Eliza and Her Monsters(32)
So I don’t know if it’s lucky or unlucky that Wallace and I are limited to homeroom, lunch, and a half hour on the bleachers behind the middle school every weekday. We share an English class too, but Wallace sits on the opposite side of the room. On Saturday afternoons we get in his car and head to Murphy’s, where we meet up with Cole. Megan comes if she doesn’t have to work and if Hazel is behaving. Cole brings his laptop and gets Chandra and Leece on video chat, but only if Leece has a break from gymnastics and if Chandra is awake, since she’s ten hours ahead of us.
“Do you ever think it’s weird that we come to a bookstore every week and don’t buy any books?” Cole asks, paused, yet again, over his unfinished geometry homework. At this rate, he’ll be done next July.
“Speak for yourself,” Wallace says. The only reason he speaks is because the bookstore is empty except for us and the one employee stocking books on the far side of the shop. Wallace slumps in the seat beside me, boxing me in, the spine of a book balanced against the table and his eyes moving slowly across the words. I feel like he must be able to absorb everything, know everything about a book, because of how slow he reads. If I like a book, I devour it in one sitting, and then I forget a lot. It’s fine with me, because I read them over and over again. But Wallace will take weeks to read a book—shortened to days, if he really likes it—and he remembers all of it, and then he doesn’t read it again. At least, he said, not for a very long time.
“Have you ever read Children of Hypnos?” I ask. Cole, Wallace, and Chandra all look up. I don’t talk much around them—I prefer listening—but I still like them. I like that they don’t expect me to talk. They don’t mind that I don’t.
“I’ve heard of it,” Wallace says, “but never read it.”
“Wasn’t that the fandom that cannibalized itself after the author went crazy?” Chandra says.
“She didn’t go crazy,” Cole says. “She ran into the mountains and barricaded herself in a cave.”
“Isn’t that covered under ‘going crazy’?” Chandra asks. “She chases people off her property with a shotgun, screaming bloody murder. I heard she has all booby traps set up.”
“She didn’t go crazy,” I say. “She just . . . couldn’t finish.”
The truth is, no one knows the reason Olivia Kane stopped writing. She isn’t in the mountains, and she doesn’t chase people off her property with a shotgun. As far as I know, she just turned into a hermit. Vanished into the countryside of North Carolina one day and never came back. Once she disappeared, reporters couldn’t even get a reason out of her. Plenty of people have heard about the fandom, at least. It ripped itself apart through arguments over speculations about a finale that would never come.
“They’re my favorite books,” I say. “You should read them.”
“Books written by a hermit lady in the mountains?” Cole hops up right away. “Let’s see if someone has them around here. Hey, Abigail!” He trots to the girl stocking books—sushi girl from Halloween—and starts up a conversation. Abigail nods at something Cole says and takes him over to a corner of the store. He comes back with a stack of all four Children of Hypnos books in the original hardback covers, though a little worn from their previous owner. “Check it out,” Cole says. “They had two full shelves of them back there.”
Wallace picks up the top one and reads the inside flap.
“Nightmare hunters, huh?” he says. He closes it again and looks at the front cover. A decorative illustration of a war hammer inlaid with the symbol of Hypnos, a closed eye.
I pick up the second book. On the cover is a great sword. “Yes! So the premise is like, strong dreams and nightmares can cross over into the real world, and we need these people, dreamhunters, to send them back to the dream world. It’s an alternate-universe Earth where this whole nightmare hunting system is embedded in society; there’s a Hypnos government, and the dreamhunters are like special agents, and they’re stronger and faster than normal people but they don’t live as long, and they rarely sleep. They have these cool weapons too, like on the covers—weapons they grow from the dream world, that match their personalities. Oh, and my favorite character—okay, I have a lot of favorites, but the main favorite—he never sleeps, and his dream world is this Frankenstein lab, and his nightmares are huge poisonous monstrosities.”
Wallace cracks open the first book and starts reading. Cole and Chandra stare at me.
“That is the most I have ever heard you say at once,” Chandra says.
I slide a little in my seat, yanking the front of my sweatshirt to get air. I only ever spoke about Children of Hypnos with other fans online. Never anyone in real life. I didn’t know all that would come out.
“I’m buying these,” Wallace announces, and takes the stack of books up to the counter with his wallet.
While he’s paying, Cole asks Chandra what she’s working on and she shows us a picture of Damien and Rory from Monstrous Sea vigorously making out. Cole scowls.
“Why do you have to put my favorite character in gay situations?” he asks.
Chandra rolls her eyes and proceeds to list off all the times in the comic there were very canon undertones to legitimize Damien and Rory’s very fanon gay relationship.