Eliza and Her Monsters(40)

Bren and Lucy—but mostly Bren—go through the usual gamut of questions about me. Where I come from, how old I am, how Wallace and I met. Wallace jumps in for that one, talking so loud it doesn’t sound like him at all.

“She had those Monstrous Sea pictures. I told you about that, remember?” He doesn’t mention Travis Stone or Deshawn Johnson, thankfully. I don’t want to have to explain to his sisters how magnificently I failed trying to stand up for him, and I get the feeling he doesn’t want to tell them he kind of sat there and took it until I showed up. But they probably already know how nonconfrontational he is.

“Right, right.” Bren waves a hand in the air. “So you’re into it too, huh? Monstrous Sea?”

I shrug. “Yeah.”

“Do you write fanfiction too?”

“Oh . . . no.”

“She does fan art,” Wallace says. “I keep trying to get her to post it online.”

“Why don’t you?” Lucy asks.

I shrug again. “Never feels right, I guess.”

Wallace runs a finger along the outside edge of his plate, smiling a little. “They’re really great,” he says, voice soft again. “You should post some of them. One or two.”

Every time he talks like this, voice quiet and eyes cast down, smiling, I want to do it. I want to get on my computer right now and upload a few drawings, just to see how he reacts. I know he wants me to be in it with everyone else. A contributor. I know he wants to show off my art, because he told me so behind the middle school one day, and whenever I think about it my stomach flips over and my heart shoots into my throat and I want to kiss him all over his beautiful, dimpled face.

Every time he talks like this, my resolve gets a little weaker.

No one will be able to tell I’m LadyConstellation from a few drawings.

“I was . . . I was thinking about it,” I say finally, and that draws Wallace’s eyes up to mine.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Maybe later.”

“Really?”

I laugh. “Yes. What’s wrong with you? Do you feel okay?”

He sits straight in his seat like a two-hundred-pound ball of energy. Before he can say anything else, the front door opens again. “Tim’s home!” Lucy shouts. A laugh comes from the entryway, and a moment later a tall bald man steps into the kitchen.

“Breakfast for dinner, my favorite!” Tim sweeps by the stove to plant a kiss on the top of Vee’s head, then moves around to the table to plant one on Lucy and Bren too. Then he takes the seat at the end of the table, on Wallace’s right side, and gives me a genial smile. “And you’re Eliza.” He reaches across the table to shake my hand; he has Bren’s titan grip. “We’re so glad to have you for dinner, Eliza.”

“Thank you.” He is very loud, and very confident, and I am shrinking in my seat every second he focuses on me.

“Lucy, hon,” Vee calls, “come help me with the food.”

Lucy gets up to bring the bacon, sausage, and toast to the table. Vee brings the eggs—all sunny-side up—and begins sliding them onto our plates. My stomach rumbles. Wallace nudges me with his elbow, and I can’t tell if it’s on purpose or if it’s because his shoulders are so wide he takes up all my arm space.

“So, Keelers and Warlands,” Tim says, after Vee sits down at the other end of the table. “What’d we accomplish today?”

Vee shares a story about an old high-school friend she ran into at the grocery store while she looked for ingredients to a new recipe she wanted to try. Lucy regales us with the research she did on tennis racquets, and spends five minutes trying to convince Tim to let her buy a restringing machine, which he declines. Bren complains about a young couple who abandoned a puppy at the day care because they got it as an early Christmas gift but didn’t want to keep it. The rest of us eat while the other person talks. Then Tim turns his sights on me.

“Eliza, would you like to share?”

“Oh. Um.” What have I done today? I lay in bed and watched Netflix. I opened up yesterday’s Westcliff Star and read the wrap-up story about the Wellhouse Turn deaths about twelve times. Then I scheduled the single Monstrous Sea page going up tonight—the only one I could finish, considering the damage Wallace had done to my productivity. After that, I spent a few hours sweating. Then I showered. And now I’m here.

“Why don’t I go?” Wallace says. “I’m done eating.” He inhaled his food.

Tim turns to him instead.

“I helped Bren get that retriever that’s had the trust issues to let me give it a bath today,” Wallace says. Then the corners of his lips creep upward. “And, uh . . . I sold two more commissioned stories.”

“Two more?” Vee chirps. “Wally, that’s great!”

“You didn’t tell me that!” Bren says.

Lucy throws her napkin at him. “Are you going to let me read them?”

Tim smiles. “That’s great, Wallace. Are these your fanfiction stories?”

“Yeah. Not Monstrous Sea, but something else.”

“Have you tried selling any of your own?”

Wallace scratches the back of his neck. “That’s not really how it works. People request the stories because they already know the characters, and what they want.”