Hypnos. Here’s a big football-looking dude sitting on my bed with a very large, happy dog wiggling into his lap, getting angry about a series of novels.

  “How is there no fifth book?” he asks. “How can it end there? How does no one know the real reason she quit writing?”

  I settle in my desk chair. “Welcome to the pain of the Children of Hypnos fandom.”

  “But what happens to all of them? Emery? Wes? Will Klaus and Marcia ever be together again? Does Trevor van der Gelt lose himself to his doppelgänger? Does Ridley come back? Do they ever find Hypnos?”

  I shrug.

  “What about the author, though?” He opens up one of the books to the back flap, the picture of Olivia Kane. “Doesn’t she know? Even though she never wrote it, couldn’t she tell the fans what happened? She must have said something.”

  “Trust me, I’ve loved these books since I was like twelve. I’ve looked. Olivia Kane is one hundred percent hermit, she doesn’t talk to anyone. She hasn’t made a public appearance in four years.”

  “But—”

 
“You heard what Cole and Chandra said. Most people think she’s a lunatic. She might be, for all anyone knows. Stress does strange things to people.”

  Wallace slumps against the wall in defeat. “This is the biggest disappointment I’ve suffered in my entire life as a fan. Can we, like . . . write her a letter, or something?”

  “You’re really hung up on this, aren’t you?”

  Wallace runs his hands over Davy’s fur. A deep furrow appears between his eyebrows. “I don’t know, I just . . . how can she leave it like that? The fifth book was supposed to explain so many things. Do they all die? Does Hypnos wake up and reset the world? Emery was dealing with all that guilt and her depression—what happens to her?”

  I pull my knees up to my chest and watch him. He pets Davy, and Davy happily rolls over onto his back. Wallace glances at the stack of books, then focuses somewhere around my feet.

  “There’s lots of fanfiction about it,” I say. “Or there used to be, before the fans scattered to the winds. People have written their own interpretations of the last book. Some of them are really good.”

  He shakes his head. “It won’t be right. Why did she stop writing them?”

  “No one knows. I think it was the pressure.”

  “I guess I can’t really be mad about it, then.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugs. “How can you be mad that something doesn’t happen, when it would hurt another person? If she had to quit for her health, then I’m glad she did. You shouldn’t have to kill yourself for your art. No matter how many fans you have.”

  I get the very intense desire to hug him then. And possibly kiss him. Still debating the kissing, though. “I’m not sure how many people would agree with you on that.”

  “Unfortunately,” he says. Then he looks toward my headboard shelves, filled with all my different copies of the Children of Hypnos books, and smiles. “I like your house,” he says. “It’s bigger and quieter than mine.”

  “It’s not quiet when Church and Sully are home, trust me. Speaking of which—do you have to be home at a certain time? I have to take them to soccer practice at four, if you want to come and hang out.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Now we’re both smiling.

  Mom calls us down for lunch. I expect to have to pull Davy off Wallace’s lap, but Wallace picks him up and sets him on the floor. Davy’s tail wags the whole time. I stare.

  “What?” Wallace says.

  “Do you play football?You seem like you should play football.”

  “I like watching football. Does that count?”

  “You just lifted a hundred-and-forty-pound Great Pyrenees like he was filled with Styrofoam.”

  Wallace holds out his arms. “Wanna try?”

  “Um. Rain check.” Despite being almost thirty pounds lighter than Davy, I haven’t let anyone try to lift me since some boys at school made a joke out of it in gym class and pretended like they couldn’t get me off the ground. That was freshman year, when I was just Creepy Too-Thin Eliza, not Creepy Don’t-Touch-Her-You’ll-Get-Rabies Eliza.

  The fact that Wallace offered is kind of nice, though.

  Mom makes us peanut butter and jelly with apple slices, aka the lunch you send to school with your first grader. I stew in horror until Wallace begins eating and says it’s “the best freaking peanut butter and jelly” he’s ever had, which makes Mom beam like she’s won an award. At this point I believe he must be either the least picky eater on the face of the Earth, or he’s always so hungry that everything tastes good all the time.

  When we return to my room, he finds his spot on the bed. There is plenty of space beside him and the headboard. It’s not like we’ve never sat that close before. We do it all the time at Murphy’s, and on the bench behind the middle school. Sure, those are out in the open and this very much isn’t, especially now that my door is closed, but it’s the same, right? I do my best to hold my frantic heart still, and cautiously arrange myself in that empty space beside him. He doesn’t say a word, but watches me until I’m settled.

  “Dog Days reruns, huh?” he says.

  “Yep. How do you feel about it?”

  “There is no higher teen soap opera.”

  “Good answer.”

  And thus begins our watching of old Dog Days episodes. The great thing about Dog Days is that it requires so little energy. You don’t have to think, you just have to watch characters making terrible decisions in the height of summer. It surprises me a little that Wallace likes it, considering how much he appreciates deeper meanings in his stories, but I guess we all need something that lets us go a little numb.

  I focus on forcing myself to relax, stretching my legs out, trying not to look like I think I might be strangled at any moment. My hair is finally beginning to dry—I pray it doesn’t frizz—and so far neither my sweatpants nor my Wookiee socks have been brought up in conversation. All in all I think we’re doing pretty good.

  At one point Wallace stands up to straighten out his pant legs, and when he sits again, he’s close enough I can feel his body heat. We sit shoulder to shoulder. I can see his eyelashes touch his cheek when he blinks. His hair always looks black from a distance, but up close it’s really dark brown. He’s been letting it grow out. I get the strangest urge to trace the curve of his ear with my finger.

  After the fourth episode, he says, “Do you have a piece of paper I could write on?”

  I jump up too fast. “Sure. Just one? Do you—of course you need something to write with. Sorry. Here.” I grab him a paper from my desk drawer and one of my myriad pencils, and he uses the first Children of Hypnos book as a flat surface to write on. When I’m sure he’s writing something for me to read right now, I say, “I thought you only needed to do that when other people were around?”

  He etches one careful line after the next. He frowns, shakes his head. “Sometimes it’s . . . tough to say things. Certain things.” His voice is hardly a whisper. I sit down beside him again, but his big hand blocks my view of the words. He stops writing, leaves the paper there, and stares.

  Then he hands it to me and looks the other direction.

  Can I kiss you?

  “Um,” is a delightfully complex word. “Um” means “I want to say something but don’t know what it is,” and also “You have caught me off guard,” and also “Am I dreaming right now? Someone please slap me.”

  I say “um,” then. Wallace’s entire head-neck region is already flushed with color, but the “um” darkens it a few shades, and goddammit, he was nervous about asking me and I made it worse. What good is “um” when I should say “YES PLEASE NOW”? Except there’s no way I’m going to say “YES PLEASE NOW” because I feel like my body is one big wired time bomb of organs and if Wallace so much as brushes my hand, I’m going to jump out of my own skin and run screaming from the house.

  I’ll like it too much. Out of control. No good.

  I say, “Can I borrow that pencil?”

  He hands me the pencil, again without looking.

  Yes, but not right now.

  I know it sounds weird. Sorry. I don’t think it’ll go well if I know it’s coming. I will definitely freak out and punch you in the face or scream bloody murder or something like that.

  Surprising me with it would probably work better. I am giving you permission to surprise me with a kiss. This is a formal invitation for surprise kisses.

  I don’t like writing the word “kiss.” It makes my skin crawl.

  Sorry. It’s weird. I’m weird. Sorry.

  I hope that doesn’t make you regret asking.

  I hand the paper and pencil back. He reads it over, then writes:

  No regret. I can do surprises.

  That’s it. That’s it?

  Shit.

  Now he’s going to try to surprise me with a kiss. At some point. Later today? Tomorrow? A week from now? What if he never does it and I spend the rest of the time we hang out wondering if he will? What have I done? This was a terrible idea.
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  I’m going to vomit.

  “Be right back,” I say, and run to the bathroom to curl up on the floor. Just for like five minutes. Then I go back to my room and sit down beside Wallace. As I’m moving myself into position, his hand falls over mine, and I don’t actually jump out of my skin. My control shakes for a moment, but I turn in to it, and everything smooths out. I flip my hand over. He flexes his fingers so I can fit mine in the spaces between. And we sit there, shoulder to shoulder, with our hands resting on the bed between us.

  It’s not so bad.

  CHAPTER 20

  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.”