Eliza and Her Monsters

  “Don’t—don’t read it,” I say again. Several people are already flipping through pages at their desks, looking for mine. Wallace looks at them, at me, at the paper. Then he reaches for another one. I try to stop him, but his big hand grabs first one wrist and then the other, holding me off like I’m a child. He spreads the newspaper out on the table and flips it open.

  “No—Wallace, don’t read it—please, please don’t read it—”

  I press against his arm, trying to push him away from the table, the papers, but he’s so solid. I whisper now. The others can’t hear me beg like this. Wallace’s brow furrows as he finds my picture, my paragraph, and begins reading. True dread squeezes around me like a second, larger hand. I know when he reaches the end because the color drains from his face like someone chopped off his head and let the blood run out. He looks at me. Jabs a finger on the paper hard enough to crinkle the page. Jabs it again. Pointing. Is it true. Is it true, is it true.

  “I wanted to tell you.” I can’t even tell if sound is coming out anymore. “I wanted to tell you, I did, but I didn’t know how—”

  He drops my wrists like they’re poisonous, steps back, then turns and walks out of the room. I try to follow him, but Mrs. Grier’s hand lands on my shoulder. She says something. I shrug her off. Someone from the back of the room says, “Holy shit, you made Monstrous Sea?”

  I stumble into the hallway. Wallace is gone. The floor sways back and forth, and blackness creeps on the edges of my vision.

  After a moment or two, it passes.

  At least, it seems like a moment or two. Maybe a few minutes. Maybe half an hour, because by the time I snap out of it, the bell is ringing and students pour into the hallways.

  I wander to first period without my backpack.

  With each passing class, more and more stares find me in the hallway. People talk, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. I don’t see Wallace again, which is some kind of feat considering his size. My body is a teacup and all my organs have been stuffed inside. Must be my allergies. It is spring, after all.

  Wallace will have to talk to me at lunch. He wouldn’t sit without me at lunch.

  I hang on the fringes of the herd of students surging for the cafeteria and let them pull me through the doors. On the other side I fall away like a leaf flung out on a stray current. I stand for a moment, unsure of the cafeteria’s exact orientation, then stagger toward the lunch lines. If I can get some food and find Wallace, it will be okay.

  A body steps in front of me. Tall. Deshawn Johnson. He’s holding something out. A folded paper. My hand reaches out to take it like this is some kind of dream and my body is responding without my permission. I unfold the paper.

  It’s my drawing. The one Travis stole in October.

  “. . . really sorry,” Deshawn says. “Travis was being an asshole . . . meant to give it back sooner, but never got the chance . . . it’s really cool that you draw Monstrous Sea . . . my brother got me into it—”

  I might throw up on his shoes if I stand here any longer, so I stumble past him. Wallace has to be here somewhere. At our table. Obviously. By the windows. I look. He’s not there.

  I get in line and stare at the purse of the girl in front of me. I don’t know what I put on my tray until I get to the end, and the lunch lady rings me up for two bowls of tomato soup, a vegetable tray, a handful of mustard packets, and a Drumstick. The Drumstick is for Wallace. Wallace loves Drumsticks.

  I wander out of the lines and look at the table again. He’s still not there. I scan the cafeteria. He’s not in any of the lines. Not at the tables near the door, or by the wall. Is he in the courtyard? It’s too cold for that today.

  Heads turn. Eyes watch me. So many eyes. I head toward our table. The world tips again. It’s like I’m a mustard packet and some baby’s hand is squeezing all the condiment out of me. Squeezing my heart, my lungs, squeezing my eyes so my vision narrows to a little point in front of me. Hair sticks to my face. One of the bowls of tomato soup falls off my tray and splatters the white tile floor.

  Someone calls my name. I think.

  They might have said LadyConstellation.

  I walk through the soup. Where is he? He should be here.

  Have I gotten this week’s Monstrous Sea pages done? I can’t remember. I must have. I’m so ahead.

  Mom and Dad really shouldn’t have written that about me in the paper.

  It is so hot in here. Why is it so hot?

  I am going to die if my lungs don’t get out of this teacup.

  Where is Wallace?

  I am one hundred percent going to die.

  He’s supposed to be here so I can give him this fucking Drumstick.

  Jesus, I’m dying.

  My tray knocks the edge of the table. Catches it, then catches my stomach. Crunches out of my hands. My legs buckle.

  Darkness slams down.

  Masterminds :: Submind :: Webcomics

  LADYCONSTELLATION REVEALED

  Posted at 11:03 a.m. on 05 - 06 - 2017 by BlessedJester

  Ladies and gentlemen, on this day of days I bring you information long awaited by internet-goers. The true identity of LadyConstellation, the artist notorious for holding her anonymity, has been revealed by none other than a local news source. Click through to the picture, and be amazed.

  ElizaMirk.jpg

  +90/-21 | 43 Comments | Reply | Flag

  Monstrous Sea Private Message

  1:15 p.m. (emmersmacks has joined the message)

  emmersmacks: E???

  emmersmacks: What happened?!?!

  1:16 p.m. (Apocalypse_Cow has joined the message)

  Apocalypse_Cow: she’s not around, is she?

  emmersmacks: No

  emmersmacks: Shes in school right now

  emmersmacks: Do you think she knows??

  Apocalypse_Cow: no clue.

  Apocalypse_Cow: eliza, we’re doing damage control. as much as we can, anyway. but i think this one may be a lost cause . . . masterminds sunk their teeth into it

  Apocalypse_Cow: and once masterminds gets it, they don’t let go.

  CHAPTER 31

  My parents put me in swimming lessons when I was younger. A pool of thirty little kids forced to float on their backs and tread water. I’d tripped over my feet in soccer and routinely gotten bowled over in basketball, so I guess they were hoping I’d have more luck as a swimmer.

  Back then, I still wanted to please my parents. I wanted to be good at something; I just wasn’t. I didn’t particularly like swimming, but if I was good at it, I would do it.

  I wasn’t good at it. When the instructor tried to teach us dead man’s float—a move everyone else picked up on instinct—I snorted water up my nose and flailed until they said I could stop. But I kept trying.

  On the last day of class, one of the boys dared me to dive to the bottom of the deep end. I did it. Or I tried. My fingers touched the bottom and I started back up, only to realize I was running out of air. Three quarters of the way to the top, oxygen deprivation made my vision black and my arms and legs thrash against the water around me. When I broke the surface, the relief of breathing was spoiled by the intensity of my inhaling and the pain of cold air needling my insides. A headache beat through my skull.

  Waking up after the cafeteria is like surfacing from the deep end of the pool. Throbbing head, cold air. A narrow hospital room comes into focus around me. My eyes squeeze shut against the brightness overhead.

  “Annie, turn down the light.”

  The lights dim.

  “Hey, Eggs. Can you hear me?”

  I crack my eyes open again. Dad sits beside the bed. Mom moves back over to him from the light switch on the other side of the room. I swallow against the sandpaper in my mouth.

  “Yeah.”

  They both smile. Mom passes a hand over her face.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “You tripped in the cafeteria at school and hit your head on a table.” Dad motions to my forehead.
I don’t have to reach up and touch it to know there’s a bandage there. “Bled all over the place, I guess. How do you feel?”

  “Head hurts,” I say. “Obviously.”

  “Were you feeling okay when you left the house this morning?” Mom asks. “Did you eat your breakfast?”

  I don’t say anything, because the reason I passed out finally comes back to me, and that squeezing hand hovers around me again. It threatens. My lungs seize in anticipation.

  They told everyone about LadyConstellation. My whole school knows. The whole township knows.

  Wallace knows.

  “How long has it been?” I ask.

  “Since the cafeteria?” Dad looks at his watch. “Maybe an hour and a half? They didn’t want to take a chance with a head injury, so they got you in an ambulance and rushed you over here. The doctor should be back to check on you any time now.”

  “You told them. You put it in the paper.” Tears blur my vision. The room spins, but I’m still lying down.

  “Told them—what, you mean the graduation issue?” Mom blinks at me, then looks at Dad. “That’s only the Star, Eliza, no one really reads it. We didn’t think it would matter if we mentioned the webcomic. And you love it so much—and we really are proud of you for it. We thought—”

  “Millions of people read it, though! The comic!” I struggle to sit up, hoping that will alleviate the dizziness. It doesn’t. “Millions of people! Some of them live here!”

  They’re going to find me. They’re going to know who I am and they’re going to find me.

  “Eggs.” Dad puts a hand on my shoulder to push me back down, worry etched into his face. I don’t think he heard what I just said.

  “Wallace lives here,” I say, shoving his hand off. “Where is he? He didn’t come here, did he?” He can’t see me like this.

  Mom frowns. “He didn’t know? I assumed you had already told him.”

  “Of course Wallace didn’t know! No one does!”

  I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and feel suddenly light-headed, as if seconds away from fainting.

  The door opens and a doctor strides in. The name HARRIS is stitched onto his coat. When he sees me there, he drops his file on the desk and hurries over.

  “Eliza, are you feeling okay?” Dr. Harris gently pushes me back onto the bed.

  “Can’t breathe,” I say. “Dizzy.”

  “You can breathe. Breathe deep. In your stomach.” He lifts my legs up and pushes my head between them. I breathe the way he says and after a minute the light-headedness goes away and the room stops spinning. “You’re okay in here. It’s just you and me and your parents. Okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  The white noise machine hums softly in the corner. The grip on my insides loosens.

  “You suffered a pretty nasty cut to your forehead,” Dr. Harris says, “so you might have a little scar once that heals. Is this the same way you felt in the cafeteria, before you fell?”

  “Yes. But that was worse.”

  “Have you felt like this before today?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell me exactly what you felt?”

  “I, um . . . I couldn’t breathe. Dizzy. I got tunnel vision, and it felt like I was being squeezed through a little tube. I thought I was dying. I thought I was going to die in front of everyone.”

  “She said—well, we put something in the newspaper we probably shouldn’t have, and that might have caused some issues at school,” Mom says, watching me. “Could that have done this?”

  Dr. Harris rests a hand on my back. “Possibly. I believe what you suffered was a panic attack. Now, panic attacks can be triggered by extremely stressful circumstances. Big life changes, death of a loved one, things like that.”

  I shove my head deeper between my knees. My forehead pulses.

  “I can recommend a great therapist who helps a lot of teens with panic and anxiety issues,” Dr. Harris says. “One panic attack doesn’t make a disorder, but if you have more, consistently, that’s what it could become. We want to do our best to avoid that.”

  Panic disorder? I don’t have panic disorder. Panic disorder was a thing that came up in my psychology elective last year. I read like half a paragraph on it.

  Dr. Harris tells my parents I’m okay to go home, but I shouldn’t go back to school today—not that there’d be enough time—and if I’m not feeling up to it, I shouldn’t go tomorrow, either. Then he ships us off, and I shuffle between Mom and Dad out to the car, where I sit in the back seat beside my recovered backpack for the ride home and try not to think about Monstrous Sea.

  Does the fandom know? Have they already been told? Do they believe whoever told them, or do they think it’s another rumor?

  Over the years, LadyConstellation has been “found out” many times. Usually someone trying to grab a little popularity before the researchers came and stripped away the fame. But this time it’s true, and the truth has a way of holding on. Truth is the worst monster, because it never really goes away.

  The house is empty when we get home. Except for Davy, who trundles over to the door and slowly smashes himself against my legs, buckling my knees. Church and Sully are still at school. Mom and Dad try to get me to lie down on the couch in the living room, but I insist I’d feel better if I slept in my own bed. They help me upstairs, and set to work making chicken noodle soup and ginger ale.

  I let Davy into my room and close the door behind him. Sidle to the computer and shake the mouse to wake it. The desktop is so serene, so quiet. I open the browser and head to the forums.

  It is chaos.

  To the untrained eye, an online forum looks like a bunch of random messages cobbled together. To someone who knows how to navigate them, they tell a story. And the story of the Monstrous Sea forums is “Eliza Mirk: Hoax or Reality?” Without clicking on any of the subforums or any of their threads, I know the consensus is reality. They found the article in the Westcliff Star. They found the MirkerLurker account, and the drawings Wallace wanted me to put up so badly. They found me.

  I’m logged in to the LadyConstellation account, and my inbox number is so high the page no longer displays the quick-tip number over the inbox icon. Just an ellipsis. Half a minute after I log in, messages attack the right side of my screen. From people I know, from people I don’t. From friends and from trolls. They come in a trickle at first, and then, as more people realize I’m online, in a flood. There are so many the page begins to lag. They come so quickly I don’t have time to read them.

  I log out and log back in under the MirkerLurker account.

  This one is even worse. There is another ellipsis next to my inbox, but when I start receiving the messages, I do have time to read them. At least one of them.

  I JUST SAW YOU LOGGED IN TO LADY CONSTELLATION

  YOU LOGGED OUT THERE AND LOGGED IN HERE

  IT WAS TOO FAST TO BE COINCIDENCE

  IS THIS REALLY YOU?

  A picture comes up in the message window. It’s my yearbook photo from this year. Not even the horrible seventh grade one they included in the graduation article. How did this person get my yearbook photo?

  I log out of MirkerLurker and close the browser, my stomach cramping.

  I push my chair away from my desk and put my head between my knees again. I’m not light-headed or having trouble breathing like before, but this makes me feel better. Makes the space seem smaller and reminds me that I’m the only one in the room.

  I grab my phone and open the messenger on there. All the MirkerLurker messages are still there, but at least the phone app lets me shut them out and look at my conversation with Emmy and Max.

  Damage control. They tried running damage control. I let out a short, hysterical laugh. How could anyone run damage control on this? This is it. The fandom won. I lost. Eliza Mirk has been swallowed by the tides of their sea.

  I switch to my messages with Wallace. There’s nothing new since the last time we used the messenger. I don’t have any emails from h
im, either. Or texts. He hasn’t tried to call me.

  Why would he? I lied to him for months. For the whole time I knew him. I could say it wasn’t really lying, it was leaving out details, but that itself is a lie. If I was him, I’d hate me.

  Footsteps start up the stairs. I flip my phone over, turn off the computer monitor, and curl up on the bed beside Davy, who lies still and lets me use him as a body pillow. My legs shake. Mom knocks softly on the door—I know it’s her because Dad never knocks softly—and comes in with a tray of soup, crackers, and ginger ale.

  “Are you feeling any better?” she asks.

  “A little.”

  She smiles and smooths the hair away from my forehead, being careful of the bandage there. “Good. Try to get some sleep.”

  I don’t. I stare at my computer across the room, silent and unmoving, and I wonder what storms brew over the all-knowing internet.

  It was only a matter of time. Since that first day I met Wallace in class. Since I hung out with his friends. Since I told myself I would try.

  I forgot there’s no air this far down.

  CHAPTER 32

  It doesn’t even take a day for internet gossip to grab the story and run with it. By the following morning, even people far outside the Monstrous Sea fandom know who I am and where I’m from. They know I’m in high school. They know I have a dog and two younger brothers. I’m not sure if they have my address and phone number, and if they don’t yet, they will soon.

  The fact that I was anonymous for so long became the fuel for this fire. My anonymity was like a game, a riddle for people to solve. Anonymity on the internet never lasts, and they all knew it.

  LadyConstellation was a pretty piñata that they beat down with sticks, and I was the prize that fell out.

  I read the messages. All of them. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself, and I don’t want to draw or read or even watch Dog Days, so the hours drag by. Most of the messages are short. I could chart a timeline with them—they start off questioning, some probing to see if the rumor is true and others outright asking. Then they accept my name and question the details. They get hung up on the fact that I’m a girl, then a teenager. The teenage part I at least kind of understand—but why it should surprise them that I’m female, I have no clue. LadyConstellation was female. It’s not as if that changed.