Eliza and Her Monsters

  I’ve been living with them their whole lives, but until right now, they’ve felt like strangers.

  I let my eyes flutter open for only a moment. I lie facing Church; he stares back at me. I close my eyes again. Pretend I saw nothing. Pretend I’m still asleep.

  Sully brings up soccer again, trying to revive the conversation, but Church stops responding. Then Sully stops too, and rolls over with a grunt. The tent goes quiet. I wish I had a bowl of hard-boiled eggs. My fingers long for my phone, my computer, my pen, my something. There is so much nothing out here I can’t fathom it. Nothing but dirt and campfire smell and s’mores made with stale graham crackers. Nothing but my brothers, who suddenly look much less like twins.

  I don’t sleep well that night.

  In all likelihood, my phone would’ve died before the end of the camping trip. That doesn’t make tromping through the backwoods any easier. On the first day we hike over some fairly impressive hills, because Indiana couldn’t manage a mountain or two. I nearly choke on my own spasming lung. Sully and Church make fun of me. On the morning of the second day we visit a few caves, and at least Mom and Dad let me opt out of those—no way will you get me inside somewhere so tight and dark and confined. I don’t care if they’re not actually going spelunking, I’ve seen enough horror movies to know what kind of backward urban legends hang out in caves.

  I sit outside the cave and draw Amity and Damien in the dirt with a stick. Neither of them had parents around to tell them what to do or where to go. Someone asked me that once, actually, why so many of the characters don’t have parents. Amity was separated from her family. Faren was an orphan of Nocturne Island. Damien’s and Rory’s parents both died in their early teens. Not all of them were horrible people, either—it wasn’t like I was taking out some subconscious aggression on my own parents. They were just absent.

  I don’t know why. Maybe it was something subconscious.

  Of course it was. All art is subconscious.

  I dig the end of the stick too hard into the dirt, and the tip breaks off. I chuck it across the clearing and find a new one.

  I wonder what the fandom is doing. I wonder what Emmy and Max are doing. Emmy’s probably dealing with that asshole calculus professor, and Max is no doubt trying to get his girlfriend back. Or maybe they’re not—maybe Emmy is eating Starburst and watching Dog Days reruns, and Max has dealt with the girlfriend situation and has moved on to more exciting ventures, like rearranging his Power Rangers action figure collection. I’ll be able to find out tomorrow, when Mom and Dad give me my freaking phone back.

  Amity and Damien face the same direction, attacking some unknown enemy, so across from them I draw a long-necked sunset riser rearing up, jaw open and fangs extended. The scale is wrong at first, so I wipe it out with my shoe and stand up to draw the sea monster to its true size.

  I miss Wallace. I miss Max and Emmy and the fandom too, but I would miss Wallace even if I had my phone and could talk to him. I miss sitting next to him at Murphy’s, boxed against the wall by his big body. I miss the way he dips both ends of his sushi rolls in soy sauce when we go out to eat. I miss how he brushes hair off his forehead with the end of his pen when he’s in the middle of writing—because it’s grown out since October, and he actually has to do that now.

  God, it hasn’t even been four days since I last saw him. This is ridiculous. I go to bed thinking about him; I wake up thinking about him. I want to draw him, but I haven’t tried it yet. I used to only feel this way about Monstrous Sea. It’s not like he’s taken that away, either—I still love Monstrous Sea. I’m still obsessed with it. And that makes sense, right? Because I created it. Who isn’t obsessed with the things they create, they love? Ideas are the asexual reproduction of the mind. You don’t have to share them with anyone else.

  But Wallace . . . I share Wallace with a lot of people. Wallace isn’t mine any more than I’m his, but I want him. I want to hold him, I want to be near him, I want to crawl inside his mind and live there until I understand the way he works. I want him to be happy.

  I wonder what he’d think of this picture I drew in the dirt. He’d probably say it’s good, but I forgot the sunset riser’s horns.

  I add in the sunset riser’s horns.

  My family exits the cave. Church and Sully charge into the trees, yelling something about the lake. Dad hurries after them, calling at them not to run in the woods. Mom comes last, and her gaze passes over my drawing before I manage to swipe my foot through the middle. Big, arcing foot swipe. Damn giant sea monster.

  “Are you still upset with us for taking your phone?” Mom asks. Softly, like I might bite her face off.

  I shrug. I’m not allowed to say no to her, and I’m not going to lie to make her feel better.

  “We don’t do things like that to punish you, you know.”

  I’ve already turned to the trees to follow Dad.

  “Eliza, I’m trying to talk to you.”

  I stop and turn back to face her. She puts her hands on her hips.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she says.

  “Like what?” I say.

  “Like I’m wasting your time. I brought you into this world, the least you can do is listen to me for two minutes.”

  “Fine, I’m listening.”

  She covers her face with her hands. Smooths back the flyaway strands of her hair. A smear of dirt arcs over her left temple.

  “Sometimes . . .” She sighs. Sighing means she wants to launch into what she believes to be a long, heartfelt conversation, and at the end of it, if I don’t agree with her, then I’m an ungrateful child.

  “Sometimes,” she says again, “we don’t know what to do with you. Your brothers are easy. They want to play sports and video games and eat a lot of food. They tell us about school and their friends. They’re like your dad and I used to be when we were younger. We never had the internet in high school. We didn’t have smartphones. Even if we did, I don’t think we’d use them as much as you do. Oh—sorry, that sounded terrible. You just spend so much time online, we never know if you’re okay or not. We don’t know what’s going on with you. You’re so quiet, and you spend so much time on your own—when Wallace started coming over, it was a real relief.

  “What I’m trying to say is that we don’t feel like we know you anymore. We don’t know what you want.”

  She stops and stares and waits.

  I say, “Monstrous Sea,” because no other words come to me.

  She nods. “And we’re proud of you for that. But . . . is that it?”

  I shrug.

  “There’s more to life than stories, Eliza.”

  She says it like it’s simple. She says it like I have a choice.

  There’s the frustration again, hot and ready, and there’s frustration’s best friend, anger, and there are my hands balling into fists and my stomach twisting in a knot and my jaw clenching so hard my molars squeal in protest. Mom takes a step back and then a step forward. She might try to hug me. I don’t want anyone touching me right now.

  “I’m going to the lake,” I say, and turn again.

  This time she doesn’t stop me.

  Sully and Church and Dad are already at the edge of the lake with the fishing supplies. It’s got to be too cold for fish. They’re fishing anyway. Mom goes to join them.

  I sit on an outcropping of rock above the lake and try to be angry, but I can’t hold the feeling. I need erupting volcanoes, hurricanes, massive earthquakes. Were I working on Monstrous Sea right now, Orcus’s monsters would bleed from the page in the search for flesh. I need vindication. I do not need little birds twittering over a wide expanse of shimmering lake and a light wind ruffling my hair.

  Nature defies my anger. Nature defies every emotion I have. I can’t complain to nature, or appeal to it, or rage at it.

  Nature doesn’t care about me.

  Monstrous Sea Private Message

  6:43 p.m. 21 - Mar -17

  MirkerLurker: Finally crawled my w
ay out of hell.

  rainmaker: Haha come on, camping’s not that bad. Dirt! Fresh air! CAMPFIRES!

  MirkerLurker: I’m convinced there’s something wrong with you. No one should love campfires this much.

  rainmaker: Campfires are crackly happiness. So how was it?

  MirkerLurker: My parents found out I had my phone and took it away. Wouldn’t let me bring my sketchbook or anything. How big of an issue is it if I have a freaking sketchbook with me?

  MirkerLurker: Sorry. I know I shouldn’t be complaining about this. It was only a few days. But they do this kind of stuff constantly, and I don’t understand why they can’t let up.

  rainmaker: I think they want to spend time with you. You do have a tendency to zone out when you’re working.

  MirkerLurker: So? So do you.

  rainmaker: When I say “zone out” I mean I have to shove you out of your seat to get your attention. It’s not exactly normal. I get where they’re coming from—didn’t you say you almost missed Christmas because you were working on something?

  MirkerLurker: Well, yeah, but I had to get stuff done. It was really important.

  rainmaker: Maybe they have a point. It’s not good to get so intense about things so often. Maybe you should see someone about it.

  MirkerLurker: That’s cute. You’re telling me I should see someone.

  rainmaker: Real nice, Eliza. I’m trying to help.

  MirkerLurker: I didn’t ask for help.

  rainmaker: You didn’t have to.

  6:55 p.m. 21 - Mar -15

  rainmaker: Are you ignoring me now?

  7:03 p.m. 21 - Mar - 15

  rainmaker: Fine.

  CHAPTER 30

  On Monday, I stand at my locker and imagine the floor shaking as Wallace stalks down the hallway toward me, parting a sea of students who scramble to get out of his way. He doesn’t look angry. He never looks angry at school. He just looks impassive. Irish Spring wafts over me when he stops two feet away and thrusts a piece of paper under my nose. On it is a single line of his machine-print handwriting.

  Are you done?

  “Yes, I’m done,” I say.

  He nods, shoves the paper in his pocket, and leans against the locker next to mine. His gaze settles somewhere on the other side of the hallway. I know he’s right, and I get too intense about my work sometimes. I also know that I wasn’t wrong, even if I wasn’t very nice when I said he should be seeing someone. Apologizing seems right, but also like if I say I’m sorry that means I don’t think there’s something wrong and that he should go on never talking to anyone.

  By the end of homeroom, he seems to have forgiven me at least a little bit, because he texts me a link to what he says is the best Children of Hypnos fifth-book fanfiction ever. By lunch, he hands over a new chapter of his Monstrous Sea transcription. He says he’s getting close to the end of what would be the first book in the series, and he would’ve had it done sooner if so much school stuff hadn’t gotten in the way.

  I inhale the new chapter. I never get enough of his writing, and I don’t know if it’s because he’s writing something I made or if he’s just that good. I like to think he’s just that good. He doesn’t volunteer to show me any of his original work, and I never ask to see it. I don’t know what I’d say to him if I didn’t like it.

  He never asks to see any of my original work, either. Sometimes I’m sure it’s for the same reason, but other times I wonder if he doesn’t care. If, like most of the Monstrous Sea fans, he doesn’t care if I have anything else in me.

  Production of Monstrous Sea is up. Five pages a week minimum, a whole chapter if I’m really on my game. Max, when he’s online, has plenty of trolls to keep him busy on the Forges_of_Risht account. Emmy has to hang around every Friday night to monitor the website and make sure it doesn’t crash. Mondays and Wednesdays at three are reserved for our biweekly mandatory chat sessions, where we don’t speak a word about Monstrous Sea and instead talk about how Emmy’s faring at the end of her freshman year (“Im not dead yet”), and how Max feels about his new boss (actual demon).

  Weekends are for Wallace. We spend Saturdays with Cole and Megan, when she can join, and Leece and Chandra on the computer, if they’re around. Not always at Murphy’s. Sometimes we go to the Blue Lane for bowling. One week we go to the park behind the high school, where Wallace and Cole teach me how to throw a spiral, then take turns running around with Hazel on their shoulders while I show Megan how to sketch a landscape using the long field and the trees of the woods in the distance. After a while I hand over the paper and pencil and give pointers while she tries it.

  “You’re really good at this,” she says, tucking a hair behind her ear and squinting at the tree line. “Teaching, I mean.”

  “You think so? I tried teaching my brothers to draw a few years ago and they said I was mean.”

  “No, not mean.” Megan laughed. “Just blunt. But that’s a good thing.”

  Hazel squeals. Wallace has hoisted her over his head in an airplane, and Cole is pretending to be the enemy jet she has to shoot down.

  I don’t call them “Wallace’s friends” anymore. They’re our friends. His first, and still mostly his, but now also mine. I talk to them on the forums through my MirkerLurker account even when Wallace isn’t around. That may not seem like much to some people, but it’s a lot to me.

  When I’m not with them or talking to Emmy and Max or hanging out with Wallace, I’m watching myself. Making sure I don’t get too focused on working. But with five pages a week, that’s easier said than done. Especially because the comic is so close to the end. If I space it out right, Monstrous Sea will end when I graduate. I may not even go to graduation. I’ll sit at my computer and post the final Monstrous Sea pages myself, no scheduling required.

  I know how this ends. The story. The fan reactions.

  It will be glorious.

  Then the graduation issue of the Westcliff Star shows up at school.

  The Westcliff Star focuses on only two stories every year. The first, obviously, is the Wellhouse Turn memorial. The second is the graduation of the seniors from Westcliff High. This is the issue where all the parents in the township write short blurbs about their graduating seniors and send them in, and the paper prints them with the ugliest student pictures they can find, and everyone in school reads through them and laughs at the humiliating things everyone else’s parents said about them.

  My parents have been looking forward to this since we got back from the spring break camping trip. They said I’d love it. Absolutely love it.

  There’s a whole stack of Westcliff Stars in Mrs. Grier’s room when I arrive that morning, and everyone is reading. I grab one, dread flooding me, sweat building on my back. Yes, let’s see what traumatizing thing my parents said about me, and everyone can read about Creepy Eliza. I head to my seat.

  Mrs. Grier’s gaze follows me across the room. She sits stick straight at her desk, eyes wide, the newspaper spread open in front of her. She doesn’t normally watch me like that, so either I have something on my face or my parents really said something they shouldn’t have. God, they put a baby picture of me in here. Or they told the story about the time I tried to kick the ball in soccer and missed so badly the momentum threw me on the ground.

  I hurry to my desk, sit without taking my backpack off, and tear the paper open. My hands shake as I flip past picture after picture, paragraphs of stories about childhood, broken arms and baseball games, school plays and birthdays. It’s in alphabetical order, and I skip past my name and have to backtrack. There it is, a terrible school picture of me from seventh grade, with greasy hair and braces and an actual turtleneck, did-I-come-out-of-the-fucking-sixties a turtleneck. My parents have never been great writers, but they managed a full paragraph for this one.

  Eliza Mirk

  We’re so proud of our Eliza. She’s our firstborn, and she’s as stubborn and passionate now as she always has been. These eighteen years have been a long road, full of lots of tw
ists and turns, but she’s taught us so much about being parents—and about being people. She loves hard-boiled eggs, thick socks, and listening to her music maybe a little too loud (but what teenager doesn’t?). Best of all, she’s an artist, and what she loves more than anything else is her webcomic, Monstrous Sea. She has spent so much of her time working on this story, poured so much of herself into it, and built something for herself from the ground up. We know that no matter where she goes or what she does after this, she’ll be successful. Eliza, we love you.

  Peter and Anna Mirk

  I look up and the room is silent. Not because everyone stopped talking, but because there is a ringing in my ears so loud nothing can penetrate it. The room expands and I shrink, the walls exploding away from me, the light dimming. My heart stutters in my chest.

  Mrs. Grier walks down my row, newspaper in hand. She kneels next to my desk. Her voice comes out too slow.

  “Eliza. Is this true?” She holds up the paper. It’s turned to my paragraph and my stupid face. “Did . . . did you create Monstrous Sea?”

  My stomach heaves violently. I clap a hand over my mouth.

  “Because I—well, I probably shouldn’t show you this, but . . .” Mrs. Grier pulls back her sleeve. She always wears long sleeves, cardigans over her sundresses, sweaters, even in the summer, and now I know why: in thick black ink up her arm are the words THERE ARE MONSTERS IN THE SEA.

  My most famous quote is tattooed on my homeroom teacher’s arm.

  Behind Mrs. Grier, Wallace walks into the room. Big, lumbering Wallace. Normally he moves slow, but today, in this slow-motion world, he moves far too fast. He reaches the front table where the newspapers are stacked up. Takes one. Opens it. I know he’ll look for my name first because mine comes before his. He’ll see it. He reads slow, but not that slow.

  I shove myself out of my seat, knock Mrs. Grier over, and reach Wallace in time to rip the newspaper out of his hands.

  “Don’t read it!”

  I hold it to my chest, panting, unable to get enough air. Heads turn. Look up from their papers. Wallace stares at me. Confusion and possibly fear flit over his face.