“Shedidn’t,” Sully snaps, “but not for—ah, youdon’t get it! You always tell us to be safe and to make good choices, but then you do something like this.” He grabs something from Church—theWestcliff Stargraduation issue. “This was not a good choice. This was a very bad choice. You left her wide open formillionsof people, and not all of them are nice. She’s never gonna get that safety back again. But you know what the—the most—”
“The most aggravating,” Church says.
“The most aggravating thing is?” Sully spreads his arms, encompassing theWestcliff Starand the computer and all of them. “We could have avoided this if you’d taken half a minute to GoogleMonstrous Sea. You want to know about every other part of our lives, but you never really cared about this.”
I step back, and a floorboard creaks beneath my foot. All four of them turn to face me. Mom is crying. Dad looks pale.
“Why didn’t you ever tell us?” Mom says. “We thought it was still small. Your bank account never had that much in it ... the taxes ...”
“You told him my taxes were my business and you wanted me to handle them on my own.” My voice wobbles.
Dad swallows thickly. “We never would have said what we did in theWestcliff Starif we knew. We thought it was a thing you did for fun. We wanted to show you that we were proud of you. AndtheStar—theStaris such a small paper, who was going to read it? It would just be for us. Just for us.”
I shrug again. They wait for me to say something, but what am I supposed to say? Am I supposed to be angry? Forgiving? My parents have never apologized like this. They’ve never screwed up so badly. Part of me never thought they would.
Mom starts crying for real. She gets up and leaves through the other door, into the hallway to their office. Church goes after her.
After a moment, I escape back upstairs. I lie curled on my bed, withDog Daysmuted on the TV, and feel strangely awake. Like everything is sharper in detail than normal. I don’t feel light-headed, though.
Ten minutes later, Sully knocks on the door and sticks his head in. “Are you okay?”
“I didn’t know you knew so much aboutMonstrous Sea,” I say.
He shrugs. “We wanted to know what you were doing all the time. You’re our big sister, right? But you’re like ... in a different world. It’s weird.” He shrugs again. “We read the comic. Me and Church. So do all our friends, but we never told them who you were because we figured something like this might happen. It’s really cool. Not that this is happening, but that you made all this. With the way Mom and Dad acted around you, I figured they didn’t know how important it was.”
“Oh.” And all this time, I thought they hated me. “I just ... thanks. I probably wouldn’t have told them.”
Sully rolls his eyes. “Mom and Dad are too old to get it. They didn’t even have cell phones when they were younger. Maybe Googling it wouldn’t have helped them.” He rubs his nose. “Anyway, if you need to, like, talk to someone, you know where to find me and Church.”
“That’s—that would be nice, actually.” My voice is small, but Sully’s expression opens up. After a moment’s hesitation, he slips into the room, shuts the door behind him, and sits with his legs curled up on the opposite end of my bed.
“Thanks,” I say.
Sully smiles at me for the first time I can remember.
CHAPTER 35
Very early Tuesday morning, when my parents and Sully and Church are all fast asleep, I get in my car and drive to Wellhouse Turn.
There is no one on the roads this early in the morning, so I park on the shoulder, walk the length of the bridge, and peer down the incline to the flat expanse of grass beside the black river. Moonlight illuminates the world. At the top of the hill are the cross, the decorations, the toys. Flowers, some fresh and some wilting, for the people who went over the turn. I wonder if there will ever come a day when they’re not needed, when the turn is no longer the turn but just a hill.
Wallace said in his email that he never came back here. SurelyVee must have dedicated something to Wallace’s father in this pile of offerings, but Wallace himself never did.
I don’t have anything except my pajamas and my car keys. I look around. There’s a smooth rock on the side of the road not far away. I grab that, polish it up a little with my sleeve, and set it on top of an empty baseball card tin, under the arm of a rain-soaked teddy bear.
“Consider this an IOU,” I say. “I’ll bring something better later.”
Wellhouse Turn is surrounded by woods, so it’s a quiet place anyway, but the river blocks out the sounds of any other nearby roads. I sit on my butt beside the flowers and toys and slide myself carefully down the incline. I’ll figure out how to get back up later. At the bottom is a wide, grassy clearing. How many cars have gone off that road? Why hasn’t anyone fixed it yet, or made it safer? Are they afraid they’ll lose their news stories? That the future will somehow be less interesting if there aren’t pieces of car permanently embedded in the ground here?
I lower myself onto the cool grass and look up at the sky. Stars puncture the darkness. For all the Nocturnian constellations I know, the only real ones I remember are the Big and Little Dippers. Oh, and Canis Major, of course—headed by Sirius, the Dog Star, the herald of the dog days of summer. It’s been brought up so many times on the showDog Daysit’s now the longest-running title-reference joke. But Sirius isn’t even in the sky right now.
Four-year-old Eliza would be so disappointed in me.
Four-year-old Eliza would be disappointed in me for a lot of things. For hiding, for making it most of the way through high school without anyone to sit with at lunch, for letting myself sink to this place. Four-year-old Elizatried, at least. She wanted to be good at things. She did things because she wanted to do them, not because other people made her. She had no masters. I don’t think any four-year-olds do.
But I’m not four anymore. I can’t be her. I can’t be my four-year-old self, I can’t be LadyConstellation, I can’t even be Wallace’s girlfriend. Right now I can only be Eliza Mirk, human being.
I tangle my fingers in the grass. A bat flits by overhead, making stars wink off and on again.
