I turn back to my line art. My shaking hands go still against the screen of the pen display, and the lines come out smooth and bold. Drawing gives me something to do as I think about that winky face, and the winky face I sent back.
Amity, with her cloud of white hair and her sharp orange eyes, comes into being against the blank background one line at a time. There’s no color on her yet, but I see it in her every time I draw her. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be the person whose color comes through even when standing still. To be someone so vibrant, others can’t help but notice you. It’s not Amity’s eyes or her hair or even her skin that do that. It’s just her.
I save the mass of knifelike orange crystals growing along Amity’s right arm—pulled back, ready to strike down her foes—for later. The show is back on.
Rainmaker hasn’t said anything else in the chat. I pop in every now and then to comment on the show, but for the most part I sit back, stop thinking, and enjoy a group of pretty twenty-somethings pretending to be teenagers, making astronomically bad decisions and learning from their mistakes. Every once in a while, a troll account will take over the chat window with screaming caps or strings of emoticons, and the account Forges_ of_Risht appears to block them.
A message from Max appears on my phone.
Apocalypse_Cow: forges, reporting for duty with the banhammer.
MirkerLurker: Excellent work, soldier.
Apocalypse_Cow: see, there’s a reason you hired me for this job.
MirkerLurker: Yeah, so Emmy doesn’t have to do that and take care of the website.
Apocalypse_Cow: har har.
MirkerLurker: But really, great job. No one wields the banhammer quite as well as you.
Max sends more emojis. A lady dancing the salsa. Nail painting. A lightning bolt. He routinely pesters Emmy to make emojis part of Monstrous Sea forum chat capability, and she refuses because she thinks it’s funny.
Emmy says something in the Dog Days chat that sets off a flood of replies so fast I can’t scroll back up to see what the original comment was.
Max and Emmy aren’t the only two people who help run the forums, but they are the best. And they’re the only ones who know me not as LadyConstellation but as Eliza. Before Max was my bouncer, even before he shared the link to Monstrous Sea on Masterminds that drew in the fans, he was an anal-retentive plot theorist on the Children of Hypnos forums. And Emmy—before Emmy built monstroussea.com and the forums and the shop where I sell my merchandise, she was the life of the Children of Hypnos party, an eleven-year-old with enough fangirl energy to power a small city.
If it weren’t for them finding my fan art, none of this would have happened. It was both of them separately who found my dead art thread on the Children of Hypnos forums, and it was in that thread where we carved out a little space just for us.
I do have friends. Maybe they live hundreds of miles away from me, and maybe I can only talk to them through a screen, but they’re still my friends. They don’t just hold Monstrous Sea together. They hold me together.
Max and Emmy are the reason any of this exists.
After the second birth, she had felt the Watcher sitting in her mind, its eyes turned on her. Inside her, of course, it had no eyes but her own, yet that was how it felt. A lump of burning coal in the back of her head. Sometimes it clung to her shoulders, though she could turn to her reflection and see nothing there. She didn’t know now if those had been hallucinations left over from post-rebirth sickness, or if she’d simply grown used to the sensation. Either way, she no longer felt it. And the Watcher hadn’t spoken to her since that first day, when it had made the bargain with her.
Her body for its power.
CHAPTER 5
Over the next few days, I finish two more pages. I could go faster—I can finish a page in a day if I try—but the quality will start to deteriorate, and that’s the last thing I want at this point. We’ve already gone through so much of the comic, it should only be getting better from here, not worse. I sketch out the pages in school, doing as much of the line work foundation as I can before it ever gets on the computer. I do these in class when no one is watching, or at lunch while I sit by myself in the drafty courtyard outside the cafeteria. Soon it’ll be too cold to sit out here at all, and I’ll have to find a table inside, which should be fun considering all of the tables are taken every day I walk in.
On Friday, the day of our homecoming game, everyone is dressed in typical Westcliff gold, adorned with football jerseys and face paint and gold ribbons tied in ponytails. In the main hallway, there are five different homecoming banners encouraging the football team to GO FIGHT WIN. On my walk to fourth period, it is banner number three that detaches from the wall as I walk beneath it. The world goes dark. I smack at the banner to get it off, and snickers erupt in the hallway behind me. The banner falls to the floor.
Travis Stone and Deshawn Johnson, the only two students in this school who scare me even on a good day, lean against the lockers nearby and watch me struggle. Travis Stone looks like a vulture in sagging jeans and a buzz cut, and Deshawn Johnson is a kid who half the time is too cool to hang out with Travis and the other half the time not very cool at all. Ten years ago they were two sweet little boys at my grade school who played tag with me on the playground, and they would’ve helped me with this banner instead of watching.
“Nice hair,” Travis says. I brush a hand over my head and find an ungodly amount of glitter trapped there. The look on my face sends Travis and Deshawn into new rounds of laughter.
In the bathroom, attempts to remove the glitter fail. All I manage to do is fill a sink with gold glitter dandruff and get a few other girls to give me strange looks, like I did it to myself. All hope of happiness and a bright future dies.
I walk outside at the end of the day to a gloomy sky, a sharp breeze, and lines of cars vying to leave the parking lot. In a few hours everyone will be back here for the football game, crammed together in the stadium behind the school, shouting their support to the chilled night air and huddled together with their friends. There will be class floats paraded around the perimeter of the football field. There will be a moment of silence and a short memorial for the band members who went off Wellhouse Turn last summer. There will be football jerseys and parties and revelry deep into the night.
I rearrange my backpack on my shoulders and hold my sketchbook in both hands. There are too many cars. I bet college doesn’t have parking issues like this. I bet college is great.
I turn and find Wallace sitting on that same bench again. He has sat there every day this week. I found out yesterday that his last name is Warland, which seems appropriate for someone of his size and stature. Capable of inflicting destruction wherever he goes.
Today, Wallace Warland is not alone. Flanking him are Travis Stone and Deshawn Johnson, forever and always the bane of my existence. Running into my long-forgotten friends once a day is bad enough—twice is asking for trouble. Deshawn stands by the bench with his arms crossed, and Travis lounges beside Wallace like they’re old buddies. Wallace sits stiffly, with his hands covering the papers he’s always writing on, his eyes stuck on the sidewalk somewhere to the left of Deshawn’s shoes.
Wallace did not strike me as the kind of person to begin a friendship with the likes of Travis Stone, at least not High-School-Dickbag Travis Stone. Curiosity makes my feet inch a little closer, pretending I’m debating going to my car. I pull out my phone and stare at the black screen.
“. . . must have typed this. No one can write that good. What is this again?”
Travis tries to take one of the papers. Wallace clamps his hand down.
“What’d you call it? Fan . . . fan . . .”
“Fanfiction,” Deshawn says.
No way in the nine circles of hell. No way is Wallace Warland writing fanfiction. Fanfiction of what? What does Wallace Warland enjoy so much he writes fanfiction about it? Can you have fanfiction about professional sports teams?
“Lemme see.” Travis tries to take the paper again, which makes Wallace lock down tighter.
“I think it’s for that online thing,” Deshawn says, peering down at the paper. “That sea thing.”
All the hair on the back of my neck prickles. My heart rate ratchets upward. They are not talking about Monstrous Sea.