turn off my phone, cut my internet connection, and draw. I have to have at least one page a week, and between Thanksgiving and winter break, I average two. It’s the quality. I could get whole chapters out if I didn’t care about the quality, but quality is king. Quality makes this story look on the outside the way I feel about it on the inside. It’s big and colorful and beautiful. The characters are alive. When a page doesn’t look as good as it could, shame worms its way into the marrow of my bones, because I’ve let the story down.
On the weekends, I take breaks. First, so I don’t burn out, and second, so I can draw pictures for Wallace. I still haven’t posted anything online like he said I should—like Cole, Megan, Leece, and Chandra also said I should, after he showed them that picture of Kite Waters. But I like drawing for Wallace because he likes looking at them. I draw him pictures of Dallas: Dallas playing with a seacreeper, Dallas looking into the bioluminescent tide pools in his cave, Dallas walking along the shore beneath the stars. I try not to make them look too much like actual panels of the comic, but every time I hand him one he beams and says how it resembles LadyConstellation’s work.
I know I should stop. I know I shouldn’t give him any more evidence.
I kind of wish he knew.
I don’t tell him what my family said at Thanksgiving, or that my mom took me to see a doctor. Thinking about the birth control has me short of breath and sweating like a pig. I sweated in the doctor’s office, and when the doctor found out that I did that on a daily basis, even she thought something was wrong, and that the birth control might regulate it.
The birth control is not regulating it. The birth control is making me sick to my stomach. It’s a strange feeling to like someone so much and yet be terrified to have them in your space, touching you. It isn’t that I don’t like it when we touch—when we brush arms or when he taps me on the shoulder or when I pick a piece of lint off his shirt. I like it too much. My body gets excited without my permission, and it’s not okay. It’s out of control. I don’t like out of control, but I like Wallace.
So I don’t know if it’s lucky or unlucky that Wallace and I are limited to homeroom, lunch, and a half hour on the bleachers behind the middle school every weekday. We share an English class too, but Wallace sits on the opposite side of the room. On Saturday afternoons we get in his car and head to Murphy’s, where we meet up with Cole. Megan comes if she doesn’t have to work and if Hazel is behaving. Cole brings his laptop and gets Chandra and Leece on video chat, but only if Leece has a break from gymnastics and if Chandra is awake, since she’s ten hours ahead of us.
“Do you ever think it’s weird that we come to a bookstore every week and don’t buy any books?” Cole asks, paused, yet again, over his unfinished geometry homework. At this rate, he’ll be done next July.
“Speak for yourself,” Wallace says. The only reason he speaks is because the bookstore is empty except for us and the one employee stocking books on the far side of the shop. Wallace slumps in the seat beside me, boxing me in, the spine of a book balanced against the table and his eyes moving slowly across the words. I feel like he must be able to absorb everything, know everything about a book, because of how slow he reads. If I like a book, I devour it in one sitting, and then I forget a lot. It’s fine with me, because I read them over and over again. But Wallace will take weeks to read a book—shortened to days, if he really likes it—and he remembers all of it, and then he doesn’t read it again. At least, he said, not for a very long time.
“Have you ever read Children of Hypnos?” I ask. Cole, Wallace, and Chandra all look up. I don’t talk much around them—I prefer listening—but I still like them. I like that they don’t expect me to talk. They don’t mind that I don’t.
“I’ve heard of it,” Wallace says, “but never read