Our Chemical Hearts (19 page)

•   •   •

“Mr. Page,” said Hink at the end of the next day's English lesson. I was sitting at my usual desk in the front row, between La and a girl named Mackenzie who'd once asked me if
very
was spelled with one or two
r
's. “A word, if you will.”

“Sure.”

I stayed at my desk as the rest of the class filed out to lunch, trying to guess if Hink was going to chew me out for a) not doing the homework assignment, b) staring at the dandruff dusting his shoulders and imagining them as Sea-Monkeys trapped in a tar pit for the entirety of the lesson, or c) both.

Once the classroom was empty, Hink walked around to the front of his desk and sat on it with his legs crossed, his hands resting on his knee. I wondered if, in the bizarro world of Alistair Hink, this was supposed to be a sign of intimidation. “Do you want to explain to me where your essay is?”

“Essay?”

“The one that was due last week. The one that you failed to hand in.”

“Oh.”
Shit
. That
essay
. The one I'd eschewed in favor of
nearly getting killed in a national park and writing a stupid grandiose love letter.

“What's going on with you, Henry? You're missing newspaper meetings, you haven't done any of the required reading or homework assignments for class this week, and now this. I had a chat with Mrs. Beady and Señor Sanchez and some of your other teachers as well, and everyone is concerned. Mr. Hotchkiss says you're frequently distracted in math.”

God, Hotchkiss, what a dick. “That's nothing out of the ordinary, to be honest.”

“I know we expect a lot from you. Maybe more than we expect of most other students. So if things are getting to be too much—if everything is piling up and you can't handle it—you need to tell me. We can find ways to help you.”

“It's fine, really. I'm fine.”

“Miss Leung came to see me yesterday. She subtly implied that the newspaper might be suffering due to a misguided relationship between you and Miss Town.”

Damn it. She actually did it. “I doubt Lola ‘subtly implied' anything.”

“Well, yes, her exact words were ‘they're destroying the very fabric of this publication with their wantonness,' but I thought it best left unsaid. She actually said ‘wantonness' so much that I had to Google it after she'd left to check it was a real word. ‘Their wantonness, Mr. Hink, their wantonness. They're ruining everything with their wantonness!'”

“Please stop saying
wantonness
.”

“You and Grace have missed or rescheduled every meeting I've planned to discuss the newspaper. Without a theme or enough content, Lola can't finish the design on time. I'm starting to get worried.”

“I'll get it under control. I promise.”

“Good. Because if the two of you can't get it sorted out by the end of the month, I'm going to have to replace you as editor.”

“Bu
t . . 
. I worked my ass off for two years.”

“You did. But that doesn't mean you get to
stop
working your ass off now. Now go adjust your attitude. And for God's sake, butter Hotchkiss up a little bit, won't you?”

•   •   •

“Judas,” I hissed when I walked into the newspaper office after school and found Lola lazing on the sex couch, reading a dictionary.

“Which would imply that you're Jesus?” she said. “Ego much?”

“I can't believe you went to Hink. Also, did you know we had an essay due last week? I totally spaced on that one.”

“I
told
you I was going to rat you out if you didn't get your act together.” Lola stood and walked over to me and grabbed my shoulders. “I know you're the captain of a sinking ship and you're determined to go down with it. That's admirable as fuck, but when this baby goes belly-up, I'm going to be on a goddamn lifeboat.”

“Who's Grace in this analogy?”

“Those dudes on the
Titanic
who played violin until the very end.”

“Strangely accurate.”

La picked up the dictionary and smacked it into my chest. “
Pick
a theme. Just close your eyes and open it up to any page and point at something. It's my birthday
tomorrow
and all I want from you is. One. Goddamn. Word.”

Grace came in then and looked from Lola to me to the dictionary aggressively forced into my chest. “A strange tableau,” she said as she put her bag down and leaned on her cane and waited.

“Lola's forcing me to pick a theme for the paper.” I took the dictionary from her and scrunched my eyes closed and did as she instructed. “
Fail
,” I read. “Verb. Definition one: ‘To be unsuccessful.' Definition two: ‘To be less than expected.' Sounds about right.”

“I don't know if you did that on purpose or not, but that's actually a good theme, so damn well use it. You,” said Lola, letting go of me and digging her talons into Grace's shoulders instead. “Life is a crapfest and you're having a really, really tough time, but you
can't
go down with the ship. Get in a lifeboat. Shape up or ship out.” Lola did the “I'm watching you” gesture to Grace and me in turn, then grabbed her backpack and stalked out of the office, grumbling something under her breath that sounded very much like “wantonness.”

“Well, that was incredibly surreal,” Grace said. “What was all that about lifeboats?”

“Hink's pissed because we've done jack on the newspaper.”

“Have we?”

“Christ, Grace, I need help with this. You're supposed to be assistant editor, so why don't you assist me with editing?”

“What is there to edit? We've done everything we can do without a theme. Why don't you just make it ‘failure'?”

“Because I can't handle that amount of irony.”

Then she looked pissed and I wanted to kiss her to make her (and maybe myself) feel better, but I was afraid that if I tried, she'd pull away from me, and I didn't want to be saddled with that feeling all afternoon, so I didn't.

“I'm gonna go,” she said. “I have stuff to do this afternoon.”

“Wait a sec,” I said, and I turned and jogged over to my backpack to retrieve the letter from where it had been lodged in my copy of
84, Charing Cross Road
all day. I hadn't forgotten it. Not for a single moment. It'd hung over me like a small storm cloud. I'd waited for the right moment all day, hoping an insane rush of courage would wash over me.

“Oh yeah. This.
The Letter
,” she said, taking the envelope from me and folding it and putting it into her bag. And I knew. I knew that this moment would either be our last as we'd been or our first as something more. A beginning or an ending. It couldn't be anything in between. I said I'd never make her choose between us and now I was because I couldn't stand it anymore. She loved him; she still loves him. I knew that.

But wasn't I worth something too?

“Can you read it now?” I said.

“You want me to read it in
front
of you?”

“U
h . . 
. yeah?”

“Can't you say it? Everything that's in the letter is inside of you right now. I don't want the filtered version. I don't want the pretty words, the final draft. I want you to say something raw. Something real.”

“I can read it out to you, if you'd like.”

“That is not what I said.”

“Come on, at least let me skim it, remember what I wrote.”

“You don't remember how you feel?”

“Of course I do, I just don't know how to put it into words.”

“Try.”

“You'r
e . . 
. You're special.”

Grace sighed. “I'm a beautiful and unique snowflake? I complete you?”

“No! It say
s . . 
. Look, everything's in there, okay? It's all in there, everything I want you to know. You just have to read it.”

Grace didn't read it. She simply said, “I'll see you tomorrow night for Lola's thing,” and pulled the door open and walked out. It all felt so strangely, ominously final. I tried to remember the last kiss we'd shared, many hours ago now, but I couldn't recall the specifics of it, which upset me, because I knew it might very well be our last.

I stepped out into the hall and watched her limp across the
linoleum-clad floor toward the door, breaking every few steps to rest her leg.

After she'd left my house last night, she must've gone to the East River track to push her injury until it hurt her again. Maybe it was something like cutting. Maybe slowing down the healing process was the only thing that made her feel in control. Maybe the injury was the last thing that tied her to the accident, and therefore to Dom, and she wasn't ready to let it go yet.

Or maybe she just hated herself so much, she thought she deserved to be in pain.

Finally, Grace made it to the exit and the door swung closed behind her and she disappeared into the school grounds. She didn't look back once.

As if, one way or another, she'd already made up her mind.

•   •   •

Lola's birthday was the next day. Georgia drove in from her hometown and arrived at my place as the sun was rising. Lola's parents, Han and Widelene, let us into their house, and the four of us quietly went about blowing up and filling the hallway, living room, and kitchen with about two hundred–odd balloons. We were all giddy by the end of it, our heads spinning from lack of oxygen, but it was worth it to hear La say, “What the hell?” in her raspy, half-asleep voice, then start giggling like a maniac.

“Happy birthday!” we shouted in unison as she wandered
into the kitchen in her very un-Lola pink nightdress, her hand held over her mouth, an impressively large cowlick giving her a Mohawk.

After she'd showered and changed, we picked up Muz and all went to breakfast together in the city. Georgia gave Lola a cactus. (“That's romantic as
fuck
,” was her reaction upon unwrapping it. “Taking our relationship to the next level.”) Muz gave her a set of oil paints in a bamboo box, and I got her a skeleton cat candle, one of those ones that burn down to bones when all the wax is gone.

Lola and I both highly believed in the value of metaphorical gifts, so while everyone else saw a demonic-looking cat skeleton dripping wax on the packaging, Lola saw the message: Our friendship is like this feline-shaped candle—burn away all the shit, and you and me are still solid underneath. Always.

“Henry, you magnificent creature,” she said, pressing her forehead to my temple. “What grand deed did I do in a past life to deserve the fortune of living next to you in this one?”

“You two are so cute, sometimes I wish you weren't a raging lesbian so you could get married and generally live an adorable life together,” Georgia said. “I mean, I'm glad you
are
a raging lesbian, but I digress.”

I started thinking about what kind of gift to give Grace for her birthday at the end of the month. None of the usual presents boyfriends bought for their girlfriends would do, because a) Grace Town was not my girlfriend and b) I was fairly certain she would've dry retched at the sight of flowers, chocolate, or
jewelry. It didn't have to be something grand; it only needed to mean something.

But what do you give a girl whose mind is like the universe, when the brain inside your own head is stuck firmly on planet Earth?

Draft Six

Because you're worth nothing less than stardust, but all I can give you is dirt.

DAD DROPPED ME OFF
at Grace's place on Saturday evening as the sky split and rain began to fall. I ran for shelter under the tall elm tree that stood in front of her house. As I got there, my hair already dripping, my phone buzzed in my hand.

GRACE TOWN:

I looked up at the sad, gloomy house with its drawn curtains and overgrown garden and thought back to how Murray had wondered if Grace was some kind of supernatural creature. A vampire. A fallen angel. There were definitely secrets inside these walls that she didn't want me to know, but what kind of secrets were they?

The door cracked open and a small, balding man appeared
from the shadows. The same man who always came by in the afternoons to pick up Grace's car.

“Henry Page?” he said, squinting at me in the low light. “Is that you?”

“Uh, yes,” I said quietly. And then, louder, “Yes, I'm Henry Page.”

“Oh, wonderful. Yes, wonderful. Come inside, come inside. My name is Martin.”

An irrational pang of fear shot through me.
Stay on the lawn. Don't go inside.
What if Grace's message hadn't been a request so much as a warning? What if Martin was a werewolf or something? And then, under the irrational fear was the real fear. Of betraying Grace. Whatever was in this house, she didn't want me to see it yet. Or maybe ever.

“U
h . . 
. I don't mind staying out here. Grace will be home in a few minutes.”

“Don't be silly, the rain is getting heavier. Come in and get warm.” Martin beckoned me with one hand, his other pressed against the screen door to keep it open. So I went. Mostly because it was cold and dark and raining, but a little bit because I wanted to know what she was keeping from me. I thought again of Sully Sullenberger, how he would never do what I was doing, how I was falling further and further from his white-mustachioed grace.

“Shut up, Sullenberger,” I muttered to myself.

“Henry,” said Martin, shaking my hand. “We've heard a lot about you.”

“Good things, I hope.” Which was the cliché thing you were supposed to say when people said that to you. But it gave me a little thrill. For someone so close to Grace to know that I existed.

“Mostly, mostly,” he said with a chuckle. “Please, make yourself at home. You can wait in Dom's room, if you like,” he said, and then he faltered. “Well, Grace's room now, I suppose.”

“I'm sorry? Dom. Lived. Here?” I said it in this weird staccato way, a pause between each word as my brain tried to process the meaning attached to the sentence.

Martin frowned. “Lived here? Grace has told you that we're not her parents, hasn't she?”

“U
m . . 
. no. I kind of assumed you were her dad.”

“No, no. My name is Martin
Sawyer
. Dominic was our son. We had Grace move in with us about a month before the crash. I'm sure she's told you all about her troubles with her mother? After Dom was gone, Mary and I insisted she stay with us. They were together for so long, so many years. Grace is practically our daughter.”

“Grac
e . . 
. live
s . . 
. in Dom's room?”

“I thought she would've told you this.”

“Uh.” I shook my head, licked my lips, and looked around for the first time. The walls were this off-cream color, almost pale orange, and all the furniture was made of dark wood. The stairs were carpeted, worn bare in patches with age, and on the wall were dozens of photographs. Smiling graduation portraits
and faded wedding snaps and he was in all of them, Dominic, over and over again.

The closest photo of him was with Grace seated atop his broad shoulders, his hands resting on her uninjured calves. It was the first time I'd seen a picture of him. The sight of him stung me like venom. Dom was broad and built and classically handsome. The exact opposite of me. In the picture with Grace, he was wearing a football jersey and grinning widely. Grace had her head tipped back in laughter, shrieking with delight inside his football helmet, her fingers in his hair.

I felt bile bubble up from somewhere in the black, destroyed remains of my gut. Not jealousy. Not anxiety. Just sadness.

“Dom was our youngest,” said Martin, leading me away from the torture wall. “Bit of a gap between him and Renee. The older two had already moved out by the time of the crash. It's been nice having Grace here. I don't know if I could handle the silence.”

“I'm so sorry. I had no idea this was his house.”

“There's nothing to be sorry for, kid. You've been a good friend to her. You and your girlfriend, Lola. We appreciate everything you've done for her.”

“My. Girlfriend. Lola?” I said, again in staccato, and Martin was looking at me then like I was a little bit slow. Grace had been lying to him. Had been lying about what we were. But then again, why wouldn't she? How exactly would you tell your dead boyfriend's dad that you were sleeping with someone else? “Yeah. My girlfriend, Lola. We love Grace.”

Martin nodded to a door at the end of the hall. “You can wait in there. Grace will be here soon. I'll send her to find you.”

“Thanks.” I waited for Martin to leave and then opened the door slowly, with one hand, hesitant to step over the threshold into his tomb. The air was heavy and smelled distinctly like Grace.

No.

Like Dom.

I wanted to vomit. Or take a scalding-hot shower. Or vomit while taking a scalding-hot shower. But my curiosity was still stronger, so instead I turned on the light and stepped inside.

It was a fairly typical teenage boy's room, filled with the same sort of clutter and haphazard order as my own. The checked duvet was crumpled and unmade at the foot of the bed. There was a bookcase filled with the likes of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. An acoustic guitar resting on a chair. A record player with stacks of old vinyl. A globe. A skateboard. A backpack. A desk and a laptop and sports magazines and trophies from his childhood. A chalkboard and a canvas with a portrait of Mozart on it and trinkets from faraway lands. On the dresser was Dom's jewelry—an assortment of long leather necklaces with anchors and crosses and skulls—and his deodorant.

We wore the same scent.

A snapshot of a lifetime, boiled down to the size of a bedroom. I stood there for a few minutes, taking in the stillness
of the place. Here he was, laid out before me, everything he'd been, everything he was.

I wondered if Grace felt close to death in this room, like I did, or if she felt close to life. And I marveled at the unfairness of it all. How a person could be so tethered to this world one moment, and gone from it the next.

I wandered into the walk-in wardrobe and pulled the cord for the light. Here was more of his tomb. All of his clothes. A pressed suit, probably in preparation for prom. A football jersey from the East River team. Half a dozen pairs of shoes. Unlabeled boxes on the overhead shelves.

The gray band shirt Grace had worn to the movies was folded on the shelf. There was a dark smudge where she'd spilled the ketchup, almost as if she'd sponged it off instead o
f . . 
.

Then it dawned on me.

“Oh Go
d . . .
,” I whispered as I picked the shirt up. The stain had been sponged away, but the shirt hadn't been washed. The fabric still smelled of Grace. Of Dom. Of me.

Grace didn't wash Dom's clothes. She didn't wash his sheets. There was always that musty, boyish smell that hung on her wherever she went. I'd assumed it was a natural quirk, or that she had lackluster hygiene practices, but standing in her dead boyfriend's closet was a great way to provoke an epiphany.

Grace lived in him. Every hour of every day, he was there with her. The scent of him on her skin. Grace was the ghost,
not Dom. Two people had died that day, but one of them still had a body.

I looked around the room again, trying to find any sign of something that belonged to her. There was nothing of Grace here except for an envelope on the dresser that bore her name. The letter I'd written her, still unopened. There was no girls' clothing, no girls' shoes, no makeup, none of the things you'd find in your sister's or mother's or friends' bedrooms.

She wore his clothes and his deodorant and she slept in his tangled sheets every night. Whoever she had been—the bright, beautiful girl in her Facebook profile picture—that person was gone now, replaced by this Dom impostor.

You can tell a lot about a person from their bedroom,
she'd said to me once. What was there for me to discern from this room apart from the fact that Grace Town did not exist at all?

“So now you know,” said Grace quietly.

I spun around to find her staring at me from the door frame, Dom's shirt still crumpled up in my shaking fingers. Looking at her then, it was easy to understand that she wasn't of the corporeal realm. Her skin was as translucent as perfumed paper, and her blond hair fell in ashen curtains to settle blunt and dead about her shoulders. There were whispers of bruises beneath the skin of her eyes, like she cried so much it made her bleed. Grace was a lost soul, a ghost adrift, the human embodiment of secondhand smoke.

I wanted to touch her. I couldn't remember if she'd ever felt warm beneath my fingertips, or if she'd always been spun
from something more ethereal than skin. “Grace, I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have—”

“I moved in a month before the accident,” she said, taking the dirty shirt from me and folding it and placing it back on its shelf in the wardrobe. She smoothed the fabric out with her hands, then placed her forehead against the shelf, her eyes closed. “The Sawyers had been trying to get me here for years. I finally worked up the guts to run away from my mom. It was the best worst day of my life.”

“That's awful. Grac
e . . 
. I don'
t . . 
. I don't know what to say. I don't know how to help you.”

Grace looked up at me. “I'm not broken, Henry. I'm not a piece of pottery out of your cabinet. I don't need to be fixed.”

“I know that. I didn't mean that. But—you can tell a lot about a person from their bedroom, remember?” It went so much deeper than she'd ever been willing to tell me. Grace hadn't only lost him in the physical sense—she'd lost the promise he held as well. It wouldn't just be his corpse that would haunt us, but the ghost of the life they could've had together. He knew everything about her, all the bad, all the good, and I was only allowed the occasional glimpse. All the potential energy Dom had held had been dispersed back into the universe when he died, and she was scrabbling to hold on to it. “So what does your bedroom look like?”

“
That's
what you want to know? I don't have one, okay? My ‘bedroom' before I moved in here was a couch in my mother's husband's basement.”

“Sometimes I feel like you don't exist.”

“Get out.”

“You keep everything from me. You don't tell me anything.”

“Get out, get out, get out!”

Then Martin Sawyer was at the door. He looked from Grace to me and back again and said, “Henry,” and I said, “I'm going.” I stalked out of the house, down the hallway filled with pictures of him that greeted her, smiling, every morning and every night. I was hurt and angry and stupidly, stupidly jealous, which was dumb, because worms were probably eating his eyeballs right now, or maybe they were done with his eyeballs and had moved onto his brain, or his heart, or his testicles, and that wasn't exactly my idea of a good time. He couldn't love her anymore and he still got to keep her and it all just seemed so desperately unfair to everyone involved.

I was sitting in the gutter outside her house when my phone rang. Murray. I smudged a tear from my eye and answered. “Yeah, I know, I'm on my—”

“Hello, Henry. It's Maddy.”

“Who?”

“Madison Carlson. From school.”

“O
h . . 
. Why are you calling me from Murray's phone?”

“I think I broke Murray.”

“I can't deal with this right now. I have to get to Lola's party.”

“No, seriously, he's lying facedown in the grass and he hasn't moved for, like, twenty minutes and Lola's gone.”

“What did you do to him?”

“Well, he asked me if I'd heard anything more from Seeta, so I told him about her new boyfriend, and then he kind of sank to his knees and laid down and refused to get up. I think he might be dead. I can't deal with a dead body, Henry.”

“Christ. Send me a drop pin of your location. I'll come and get him.”

“We're at the football field. Everyone's gone. You need to get here ASAP.”

I didn't get there ASAP. I hung up and wandered slowly from Grace's house to the school, hoping Murray would grow up before I got there so I could go home and die in peace. While I walked, I messaged La and told her I might not make it to her party because Murray had been injured at the pregame.