Eliza and Her Monsters(61)

“Don’t look at that garbage.” He actually sounds angry. “People are stupid, and you don’t need to read that stuff. Come on, dinner’s ready.”

It’s too late, but he doesn’t know that. I already read them all, and was reading the new ones as they poured in. Both on the LadyConstellation and the MirkerLurker accounts. The comments on the news articles. The replies to the Masterminds thread and on the Monstrous Sea forums themselves. Good, bad, ugly.

I get up and shuffle downstairs after Sully.

I plead ill and skip school the next day, too. Friday. The Monstrous Sea pages are already scheduled to go up. I can hardly handle touching my keyboard, much less returning to the website to put up pages. I can’t be near my pen display, either. Or a pencil and paper. I can’t even think about drawing.

I can’t even think about Monstrous Sea.

A crow’s wing, a seacreeper fin, a long scarf, a saber, large bodies of water, clocks, planets, stars. They make me sick to my stomach. I have no interest in plotting out pages and panels. None at all in tying up character threads. The end of the story, so close, flits out of my loosened grip and flies away.

I can’t do it. Whatever force kept me going has vanished.

I tear the Monstrous Sea posters off the walls. I shove the compendium graphic novels under my bed. All the fan art comes down, everything anyone ever sent me, all the little stuffed toys and stickers and especially the Kite Waters costume. Even Mr. Greatbody and his missing eyes. Anything that can get stuffed in the trash can does.

When Mom comes up to check on me later, I’m lying on my bed hugging Davy again, and she sees the blank walls and the overflowing garbage and asks me if I feel okay. I lie. She leaves.

That afternoon, a reporter from the Westcliff Star calls the house and asks if she can interview me for a story. Sully, who answered the phone, tells her to fuck off.

Dad scolds him halfheartedly. That’s the first time. When more calls come in—and no one tells me who—Dad stops scolding and starts telling the callers to lose our number.

Mom and Dad move around me like I’m electrified. Few words. Distance unless they want to check the stitches beneath my bandage. I’d like to think they feel bad, but I don’t think they fully understand what they’ve done.

Church and Sully come into my room that night—at the exact time the Monstrous Sea pages are supposed to go up, coincidentally—and sit on either side of me on the bed to watch reruns of Dog Days. That, at least, I’ve managed to start doing again. A constantly numbed mind doesn’t sound so bad at all. Sully and Church bring a bowl of hard-boiled eggs bigger than Church’s head as an offering. We eat. They make fun of the stupid characters. I agree that the characters are stupid.

“Have you talked to Wallace?” Church asks when the third episode is over.

“No,” I say, picking at an eggshell.

“We saw his sister at school today,” Sully says. “Um, Lucy.”

“Okay.”

I drop the shell in the extra bowl they brought and bite into the egg carefully, trying not to nick the hardened yolk with my teeth.

“So what’d she say?” I ask.

“She said he was really upset.”

“And that we should try to get you to talk to him,” Church adds.

I want to say it’s not my job to make him happy, but I owe him a better apology than the one I squeezed out in Mrs. Grier’s room. Still, every time I think about texting him—just texting him, the two words—I imagine him ignoring me, spitting in my face, taking all the pictures I drew for him and burning them.

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

I’ll think about it. If I can even force myself to go back to school on Monday.





CHAPTER 33


I don’t go back to school on Monday. I drive to the parking lot of the nearest grocery store, park in the back forty, and climb into my back seat to nap until the car gets too stuffy and I have to roll the windows down. When school would normally let out, I drive home. The next day, I do the same thing.

When I get home, Mom says, “School called today. They said you’ve missed two days in a row, unexcused.”

I hesitate at the bottom of the stairs. “Oh. Yeah. I just . . . I got there, and I didn’t feel good.”

“If you need a little more time off, I’ll call in for you.” She wrings an old pair of jogging shorts in her hands. A pile of exercise clothes bound for Goodwill sits on the living-room floor behind her.

“Okay,” I say, and start up the stairs.

“Eliza, wait.” She moves after me. “If I call you in sick, will you go see the therapist Dr. Harris recommended? Not tomorrow, but maybe next week? We talked to her already, and she said she’d have some time open to see you.”

“Why?” I say, but the word feels hollow.

“Because you’re not acting like yourself, and your dad and I are worried.”

“I don’t really want to.”

“Please, will you go? For us?”

I shrug. That seems to be enough answer for her, because she lets me go upstairs.

After a week of no school, of lying in bed all day and watching Dog Days until I forget why I ever tried to make anything of my own, everything feels terrible. My stomach, my head, my back. My neck aches. My hair is greasy. That’s the only thing that makes me get up and take a shower: when I can feel the oil oozing from my scalp. I’m so tired of being gross. So tired of feeling like my body is this thing I have to lug around with me all day. After the shower I collapse on my bed again. The bare walls make my room feel like a cell, but I don’t have the energy to decorate them with anything else.