Eliza and Her Monsters

by Francesca Zappia

  That darkness made him mortal. I saw it in my dad before the day he died, and I denied it. I shouldn’t have. I should have told Vee, I should have told a doctor, I should have told someone. Over winter break of my sophomore year, we were driving home from a Christmas break spent in Tennessee with Vee’s family. It was only me and my dad; Vee and Lucy were coming home the next day. Dad was on one of his rants. He’d gotten a little time off from work for the holidays, but not much, and he made me swear I’d never get a job like his. I had never seen him so worked up before. I told him I thought it would be smarter to get a job that paid decently, at least at first. It wouldn’t be so bad, as long as I didn’t make it my life.

  That only made him angrier. I know now that he wasn’t in his right mind. At the time, his yelling was incoherent, and when he stopped the car and told me to get out, I thought he was joking. It was almost January, freezing, and there were another few miles to go until home. He kicked me out right before Wellhouse Bridge and kept driving.

  The second before he hit the gas, my stomach dropped. Really dropped. Like it wasn’t there anymore. Sometimes the premonition of something happening is worse than the actual event, because you know it’s coming and you can’t do anything to stop it. He was going too fast for Wellhouse Turn, even without the ice on the road.

  The Westcliff Star likes to lump my dad’s death in with the other accidents that happened there. That band bus. The drunk teenagers. The woman with the kids. They think it was the ice that sent him off the road, but I stood there and watched him and I know that car went straight as an arrow until the moment it disappeared over the hill. I sprinted across the bridge after him, fell on a patch of black ice, smashed my face on the ground, broke my nose. Got back up, kept running. There’s no good way to go down the incline at Wellhouse Turn, and I don’t remember how I tried it, but I know I broke my leg too before I got to the bottom. They were the kind of breaks you don’t feel at the time because of adrenaline and shock and fear. The car was at the bottom, sitting on all four wheels. Only when I got around to the other side of it did I see the smashed front of the car and my dad hanging out the windshield.

  He was dead as soon as the car hit the ground. When you go straight off Wellhouse Turn that fast, you pretty much always are. I don’t remember calling an ambulance, but I remember my phone smeared with blood after I pulled it away from my face. I don’t remember trying to yank my dad the rest of the way through the windshield, but I remember sitting in the snow at the nose of the car, staring at his blank eyes while he lay across the accordion folds of the hood. I don’t remember the paramedics getting there and asking if I was in the car with him, but I must have said yes, because that’s how the story came out.

  That’s what the Star does, right? Says “a man and his son” when they list off all the people who’ve gone over that turn? I only read the Star once after that, two days after, and I never read it again.

  My dad didn’t hit ice. He wasn’t drunk, or falling asleep at the wheel. When they asked me how it happened, I said I couldn’t remember. I still say that. I haven’t even told Vee, but I think she guessed. My dad didn’t want to be here anymore. He was tired of his job, never having enough money, being yelled at by strangers. He was unhappy. Viciously unhappy.

  I didn’t stop talking on purpose. It just happened. A year ago I couldn’t talk to anyone for anything. I’d like to say I tried and nothing came out, but I didn’t try. Even trying was terrifying.

  I could still write, though. I was into Monstrous Sea before Wellhouse Turn happened, but I didn’t tell anyone about it, because my friends wouldn’t have understood. After Wellhouse Turn, I couldn’t do anything because of that broken leg, so I spent all my time writing fanfiction. I love playing football, but writing makes me happy in a way sports don’t. We’ve talked about this before. Having the breakthrough that lets all the light in.

  I spent another year and a half in my old school being That Kid Who Survived Wellhouse Turn and Never Spoke Again. I didn’t go back to football after my leg healed, so most of my friends floated away. I thought about going to Wellhouse Turn, that maybe being back there would help, but every time I drove past I couldn’t bring myself to stop the car. So I never did.

  Things got better. Vee married Tim. I started working with Bren and her dogs. I stayed online and practiced my writing. I forced myself to talk at home, and to Cole and Megan and the others when we started hanging out at Murphy’s, though I still can’t do it when big groups of people are around. I started senior year at my old school, but by then I was the local freak show exhibit, so Vee and Tim let me transfer to Westcliff, where only football players might recognize my name.

  The only other person I’d ever met in school who liked Monstrous Sea was Cole, and he’s the kind of dick who doesn’t hang out with you in public if it’s not his ideal social situation, so we only talked to each other at Murphy’s. And then I met you. You had this whole sketchbook full of Monstrous Sea fan art, and you actually stood up for me. Most people never do that; what kind of two-hundred-pound guy needs someone to stand up for him? I really thought you hated me at first. Or at least thought I was stupid. Most people think I’m stupid because I don’t talk and I write slow.

  But you wrote back. And you love creating things. And you get what I mean when I say I don’t want to spend my life doing something I hate. If you know what you’re meant to do, if you know what you love, why not do that? Find a way to do it, find a way to make money doing it. My dad hated what he did, and I think it made him hate himself. I don’t want to hate myself. I don’t want you to hate yourself.

  I know we’re both not the most socially adept people. I’m writing this all to you in an email because I’ll pass out from stress if I try to say it to you in real time, even with a screen between us. I’m almost passing out from it right now, and we’re in different places and I don’t have to send it if I don’t want to. I should end this before something bad happens.

  I like being together. I like feeling like nothing is wrong with me. I like being able to think about something else at night instead of Wellhouse Turn. I know I should see someone about the talking, but for now I’m good with this. I’m happy.

  I hope you’re happy too.

  Wallace

  CHAPTER 27

  My head is empty and ringing when I scroll back to the top of the email. My fingers feel like jelly. No one has ever told me something this important before. It’s like Wallace took off a mask of his own face. The face beneath it is the same, but now I can watch the expression change.

  What a whiny, spoiled brat I’ve been. This whole time.

  Then I see the email’s subject line.

  Monstrous Sea Private Message

  12:05 a.m. (MirkerLurker has joined the message)

  MirkerLurker: Either of you guys around?

  MirkerLurker: I have a question.

  MirkerLurker: Really not sure what to do…

  12:25 a.m. (emmersmacks has joined the message)

  emmersmacks: Sorry

  emmersmacks: Been falling asleep way early lately

  emmersmacks: Like whats up with that right Im fourteen

  emmersmacks: Should be able to crush a Monty D and stay awake

  emmersmacks: Anyways

  emmersmacks: Whats up

  MirkerLurker: I don’t know what “crush a Monty D” means, but I’d like to hear about your issues way more than I’d like to talk about mine.

  emmersmacks: In college there are these things called projects and if you want a good grade you work hard on them deep into the night for many weeks

  MirkerLurker: We have those in high school too.

  emmersmacks: Haha no you dont

  emmersmacks: Come take mechanical engineering and then tell me you do projects

  emmersmacks: If you really want to hear about it I can go on . . .

  MirkerLurker: No no, please.

  MirkerLurker: I’m having issues of the Wallace kind.

 
; emmersmacks: Oh no

  emmersmacks: Bad issues??

  MirkerLurker: No. More like the “He pulled the You Found Me in a Constellation card after telling me some very important things and now I don’t know what to say to him” kind.

  emmersmacks: O.O

  emmersmacks: He used the constellation line??

  emmersmacks: Wow he must really like you

  emmersmacks: So do you not like him back???

  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.

  I don’t look at him and see Wellhouse Turn, like I thought I might. I only see Wallace. If he says he’s happy, I trust him. The first time we go by Wellhouse Turn on the way to Murphy’s, I glance over at him and he shakes his head, smiling a little.

  “Don’t look at me,” he says.

  When I look at Wellhouse Turn, all I see is the drop and the wonder.

  We dwell on that email as little as possible. When we hang out, we do homework together to try to buffer each other’s grades. Wallace checks history, English (of course), and about ninety percent of the elective courses; I cover math, the science courses, and the other ten percent of the electives, which means art class. Wallace only takes art because he hates the prompts in the creative writing class; I don’t take art because the art teacher is a notorious snoop who would definitely find the Monstrous Sea panels in my sketchbook.

  Because of that time around Christmas and the week of New Year’s when we didn’t hang out in person and I had time to catch up on Monstrous Sea, I have a surplus of pages and the momentum to keep going. Reader numbers climb. I post a few more drawings as MirkerLurker, and Wallace tells me how much people love them. I refuse to look at comments. I compile the next graphic novel for the shop, and almost choke at the sheer number of people who buy it in the first three hours after it goes up. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised with the views the pages get online, and the meteoric popularity of Wallace’s transcription chapters—which have almost matched the page views of the comic itself—but it still gets me. Just like my alarm clock every morning.

  I see Max around the forums every once in a while, banning someone or closing old threads under the Forges_of_Risht account, and Emmy stops by for the Dog Days watches, but our messages are few and far between. Usually whenever Emmy has time between classes, and when Max lets himself get online. Sometimes it
feels like I see Cole, Megan, Leece, and Chandra more than I talk to Max and Emmy. I like Wallace’s friends, but they still feel like his friends. I want my friends back.

  By the time February hits—with some delightful below-zero weather cold enough to give you brain freeze from breathing through your mouth—it feels like I’ve known Wallace for five years instead of only five months. Neither of us ever brings up his email again, and I hope it’s okay, but sometimes trying to read him is like trying to read a brick wall. His neutral expression is flat; when it changes it changes fast, and the change never lasts long.

  He said we didn’t need to talk about the email, what he said, his dad. We did, kind of, but not out loud. And now I feel like we should. We are both adept at the internet, at molding our text to mean what we want it to mean and what we think it should mean. I can lie on the internet, where people can’t hear my voice. But with him, alone, I can’t lie—I’m not a good enough actress. I hope he knows that.

  “That email,” I say one afternoon, while we lie on the mattress in Wallace’s basement room. I’m tucked in the curve of his arm. His cheek is pressed to my hair. We both wear sweatpants. Our textbooks are scattered around our legs, and Wallace holds my latest English essay in one hand and a red pen in the other. I am now certain that the old football jersey pinned to his wall, the one that says WARLAND and the number 73, once belonged to his father.

  I say nothing else, and after a moment he shifts his head. The essay and the pen sink to rest against my leg.

  “That email,” he repeats.

  “We never really talked about it.”

  “I didn’t know if you wanted to.” His voice dwindles away. He can talk about grammatical errors, but not this.

  “I wanted to say . . . I’m sorry about your dad. Everything that happened. But I’m happy you’re happy. And I’m glad—I’m really glad—you felt like you could tell me all that. I am too. Happy, I mean.”