Our Chemical Hearts (11 page)

“Oh, me too,” Georgia echoed.

As soon as they were out of earshot, I turned to Lola. “I don't mean for this to sound harsh, but please, for the love of all that is holy, you need to fuck off immediately. I think something is happening with Grace.”

“I did notice a bit of hand-holding going on.”

“Then why the
hell
did you come over?”

“Because she's drunk, and so are you, and I think this is a very bad idea.”

“Lola.”

“Have you found out who she visits at the cemetery every day? Because the more I think about it, the more messed up it seems.”

“Lola.”

“Are you falling for
her
, Henry? For the Grace we know? Or for the girl in her Facebook profile picture? Because that's clearly not who she is anymore, as much as you might want it to be.”

“Lola.”

“Fine! But when this ends with her gouging your heart out through your kneecaps, I won't be your shoulder to cry on.”

“Yeah, you will. Because that's what best friends do.” I
nodded over Lola's shoulder at Murray and Sugar Gandhi, who were arguing quite animatedly at the bottom of the garden, Muz still dressed as a pirate.

“God.” Lola shook her head.
“Men.”

When our respective love interests returned, La stood and kissed Georgia on the cheek and said, “Come, my darling, we must go see a man about a dog.”

And then, finally, it was just us. Just us, and the universe.

Grace pulled me to my feet and we wandered, holding hands, through the crowd for a few minutes, waiting for the alcohol to seep back into our bloodstreams and return us to the blissful haze we'd been in thirty minutes ago.

I don't know who led who, or if we both had the same idea, but suddenly we were in the dark corridor that ran up the side of the house. I leaned against the bricks to steady myself, and before I had time to really comprehend what was happening, Grace was on me, her mouth moving against mine, her fingers in my hair. And my first thought was,
Damn. I don't even know what song's playing
, but soon that didn't matter, because Grace Town was kissing me and it was everything I thought it would be. The weeks of
Does she even like me?
melted away because she did, she must, she had to.

My drink was sloshing in one hand but I didn't want to interrupt the kiss, so I wrapped my free arm around her waist and tried to keep the red soda from spilling down her back. We moved against each other like tessellating shapes. I wanted to pick her up and for her to wrap her legs around my hips but I
was aware that people could see us and I didn't want to be the couple that practically had sex in public.

The kiss went on for two songs, both of which I didn't know, then Grace broke away and bit her bottom lip and looked at me like she wanted to tell me something, her palms pressed into my chest, but eventually she just said, “I should go home.”

“I can walk you, if you'd like.”

“Okay.”

I grabbed our bags and coats from Heslin's little sister's bedroom (there was a
NO SEX IN HERE YOU F
UCKING HEATHENS
sign taped to the door) while Grace called her parents to let them know she was walking home, like she was trying to make it clear that when we got there, I wasn't coming inside. Which was fine by me, really, because I'd never had sex before and I didn't think being this drunk would be very conducive to giving a great performance, virgin or not. So I walked with her in the cold, not touching her, not holding her hand, the both of us brainstorming inane themes for the newspaper (“school spirit”? “the story so far”? “leave your mark”?) like we hadn't been making out.

When we got to her place, she waved good-bye and said she'd see me on Monday and that was that.

Still drunk enough to be courageous, I messaged her as I wandered toward Murray's house, which was easy enough to break into and way closer than mine.

HENRY PAGE:

GRACE TOWN:

“Muz,” I whispered when I got to Murray's house and started tapping at his bedroom window. No one came to answer, so I lifted the window, hauled myself inside, and fell asleep, alone and fully clothed on Murray's bed, thinking of Grace Town and how, if people really were assembled from pieces of the universe, her soul was made of stardust and chaos.

OUR PARENTS HAD
become entirely accustomed to coming into our bedrooms in the mornings and not finding their own children there, but someone else's. Murray's dad, Baz (short for Sebastian, not Barry—he was always sure to tell people this when he introduced himself), roused me from sleep with the smell of bacon and coffee. I came to with my brain detached from its tethers. Whenever I moved, it moved, too, smacking around the inside of my skull like an angry jellyfish, stinging as it went.

I carried my thumping head out to the dining room, where Murray's mom and three younger sisters were already sitting around the table.

“Morning, Henry,” the girls sang in unison, giggling as they went. They all looked like Muz, all blond perms and blue eyes (minus the seedy teenage 'stache, of course).

“Hush, hell beasts,” I said to them as I sank into a dining room chair and laid my forehead gently against the wooden table, which only made them giggle more. “Why is the sunshine
so bright?” It seemed to be streaming in from everywhere, searing my vodka- and punch-soaked veins, burning through me like wildfire. “Maybe Dracula wasn't a vampire, just a raging alcoholic who was constantly hungover.”

“Now,
that
is a story I would read,” said Baz.

“I don't suppose you know where our child is?” said Sonya, Murray's mom. Keeping my head on the cool wood of the table, I checked my phone. There were three messages:

LOLA LEUNG:

This was followed by a picture of a very drunk Murray, half-conscious and crying violently on Lola's kitchen floor, hugging what appeared to be a plush kangaroo toy.

LOLA LEUNG:

And then, at 4:03 a.m.:

MUZ FINCH:

I closed my eyes and groaned. “That Australian
bastard
.”

“Henry,” said Baz, nodding to the girls. “Language.”

“Oh, sorry. Yeah, Murray's at my place.”

“Musical beds again, is it?”

“As always. He originally fell asleep at Lola's. Possibly on the kitchen floor. Possibly with a kangaroo. Your son is a miscreant.”

“And that's why we allow him to hang out with you lot. Because you use words like
miscreant
in general conversation,” Sonya said, mussing my hair and pouring me a glass of orange juice.

We ate breakfast together in the too-bright sun, and then the girls dragged me into their playroom to watch
Avatar: The Last Airbender
until my parents brought Murray home. I let the girls paint my fingernails with silver glitter in exchange for them covertly fetching me snacks from the kitchen. They tried to braid my hair, but none of them were good enough at it yet to get it to stay.

Finally, Mom and Dad arrived to trade children with Muz's parents. Murray wandered in barefoot, still dressed as a pirate, carrying an empty baking tray and a sign around his neck that read
FREE HUGS AND
COOKIES.

I didn't ask. I didn't need to.

My folks decided to stick around for lunch, so I lay in Murray's bed for the next hour and a half, slipping in and out of sleep as he tidied his room and told me about how he'd made up with Sugar Gandhi (twice) in my bed. Which I wasn't very
happy about, but he pointed out that my sheets were offensive and long overdue for a wash anyway, which was true. And I told him about Grace, about the kiss, about the message she'd sent me afterward.
I wouldn't have chased you if I didn't feel the same way.
About how, all this time, when I thought she'd been indifferent, she'd actually been pursuing me in her own strange, quiet style. It wasn't the sort of thing Murray and I normally talked about, because it wasn't the sort of thing I normally did, but I liked it. It was nice to have something to share for a change.

“Look at us—two fools in love,” Muz said as he flopped down on the bed next to me, wrapped his leg over my hips, and nuzzled into my neck like a shaggy dog, as he was wont to do.

I wasn't sure about the love part yet, but the fool part, certainly, was true.

AND THEN THERE
was nothing.

I don't know exactly what I expected. I knew a single, drunken kiss didn't mean Grace had to pledge herself to me body and soul, but I at least thought we'd be more, like,
obvious
about our feelings. That, now that I knew she liked me, it would be easier to draw her out of herself on the days when she switched off, easier to be around her even when she pretended she was the only person in the world, easier to accidentally brush her arm and not have her go rigid, like an electric current was twisting through her spine. I thought that after people made out with each other, things kind of fell in place around them. I was, naturally, very wrong.

The week after our first kiss went something like this.

SATURDAY

When I got home from Muz's in the early afternoon, I sent Grace a message (after I'd peeled the sheets off my bed and
stuffed them in the washing machine while wearing gloves and a surgical mask).

HENRY PAGE:

GRACE TOWN:

SUNDAY

Despite what she'd said, Grace Town did
not
let me know about that weekend. I know, because I spent most of the those forty-eight hours waiting for her to message me, but she didn't, so I went to bed at eight p.m. on Sunday night but didn't fall asleep until the sky was turning pale pink with sunrise through the basement windows.

MONDAY

Grace Town walked into the newspaper office in the morning before class, nodded at me, collected a stack of papers off her desk, and left. It was at this point that I became fairly certain that The Kiss (as it would come to be known) had been little more than a hallucination caused by mild methanol poisoning
from the punch. I spent the day wanting to go home and research new schools that didn't frown on senior-year transfers.

Unfortunately I had to stay after school to finish (read: begin) my first English assignment for Hink, catch up on my math homework, open my Spanish textbook for the first time, and start thinking about college applications, which is why I was still in the library when I received Grace's message and felt my heart kick up into my neck. It was much, much worse than I thought it would be.

GRACE TOWN:

I'd been expecting a “Friday night was a mistake” or “I don't want things to be weird” type message, but this? This was torture. On the one hand, joining the teachers' recreational football team had two benefits:

1. Grace Town, obviously. Obligatory social events meant more obligatory time spent together, outside of school and the newspaper office and Grace's car.
   
2. The chance to prove to my teachers, especially the ones who still thought I was Sadie Page's male
   equivalent, that I was neither criminally devious nor psychotically brilliant.
   

On the other hand, there was one massive downside:

1. Sports.
   

The cons almost won. The thought of Grace having to witness my fumbled attempts at hand-eye coordination made me cringe. But I couldn't pass up the opportunity to spend more time with her. So I typed:

HENRY PAGE:

TUESDAY

At lunchtime we went to a café near the mall and stood in line together, in silence, because it was a Bad Grace Day and she'd barely said more than a word to me for hours and it's hard to bounce off someone who isn't there. The song over the loudspeaker changed to “Can't Help Falling in Love,” the Elvis version, and it was so ridiculously cliché that I had to press my lips together to keep from laughing.

When we reached the counter, I ordered a tea. Grace didn't want anything, but she insisted on paying for my drink, which I let her do, because I liked the way it made me feel. People didn't buy hot beverages for just anybody, right?

In that moment, with Elvis crooning
Take my hand, take my whole life too
over the speaker, tea was so much more than leaves steeped in boiling water. It was a symbol, after half a week of nothingness, that Grace Town was still interested in me, even if she couldn't find the words to say so.

•   •   •

“What part of that outfit, exactly, will help us blend in while we're shadowing her?” I said.

It was Tuesday night, one week since Madison Carlson had
provided us with insider intel, and I was driving toward East River High. Murray was sitting next to me in the passenger seat, wearing a trench coat and a fedora, an unlit cigar wedged between his lips.

“The rain was falling like bullets,” said Murray around his cigar, continuing his hard-boiled narration of the evening's events in a fifties American accent. It was not, in fact, raining at all. “I turned to the kid”—Murray turned to me—“and said, ‘I hope you know what you're getting yourself into.' He was a good guy, six feet of skin and bones, with a decent head screwed on his shoulders. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the dame he was chasing was like secondhand smoke: beautiful but deadly.”

“Secondhand smoke isn't beautiful.”

“The kid said something stupid, but I ignored him. ‘We're coming up on East River now,' I said as we rounded the corner and the acrid lights of the school came into view. ‘Park here or they'll have eyes on us in two shakes of a lamb's tail.'”

“Seriously, if you don't shut up and take that hat off, I'm gonna leave you in the car.”

“I couldn't take any more of the kid's whining. I needed a smoke, and badly.” Murray struck a match and went to light his cigar, in my mother's car no less. I smacked him across the back of the head.

“Ow, fuck, all right, all right!” he said, shaking the match until the flame flicked out. He took the hat off and left the cigar in the car, and we walked toward the white lights of East
River's track. The wind picked up, carrying with it the clean, crisp smell of fall. Dead leaves crunched under our feet. Streetlights burned in the dimness, but the roads were empty and quiet. I dug my hands into my pockets and speculated as to what the hell Madison Carlson had sent us here to see.

When we reached the track, we found the bleachers deserted, so we hung back in the shadows. Muz nudged me in the ribs and pointed across the field and said, “Over there,” which was entirely unnecessary, because she was the only one there, a small figure cast up against a galaxy of fluorescent light.

Grace was dressed in her usual oversized, boyish attire, but there was something different about her tonight. Her hair was pulled back and her face was pink and glazed with sweat and she was bent over, hands on her knees, heaving breaths. After a minute she stood and limped—caneless—back to the starting line, where she knelt. Took a breath. Started running, her limp haphazard, her face set in a grimace that deepened each time her injured leg impacted the red rubber of the track.

“What's she doing?” said Muz as we watched her.

Maybe it was because she was usually so pale and brittle—not fragile, not by a long shot, just hard somehow—but I'd never imagined her as capable of physical exertion. After she'd sprinted about one hundred feet, Grace stopped and screamed and pulled at her hair. She took up her cane from where it'd been cast trackside and hit it across her injured leg again and again and again before sinking to the ground in a sobbing heap. No wonder her limp remained pronounced.

“Fucking Christ,” Murray said, pulling another cigar from his trench coat pocket. I didn't stop him when he went to light this one. He took a long draw, like he really was some hard-ass detective from a crime novel.

“Secondhand smoke, in the flesh,” he said in his American accent as he breathed out, swirling gray eddies slipping from his lips. “I didn't want to say nothing to the kid, but I thought, as we watched her, that the more he breathed her in, the sicker and sicker he'd get.”

WEDNESDAY

“Ask her out,” Muz said to me the next afternoon. We'd decided not to tell Lola about seeing Grace at the track because a) she'd point out the obvious—that Grace was deeply emotionally damaged and clearly bad news—and be far too rational about reasons why I should stay away from her, and b) we already felt bad enough about what we'd done, what we'd seen. The memory of it had clung to me all day, sticking to my skin like I'd walked through a spiderweb, so now, like the graveyard, I was trying to repress it entirely. “You're never gonna get in her pants if you mope around like a delicate sunflower all the time. Stop being such a pussy.”

“Murray,” snapped Lola. “We talked about the ‘pussy' thing.”

“Oh, shit, right,” Muz said, genuinely apologetic. He left his
CoD
game and twisted around on the couch to face where Lola and I were lying in my bed. “Vaginas are pretty gnarly, and in no way was I insinuating that the female reproductive organs are
weak. I was using it as it's understood in its colloquial terms, but I realize that this might've been construed as offensive. I shall cease and desist from such usage in the future.”

“Thank you.”

“Anyway, you gotta do a grand gesture. That's how I bagged Sugar Gandhi.”

“Sugar Gandhi almost punched you in the face at Heslin's when you started crying.” Lola shook her head and turned to me. “Henry, you need to tell her how you feel. None of this cryptic bullshit. If you want something, you say something. Send her a message right now that says: ‘So I liked kissing you and would be super into doing that again sometime. Sound good?'”

“Do you even know what you want from this broad?” Murray said. “Like, do you really wanna start a relationship now when you're going away to college next year anyway? Or are you only after a root?”

“Eloquent as ever, my Australian friend,” I said. The trouble was, I
did
know what I wanted from Grace Town. I wanted to sleep with her, sure. I wanted her to be my girlfriend. A few years from now, I wanted to marry her. And then, when we were old, I wanted to drink peppermint tea and read Harry Potter to our grandchildren with her on the veranda of an old house out in the countryside as we watched a summer storm roll toward us. Was that so much to ask?

“Maybe I'm doomed to be alone forever.” I pulled out my phone, opened the Notes app, and started writing.

Draft Four

Because it seems like a lot of hassle, liking someone. Your brain runs hot, the cogs inside your mind jarring together until all the oil of your thoughts is burned away. The fire spreads to your chest, where it chars your lungs and turns your heart to embers. And right when you think the flames have burned away everything but your skeleton, the spark skips from your bones to immolate not only your flesh, but your entire life.