Eliza and Her Monsters(78)

“Coming!” He hands me the lemonade bottle. Only a few dregs swirl at the bottom. I should probably go home and prepare for an empty refrigerator once Wallace and the rest of my family get back to the house.

Wallace stares at the field for a long second, then turns back and, before I can react, leans down to kiss me. He tastes like sweat and lemonade. It’s quick. Easy. He pulls away, eyes down, voice soft.

“Surprise,” he says.

The relief registers. I wrinkle my nose and laugh. “Like hell.”

“Please, you know you love this.” He flaps his sweaty shirt in my direction before turning and jogging back.

“I love you,” I say, but he’s too far away to hear it.

That’s okay. He knows.

I finish Davy’s walk and let him off his leash inside the house so he can trudge after me up to my room and collapse on my bed for a nap. My comforter has been covered in white fur for weeks, so what’s a little more going to hurt? I throw the window open and turn on my oscillating fan to get some air circulating in the room, then push my desk chair out of the way and spend ten minutes doing stretches. Stretching makes everything feel better. My neck, my back, my legs. Everything that always cramped up when I sat at my desk for too long.

My parents have been looking into ergonomic desk chairs. Mom wants to buy me an exercise ball to sit on. I keep telling them I’ll use whatever they get me, because they’ve been trying so hard this whole time to be helpful. They know they’ve done wrong, I can see it in their faces every time they talk to me. I don’t want them to feel bad anymore. It might take a long time to get to that point, but it’s worth it.

When the stretches are done and I feel like my mind is breathing, I climb up into my chair and turn on the computer.

For the past week or so, this has been a daily ritual. Sit. Look at the computer. Turn it on. Every day I try to go a little further, but not so far that it causes me distress. After I turn it on, I look at the desktop for a few minutes, or play a few games. The other day I used it to Google better walking harnesses for dogs. I talk to Max and Emmy again, but not anyone else. No one from the Monstrous Sea forums.

I haven’t been back to the forums. Today I open up the browser and let the cursor hover over the bookmark for the forums, but I don’t click it. I still feel that if I do, I’ll only get upset. So I leave it alone.

I want to go somewhere, though. Somewhere that isn’t a search engine, or a reference website. My attention wanders away from the computer monitor, to the books lined up beside it. The books that are the only things on the desk besides the monitor itself. I moved them there when I got tired of the desk being so empty. Children of Hypnos.

There. There is where I’ll go.

My fingers remember the address like I’m thirteen again and I go to the Children of Hypnos fan forums every day. The page comes up right away. It’s still there, after all this time. All the threads, all the posts. The fans may have fled, but the heart is still here, like a little fandom time capsule.

I only have to glance at the welcome thread and all those old emotions rush back into me. For a few years, this was where I belonged. I was a citizen in the city of the Children of Hypnos fandom, and I woke up every morning excited to talk with my fellow fans. I scroll through a few of the old role-playing threads where I once pretended to be a nightmare hunter in the Children of Hypnos world, wielding an oversized battle axe like one of my favorite characters, Marcia. Then I find the discussions where people argued about the meaning behind the symbols of the books and the pieces of the plot. Then conversations about favorite quotes from the four books. Then the endless speculations about that spectral fifth book and what became of Olivia Kane—the speculations that tore the fandom apart and killed this forum for good.

I don’t want the Monstrous Sea fandom to collapse the same way the Children of Hypnos fandom did. I don’t want my fans to float off the way I did. Not all of them will have the boon of their own creations to tether them down; not all of them will be able to create their own spaces where they can be who they want to be and love what they want to love without the fear of someone judging them. I don’t want them to lose this story or this community. I don’t know who they all are, but I know who I was, and I know what it would have meant to me.

I also know this isn’t a good enough reason to force myself to finish the comic. If I don’t have the motivation for it, it won’t turn out well, and no one will be happy with the result.

But motivation doesn’t come from nowhere. Like any good monster, you have to feed it.

I pick up the first Children of Hypnos book and run my hand along the war hammer embossed on the cover. The books never had the titles or Olivia Kane’s name printed on the front cover. Only the weapons. My fingers graze along the spine and bump over the name KANE, and then, larger, DREAMHUNTER.

I crack the book open. Read the synopsis on the inside front flap. “Emery Ashworth’s nightmares routinely try to kill her. . . .” Then flip inside, to the first chapter. As it always does, the first page entices me to read the next, and the next, and the next, until the front door bangs open and my brothers and Wallace tromp inside and I’ve blown through to the final chapter and sit pages away from finishing the book.

Wallace sticks his head through the doorway. “Hey. Thought you might be in here.”

I look up. “What time is it?”