Eliza and Her Monsters - Francesca Zappia Page 0,26

shorts and T-shirt. Sully appears behind him a minute later, wearing almost exactly the same thing, just a touch taller.

“Is that something from your comic?” Sully says.

Mom and Dad have turned around. Great, let’s just get the whole Mirk clan in on this Make Fun of Eliza fest. Bereft of my stealth, I stomp down the stairs, past my parents, and yank open the door.

“I’ll be back later,” I grunt. “I have my phone.”

I close the door behind me and hurry down the driveway. Wallace waits at the end in a swamp-green Taurus, but it’s dark and I can’t see his costume. My heart juts out a staccato rhythm in my chest and my stomach sloshes around like the great foaming tides of Orcus. I slide into the passenger seat.

“Hi,” I say as I buckle my seat belt.

“Hi,” he says back.

I stop. His head is turned toward me, but he looks away, at the dashboard, out the windshield. His voice is so much softer than I expected. I imagined he’d be extra loud, maybe to compensate for all the time he spends quiet, but no. It’s deep and soft, like a fat fleece blanket in the middle of winter.

“You only talk sometimes?” I say.

He nods. “Alone in my car is okay. School is . . . too much. With my friends, yeah, and sometimes with strangers. Still not weird?”

“No, not weird.”

He looks me in the eye and smiles the little smile.

“You make an awesome Kite Waters,” he says.

My body heats up a few degrees. I remembered deodorant. “Thanks,” I say, then look him up and down. “I thought you were going as Dallas?”

“I am,” he says. “The wig and the scarf are in the trunk. They’re kind of dangerous to wear while driving.”

“Ah. Good point.”

“You ready?”

“Ready enough.”

“So where did you move from?”

We round the corner and continue down the long road that connects my neighborhood to the rest of Westcliff. Wallace’s headlights blink on in the growing darkness.

“Illinois,” he says. His voice sits comfortably above a whisper.

“Why?”

“Family got new jobs.” He pauses. “And my mom likes it better here. I have a few friends here too, so it’s not so bad.”

“To each their own, I guess.”

“You don’t like it?”

I shrug. “Maybe, maybe not. I’ve never been anywhere else, so I don’t know if I’d like it better somewhere else, but I’m tired of Westcliff. I’m tired of that high school. And small-town nonsense. Everyone knowing everything about everyone. Have you read the Westcliff Star?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s stuff like that. All the stories they run—you know how they’ve had the story about Wellhouse Turn for the past few weeks? That’s all they cover this time of year. So little goes on that they have to focus on the killer road. It’s kind of . . . disturbing.”

“Disturbing?”

“They just get so focused on one or two things. They should leave people alone.”

He glances over at me. Smiles. “Got something to hide?”

“No,” I shoot back. “I’m just saying, I’d rather be somewhere where no one looks twice at you, no matter what you are.”

“I get that.”

We climb a hill, drive through a patch of trees, and start over Wellhouse Bridge. On the far side of Wellhouse Bridge, illuminated by Wallace’s headlights and the fading sun, is Wellhouse Turn: a sharp jackknife in the road where the ground falls away.

The flowers and other decorations from the picture in the Star are still there, some old and wilting, others fresh. There’s a bent and mangled metal barrier that gets put back up every time someone drives through it and goes over the side. The steep incline leads to the river below where, some say, you can find old car parts embedded in the ground.

I wonder if death comes quickly for those who go off the turn, or if the long tumble to the bottom takes years.

Wallace slows nearly to a stop at the turn. Most people slow down here, but never this slow. And never with unblinking rigidity. I get a glimpse of the drop. Even walking down the incline seems like a terrible idea. I bet it would hurt if you slipped, even a little.

Wallace’s face looks pale while we’re in the turn, but then we pull out of it and beneath the next yellow streetlight, and he’s fine again. As if nothing was wrong to begin with.

“Bet you don’t have places like that in Illinois,” I say.

The used bookstore Wallace’s friends told him about is called Murphy’s. I’ve heard of it in passing but never