to go,” meaning “barely beat doubt back into its corner,” so I guess he’s right with that.
“Yeah. It was . . . it was fun.”
Wallace, who has been staring at his hands, glances up. “Really? You didn’t say much.”
“I usually don’t.”
“You talk a lot at school.”
I smile. “I write a lot at school. And I didn’t do that, either, before you showed up.”
He hesitates. “How come?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t like it.”
“You’re not super into school, are you?”
“Not really, no.”
“I’m not, either.” He looks down at the table again. “It feels like I already know what I want to do, and school is wasting my time. Like they assume we don’t know what we want to do, so they make us keep doing everything. I can’t wait to leave.”
“Right?” The force of my voice shocks even me. Wallace looks up again. “I . . . I mean—yes, it’s exhausting. I keep telling my parents that. I just want to focus on art, and I’ll probably get into college, so why does the rest of senior year even matter?”
“It’s stupid, right?”
“So stupid.”
He leans back in his seat. “Thank god. I thought I had cabin fever or something.”
“High school fever.”
“High school fever: like The Shining, but with teenagers.”
I laugh. Wallace smiles. The waiter brings us our sushi, and happiness trickles from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. Part of me knows it’s silly to be happy that someone finally gets it. My parents get it. They know I don’t like school and I don’t want to be here anymore. I’m sure most of my teachers know that too. They know I care about my art more than any homework, or sporting event, or dance. They might even get that it’s easier to be online, though I doubt that one.
But Wallace is the first person I’ve met who gets all of it.
Sometimes, when Amity woke from her rebirth dreams, in the long minutes she spent watching Faren sleep, she imagined what it would be like if she had never accepted the Watcher’s offer.
Faren would be dead.
Maybe she would be too.
The Watcher would have no host, and the Nocturnians would wait patiently until it did.
CHAPTER 15
Wallace gets a lot of things.
He gets that the stuffed crust pizza at lunch should be eaten up to the crust, then the crust should be peeled back and eaten, and the cheese inside should be balled up and consumed last as the crowning jewel of the meal. He gets that sweatpants and sweatshirts are infinitely better than any other types of clothing. He gets that talking is easier when there’s a screen or even a piece of paper between you and the person you’re talking to.
The first half of November has passed before I notice it going. Every day I wake up and experience the strange sensation of wanting to go to school. Now I linger at my locker in the mornings, not because it’s too difficult to get my feet to move and start the day, but because Wallace waits for me there, and I like standing in the hallway with him better than sitting in homeroom. Sometimes I go to his locker instead, and we linger there for a while. We don’t talk, because there are too many people around and Wallace doesn’t like writing on vertical surfaces.
In my classes I throw myself into Monstrous Sea sketch pages, cranking them out in the hours before and after lunch, hiding them in the bottom of my backpack so Wallace won’t find them. Not that I think he’d look through my stuff. I don’t. But my sketchbook might fall open, or a wayward Travis Stone might show up and take them and spread them around for the whole school to see. At lunch, Wallace and I sit together—in the courtyard, if it’s warm enough, but usually at one of the tables in the cafeteria—and he forks over new transcribed Monstrous Sea chapters when he finishes them, and I devour them like the hungry beast I am, and he kind of smiles. Wallace gets it.
Wallace gets the feeling of creating things.
“Do you ever have an idea for a story, or a character, or even a line of dialogue or something, and suddenly it seems like the whole world is brighter? Like everything opens up, and everything makes sense?” He looks down at his sheaf of papers—the latest Monstrous Sea transcribed chapter—as he says it. We sit outside the tennis courts behind the middle