I release Davy; he follows me into the kitchen, Mom trailing not far behind him. I grab a pair of scissors and tear open the box.
Inside is a note from Emmy and a pile of assorted goodies one might expect to receive from a fourteen-year-old college student: hard-lead drawing pencils she probably got at a steep discount from the campus bookstore, or charmed out of some art student; a picture of a man made from a collage of body parts she must’ve found in magazines and online, who somehow manages to be anatomically correct; and of course a few packages of ramen. Mom makes a face at the man picture and the ramen. I ignore her and open the letter. It’s handwritten; Emmy likes to dot her I’s with hearts. Ironically, she says.
E!!!
You better like your care package! I know you said you needed some new hard pencils, so I hope you haven’t bought any yourself yet. The ramen is for eating, because I know you forget to do that sometimes. But of course we both know the best part of this is the Mr. Greatbody. Yes, he has a name. I have taken everything you’ve told me about your perfect man over the years and I have created him for you. Marvel at my masterpiece. Feast your eyes on my fantastical creation.
Speaking of eyes . . . if his eyes fall off, it’s because I ran out of glue. I’m a civil engineering major, not a craft supply store.
Love you lots!
Emmy
I look at Mr. Greatbody again. Strong jaw, striking eyes, lean muscle—honestly, it’s the sort of thing anyone could find attractive. I’ve never been picky about what guys look like, and I think Emmy buried a joke about that in here somewhere. I laugh anyway.
“What is that?” Mom asks. I taste the disdain in her voice.
“Nothing,” I say, gathering up the box and its contents. “Inside joke.”
“Is Emmy . . . Emmy’s a girl, right?” Mom follows me again as I leave the kitchen and head up the stairs.
“Yes, Emmy’s a girl. When have you heard of someone named Emmy not being a girl?”
“I don’t know, but with these internet people, I thought I’d ask. . . .”
I clench my teeth to keep my mouth shut. I don’t think she means to offend me anymore—she probably never did—but whenever we get into this conversation, one of us ends up too angry to continue. I jog up the stairs, Davy on my heels, and turn down the hall for my room.
“I’m not sure I like that they have our address, either,” Mom starts.
“They’re my friends. I don’t give our address to people who aren’t my friends.” I step inside my room. Davy scoots in after me, and I close and lock the door. Mom’s footsteps stop outside. Then comes her huff at the closed door.
“You should take Davy for a walk later!” she calls.
“Sully and Church take him for walks,” I yell back. “They love it.”
“What kind of homework do you have?”
“I don’t know. Math. Physics.”
“Make sure you get it done. We got a call from your homeroom teacher again, she’s worried you aren’t doing as much as you should be—”
“It’s not like I’m applying to Ivy League colleges, I’m going to get in. Why does it matter?”
She doesn’t answer, but I know what she’d say. First, that I should aim higher and not settle for any school less than the best—but right now, I don’t care about learning, I care about drawing. And second, even non-Ivy League schools can be hard to get into, or I could lose scholarships, or whatever. It can’t be that hard to get into college, because all kinds of people do it all the time. And I already don’t have anything in the way of scholarships, and I plan on paying for college with the money I’m making off my Monstrous Sea merchandise. When Emmy made monstroussea.com, she also set up a store page where we could sell official gear—bags, notebooks, binders, pencils, shirts, buttons, wallets, phone cases, anything we could brand with designs and logos from MS. It’s how I bought my computer, and the newest version of Photoshop, and most importantly, my pen display.
My parents don’t know the extent of this. They know I bought the stuff, but when this all started, they helped me set up a bank account and gave me their tax man’s phone number and told me if I wanted to make a little money off my hobby, I’d have to learn how to take care of that money myself, that it would be educational for me.
The comic didn’t really start making me money until earlier this year, and as soon as I realized what was happening, I plucked up my meager reserve of courage and marched down to the bank to set up my own account, one they couldn’t see online. I funnel money from it into my other account sometimes, so when Mom looks at it she still sees that I have income, but she and Dad don’t know the actual amount. They don’t know I could pay for college and make a living off of it.
I don’t want them to know. I don’t want them to become as involved in my online life as they try to be in my offline one.
Mom stomps away from the door. I’ll hear about this when Dad gets back from . . . wherever he is today. Probably at some meeting about high-tech sporting gear. He’ll say I should do my homework because it’ll make me a well-rounded person regardless of what it does for my college options; he’ll also say I should go walk Davy because it’s good exercise. “Good exercise,” aka the actual worst phrase in the English language next to “wake up” and “all the eggs are gone.”
I drop my backpack on the floor, put Emmy’s box on the desk—removing Mr. Greatbody to tack him up on the wall between two Monstrous Sea posters—and flop over on the bed with my sketchbook. The books in the headboard bookcase slump over on themselves. They’re all different editions of the four published Children of Hypnos books, the series forever incomplete. Davy climbs up beside me.
For a minute, I lie on my side and bury my face in his ruff of white fur. The world becomes the quiet hum of the heater kicking on and the smell of dog dandruff. No one is watching me, or judging me, or even thinking about me. No one else is in the room. Davy sighs and lays his head across my arm.
After a minute I sit up and reach for my sketchbook. First my sidewalk-dirtied drawings fall out, then Wallace’s papers. He actually gave me these to critique. To write on. And we only talked for the first time today. I don’t know many writers, but I don’t think that happens very often. Maybe he was just happy to have another Monstrous Sea fan to talk to. I hold the papers out to Davy; he sniffs them, nudges them with his nose, then lays his head on his paws and stares at me with big dark eyes.
“Good?” I ask. “I’ll say that’s good.”
I flip through the pages. They have such a nice crinkly feeling, and they don’t sit quite flat on each other because Wallace’s pen strokes have warped the paper. I trace my fingers over the words without reading them. So clean and precise—one benefit of moving slowly, I guess. He could be an artist with this kind of dexterity.
I hold my excitement in check.