“No. I understand that it’sa teenage thingto say parents don’t get it, but theydon’t get it. It’s not their fault they were born two and a half decades before me, but would it kill them to ask me what I’m doing on the phone before they assume it’s something pointless?”
“Maybe they’re worried you’ll snap at them if they ask whatyou’re doing,” Wallace says.
I open my mouth to argue but remember that I have actually done that to my parents before.
“Do yours ever do that to you?” I ask.
“Sometimes. Not as often as they used to. We’ve ... moved past that, and into other issues.”
Before I can ask what issues, he says, “Why did your brother call you Eggs Benedict?”
“Because I eat hard-boiled eggs for breakfast. Dad calls me Eggs, and Sully and Church just kind of tack on whatever egg type they can think of that day.”
“Cute.”
“I think my brothers hate me.”
It must sound too real, because Wallace actually looks concerned. “Why?”
My gaze fixes on my feet, Mom’s worn Nikes scuffing the ground. “I don’t know. Because I don’t try to hang out with them more, or get invested in what they like doing. According to Dad, they’re really good at soccer, but I wouldn’t know because I never pay attention when we go to their games.”
“So hang out with them more.”
“But I don’t like doing what they do, because all they do is play soccer. Or video games. I don’t like sports. They make fun of me for being bad at them anyway, so what’s the point?”
“Of course they’re going to make fun of you. They’re middle-schoolboys raised in a highly competitive, testosterone-fueled environment. That’s how they psych each other up.”
“And you know this how?”
“I watch the sportball on the television. Also I played peewee football when I was younger.”
“Youdidplay football!”
He laughs. “Yeah, when I was like a quarter the size I am now. They had me as a running back.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I ran real fast.”
“You? Move fast?”
“I know. One of life’s great mysteries.” His knuckles rap the back of my hand. My resistance meets its end, and I grab his fingers, holding them in mine. He smiles and says, “I don’t think your brothers hate you. I think you don’t like the same things. It’s not a bad thing, it just is what it is. They do sports. You do art.”
I doMonstrous Sea. That is what I do, and all I need from Sully and Church is their silence about it to their friends at school. We don’t have to get along. They just have to keep their mouths shut. They’ve stayed quiet this long; they must havesomeidea how important it is. So maybe Wallace is right. Maybe they don’t hate me.
“So where’s your house at?” I ask, swinging our hands between us. “I want to properly Google Maps creeper-stalk you before agreeing to meet your family.”
He laughs again.
The walk home that Amity normally found meditative now teemed with her own unquenchable thoughts. Her guilt. If she was the only one who could stop Faust, didn’t that mean she had to? Even if it meant danger to her? It was easy to think of him in the abstract when he was only terrorizing faraway places, but what if he came to Nocturne Island?
What if, instead of strangers, he attacked Faren?
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