Our Chemical Hearts (12 page)

“Jesus, Henry,” Lola said, rolling her eyes as she read over my shoulder. “Very dramatic.”

“Shut up, dude. You don't know my struggle.”

•   •   •

Later in the afternoon, I messaged Grace and used the only excuse I could think of to start a conversation:

HENRY PAGE:

GRACE TOWN:

THURSDAY

The afternoon rolled around far too quickly, as I've learned things you aren't looking forward to tend to do. After last period, I went straight to the guys' locker room and changed into what few pieces of clothing I owned that could pass for “athletic.” I'd hit the six-foot mark about a year ago, but my weight had yet to catch up with my height, despite the fact I consumed food like I was a garbage disposal. I looked especially lanky in my gym gear, all limbs, and I hoped Grace wouldn't be too repulsed by my pale, spindly body.

“This is
not
going to end well,” I said with a sigh, wishing I'd conned Muz into joining the team so everyone would be so awed by his athletic prowess that they might not notice me slinking away to hide under the bleachers.

“Very fetching, Henrik,” Grace said with a suppressed
grin when she saw me in my sports gear. Her limp was distinct again, like some kind of old-school Bond villain, and she winced when she walked. (“My rehab is really pushing me,” she'd explained the day before. I'd nodded and pretended not to notice how easy it was for her to lie.)

“I hate you,” I said.

The teachers organized friendly recreational games between themselves and teachers from other high schools on a weekly basis, but frequently brought along students to give their team an edge. Hink—who'd never played before and apparently had a competitive streak—thought injecting some young blood would be a good idea, so there were two other students on the team apart from Grace and me. Suki Perkins-Mugnai, who was apparently some kind of touch football whiz kid, and a dude who was repeating senior year for like the third time and who I'd only ever known as “Buck.” Buck, who was small and nuggety and had an even seedier teenage mustache than Murray, was, I suspected, only on the team because he looked like a thirty-year-old convicted felon.

“Ready, team?” Hink said when he met us outside his office ten minutes later, dressed in athletic gear, the walking embodiment of Kip Dynamite when he went to meet LaFawnduh at the bus stop. All of us tried very, very hard not to laugh at his sweatband-and-knee-high-socks combo. At least I wouldn't be the most ridiculous-looking person on the field.

Hink walked with us to the football field, where the rest of
our teachers were already warming up, stretching and practicing passes.

“God, this is horrifying,” Suki said. “No high schooler is ever meant to see their teachers in these kinds of positions.”

“If this were a movie,” I said, grimacing at the sight of our motley crew, “we'd be the underdogs who overcome great personal shortcomings to win this entire tournament at the end. Like
DodgeBall
.”

“Yeah, I somehow don't think dodging wrenches is going to help you much,” Grace said. “You guys are screwed.”

“Tsk, tsk. Ye of little faith,” I said as I copied Hink's stretches without him noticing, which made Suki double over with laughter.

“More like ye of practicality,” Grace said. She nodded toward the other end of the field. “
That's
who you're playing.”

As it turns out, it was much more like
DodgeBall
than first anticipated, but without the happy ending. Instead of enrolling us in the Beginners or even Intermediate tier of recreational football, Hink had slotted us into the Advanced category, mostly (only) because Suki Perkins-Mugnai had played before and he thought that would be enough to get us through.

The opposing team was composed entirely of gym teachers and lightly injured star athletes from Rockwood High, who all looked remarkably similar to the Mountain That Rides from
Game of Thrones
. They'd been playing (and winning) together for so long that they'd even invested in legit uniforms, black
T-shirts emblazoned with red anatomical hearts being crushed by a hand.

The game went pretty much how I expected it to go. Grace sat on the bleachers, waving a pom-pom attached to her cane to cheer us on as the Gutcrushers lived up to their name. (Our team name, thanks to Hink, was still “Hi, Maria, can we decide on this later and get back to you?”) Most of the opposing team were either ex or current football players and frequently forgot the “touch” aspect of the game and went in for tackles instead.

The first time he was thrown the ball, Buck looked at it, looked up at the stampede coming in his direction, said, “Oh hell no,” turned around, and bolted. We didn't see him again.

I tried to touch the ball as little as possible and would always feed it through to Suki, who really was the only person who knew what she was doing. She scored our only two touchdowns, both of which the Gutcrushers were extremely unhappy about despite the fact that they were already slaughtering us.

Hink was like a newborn gazelle that hadn't quite yet learned to walk. Beady sprained her ankle after being on the field for seven minutes. My math teacher, Mr. Hotchkiss, seemed to hate me more during the game than he did in class, which was the exact opposite of my motivation to be there. And then, when the hell was nearly over and poor Suki looked close to death from carrying our entire team against a horde of wildebeests, I accidentally found myself with the ball and no one to pass it to.

The impact made the horizon shift sideways in a violent tilt. One moment I was standing, panicking about what to do with the stupid ball, the next I was on the ground, unable to breathe.

“Sorry, dude, momentum,” said the giant who'd plowed me over as he grabbed my arm and pulled me off the ground, which I suppose was meant to be friendly, but since I was winded, all I could do was flop my free hand in his general direction. “You guys should probably think about dropping down to Intermediate. Or Beginners.”

Grace was, naturally, cackling her evil laugh as I stumbled toward the bleachers, sure at least some of my ribs were broken. I kept stealing glances at her as I staggered across the field, but there wasn't even a shadow of the manic stranger she'd been at the track Tuesday night.

“Never. Ever. Again” were the first words I said to her once I'd regained the ability to speak.

After the Gutcrushers were through macerating us, Hink took us all out to dinner to apologize for what, in the end, had amounted to little more than a ritual sacrifice: sixteen touchdowns to two. What made the hell worth it, though, was sitting next to Grace at dinner. She was in one of the better moods I'd ever seen her in, playful as she teased me for being unable to eat my sushi with chopsticks, and wondering aloud if we'd ever see Buck again or if he was pulling a Forrest Gump and still running.

Hotchkiss even remarked that I wasn't doing as well as
Sadie had in math class and I really needed to start handing in my homework if I wanted to scrape a pass, so that was nice. Maybe he was finally starting to get the message that we weren't the same person and I wasn't likely to light firecrackers under his desk.

In the end, we made a pact to go to our graves without ever playing recreational football again, so the bruises and mild concussion were
almost
worth it for several more hours with Grace on a Good Day.

FRIDAY

We met in the library in the morning before homeroom, me with the pagination folded and tucked under my arm, her with a thermos and two delicate teacups with
Alice in Wonderland
illustrations on them and little tags on the handle that read
Drink me
. Lola had finally lost it and demanded that we pick a theme so she could start designing the front cover and main articles. We'd done as much as we could do with the Magic: The Gathering piece, several photo pages, and Galaxy Nguyen's enthusiastic weekly recaps of the year so far. It was almost getting to crunch time.

I followed Grace silently through the stacks, far deeper into the bowels of the library than we usually went, both of us too sleepy to talk.

There were no chairs or tables set up back here, so we sat cross-legged on the carpet, the pagination on the floor
between us. Grace poured us tea—caramel and vanilla, she told me, nowhere near caffeinated enough to dezombify me at this ungodly hour—and then we went about silently numbering the little boxes, 1 to 30, each one representing a page in what would eventually become a full-fledged, tabloid-sized newspaper. Laid bare before us, it became clear that all of the usable content we'd accumulated so far only filled up about a third of the available space, even if we included the nine-thousand-word Magic: The Gathering feature story.

Fuck.

At first it was strictly business. We sat apart from each other, Grace straight-backed and straight-faced, doodling in ideas.
Possibly controversial sex ed feature?
she wrote.
Cliché spotlight on up-and-coming athlete/high school jock?
As the hour passed and we both woke up, it became clear that today would be a Good Grace Day. She shuffled closer to me. Rested her head on my shoulder while she worked, like it was the most casual thing in the world, like we'd been this intimate one hundred times before.

I distinctly remember thinking,
God, she's so confusing.
Because she was. A week of barely anything, and now this, her (uncharacteristically) clean and brushed hair spilling down my back, her elbow resting on my knee, her fingers tracing small circles on my shoe. The smell of her, warm and heady and somehow stale, rising from her skin and filling up my head with rabid possibility. It felt almost like we were together.

There was no work to be done after that. I kept my pencil in my hand but I didn't make another mark on the paper. I didn't want to move too much, lest Grace think I was uncomfortable. So I rested my head against hers and breathed quietly and steadily while she scribbled on the pagination, apparently unaware of the proximity of our bodies. We stayed like this for some time, until the bell rang, and Grace sat up slowly, yawning, as if waking from a dream.

But it was the look she gave me when she turned to me, the same look I'd seen on her face after The Kiss, that really had me confused. It was a brief moment of confusion, of disbelief almost, like she'd been expecting to find someone else next to her and not me.

How to reconcile that look? What did it mean? Or was I imagining things?

“Lift this afternoon?” she said as she composed herself and folded the pagination and handed it to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “That'd be great.”

Grace just nodded before she stood and left, as indifferent as always.

•   •   •

I decided to skip my first two classes, because today was reckoning day. It had to be. I couldn't make it through another weekend, let alone another week, unsure if she felt about me how I felt about her. So I went to our office and turned off all the lights and sat under my desk. While I was there, curled up
in the fetal position, I wrote her a message, like Lola told me to, but it didn't feel big enough somehow. It didn't feel grand enough. If by some miracle we ended up together, I wanted the story of us to begin with something extraordinary, not just a Facebook chat.

In the end, I settled on an appropriately Henryesque PowerPoint presentation entitled “Why You Should Date Me,” based on an extremely persuasive one I'd seen on Imgur. It wasn't the sort of thing I ever would have done before meeting Grace, but I thought about the conversation we'd had that night at the secret fishpond, about cosmic redemption. How Grace had talked about bravery and a blank slate at the end of time, about doing what you could while your atoms were in such a pattern that produced consciousness. In that moment, writing that PowerPoint, I thought I finally understood why she didn't mind oblivion. How it could make you fearless, knowing that the universe had your back, in the end. Redemption for all the stupid shit you'd done. Total absolution of your sins.

It didn't matter if she said yes or no. Not in the end.

So I wrote my PowerPoint while sitting under my desk. I barely even noticed when Lola came in, and she apparently didn't find me being curled up on the floor under the furniture strange enough to question me about it, so I carried on silently until it was done. And then it
was
done. It was playful and silly and hopefully funny enough to make her laugh.