Eliza and Her Monsters(49)

MirkerLurker: I do!

MirkerLurker: But what are you supposed to say to someone who says that?

MirkerLurker: And it wasn’t even that—he said that and he said all that other stuff too. Like stuff he’s never told anyone else before.

emmersmacks: Tell him you love him

MirkerLurker: Gahhh. It’s not that kind of conversation. The stuff he told me was . . . sensitive.

emmersmacks: You do love him dont you??

MirkerLurker: I don’t know! How are you supposed to love someone when they don’t even know who you are? I’m lying to him all the time, and he told me things about himself. Serious things. Things that matter.

emmersmacks: Sounds intimidating

MirkerLurker: It wasn’t, not really. Not the way he put it.

MirkerLurker: Where is Max when you need him? He would explain what a guy wants to hear in this situation.

emmersmacks: Max is probably going to be gone a lot MirkerLurker: What? Why?

emmersmacks: His girlfriend broke up with him a couple days ago emmersmacks: She said he spent too much time online emmersmacks: So now hes going to reevaluate his life or something MirkerLurker: Why didn’t he tell me?

emmersmacks: He did

emmersmacks: In a message thread a few days ago MirkerLurker: Oh.

emmersmacks: But anyway I dont think you really need a guys perspective emmersmacks: I mean like

emmersmacks: What would you want to hear if you said those things to someone??





CHAPTER 28


I can’t even acknowledge that email until we go back to school. What would I say? What can you say to that in an email that doesn’t sound fake?

Wallace lumbers into homeroom and sits beside me, as usual. He pulls out a paper and a pencil and carefully spells out a message, as usual. He slides it over to my desk, as usual.

Mrs. Grier’s earrings look like actual dildos.

My laugh makes a few heads turn, including Mrs. Grier’s. Her earrings—which are probably supposed to be eggplants but do indeed look like dildos—shake, and that makes me laugh harder.

It takes me a hot second to regain enough composure to write back.

I’d like to think she knows it and is just sticking it to the school administration by wearing them anyway.

Wallace snorts, then falls silent. It’s a heavy, awkward silence, the kind of silence when you know you’re both screaming in your heads and wondering why the other person can’t read your thoughts.

I’m thinking: You’re the kid I read about in the Westcliff Star.

And also: Your dad killed himself and I’m still trying to absorb it, so I can’t imagine what it’s like for you.

And finally: I’m really glad you told me that, but I’m so bad at talking I don’t know how to say it.

Wallace sits quietly with an expression that looks like he must be screaming even louder than I am. He keeps the paper folded under his hands for a minute, gazes around the room, and finally writes, Email?

What would I want someone to say to me after all that? If I lost one of my parents that way? If I was afraid of being like that? If I’d been cut off from what I loved doing and the friends I had? If I was happy, and wanted to tell someone?

I write, Are you okay?

He writes, I think so.

I’m so impossibly out of my depth with this, but damn it, I can learn to keep my head above the water if I try hard enough. I know, then and there, that Wallace needs me to do it. He told me his truth when I couldn’t tell him mine; I can at least muster this much for him. I write lines like this all the time. I draw important, character-changing conversations. Maybe I couldn’t say these things out loud, but I know how to put them on paper.

I write, This doesn’t change us.

He takes the paper back, reads it. Then he rests his forehead on his hands. The paper blocks his face. He sniffs, light, dry, and it could be nothing. No one around us pays any attention. When he lowers his hands to write again, he looks normal except for the slight redness beneath his eyes.

His pencil hovers over the paper. He scribbles—actually scribbles, hard and fast—the word Good. Then hands it back.

I wait a few minutes before writing,

That had quite the subject line.

I can’t not bring it up, and the sooner the better. Wallace’s ears turn red.

Super cheese, right?

Maybe a little.

It was all I had.

It is weird to have someone say to me the second most famous line in my own work, and mean it. It is weirder now that I know why his nose is crooked, and why he doesn’t speak out loud in public. But he doesn’t know who I am. It’s not like he’s using it to flatter me, or mock me.

I have to tell him that I’m LadyConstellation. Everything is unbalanced now, even if he doesn’t feel it. But I have to do it the right way, at the right time.

So I write:

It is kind of a lot to process. Not in a bad way.

He nods.

The first half of the semester quickly becomes an exercise in figuring out how to break it to Wallace that I created Monstrous Sea. I cannot begin to fathom what he’ll do, or how he’ll take it.

Especially after that email. I read it at least once a day.

I know I should stare him straight in the eye and say it, but when I try, my body becomes violently ill. In homeroom, at lunch, on the benches behind the middle school—which has become “in my car behind the middle school,” because January in Indiana is like the pregame cold for February in Indiana—at my house, at his house, at Murphy’s, wherever.