Down the back hallway is a set of stairs that lead to the basement. The basement is brick walled, carpeted, and chillier than the rest of the house. Wallace flicks a light switch at the bottom of the stairs that turns on soft, ambient sconces. The room is divided in half by a wall with a large opening. On this side is a moth-eaten couch and a large, old television. Wallace leads me to the other side of the room, through the opening. The darker side. There’s a mattress here on the floor covered with rumpled bedsheets, a lamp plugged into a power strip, and books and papers piled around it, including the Children of Hypnos series and chapters of Wallace’s Monstrous Sea transcription. A pool table takes up a lot of the space. Just to the left of the lamp on the floor is an old recliner. Behind that is a large poster of Dallas Rainer standing on a beach, looking over the ocean, and the words THERE ARE MONSTERS IN THE SEA sketched into the shadow he casts on the sand. Pinned beside the poster is an old football jersey that says WARLAND and the number 73.
From the opening in the wall, Wallace pulls a heavy, sliding wood door and locks it on the other side of the doorframe. It cuts off any residual noise from upstairs, and even from the rest of the basement. He presses his forehead to the door and closes his eyes.
“I am so sorry,” he says. “I didn’t think he would do that.”
I shift from foot to foot. The room is cold, and my jacket is upstairs. “Does he usually?”
“Sometimes. He’s—he’s a great guy, and he’s a good person, but I hate it when he starts saying things are meaningless.” He pulls his head away from the door and starts to pace. “Sorry. Sorry, I don’t mean to freak you out. I didn’t think he would be like that if you were here.”
“It’s fine. I get it.” I’m just glad I can breathe again.
Wallace balls his hands together at his sides. I’ve never seen him so angry. Not like this. He looks like he could break something. Maybe the pool table. “What’s the point of being alive if you don’t do what makes you happy? What good is a career that makes you money if you hate yourself every day you do it? I don’t have a family to support, I don’t have bills to pay, at least not right now. Sure, I’ll have to pay student loans, but we only have enough money for me to go to community college anyway, so I’ll pay it off with whatever job I get after that. I don’t need to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or whatever important job he wants me to get. I just want to write.”
I watch him pace and feel myself growing to the floor, feet rooted in place, uncertainty creeping its way through my veins. I’ve never seen him like this—I don’t know what to do with him, so I stand there and stare until he finally looks up at me and says, “I’m really sorry” again.
“Do you need something to scream into?” I ask.
He considers. “That would be nice.”
I pluck the pillow off the mattress and toss it to him. He presses it to his face and lets out a muffled scream. Probably the loudest sound that’s ever come out of him in my presence, and the pillow makes it no louder than his usual speaking volume.
He throws the pillow back to the bed and follows it. He is much less intimidating while supine. I sit on the edge of the mattress and turn toward him.
“I’m sorry he has to be like that,” I say.
Wallace covers his eyes with his hands. How easy it would be to lean over and kiss him now, but it doesn’t feel like the time. Maybe it will never be the time. It will never be the time because I’m Eliza Mirk, great avoider of life and all its consequences. How can I want something so badly but become so paralyzed every time I even think about taking it?
“I’ve already spent twelve years of school doing what other people have told me I have to do,” he says. “And I know what happens when someone’s forced to do something they hate. Is it too much to ask for a few years of what I want? Do your parents do this to you? Are you really going to major in graphic design?”
“Oh, no. I said that so Tim wouldn’t throw me out of the house.”
Wallace snorts.
“I don’t know what I want to major in. I just don’t want to be . . . here. My parents like to remind me that I still have to finish high school to know if I get to go to college, and they think once I go I’ll become some dorm hermit who never leaves her room and stares at her computer screen all day. But no, they don’t tell me what I should do—not all the time, anyway—and I guess that’s better.”
But the only reason they aren’t trying to whip me into shape anymore is because I’ve raged against it for so long that I wore them out. They still mention it sometimes, in Mom’s little jabs about doing better in school, and Dad’s mentions of scholarships, but it’s not the same issue. Mom and Dad don’t know how much money I make, but I do, and I have at least that peace of mind. Wallace only has fanfiction, and that can’t help him.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. He lowers his hands, stares at the ceiling, and shrugs. Then he looks at me.
“Are you cold?”
My hands are clamped around my upper arms, my torso curled into my legs to keep the heat in.
“Um.”
“Here.” Wallace sits up and pulls a thick knitted blanket from beneath the other sheets on his bed. “Insulation layer. Hope it doesn’t smell bad.” He wraps it around me. It’s already warm. Probably warm from him, considering he sleeps with it touching him every freaking night.
“Smells like Irish Spring and spicy boy shampoo,” I say.
“Is that good or bad?”
“It’s great.”
I have never been so close to something that smells like Irish Spring and spicy boy shampoo, unless you count anything my dad goes near, and I do not. I’m not entirely sure my brothers shower. I curl up in his blanket but stay turned away from him.
“You didn’t correct Bren when she said I was your girlfriend.”
Wallace shifts behind me. “Oh. Yeah. Well, I thought—you know, it would bring up more questions than it answered . . . and she’s kind of persistent . . . and I didn’t want to make the situation awkward. . . .”
“Oh.”
“Hmm.”
Someone flushes a toilet upstairs; water rushes through the basement pipes. I bury my face in Wallace’s blanket. Wallace shifts again behind me.
“Unless you want to be,” he says.
I look over my shoulder. “What?”
He sits against the wall with his arms wrapped around his knees, his eyes wide. When I look at him, he looks down at his feet. His voice drops, and his words come out in terse little bunches. “I didn’t know if—if you wanted to be my girlfriend, so I didn’t want to get into a big thing about it at dinner.”
“Do you want me to be?” I choke out.
He glances up. “I mean, yes.”
Ball in your court, Mirk.
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes?” He frowns.
Aghh. Wrong word.
“I mean, okay.”
The little smile appears. “Really?”