Eliza and Her Monsters(59)

Wallace knows.

“How long has it been?” I ask.

“Since the cafeteria?” Dad looks at his watch. “Maybe an hour and a half? They didn’t want to take a chance with a head injury, so they got you in an ambulance and rushed you over here. The doctor should be back to check on you any time now.”

“You told them. You put it in the paper.” Tears blur my vision. The room spins, but I’m still lying down.

“Told them—what, you mean the graduation issue?” Mom blinks at me, then looks at Dad. “That’s only the Star, Eliza, no one really reads it. We didn’t think it would matter if we mentioned the webcomic. And you love it so much—and we really are proud of you for it. We thought—”

“Millions of people read it, though! The comic!” I struggle to sit up, hoping that will alleviate the dizziness. It doesn’t. “Millions of people! Some of them live here!”

They’re going to find me. They’re going to know who I am and they’re going to find me.

“Eggs.” Dad puts a hand on my shoulder to push me back down, worry etched into his face. I don’t think he heard what I just said.

“Wallace lives here,” I say, shoving his hand off. “Where is he? He didn’t come here, did he?” He can’t see me like this.

Mom frowns. “He didn’t know? I assumed you had already told him.”

“Of course Wallace didn’t know! No one does!”

I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and feel suddenly light-headed, as if seconds away from fainting.

The door opens and a doctor strides in. The name HARRIS is stitched onto his coat. When he sees me there, he drops his file on the desk and hurries over.

“Eliza, are you feeling okay?” Dr. Harris gently pushes me back onto the bed.

“Can’t breathe,” I say. “Dizzy.”

“You can breathe. Breathe deep. In your stomach.” He lifts my legs up and pushes my head between them. I breathe the way he says and after a minute the light-headedness goes away and the room stops spinning. “You’re okay in here. It’s just you and me and your parents. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

The white noise machine hums softly in the corner. The grip on my insides loosens.

“You suffered a pretty nasty cut to your forehead,” Dr. Harris says, “so you might have a little scar once that heals. Is this the same way you felt in the cafeteria, before you fell?”

“Yes. But that was worse.”

“Have you felt like this before today?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me exactly what you felt?”

“I, um . . . I couldn’t breathe. Dizzy. I got tunnel vision, and it felt like I was being squeezed through a little tube. I thought I was dying. I thought I was going to die in front of everyone.”

“She said—well, we put something in the newspaper we probably shouldn’t have, and that might have caused some issues at school,” Mom says, watching me. “Could that have done this?”

Dr. Harris rests a hand on my back. “Possibly. I believe what you suffered was a panic attack. Now, panic attacks can be triggered by extremely stressful circumstances. Big life changes, death of a loved one, things like that.”

I shove my head deeper between my knees. My forehead pulses.

“I can recommend a great therapist who helps a lot of teens with panic and anxiety issues,” Dr. Harris says. “One panic attack doesn’t make a disorder, but if you have more, consistently, that’s what it could become. We want to do our best to avoid that.”

Panic disorder? I don’t have panic disorder. Panic disorder was a thing that came up in my psychology elective last year. I read like half a paragraph on it.

Dr. Harris tells my parents I’m okay to go home, but I shouldn’t go back to school today—not that there’d be enough time—and if I’m not feeling up to it, I shouldn’t go tomorrow, either. Then he ships us off, and I shuffle between Mom and Dad out to the car, where I sit in the back seat beside my recovered backpack for the ride home and try not to think about Monstrous Sea.

Does the fandom know? Have they already been told? Do they believe whoever told them, or do they think it’s another rumor?

Over the years, LadyConstellation has been “found out” many times. Usually someone trying to grab a little popularity before the researchers came and stripped away the fame. But this time it’s true, and the truth has a way of holding on. Truth is the worst monster, because it never really goes away.

The house is empty when we get home. Except for Davy, who trundles over to the door and slowly smashes himself against my legs, buckling my knees. Church and Sully are still at school. Mom and Dad try to get me to lie down on the couch in the living room, but I insist I’d feel better if I slept in my own bed. They help me upstairs, and set to work making chicken noodle soup and ginger ale.

I let Davy into my room and close the door behind him. Sidle to the computer and shake the mouse to wake it. The desktop is so serene, so quiet. I open the browser and head to the forums.

It is chaos.

To the untrained eye, an online forum looks like a bunch of random messages cobbled together. To someone who knows how to navigate them, they tell a story. And the story of the Monstrous Sea forums is “Eliza Mirk: Hoax or Reality?” Without clicking on any of the subforums or any of their threads, I know the consensus is reality. They found the article in the Westcliff Star. They found the MirkerLurker account, and the drawings Wallace wanted me to put up so badly. They found me.