Our Chemical Hearts (16 page)

“It's a display cabine
t . . 
. full of broken jun
k . . 
.”

“It's not junk!” I sprang off the bed and went over to her and the cabinet, which I'd been filling with various treasures since I was in elementary school. “Grakov Town, you filthy casual. It's a cabinet of curiosities. The bowls here are my favorite. I read about this technique called Kintsukuroi in an art book in middle school. Have you heard of it?” Grace shook her head. “So basically it's this old-school Japanese art form where they mend broken pottery with seams of gold. Like, they glue all the shattered pieces back together, and when it's done, it's
covered in these webs of gold veins. They do it because they believe that some things are more beautiful when they've been broken.”

Grace picked up one of the Kintsukuroi pieces. I had eleven in total now, some of them gifts from Lola over the years, some from Mom after art acquisition trips to Japan, some purchased on eBay or Craigslist with my allowance. There were other things in the cabinet as well, all of them broken or crooked or wrong somehow. A silver bangle that Sadie had been given as a gift, the joint warped. A can of Coke with a misprinted label.

“It's a shame people can't be melded back together with gold seams,” Grace said, turning the bowl over in her hands. I wasn't sure if she was talking about herself or her mother or some other person in her life, and I probably never would, because Grace Town liked being a mystery. And then, realizing the lighthearted nature of a minute before was gone, weighed down now by something much heavier, she put the bowl back and said, “You know this is only slightly less creepy than collecting Cabbage Patch Kids, right?”

“You know nothing, Grace Town. The ladies love Kintsukuroi.”

Grace tried and failed to fake a smile. “Can we make dinner? I'm starved.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure.”

Grace helped me prepare the mini pizzas. Well, sort of. The kitchen seemed like an alien place she'd never set foot in before, and I had to direct her on how to assist.
Would you mind
cutting the tomatoes? You can grate some cheese if you'd like.
After every small job, she'd stand out of the way and watch me quietly, awkwardly waiting for her next instruction.

While the pizzas were in the oven, we ventured back downstairs and lay on my bed, not touching, the both of us staring at the ceiling.

“What do you want from this?” I said, overcome by a sudden rush of courage, because I was genuinely curious. What
did
she want from me? What did she hope to gain from all this?

Grace didn't look at me. “I don't know. What do you want?”

“You know what I want.”

“I'm not sure I do.”

“I want you.”

She smiled a little then, but she never said, “I want you too.”

At dinner, Grace was odd around my parents, the way she was around almost everyone except me, all of the warmth drained out of her. She spoke only when spoken to and didn't laugh or smile at the appropriate times. She ate little and spoke less.

By the time I walked her to the door at eleven p.m. and watched her disappear into the darkness toward the graveyard, I was almost glad to see her go, worried that my parents would find the first girl I'd ever brought home to be lacking somehow.

When I came back inside, Mom and Dad were in the kitchen, stacking the dishwasher together. I sat quietly at
the breakfast bar, waiting for their assessment, which I knew would come whether I wanted to hear it or not.

“She's very brooding,” Mom said after a while. “Beautiful, but very brooding.”

“Do you think?” I said, puzzled.
Brooding
is the way I'd describe vampires, not Grace. “I hadn't noticed.”

“Pretty smile, though, when she
does
smile. Strange girl.”

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty,” Dad said, threading his arms around my mother's waist. Mom nodded but pulled away from him, and as I watched them for the next ten minutes, watched as they moved around the kitchen but never touched, were never drawn to each other, I realized it'd been a long time since I'd seen them kiss or hold hands or slow dance together when they thought no one was watching, like they used to when I was a kid.

A long, long time.

•   •   •

For the next three days, hardly an hour went by when Grace and I didn't see each other. In the mornings before school we sat in the office and worked on the newspaper and teased each other endlessly. We brought in a badminton kit and had silly framed family pictures of us with Ricky Martin Knupps II on our desks. At lunch we'd go to McDonald's together, or read each other passages from books in the library (me: always Harry Potter, her: always poetry), or walk around the outermost boundary of the school grounds and kick the last of the leaf piles and brainstorm bullshit newspaper themes, neither
of us realizing that we hadn't actually eaten anything until the bell rang.

And then in the evenings, when school and work were done, we'd follow the routine that was now our ritual: We'd walk to her house and I'd wait outside while she fetched her keys, and she'd make me drive myself home in her car. And that's where everything would change. The moment the sun set, it was like Grace became a different person, like the sunshine fueled her somehow and without it she powered down, empty. On Thursday she came inside and sat uncomfortably in the basement, clinging to Lola like she was a life preserver, barely speaking to Murray, and rarely engaging in any sort of group conversation. On her own, Grace could be effervescent, illuminating the entire room with her intelligence and wit. Around others she seemed to lose her luster.

“I swear I used to be good at this stuff,” she said to me after Muz left, by this time convinced that Grace hated him. “At socializing, I mean. I used to do it all the time.”

“I guess it must be harder. Without him. Right?” It was one of the rare instances that either of us acknowledged that there had been someone before me who wasn't here now.

Grace shook her head. “Not harder, no. I just forget to do it. I slip into my head and keep falling deeper into the abyss. I forget the world exists.”

Which is the point when I probably should've said, “That sounds remarkably like some kind of mental illness that you should seek therapy and medication to help treat,” but I didn't,
because I didn't want Grace to be sick or broken or depressed. I wanted her to brush her hair and wash her clothes and to be whole and full and happy.

So I pretended she was.

•   •   •

And slowly, hour by hour, the countdown to All Hallows' Eve ticked away, until it finally arrived. My street turned into an annex of the cemetery, tombstones, cobwebs, and skeletons strewn everywhere. By midday on Saturday, it looked like some sort of kitsch apocalypse had exploded in our front yard. Sadie brought Ryan over to carve pumpkins on the lawn, but all I could think about was the party happening that night. Or rather what was happening
after
the party, which I felt wholly underprepared for.

“Dude, what the hell are you doing to that pumpkin?” Sadie said as she surveyed my handiwork. Sadie, with her piercings and dreads and leather jacket, looked maniacal with a carving knife in one hand and a pumpkin wedged between her knees. My pumpkin was a little soft and my knife was a little blunt, which combined to make it look like the face had been carved using a sawed-off shotgun at close range. “It's worse than Ryan's and he doesn't even have fine motor skills yet. No offense, Ryan.”

“It's a surrealist interpretation of the traditional jack-o'-lantern, thank you very much.”

“If it could speak, it would simply whisper, ‘Kill me,' before vomiting seeds and pulp everywhere.”

I sighed and put my carving knife down. “Suds, I know it's unethical, but do you think you could score me some Valium from the hospital?”

“Pray tell, what do you need Valium for?”

“Grace is kinda coming over tonight, after the party. Sleeping over, actually. For the first time.”

“Oh.
Oh.
My baby's growing up so fast!”

“Get off me, She-Devil,” I said, trying to push Sadie away as she squashed my ribs in a bear hug, her pumpkin rolling across the grass. “Ugh, I shouldn't have told you.”

“Don't stress too much, man. People have been banging for millions of years. You got condoms?”

I grimaced. “Yeah.”

“You know how to use 'em?”

“Christ, Sadie. Yes.”

“And you want to have sex with this girl?”

“She's a consenting human female and I'm a teenage boy. That's an irrelevant question.”

“No, it's not. Look, you don't need to love someone to lose your virginity to them, but you should know them and trust them and feel comfortable with them and really, really
want
to sleep with them.”

“Well, yeah. I guess. I mean, yeah. I want to be with her.”

“And it's a stupid cliché question, but do you feel ready? I mean, sex is not a big deal, but it's not
not
a big deal, you know?”

“I think I feel ready?” I didn't mean for it to sound so much like a question.

“Okay, good. That's all that matters. Everything else is biology. Now give me that poor pumpkin before you make it any worse.”

•   •   •

Grace came to my house in the evening to do my makeup, a small yet ominous overnight bag in her hands.

“It still cool if I stay here tonight?” she said when she caught me staring at it.

“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” It wasn't that I didn't want to have sex with her. I'd been thinking about having sex since I was about twelve years old.

“Good,” she said as she pulled a palette of face paint and a thirty-ounce bottle of fake blood out of her bag. “Now, do you want to be a zombie or a car crash victim? Because they're the only special effects makeup I'm good at.”

My eyes flicked down to where her cane was resting across my bed. “U
h . . 
. I don'
t . . 
.”

“That was a joke, Henry.”

“O
h . . 
.” I forced out a nervous
ha
sound. Making light of the horrific car accident that killed your boyfriend. Hilarious. “Zombie, I guess.”

For the next hour I sat on the edge of my bed while Grace moved around me, holding herself away from me in her usual rigid marionette fashion while she applied liquid latex wounds and decomposing special effects to my face. Which I know is not the most romantic of situations, but it felt almost clinical, the way she went about touching me as little as possible.

I expected her to go as something entirely weird, like a meme or an obscure literary character or a figure from an eighteenth-century impressionist artwork. But when she went upstairs to get dressed and do her makeup while I shredded an old T-shirt and drenched myself in fake blood, she came back down in a sexy vampire costume, a single trickle of red seeping from the corner of her mouth.

It was the first time I'd seen her in clothes that were made to fit a feminine figure, and it was shocking. Her legs were long and toned, encased in dark stockings, her breasts and waist accentuated by a black lace corset that gave her the kind of shape I'd never imagined a high school girl as capable of having. Her blond hair was brushed and curled and pinned back by black netting that covered her smoky eyes, and she'd even tied a red ribbon around her cane.

She was darkly beautiful, a femme fatale, a heroin junkie risen from the dead—and I could hardly recognize her.

“I didn't really think much about a costume, so I recycled this from last year,” she said, shrugging. “It's lame.”

“No. I approve wholeheartedly.”

“Really? 'Cause you look a littl
e . . 
. shocked?”

“I guess I didn't expec
t . . 
. It doesn't seem like something you'd wear, that's all. Not the you that I know, anyway. I was expecting something, I don't know, weird or something that I'd have to ask you twenty questions to get. You look sexy as hell, though.”

“Grace this time last year was pretty different from the Grace I am now.”

I looked at her for a little longer and then nodded.

“Say it, Henry.”

“Say what?”

“Whatever it is that's going on in that mysterious brain of yours. I can see the cogs furiously turning behind your eyes, but all you do is nod. So say it.”

“It's jus
t . . 
. I wonder sometime
s . . 
. Man, I'm no good at this drafting busines
s . . 
. If the person you wer
e . . 
. What if that's who you are? I mean, I don't know her at all, I don't know anything about her. I see her in you sometimes, I get these flashes of this girl you used to be, bu
t . . 
. Was she an act and you're more yourself now, or is the Grace I know an act until you feel comfortable being yourself again?”

“People change. There's no way you're the same person you were when you were sixteen.”

“Yeah, but I didn't change schools and start wearing a dead guy's clothes.”

There was a beat of silence. “So you know,” she said slowly, staring at me, unblinking. “The truth outs.”

“I'm sorry, I shouldn't have—”

“I know who you want me to be, Henry. It isn't hard to see.”

“What does that—”

“You look at me differently sometimes. You think I don't notice, but I do. There are times when you really like me, and
others when you don't so much. But I can't pretend to be all better because that's what you want.”

“Grace, it's nothing like that, not at—”

“Look, let's not talk about it tonight, okay?”