Eliza and Her Monsters(31)
emmersmacks: Leave her alone Max
emmersmacks: E if you want to go to parties GO TO PARTIES
emmersmacks: Go to parties for those of us surrounded by parties but unable to attend due to our unfortunately young age emmersmacks: . . .
emmersmacks: Also you should definitely go out with Wallace because I am surrounded by cute older boys and CAN’T GO OUT WITH ANY OF THEM
MirkerLurker: I don’t know.
Apocalypse_Cow: don’t know what? if he’s cute or if you want to go out with him? you could send us a picture and we’ll tell you.
emmersmacks: That is true I definitely would MirkerLurker: Haha I don’t need you to tell me if he’s cute or not. I know he’s cute.
emmersmacks: Then whats the problem
MirkerLurker: I don’t know!
Apocalypse_Cow: look, e. lemme give you some advice.
emmersmacks: Yes
emmersmacks: Advice from the guy who keeps calling his girlfriend a model Apocalypse_Cow: if you like him, you might as well say it to him.
Apocalypse_Cow: if he doesn’t like you, you can stop worrying about it.
Apocalypse_Cow: and if he does like you, you’re in business.
Apocalypse_Cow: either way, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and pain.
CHAPTER 17
Max and I don’t agree on everything, but we see eye-to-eye on this particular thing least of all. I didn’t think it would be possible, but admitting to Wallace’s face—or even to his username on a screen—that I like him seems like as bad an idea as telling him I’m LadyConstellation. Either bit of information could drive him away.
He has another chapter ready for me on Monday. He has started posting them online—to great response from the fandom—but I still get first look at all the chapters as soon as he finishes writing them. Amity is preparing to leave Nocturne Island for the first time in her life, to hunt Damien Faust for the Alliance; she doesn’t want to leave Faren behind, because she won’t be there to protect him. In it is a scene the whole fandom knows well, a staple of the series.
Wallace nails it.
The early-morning calm while Amity traces the constellation-name tattoos on Faren’s back. The melancholy breakfast where neither of them admits she’ll be leaving soon on a mission that is very likely to kill her. And finally, before she goes, Faren’s gift to her: the discovery that Amity herself was named after a constellation by her birth parents, though Faren doesn’t know what the constellation is called. If Amity can figure that out—what the constellation is called and what culture claims it—she might find out where she came from, and where she belongs.
He had found her in a constellation.
In the comic, Amity repeated it to herself often. “He found me in a constellation.” The fandom altered it slightly, made it “You found me in a constellation,” and put it on posters, shirts, phone cases, bracelets, actual tattoos. One couple even said it in their wedding vows. It wasn’t why I called myself LadyConstellation, but most people thought it was.
I didn’t understand what it meant when I wrote it, when I drew Amity saying the words. I understood what I wanted it to mean. I understood what the words literally meant. But I didn’t understand the truth behind it.
I guess I still don’t. At least now I know it.
CHAPTER 18
As it turns out, it’s difficult to keep up a high page count when you spend all your time after school texting the boy you like.
At five p.m. every day, I force myself to turn off my phone, cut my internet connection, and draw. I have to have at least one page a week, and between Thanksgiving and winter break, I average two. It’s the quality. I could get whole chapters out if I didn’t care about the quality, but quality is king. Quality makes this story look on the outside the way I feel about it on the inside. It’s big and colorful and beautiful. The characters are alive. When a page doesn’t look as good as it could, shame worms its way into the marrow of my bones, because I’ve let the story down.
On the weekends, I take breaks. First, so I don’t burn out, and second, so I can draw pictures for Wallace. I still haven’t posted anything online like he said I should—like Cole, Megan, Leece, and Chandra also said I should, after he showed them that picture of Kite Waters. But I like drawing for Wallace because he likes looking at them. I draw him pictures of Dallas: Dallas playing with a seacreeper, Dallas looking into the bioluminescent tide pools in his cave, Dallas walking along the shore beneath the stars. I try not to make them look too much like actual panels of the comic, but every time I hand him one he beams and says how it resembles LadyConstellation’s work.
I know I should stop. I know I shouldn’t give him any more evidence.
I kind of wish he knew.
I don’t tell him what my family said at Thanksgiving, or that my mom took me to see a doctor. Thinking about the birth control has me short of breath and sweating like a pig. I sweated in the doctor’s office, and when the doctor found out that I did that on a daily basis, even she thought something was wrong, and that the birth control might regulate it.
The birth control is not regulating it. The birth control is making me sick to my stomach. It’s a strange feeling to like someone so much and yet be terrified to have them in your space, touching you. It isn’t that I don’t like it when we touch—when we brush arms or when he taps me on the shoulder or when I pick a piece of lint off his shirt. I like it too much. My body gets excited without my permission, and it’s not okay. It’s out of control. I don’t like out of control, but I like Wallace.