Then there are fans. Some of them say how I inspired them. Some say how alike we are, and how they think we’d be friends. Others just want to thank me. They like having a face to the name. They like having a name to the name. They like that I’m visible now.
Of course, there are crude messages. Vile ones. Ones that don’t seem like they came from a real human being at all, but some computer program designed to say things no person should say to another person. I read all of those too, like Pringles—they might be terrible for you, but once you pop, you can’t stop. This is a roller coaster that only goes down. Near the end I feel like a hollow shell clicking a mouse, scanning words with aching eyes.
“Eliza?” The door opens. A dark-haired head pops in. “Mom said to tell you dinner is ready. I yelled it up the stairs, but she said you wouldn’t hear.”
“Yeah,” I say, not turning away from the computer.
“What are you looking at?” Heavy footsteps pad up behind me. The smell of unshowered boy fills the air. Sully’s a fast little shit—I don’t have time to click away from the Monstrous Sea messages and the myriad news stories I pulled up in other tabs before his hand comes down on the mouse and he closes out of them for me.
“Don’t look at that garbage.” He actually sounds angry. “People are stupid, and you don’t need to read that stuff. Come on, dinner’s ready.”
It’s too late, but he doesn’t know that. I already read them all, and was reading the new ones as they poured in. Both on the LadyConstellation and the MirkerLurker accounts. The comments on the news articles. The replies to the Masterminds thread and on the Monstrous Sea forums themselves. Good, bad, ugly.
I get up and shuffle downstairs after Sully.
I plead ill and skip school the next day, too. Friday. The Monstrous Sea pages are already scheduled to go up. I can hardly handle touching my keyboard, much less returning to the website to put up pages. I can’t be near my pen display, either. Or a pencil and paper. I can’t even think about drawing.
I can’t even think about Monstrous Sea.
A crow’s wing, a seacreeper fin, a long scarf, a saber, large bodies of water, clocks, planets, stars. They make me sick to my stomach. I have no interest in plotting out pages and panels. None at all in tying up character threads. The end of the story, so close, flits out of my loosened grip and flies away.
I can’t do it. Whatever force kept me going has vanished.
I tear the Monstrous Sea posters off the walls. I shove the compendium graphic novels under my bed. All the fan art comes down, everything anyone ever sent me, all the little stuffed toys and stickers and especially the Kite Waters costume. Even Mr. Greatbody and his missing eyes. Anything that can get stuffed in the trash can does.
When Mom comes up to check on me later, I’m lying on my bed hugging Davy again, and she sees the blank walls and the overflowing garbage and asks me if I feel okay. I lie. She leaves.
That afternoon, a reporter from the Westcliff Star calls the house and asks if she can interview me for a story. Sully, who answered the phone, tells her to fuck off.
Dad scolds him halfheartedly. That’s the first time. When more calls come in—and no one tells me who—Dad stops scolding and starts telling the callers to lose our number.
Mom and Dad move around me like I’m electrified. Few words. Distance unless they want to check the stitches beneath my bandage. I’d like to think they feel bad, but I don’t think they fully understand what they’ve done.
Church and Sully come into my room that night—at the exact time the Monstrous Sea pages are supposed to go up, coincidentally—and sit on either side of me on the bed to watch reruns of Dog Days. That, at least, I’ve managed to start doing again. A constantly numbed mind doesn’t sound so bad at all. Sully and Church bring a bowl of hard-boiled eggs bigger than Church’s head as an offering. We eat. They make fun of the stupid characters. I agree that the characters are stupid.
“Have you talked to Wallace?” Church asks when the third episode is over.
“No,” I say, picking at an eggshell.
“We saw his sister at school today,” Sully says. “Um, Lucy.”
“Okay.”
I drop the shell in the extra bowl they brought and bite into the egg carefully, trying not to nick the hardened yolk with my teeth.
“So what’d she say?” I ask.
“She said he was really upset.”
“And that we should try to get you to talk to him,” Church adds.
I want to say it’s not my job to make him happy, but I owe him a better apology than the one I squeezed out in Mrs. Grier’s room. Still, every time I think about texting him—just texting him, the two words—I imagine him ignoring me, spitting in my face, taking all the pictures I drew for him and burning them.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
I’ll think about it. If I can even force myself to go back to school on Monday.
CHAPTER 33
I don’t go back to school on Monday. I drive to the parking lot of the nearest grocery store, park in the back forty, and climb into my back seat to nap until the car gets too stuffy and I have to roll the windows down. When school would normally let out, I drive home. The next day, I do the same thing.
When I get home, Mom says, “School called today. They said you’ve missed two days in a row, unexcused.”
I hesitate at the bottom of the stairs. “Oh. Yeah. I just . . . I got there, and I didn’t feel good.”
“If you need a little more time off, I’ll call in for you.” She wrings an old pair of jogging shorts in her hands. A pile of exercise clothes bound for Goodwill sits on the living-room floor behind her.
“Okay,” I say, and start up the stairs.
“Eliza, wait.” She moves after me. “If I call you in sick, will you go see the therapist Dr. Harris recommended? Not tomorrow, but maybe next week? We talked to her already, and she said she’d have some time open to see you.”
“Why?” I say, but the word feels hollow.
“Because you’re not acting like yourself, and your dad and I are worried.”
“I don’t really want to.”
“Please, will you go? For us?”
I shrug. That seems to be enough answer for her, because she lets me go upstairs.
After a week of no school, of lying in bed all day and watching Dog Days until I forget why I ever tried to make anything of my own, everything feels terrible. My stomach, my head, my back. My neck aches. My hair is greasy. That’s the only thing that makes me get up and take a shower: when I can feel the oil oozing from my scalp. I’m so tired of being gross. So tired of feeling like my body is this thing I have to lug around with me all day. After the shower I collapse on my bed again. The bare walls make my room feel like a cell, but I don’t have the energy to decorate them with anything else.
There will be no Monstrous Sea pages at the end of this week. I didn’t get online to see what the fandom thought of the last ones. My will is gone. My will to draw, my will to talk, my will to do anything. Where Monstrous Sea once wrapped around my heart, there is nothing anymore.
Maybe that’s normal. The things you care most about are the ones that leave the biggest holes.
There was something distinctly un-Orcian about General White that Amity couldn’t place. Everything about him was sharp, like shards of metal fused into the shape of a man, dressed in an Orcian Alliance military uniform.
“If you kill Faust,” he said, “you will be regarded as a hero. Maybe even a legend. It won’t end our enemies’ attacks, but it will even the odds, and that’s a greater advantage than we’ve hoped for in these long decades.”
“Even the odds . . . ,” Faren said, his stilted cadence melting away. “If she kills Faust, but she’s still alive, wouldn’t the odds be tipped severely in your favor? As far as they’re stacked against you now?”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” White said.
“What happens after?” Faren stared White down. “Wh
at happens after she defeats Faust? I assume you won’t be able to remove the Watcher from her. She’ll still be here, and she’ll still feel like she has to save the innocent. What enemies will you send her after then? The Rishtians? The Angels? Those are the enemies you’re speaking of, aren’t they? The clockwork kings and the demons of Orcus?”
His voice rose on the last word. Amity’s skin prickled; she had never considered she might have to fight Orcus’s Angels. White, unperturbed, stared back at Faren. “No one said anything about further enemies, Mr. Nox.”
“Nox-eys,” Faren corrected coldly. He’d never demanded—or even asked—to be addressed with Nocturnian honorifics, and that, more than his attitude toward the general, gave Amity pause. The pretense of his poor Colaarin fled completely. “I don’t for a moment believe you’ll let her come back here to live in peace once Faust is gone. Your people have spent the last half year turning her into a weapon, and years before that studying her. You know what she’s capable of. You’ve convinced her Faust is her responsibility—where does it end?”
CHAPTER 34
“This is stupid.”
Sully stands in the doorway to my bedroom, arms crossed over his chest. I lie on the bed and stare unblinking at my TV.
“No it’s not,” I say. “It’s my favorite episode.”
“I’m not talking about Dog Days.”
I turn my head to look at him.
“I’m talking about you lying here, not telling Mom and Dad exactly what they did.”
“They know what they did.”
Sully rolls his eyes. “Bullshit. They think they know but they don’t, because you won’t tell them.”
I turn back to the TV. “It doesn’t matter. It’s done.”
He growls. “If you won’t tell them, I will.” He storms off. I ignore him until I hear the door to Mom and Dad’s office downstairs bang open, and Sully yelling out to ask if he can use their laptop.
I spring out of bed and rush downstairs. Church and Sully’s homework is spread over the kitchen table, but both of them stand across from Mom and Dad at the island counter, bringing up something on the laptop.
The post on the Masterminds site. The one I used to look at every day.
“What is this?” Mom asks, setting aside her fitness magazine. Neither she nor Dad has noticed I’m in the room.
“This is the post that made Monstrous Sea popular,” Sully says. “This website, Masterminds, is where people share things. There are a lot of people here, and for a post to get to the top of a forum like this one and to stay at the top for as long as it has is really hard.”
“And look at all the comments on it. And the likes,” says Church. “Those are all real people, and most of them are people who read and liked Monstrous Sea.”
“But they’re only a few of the people who actually read it.” Sully turns the computer around again and navigates to a new website before turning it back to our parents. The Monstrous Sea forums. “This is the website where the fans gather. You would have seen this if you hadn’t stopped looking at her website two years ago. Look at the numbers on the posts. Look at just the people who are online right now.”
They wait while Mom and Dad scroll through the forum threads, reading usernames, post titles, comment numbers. From the door I can see Dad’s brow furrow and Mom put her hand over her mouth. I fist my hands in my sweatshirt and clamp my mouth shut.
“There are millions of these people,” Sully says. “Way more than are just online here. They read the comic pages Eliza puts up every week. They pay for them. Do you know how much she makes from this? She keeps herself logged in to her bank account on her computer, and we saw. It’s ridiculous.”
“It is, actually,” Church says.
“Like, you keep hounding her about college scholarships and stuff, but she doesn’t need it. Did you guys realize that, or did you stop paying attention after you started making her go to the tax guy by herself?”
“But it’s . . . it’s just a hobby,” Mom says.
“No it’s not.” Sully puts both hands flat on the counter on either side of the laptop. “I don’t know what I can show you to make you understand. This is a thing. Eliza is famous. Not like a movie star, or anything, but a lot of people wanted to know who she was. And now, thanks to you, they do.”
“None of these people knew who she was?” Dad says softly.
“No, of course not,” Church says. “Why do you think she never wanted to tell anyone?”
“She’s always been private. We thought she didn’t want the attention.”
“She didn’t,” Sully snaps, “but not for—ah, you don’t get it! You always tell us to be safe and to make good choices, but then you do something like this.” He grabs something from Church—the Westcliff Star graduation issue. “This was not a good choice. This was a very bad choice. You left her wide open for millions of people, and not all of them are nice. She’s never gonna get that safety back again. But you know what the—the most—”
“The most aggravating,” Church says.
“The most aggravating thing is?” Sully spreads his arms, encompassing the Westcliff Star and the computer and all of them. “We could have avoided this if you’d taken half a minute to Google Monstrous Sea. You want to know about every other part of our lives, but you never really cared about this.”
I step back, and a floorboard creaks beneath my foot. All four of them turn to face me. Mom is crying. Dad looks pale.
“Why didn’t you ever tell us?” Mom says. “We thought it was still small. Your bank account never had that much in it . . . the taxes . . .”
“You told him my taxes were my business and you wanted me to handle them on my own.” My voice wobbles.
Dad swallows thickly. “We never would have said what we did in the Westcliff Star if we knew. We thought it was a thing you did for fun. We wanted to show you that we were proud of you. And the Star—the Star is such a small paper, who was going to read it? It would just be for us. Just for us.”
I shrug again. They wait for me to say something, but what am I supposed to say? Am I supposed to be angry? Forgiving? My parents have never apologized like this. They’ve never screwed up so badly. Part of me never thought they would.
Mom starts crying for real. She gets up and leaves through the other door, into the hallway to their office. Church goes after her.
After a moment, I escape back upstairs. I lie curled on my bed, with Dog Days muted on the TV, and feel strangely awake. Like everything is sharper in detail than normal. I don’t feel light-headed, though.
Ten minutes later, Sully knocks on the door and sticks his head in. “Are you okay?”
“I didn’t know you knew so much about Monstrous Sea,” I say.
He shrugs. “We wanted to know what you were doing all the time. You’re our big sister, right? But you’re like . . . in a different world. It’s weird.” He shrugs again. “We read the comic. Me and Church. So do all our friends, but we never told them who you were because we figured something like this might happen. It’s really cool. Not that this is happening, but that you made all this. With the way Mom and Dad acted around you, I figured they didn’t know how important it was.”
“Oh.” And all this time, I thought they hated me. “I just . . . thanks. I probably wouldn’t have told them.”
Sully rolls his eyes. “Mom and Dad are too old to get it. They didn’t even have cell phones when they were younger. Maybe Googling it wouldn’t have helped them.” He rubs his nose. “Anyway, if you need to, like, talk to someone, you know where to find me and Church.”
“That’s—that would be nice, actually.” My voice is small, but Sully’s expression opens up. After a moment’s hesitation, he slips into the room, shuts the door behind him, and sits with his legs curled up on the opposite end of my bed.
“Thanks,” I say.
Sully smiles at me for the first time I can remember.
CHAPTER 35
Very early Tuesday morning, whe
n my parents and Sully and Church are all fast asleep, I get in my car and drive to Wellhouse Turn.
There is no one on the roads this early in the morning, so I park on the shoulder, walk the length of the bridge, and peer down the incline to the flat expanse of grass beside the black river. Moonlight illuminates the world. At the top of the hill are the cross, the decorations, the toys. Flowers, some fresh and some wilting, for the people who went over the turn. I wonder if there will ever come a day when they’re not needed, when the turn is no longer the turn but just a hill.
Wallace said in his email that he never came back here. Surely Vee must have dedicated something to Wallace’s father in this pile of offerings, but Wallace himself never did.
I don’t have anything except my pajamas and my car keys. I look around. There’s a smooth rock on the side of the road not far away. I grab that, polish it up a little with my sleeve, and set it on top of an empty baseball card tin, under the arm of a rain-soaked teddy bear.
“Consider this an IOU,” I say. “I’ll bring something better later.”
Wellhouse Turn is surrounded by woods, so it’s a quiet place anyway, but the river blocks out the sounds of any other nearby roads. I sit on my butt beside the flowers and toys and slide myself carefully down the incline. I’ll figure out how to get back up later. At the bottom is a wide, grassy clearing. How many cars have gone off that road? Why hasn’t anyone fixed it yet, or made it safer? Are they afraid they’ll lose their news stories? That the future will somehow be less interesting if there aren’t pieces of car permanently embedded in the ground here?
I lower myself onto the cool grass and look up at the sky. Stars puncture the darkness. For all the Nocturnian constellations I know, the only real ones I remember are the Big and Little Dippers. Oh, and Canis Major, of course—headed by Sirius, the Dog Star, the herald of the dog days of summer. It’s been brought up so many times on the show Dog Days it’s now the longest-running title-reference joke. But Sirius isn’t even in the sky right now.