Our Chemical Hearts (25 page)

•   •   •

Sunday was grueling. I met Lola outside my house at seven a.m., the streetlights burning brighter than the watercolor sunrise. She pushed a large coffee into my gloved hands and said, “Do not speak to me for two hours,” so I didn't.

We met Jim Jenkins outside Hink's office. We sat down. Turned on the computers. Tried not to die. Died a lot. My eyes had apparently lost the ability to produce their own moisture, so I spent the morning alternating between abusing my digestive system with mass amounts of Red Bull and rubbing my eyes red raw.

When La was finally ready for human interaction, the first thing she did was show me the cover: a picture of a girl in black and white, a grayscale universe behind her, an exploding supernova where her head should be. It looked like an old penny dreadful novel. Even with
THE WESTLAND R
EDEMPTION
splashed across the image in orange letters, I could still tell that the girl had been traced from Grace, a ghostly imitation of her true form.

“I still had photos left over from the shoot you guys did for me. I can use a different model, find someone on Flickr, if you want.”

“It's perfect,” I told her. “Print it out, tabloid-sized. Let's stick it up and let everyone see.”

So we did. And they did. The juniors arrived at ten a.m., Buck not long after. And then—curiously—two girls who'd been at Heslin's party the night before. He'd told them what we were doing here, encouraged them to drop by. Most of the pages were filled by now, except for Lola's spread of handwritten confessions, which the girls—in their deeply hungover state—thought was a great idea.

They wrote down their sins. They gave them to us. We assured them they would be absolved.

And then another person came. And then another. And then two more. After the eighth person, Lola made a sign that read
Confess your sins for absolution
and stuck it above a drop box in the hall. Murray got wind of the situation and turned up at lunchtime in a priest costume, complete with holy water, and then proceeded to sit by our makeshift confessional, greeting each wayward soul that came our way. We watched our classmates and friends and strangers from other grades come and go throughout the day as news of what we were doing spread on Facebook.

At five p.m. I asked Lola: “How are we doing for pages?”

She said: “We now only have one spare page.”

I said: “Shit, what are we going to do with that?”

She rolled her eyes and said: “It's for your redemption, dingbat.”

I said: “Oh.”

And then I looked up at the supernova girl printed in black and white and thought about how, in retrospect, you can see
that something is poison from the beginning. Grace had torn me apart and put me back together so many times that I'd started to believe that was what I wanted. A Kintsukuroi relationship, more beautiful for having been broken. But something can only be shattered so many times before it becomes irreparable, just as a piece of paper can only be folded so many times before it cannot be folded any more.

While I sat there, that root canal pain sparking through my body, phrases like
I wish I'd never met her
and
I wish she'd never kissed me
started to cascade through my thoughts. I might've—had it been a viable option at that moment—gone all
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
on her. Bleached her out of my memory. Ripped her from where she'd stitched herself into the lining of my soul.

But I thought, again, of Kintsukuroi. That something must first be shattered for it to be put back together in a way that made it more beautiful than before. I thought of how I liked broken things, things that were blemished or dented or cracked, and why that was probably why I fell for Grace in the first place. She was a broken thing in human form, and now—because of her—I was too.

Grace might always be broken, but I hoped that all my shattered pieces could be glued back together and mended with gold seams. That the tears in my heart would heal into scars that would glisten.

And that's when my phone vibrated in my pocket.

GRACE TOWN:

HENRY PAGE:

“You are a demon,” I said to La as I stood, my heart stripped and swollen inside my throat.

To which she replied, “In the sack!”

As I stepped out into the pale-pink-and-lemon-colored nightmare that was the hall, I hoped terrible things for Grace Town in spite of myself. I hoped that she would regret this decision for the rest of her life. That it would pierce her like a hot skewer until the day she died. I imagined her old and thin, her skin draped across her bones like damp paper. I saw her draw her final breath, a look of regret in her eyes for the life she could've had with me, and I felt vindicated.

And in that moment I wanted things for myself that I'd never wanted before. I wanted to be rich. I wanted to be famous. I wanted to marry a supermodel and screw her lingerie-clad body every night. I wanted every achievement of my life to stand in testament as a grand “fuck you” to Grace Town. I wanted to destroy her with my extraordinariness.

But by the time I'd reached the end of the hallway, some of the acid had washed away.
Why is it,
I thought,
that we're so willing to hurt the ones we care about the most?
Two days ago I loved her, and now I wanted to carve away pieces of her soul. Why was that? Because she'd hurt me? Because she didn't love me back?

You can't begrudge people their feelings. Grace had done what was right by her. I couldn't ask for more than that.

•   •   •

She was sitting on the seat where we'd waited the afternoon we'd been called to Hink's office. A beginning and an end, all in one place. “Henrik,” she said quietly, motioning to the space next to her, the spot where I'd folded my body awkwardly because of her presence. “I wanted to give you something.”

“I can't, Grace. I can't do this anymore.”

“I know. I know. Trust me: this is the end.”

In a normal conversation, this would be the point that she would've apologized for ripping my heart out of my chest. But Grace was not a normal girl and she didn't understand that the word
sorry
was sometimes enough. Instead, she handed me a small envelope with
For the consideration of the editor
written across the front and said, “You asked me, the day we started at the newspaper, why I'd changed my mind. I never answered you, but I should've, because I already knew.”

“Okay.”

“Every day since the day he died, all I thought about was him. For the first few weeks after the accident, I expected the
grief. I let myself feel every inch of it. I'd lost people I loved before. Almost everyone. I knew how grief worked. The only thing that numbs the pain is time, filling up your head with new memories, driving a wedge between yourself and the tragedy. I waited for things to get easier. I waited for the replays of our happiest days together to stop. I waited for my breath to stop catching in my chest whenever a thunderclap of misery would roll through me.

“But it never got easier. After a while I realized it was because I didn't
want
it to. I carried him with me heavily, and it exhausted me, but I did it because I deserved it. I deserved the weight of him, and the pain, and when his parents' grief was too heavy, I carried some of theirs too.

“And then I met you.

“The first afternoon we talked, I didn't think about him for twenty minutes. I know it doesn't seem like a lot, but it was a record for me, and I felt so light and buoyant afterward. I slept for four hours that night without waking up once. And I knew it was because of you. I don't know how, or why, but when I was with you, you made the grief go away.”

“But that still isn't enough.”

“Oh, Henry,” she said, shuffling closer and taking my cheek in her hand. I closed my eyes at the gentleness of her touch and then her lips were moving against mine, impossibly soft.

“Why do you kiss me like that?” I said when it was over.

“Like what?” she said, pulling back from me slightly.

“Like you're in love with me.”

Grace looked from my eyes to my lips and then back again. “It's the only way I know how.”

Because Dom had been her first and only everything, before me. When she'd first learned to kiss, it had been with the great love of her life.

And it took until that moment for me to realize, finally, that I was a blip in someone else's love story. That there was a grand love going on here, but it wasn't my own, as I'd hoped; I was a side character in the peripheries, a plot device to keep the main characters apart. That if this were
The Notebook
and Dom were still alive, he would be Allie, Grace would be Noah, and I would be the redheaded chick whose name I can't remember, the one who gets shafted and has to pretend like it's no big deal.

I wasn't just her second choice, which I'd convinced myself I could live with: I was a cameo, a walk-on role, a guest star, and it killed me that it had taken me this long to realize it.

And my first immediate thought, because I'm an idiot, was how much I'd make her work if she decided she wanted me back. That a month from now or a year from now or a decade from now, Grace Town would walk back into my life after paying off her debt to her dead boyfriend, after feeling all the pain his death deserved, and I'd make her chase me the way I'd chased her. She'd come to my house in the middle of a thunderstorm with a boom box held over her head, and I'd finally get to see her sopping wet, drenched in rain, the way
I'd wanted to from the beginning. And she'd fling herself into my arms and, my God, it would be so grand.

But as I watched her watch me, I knew it would never happen. As I looked at her looking into my eyes, I realized how very little I knew about her. All the things I'd been desperate to ask her about, to know about her—her childhood, her mom, her future—I'd never gotten around to asking.

Grace waited for me to speak, but I didn't, because everything there was to say had already been said a hundred times before, and I was tired, so tired, of saying the same things over and over again and them making no difference. So she put her hands on top of her head and exhaled loudly. And then she did something I wasn't expecting. Grace Town smiled. It was a smile that stretched across her whole face, crinkled the corners of her eyes. The sunlight caught her irises and made them almost crystal clear and my heart trembled at how achingly beautiful she was and how much I hated her for not being mine.

“You're an extraordinary collection of atoms, Henry Page,” she said, and her smile stretched wider and she laughed that silent laugh that's more of an exhale through the nose than anything else. Then she put her arms down by her side and pursed her lips and nodded once, her smile entirely faded.

And as I watched her stand and leave—again, again, again—I finally understood that I loved a multiverse of Graces.

The flesh-and-blood her, the version of her that still wore
Dom's unwashed clothes and slept in unwashed sheets and ran on her injured leg to make sure it didn't heal too quickly. A tithe of guilt paid in pain. The only justice she could offer him; the only redemption she could offer herself.

The version she'd been, the ethereal creature that now existed only in photographs and half-remembered fantasies.

And the Kintsukuroi dream girl, stitched together with gold seams. The version that was clean and whole and dressed in floral, backlit by the setting sun. The version that hummed the Pixies and the Strokes as we slow danced together under string lights. The one I helped put back together.

A multiverse bound up in the skin of a single girl.

I opened her contribution to the
Post
. It was a piece of paper that'd been torn into little pieces and stuck back together with a patchwork of clear tape on the back. All the little jagged scars that broke up the text had been gone over with gold ink. Pablo Neruda's poem, Kintsukuroi in paper form. Lola must've given it back to Grace, bless her. La. A devil and an angel in one. The title, “I do not love you,” had been circled in gold, which I expected to hurt like hell, but it didn't. So I read it again, for the last time.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I can't lie to you and tell you that standing in front of someone and offering them your soul and having them reject
you is not gonna be one of the worst things that ever happens to you. You will wonder for days or weeks or months or years afterward what it is about you that was so wrong or broken or ugly that they couldn't love you the way you loved them. You will look for all the reasons inside yourself that they didn't want you and you will find a million.

Maybe it was the way you looked in the mornings when you first woke up and hadn't showered. Maybe it was the way you were too available, because despite what everyone says, playing hard to get is still attractive.

Some days you will believe that every atom of your being is defective somehow. What you need to remember, as I remembered as I watched Grace Town leave, is that you are extraordinary.

Grace Town was a chemical explosion inside my heart. She was a star that'd gone supernova. For a few fleeting moments there was light and heat and pain, brighter than a galaxy, and in her wake she left nothing but darkness. But the death of stars provides the building blocks of life. We're all made of star stuff. We're all made of Grace Town.

“My redemption,” I said to Lola as I slipped her the envelope from Grace.

She opened it. She read it. She grinned.

THE REMAINDER OF
the semester went like this: One week later, when I woke up in the morning, Grace Town was not the first thing I thought about when I opened my eyes, but the second. I don't remember what the first thing was exactly, only that she hadn't been it. She didn't split through me like lightning, searing my veins. The infection had begun to clear. The wound was healing.

I knew then that I would survive.

And I did.

If you thought
The Westland Redemption
turned out to be a resounding success, then you haven't been paying attention. The document that went to the printer (two hours early, might I add) was somewhere between
catastrophe
and
disaster
on the Shit-o-Meter. It was the Frankenstein's monster of student publications, which—to be honest—aren't exactly known for their style and clarity in the first place.

It was clearly assembled by a dozen or so people who had
differing ideas of what the end product should look like. Buck's hand-drawn sketches clashed with Lola's sleek design, and I hadn't had enough time to edit all the juniors' copy, so most of their work read like postmodern interpretations of classical grammar at best. But it was big, and it was bold, and its orange, black, and white color scheme was eye-catching, and the drawings were beautiful, and the confessions were funny and stupid and heartbreaking, and Lola had organized it all in such a way that, yes, the more I looked at it, yes, it was actually pretty damn good. Yes, there was real redemption there.

Hink didn't even know we'd made our deadline until I approved the proofs four days later. Once he found out, he proceeded to flip the eff out because we'd violated every rule in the charter. Turns out almost all the sins teenagers want absolved involve sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, and Lola and I had to petition the PTA to hold a vote on whether the newspaper could even be released.

The deciding vote ended up coming down to Mr. Hotchkiss. Luckily, a container of lemon curd cupcakes had appeared on his desk two hours before the hearing and put him in an abnormally good mood. He voted in our favor, and kept a framed copy of Sadie's handwritten apology on his desk for the remainder of senior year.

The Westland Redemption
was distributed the next day, at which point it proceeded to blow Kyle's legacy out of the water, by which I mean at least 60 percent of the student body picked up a copy. A 15 percent spike in circulation—enough to
convince Hink and Valentine that, despite my wantonness, I'd redeemed myself enough to remain in charge of the newspaper for at least one more issue.

When Lola and Georgia broke up without warning or explanation, Murray and I dragged her kicking and screaming through the pain, just as she'd dragged us. We made her sing Christmas carols and drink eggnog. We made her put on a hat and scarf and gloves and drive with us (and Maddy) to the mall to get our picture with Santa. We made her watch
The Nightmare Before Christmas
on Christmas Eve, her small body wedged between ours under the covers of my bed. We made her better. Not quickly. Not by a long shot. But we helped.

After Christmas, my parents announced that they'd decided to take separate vacations. One to Canada, the other to Mexico, but this time there was no unwanted pregnancy at the end to bring them back together. When he returned home, Dad packed his thing
s . . 
. and moved all the way into his carpentry workshop in the backyard. They still ate breakfast together every morning.

And gradually, as her tithe was paid, the gold seams in Grace Town began to appear. After Christmas break, her limp grew less noticeable, until she stopped walking with her cane altogether. She started driving to school. Sometimes she'd wear a piece of Dom's clothing: a knit cap, a necklace, a jacket. But mostly, she wore her own things. Slowly, as she worked off her imagined debt, she let herself be redeemed. Justice had been served.

We came unstuck from each other's lives. We deleted each other off Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat. We signed custody of Ricky Martin Knupps II over to Ryan, who renamed him “Fish Fish” and loved him more than we ever could. All the ties that had connected us slowly snapped and healed, until we were separate entities once more. Until I remembered her only when an ache of longing throbbed through me: on New Year's Eve when the fireworks went off, when I watched movies by myself in the dark, but mostly when I woke up in the morning and she wasn't there.

And all the while I loved her, just as she loved him.

In secret, between the shadow and the soul.