She’s up and at the door in a second. Excitement fills her eyes, but that could be left over from the plank. “Of course. Does he want lunch? I can make lunch. Will you be spending the time in your room?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Is he coming now? Is that what you’re wearing?”
I look down. I’m wearing a T-shirt from one of Dad’s intramural baseball teams, so it’s about five sizes too big; a pair of ragged Harlem Globetrotters sweatpants, rolled up to just below my knees; and my thickest, warmest pair of socks. The socks are made out of Wookiee fur or something.
“And you should probably take a shower, don’t you think?” Mom says. “Your hair is a little greasy.”
I wish she wouldn’t point it out, but also she’s right. I rush upstairs, lock myself in the bathroom, and hop into the shower. I don’t know where Wallace lives, but it usually takes him fifteen minutes to get here. I’ve already spent ten of those, and I shower in five, and as I’m wrapping my hair up in a towel and pulling on a slightly better-fitting pair of sweatpants, a T-shirt, and my Wookiee socks, the doorbell rings.
“Eliza! Wallace is here!”
I shove the Wookiee socks back on my feet, and when I get tothe top of the stairs, Mom is letting Wallace in through the front door.
“Hi there,” she says in her normal voice, holding out her hand for him to shake. “It’s so nice to finally meet you! I’m Eliza’s mom.”
Wallace says something back, but it’s so quiet I can’t hear it. I’m surprised he said anything to her at all. Mom must be satisfied, because she turns around and smiles at me with her eyebrows raised. “Have fun, you two! I’ll get some lunch ready.”
She disappears into the kitchen. Wallace glances up at me. He’s wearing jeans, a sweater, and a fat brown corduroy jacket. All four Children of Hypnos books are tucked under one thick arm.
I jerk my thumb over my shoulder. “You can come up to my room, if you want.”
Wallace climbs the stairs. I remember the towel wrapped around my hair and rip it off, chucking it back into the bathroom. I might as well embrace the drowned-rat look, because that’s as good as it’s getting today. At least I’ll smell nice.
Wallace stops beside me, holds up the fourth Children of Hypnos book—the one with a battle axe on the cover—and says softly, “You arejoking.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I was a little worried about that. Okay, come on....”
I bring him to my room. Inside, Davy sits up on the bed, tail thumping against the wall.
“You have a dog?” Wallace forgets the books and stands by the bed for Davy to sniff him. Half a second later they’re cuddling on the bed, and Davy is doing his best to climb into Wallace’s lap.
I glance around the room to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I have a lot ofMonstrous Seastuff lying around, but all of it could’ve been bought by a fan. I turn down the volume on the television but don’t turn it completely off—I can’t handle Wallace being in my room withoutDog Daysto back me up. “That’s Davy. If he gets annoying, shove him onto the floor.”
“Davy?” Wallace lets Davy lick his face. “Like Dallas’s sea monster Davy?”
Crap. “Hah, yes, like that. I got to name him.” Lies. I named the sea monster Davy after the dog Davy, not the other way around. The dog Davy is big and white and happy. The sea monster Davy could crush most cities, sheds clumps of fur that get mistaken for icebergs, and has a long neck and a tiny head with two little round eyes and a perpetual vacant smile. Sea monster Davy came to life when I was very little, and dog Davy dwarfed me.
Wallace looks around the room at the decorations on my walls. “What is that?”
He motions to Mr. Greatbody, who has made his rounds across the walls of my room and now sits above my computer. One of his paper eyes has fallen off, lost forever to the vent in the floor. “Something one of my online friends made for me. It’s her kind of joke.”
“I won’t ask, then.”
“So. Children of Hypnos. I’m guessing this means you finished?”
Wallace levels a stare at me the likes of which I’ve never seen before. Except in the mirror, every freaking time I read through Children of Hypnos. Here’s a big football-looking dude sitting on my bed with a very large, happy dog wiggling into his lap, getting angry about a series of novels.
“How is there no fifth book?” he asks. “How can it end there? How does no one know the real reason she quit writing?”
I settle in my desk chair. “Welcome to the pain of the Children of Hypnos fandom.”
“But what happens to all of them? Emery? Wes? Will Klaus and Marcia ever be together again? Does Trevor van der Gelt lose himself to his doppelgänger? Does Ridley come back?Do they ever find Hypnos?”
I shrug.
“What about the author, though?” He opens up one of the books to the back flap, the picture of Olivia Kane. “Doesn’t she know? Even though she never wrote it, couldn’t she tell the fans what happened? She must have saidsomething.”
