I don’t think it’s him at first. I’ve never heard his voice that loud across so much space. But one hand is cupped to his mouth and the other points directions to some of the players—among them Lucy, who convinced the others to let her play and is now outrunning them all.
I stop to watch. Church runs past and sees me. He meets up with Sully at the other end, nudges him in the ribs, and nods his head my way. I politely pretend not to notice. Then Sully has the ball, and the two of them juggle it between them down the field in a way even I know isn’t legal in football, weaving between the other players until they reach the trash cans—makeshift goalposts—at the other end of the lot. Wallace yells something at them, laughing when they launch into exaggerated touchdown dances.
He pulls them back into line. The other team gets the ball. Their quarterback has it, looking for an open pass. Wallace breaks through the line and charges at him.
I yell, “TAKE HIM DOWN!”
Both Wallace and the quarterback whip around with shock on their faces, but Wallace’s momentum carries him straight into the other boy, and they tumble to the ground.
“Sorry!” I call.
Someone shouts for a time-out. Wallace picks himself up, helps the other boy, then jogs over to me. His shirt is stuck to his chest with sweat, and he smiles when I hold out my bottle of lemonade for him. He chugs half of it. Davy noses at Wallace’s leg until Wallace pets him.
“It’s supposed to be flag football, you know,” he says. “I should ban you from the field for disrupting play.”
“Nah, that would be way less fun.” I reach out and pick at his sleeve. “You smell like hell.”
“You should come play with us,” he says. He hasn’t moved away from me the few times I’ve reached out to touch him like that this week, but he goes still in a way that means he knows it’s happening. He hasn’t made any moves himself. There could be a lot of reasons for that, I guess, but for now I’m letting him keep them to himself.
“I don’t think it’d work out.” If I tried to play, I’d get trampled. It’s good to know your limits, my therapist says. This is mine. “Lucy’s killing them, though.”
“She is.”
“You’re yelling.”
“So are you.”
Lucy appears at the edge of the field. “Hey, dummy! We’re ready again!”
“Coming!” He hands me the lemonade bottle. Only a few dregs swirl at the bottom. I should probably go home and prepare for an empty refrigerator once Wallace and the rest of my family get back to the house.
Wallace stares at the field for a long second, then turns back and, before I can react, leans down to kiss me. He tastes like sweat and lemonade. It’s quick. Easy. He pulls away, eyes down, voice soft.
“Surprise,” he says.
The relief registers. I wrinkle my nose and laugh. “Like hell.”
“Please, you know you love this.” He flaps his sweaty shirt in my direction before turning and jogging back.
“I love you,” I say, but he’s too far away to hear it.
That’s okay. He knows.
I finish Davy’s walk and let him off his leash inside the house so he can trudge after me up to my room and collapse on my bed for a nap. My comforter has been covered in white fur for weeks, so what’s a little more going to hurt? I throw the window open and turn on my oscillating fan to get some air circulating in the room, then push my desk chair out of the way and spend ten minutes doing stretches. Stretching makes everything feel better. My neck, my back, my legs. Everything that always cramped up when I sat at my desk for too long.
My parents have been looking into ergonomic desk chairs. Mom wants to buy me an exercise ball to sit on. I keep telling them I’ll use whatever they get me, because they’ve been trying so hard this whole time to be helpful. They know they’ve done wrong, I can see it in their faces every time they talk to me. I don’t want them to feel bad anymore. It might take a long time to get to that point, but it’s worth it.
When the stretches are done and I feel like my mind is breathing, I climb up into my chair and turn on the computer.
For the past week or so, this has been a daily ritual. Sit. Look at the computer. Turn it on. Every day I try to go a little further, but not so far that it causes me distress. After I turn it on, I look at the desktop for a few minutes, or play a few games. The other day I used it to Google better walking harnesses for dogs. I talk to Max and Emmy again, but not anyone else. No one from the Monstrous Sea forums.
I haven’t been back to the forums. Today I open up the browser and let the cursor hover over the bookmark for the forums, but I don’t click it. I still feel that if I do, I’ll only get upset. So I leave it alone.
I want to go somewhere, though. Somewhere that isn’t a search engine, or a reference website. My attention wanders away from the computer monitor, to the books lined up beside it. The books that are the only things on the desk besides the monitor itself. I moved them there when I got tired of the desk being so empty. Children of Hypnos.
There. There is where I’ll go.
My fingers remember the address like I’m thirteen again and I go to the Children of Hypnos fan forums every day. The page comes up right away. It’s still there, after all this time. All the threads, all the posts. The fans may have fled, but the heart is still here, like a little fandom time capsule.
I only have to glance at the welcome thread and all those old emotions rush back into me. For a few years, this was where I belonged. I was a citizen in the city of the Children of Hypnos fandom, and I woke up every morning excited to talk with my fellow fans. I scroll through a few of the old role-playing threads where I once pretended to be a nightmare hunter in the Children of Hypnos world, wielding an oversized battle axe like one of my favorite characters, Marcia. Then I find the discussions where people argued about the meaning behind the symbols of the books and the pieces of the plot. Then conversations about favorite quotes from the four books. Then the endless speculations about that spectral fifth book and what became of Olivia Kane—the speculations that tore the fandom apart and killed this forum for good.
I don’t want the Monstrous Sea fandom to collapse the same way the Children of Hypnos fandom did. I don’t want my fans to float off the way I did. Not all of them will have the boon of their own creations to tether them down; not all of them will be able to create their own spaces where they can be who they want to be and love what they want to love without the fear of someone judging them. I don’t want them to lose this story or this community. I don’t know who they all are, but I know who I was, and I know what it would have meant to me.
I also know this isn’t a good enough reason to force myself to finish the comic. If I don’t have the motivation for it, it won’t turn out well, and no one will be happy with the result.
But motivation doesn’t come from nowhere. Like any good monster, you have to feed it.
I pick up the first Children of Hypnos book and run my hand along the war hammer embossed on the cover. The books never had the titles or Olivia Kane’s name printed on the front cover. Only the weapons. My fingers graze along the spine and bump over the name KANE, and then, larger, DREAMHUNTER.
I crack the book open. Read the synopsis on the inside front flap. “Emery Ashworth’s nightmares routinely try to kill her. . . .” Then flip inside, to the first chapter. As it always does, the first page entices me to read the next, and the next, and the next, until the front door bangs open and my brothers and Wallace tromp inside and I’ve blown through to the final chapter and sit pages away from finishing the book.
Wallace sticks his head through the doorway. “Hey. Thought you might be in here.”
I look up. “What time is it?”
“Like four thirty. Your parents are making dinner.”
“Oh.”
“You rereading Children of Hypnos?”
“I . . . yeah, I guess.” I didn’t mean to, but now I really want to move on to the second book. “I’m almost done.
”
Wallace sits on the floor near the foot of my bed and pets Davy while I finish reading.
That night after dinner, I go back upstairs, get the second book, and start reading again. Then the third. I’ve read them so many times I breeze right through, and by five the next morning I’m halfway through the fourth book. When my parents get up, I’m done, and my emotions have been wrung out like a wet washcloth. Like someone cut me open, scrubbed my insides with a stiff brush, and sewed me back up again.
My brain is in high gear. My blood pumps hard through my veins, and my fingers twitch, and I need something. I need it, I need it, I need it. I need it right now, I need it worse than I’ve ever needed anything before.
I need my pencil.
CHAPTER 44
Monstrous Sea is mine.
I made it, not the other way around.
It’s not a parasite, or an obligation, or a destiny.
It’s a monster.
It’s mine.
And I have a battle axe waiting for it.
MONSTROUS SEA FORUMS
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Aug 25 2017
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EPILOGUE
I show Max and Emmy the pages before I put them up, of course. I’m not a completely terrible friend. Max demands I put them all up right away. Emmy is freaking out too hard about the ending to tell me to do much of anything besides fly out to California with a gallon of ice cream and hold her.
I don’t look at the comments. I don’t go to the forums. I don’t want to see what people are saying about me or my story. I’m not ready for that yet, but I am ready for this to be finished.
Max and Emmy watch the boards, and Wallace reports back to me on the status of the fans.
“They’re going fucking nuts,” he tells me the night the pages go up. I have his webcam feed in one window and Minesweeper open in another. He looks off to the side, clicking through the Monstrous Sea forums. Behind him is a small dorm room, a bed lofted with his roommate’s desk beneath it, and a TV perched precariously atop a dresser strewn with ramen noodles and open cereal boxes. I’d like to blame the mess on his roommate, but if it’s food, it’s probably Wallace’s.
“More people are reading it every day. Way more than were ever in the fandom before. And the people who wrote articles about your identity back in May—they’re talking about this now. That the comic’s coming back, that it’s ending. It’s a thing, Eliza. Reading Monstrous Sea is a thing people do. Not just people who like comics but—but everyone. It’s all over the internet.”
I clear out a corner of the Minesweeper board. “Imagine what they’re going to do when they hear about your transcription.”
Wallace beams.
“My editor says we’re in really good shape to have advance copies of the first book ready before the con.” He starts clicking through something on his screen. “Here she said, ‘Your chapters were already so clean, the line edits will be pretty light.’ And she keeps asking if I think I’m going to have time to do my edits with all my homework.” His smile grows. “Like my professors could even assign me enough homework to keep me away from this.”
“If they do, I know some people who might be willing to help with that.”
“I hope you’re not talking about outsourcing my homework.”
“Didn’t you hear? I’m famous. I can do what I want.”
Wallace laughs.
“Who’s famous?” Wallace’s roommate, Tyler, walks into the room behind Wallace carrying a hamper of laundry. Wallace explains the conversation quickly; when he mentions Monstrous Sea, Tyler bends into the webcam’s sight.
“You made Monstrous Sea?” Then he looks back at Wallace. “Your girlfriend made Monstrous Sea?”
“Her name’s Eliza,” Wallace says.
“You have to be kidding.” Tyler drops his laundry basket and hustles out of the room. A minute later, he returns with a flock of college students chattering about Monstrous Sea.
Wallace handles them well. He blocks them from the computer at first, letting them work through their preliminary questions, then lets them see me. Lets me see them.
They’re not monsters. They’re people. We greet each other, and they’re polite, and they want to know how it feels to be me.
“A lot better than it used to,” I say.
I think this will be okay. I think it will be strange, and probably scary, and I think there will still be times where I think I am the worst person on the planet. But I think I will also love myself and what I’ve made, and I’ll know without doubt that those two things are separate.
I am Eliza Mirk, daughter and sister and friend.
I am Eliza Mirk, mother of a fandom.
I am Eliza Mirk.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FRANCESCA ZAPPIA lives in central Indiana. When she’s not writing, she’s drawing her characters, reading, or playing video games. She is also the author of Made You Up and Eliza Mirk’s favorite, The Children of Hypnos, a biweekly serial novel posted on Tumblr and Wattpad.
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BOOKS BY FRANCESCA ZAPPIA
Made You Up
Eliza and Her Monsters
CREDITS
Cover photography © 2017 by Rachel Baran
Cover illustration © 2017 by Francesca Zappia
Cover design by Sylvie Le Floc’h
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
ELIZA AND HER MONSTERS. Copyright © 2017 by Francesca Zappia. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934160
EPub Edition © May 2017 ISBN 9780062290151
ISBN 978-0-06-229013-7 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-06-269310-5 (proprietary edition)
17 18 19 20 21 PC/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
Greenwillow Books
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Francesca Zappia, Eliza and Her Monsters
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