Our Chemical Hearts (13 page)

I read it and reread it and reread it, thinking,
Should I show her? Am I
really
going to show her?

Then “Someday” by the Strokes came on Lola's Spotify.

My song for Grace.

Our song.

“I didn't know you liked the Strokes,” I said to Lola.

“Hmm?” Lola spun slowly around in her chair. “Oh, I don't really know their stuff, but I heard Grace listening to this the other day and I liked it.”

Screw it,
I thought as I opened Facebook and typed:

HENRY PAGE:

GRACE TOWN:

I blinked several times and turned off my computer, then stayed in the office for the rest of the day. Principal Valentine walked past at one point and spotted me, my forehead pressed flat against my desk, and said, “Page. Aren't you supposed to be in class?”

To which I replied, without sitting up, “My teenage
hormones have rendered me too emotionally fragile to be in a learning environment right now.”

Valentine was silent for a few seconds, and then she simply said, “Carry on.”

So I did.

I'M GOING TO
have to kill myself,
I thought as I paced back and forth onstage in the auditorium later that afternoon. I really couldn't see any way around it. My plan, clearly, was spectacularly stupid, and I couldn't imagine living with the humiliation of being turned down, universal redemption or not.

Grace was late, which made me panic and think she wasn't coming, which actually would've been a good thing. I considered bailing, but then the door at the back of the auditorium creaked open and she was moving down the center aisle between rows and rows of seats, leaning heavily on her cane. She looked so small in the vast, empty space, her long shadow cast up behind her. Like a miniature figurine in a diorama.

“What's this?” she said when I jumped off the stage and jogged up the aisle to meet her.

“A grand gesture I'm going to regret in about five minutes.”

“Oh.”

I clicked the power button for the projector and the title slide glowed to life on the screen.

“You're a ridiculous human being,” Grace said, but it was playful, and she smiled, and then she limped to the front row of seats with me by her side and put down her bag and took a seat. “Well, let's get the regret train rolling, then.”

Grace watched it from between her fingers like it was a horror movie, and said things like, “I'm so embarrassed for you right now,” as she laughed. I clicked the
Next
button again and again until the
Pros and Cons of Dating Me
slide popped up and I watched her eyes flick from side to side as she read, her grin growing wider. But when she reached the second-to-last Pro (
I won't abandon you like your grade school boyfriend did.
), Grace immediately went cold.

“Stop,” she said, her voice strong and clear, but I didn't have time to stop because she was already on her feet, her backpack already slung over her shoulders as she reeled toward the closest exit. It was
Groundhog Day
of the first afternoon I'd followed her from Hink's office: I grabbed my things and went after her, but she was fast, her movements wild as she raced across the school grounds.

“Wait!” I said, but she didn't wait, didn't stop, not until I caught up to her and put my hand on my shoulder, at which point she sank to the ground right near the bus stop. It was like freaking Obi-Wan in
A New Hope
—she seemed to fold into a pile of clothes, her body gone.

“This is not going at all how I envisioned it,” I said as I sat next to her, running my hands through my hair, and Grace was kind of laugh-sobbing then, something between a manic cackle and hyperventilation.

“He was driving,” she said between breaths. “Dom was driving. I messed up my leg, but h
e . . 
. h
e . . 
.” Grace couldn't say the words, but I didn't need her to. My insides shriveled, my stomach and lungs compacting to the size of pennies. I'd had asthma as a kid. That thick feeling in your throat, the way the spot behind your sternum turns to concrete and each breath becomes a battle.

It all made sudden, shocking sense. The graveyard. The clothes. The car. The track. The abandoned train station. Jesus Christ, even the Strokes.

It hadn't been her music I'd been listening to. It'd been his.
Our song.
Fuck. Our song wasn't even our song, it was
their
song. I had the sudden urge to vomit Julian Casablancas out of my bloodstream.

Grace buried her head against my shoulder, more for stability than anything else, like she might actually sink into the earth if she didn't. “That's why I transferred. I needed a fresh start, away from all the places we'd been together. I was trying to keep my shit together and then all of a sudden there you were, and I didn't plan to like you and I didn't plan to kiss you and I didn't plan fo
r . . 
. I didn't want to be the girl with the dead boyfriend, I just wante
d . . 
. I wante
d . . 
.”

“Jesus. Grace. I don't even know what to say.
Jesus.
” My face was on fire. Murray and Lola were standing in the bus line, watching us with frowns on their faces, and I really wanted to get on the bus and get out of there and go home and start researching methods of suicide. Self-immolation seemed preferable at this point in time. I held up my hand to them and mouthed,
Wait for me.

Grace lifted her heavy head from my shoulder, her breathing still ragged.

“I understand if you don't want—” I started, but then she had me by the collar and was kissing me like I was oxygen and she was drowning, so I let her draw all the breath from my lips to save herself.

I somehow knew, in that moment, that Grace Town was a jagged piece of glass that I'd cut myself on again and again if I let myself get involved with her. That the way forward would be pockmarked by sadness and grief and jealousy.

I thought about Pablo Neruda's poem, still folded where I'd nestled it in my wallet the first day she'd given it to me. I thought about loving her in secret, between the shadow and the soul. Maybe I should do that. Maybe that was where my feelings for Grace Town belonged, in the darkness, never to be realized.

But I'd never had a crush on a girl before, not like this, anyway, and as selfish as it sounds, I worried that I might never again. What if my family had some long-forgotten
voodoo curse on them so that the firstborn male could only be attracted to someone every seventeen years? Dad's older brother, Uncle Michael, had never (as far as I was aware) had a serious girlfriend. (He did have a live-in “housemate” named Albert who seemed to come to a lot of family gatherings, but I digress.) If the spark of attraction only came along every seventeen years for me, I'd be thirty-four before I found another girl I liked. And if
she
didn't work out, the next one wouldn't come along until I was fifty-one. That seemed like a long time to wait to have your first relationship.

Grace liked me. We worked well together. And I wanted her. God, I wanted her. But was I really willing to throw all caution to the wind and get involved with someone who was still clearly very deep in mourning?

Then a teacher said, “Leave room for Jesus,” over a megaphone. (Our school had a “no loving, no shoving” policy in place in an attempt to curb teen pregnancy and fights. Students were supposed to retain a two-foot no-touching radius at all times.) Grace broke away from me and scrabbled to her feet and all of the kids were on the bus and the driver was honking the horn and Murray was yelling at me to “get a bloody move on, you drongo!” I thought Grace might offer me a lift home so we'd have more time to talk, but she didn't, so I just said, “I want you anyway.” And then I turned and ran shakily to the bus, sucking in breaths through my mouth like I'd done as a child before the inhaler kicked in.

As the bus pulled out of the school grounds, it drove past her, already limping toward the road. She was running the fingers of her free hand through her hair, her head drooped toward the ground like she'd recently been told some terrible, tragic news. And I thought, as a sting of misery murmured through my veins, that I'd never seen a human being look quite so sad as Grace Town did in that moment.