Our Chemical Hearts (3 page)

“You want
me
to drive?”

“No, I thought it would be hilarious to hand you the keys and stand here until someone invents teleportation. Yes, Henry Page, I want you to drive.”

“Uh, okay, I guess. I'm a bit rusty, but yeah. Okay.” I unlocked the car and opened the door and sat in the driver's seat. The inside of the car smelled like her, the musky, masculine scent of a teenage boy. Which was very confusing for me, to say the least. I started the engine—so far, so good—and took a deep breath.

“I'll try my best not to kill us both,” I said. Grace Town did not reply, so I laughed at my own joke—a single, awkward “ha”—and then I put the car in reverse.

My grandmother would've looked cooler driving than I did on the journey home. I hunched over the steering wheel,
sweating, hyperaware that I a) was driving someone else's car, b) hadn't driven any car at all for months, and c) had only scraped through my driving test because my instructor was my violently hungover second cousin twice removed, and I'd had to stop three times to let him vomit on the side of the road.

“Are you
sure
you passed your driving test?” Grace said, leaning over to check the speedometer, which revealed I was sitting five miles under the speed limit.

“Hey, I only had to bribe
two
officials. I
earned
my license.” I swear I might've almost seen her smile. “So you came from East River, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Why'd you change schools in senior year?”

“I'm all about adventure,” she said dryly.

“Well, we are a particularly thrilling institution. I can definitely see the appeal.”

“Hink seems like a riot. I bet he gets into all sorts of shenanigans.”

“Life of the party, that one.”

And then, thank God, it was over. I pulled up in front of my house and relaxed my fingers from the steering wheel, aware for the first time of how tightly I'd been clenching my muscles.

“I don't think I've seen anyone drive that tensely sinc
e . . 
. Do you need a minute to compose yourself?” she said.

“What can I say? I'm a rebel without a cause.”

I expected Grace to slide over to the driver's side, but she told me to turn the car off. We both got out and I handed her the keys and she locked the door like she meant to come inside. I hesitated. Was I supposed to invite her in? But then she turned to me and said, “Okay. Good-bye. I'll see you tomorrow. Or maybe not. Who knows where I'll be,” and she started hobbling down the street in the complete opposite direction from which we'd come.

“There's not much down there but a storm-water drain and a cemetery a block away.” (The graveyard was close enough that its proximity had resulted in several counseling sessions in elementary school due to a brief yet intense period when I was convinced my great-grandfather Johannes van de Vliert's ghost was trying to kill me.) Grace didn't say anything, didn't look back, just lifted the hand that wasn't holding her cane as if to say
I know
and kept on walking.

I watched her, entirely puzzled, until she disappeared around the next street corner.

•   •   •

“Hola, broseph,” said my sister, Sadie, the moment I closed the front door behind me.

“Jesus, Suds, you scared the crap outta me,” I said, clutching at my chest. Sadie was twelve years older than me, a celebrated neuroscientist, and was generally considered both the golden child and black sheep of the family simultaneously. We looked a lot alike: black hair, slightly buggy eyes, dimples
when we smiled. Except Suds was
slightly
more cutting edge than me with her septum piercing, tattoo sleeve, and intricate dreadlocks, all souvenirs from her rocky teenage years.

“Haven't seen or heard from you in, like, two days, kid. I was starting to think Mom and Dad had murdered you and buried you in a shallow grave.” This was, of course, a strategic lie. Suds was going through a fairly shitty divorce from her fairly shitty doctor husband, which meant she spent about 90 percent of the time she didn't spend at the hospital at our house.

“Sadie, don't be ridiculous,” Dad said from the kitchen, dressed in his usual getup of a Hawaiian shirt, male short shorts, and black spectacles. (His fashion sense had rapidly declined after he'd moved his carpentry workshop into the backyard three years ago. Honestly it was a miracle to find him in something other than pajamas.) Sadie and I got our hair from him. Or at least, I assumed we did. The ever-present stubble on his chin was dark, but he'd been bald for the majority of my life. “We'd make his grave at least four or five feet deep. We don't half-ass murder in this house.”

“Toby and Gloria can attest to that,” Sadie said, referring to an event six years prior to my birth that involved a pair of goldfish, insect spray, and the accidental yet untimely death of her aquatic pets.

“Twenty-three years, Suds. It's been twenty-three years since your goldfish died. Are you ever going to let it go?”

“Not until I have my vengeance!” Sadie yelled dramatically. A toddler started crying from the back of the house. Sadie
sighed. “You'd think after three years I'd start getting used to this whole motherhood thing, but I keep forgetting about the damn kid.”

“I'll get him,” I said, dumping my schoolbag and heading down the hallway to where Ryan usually slept in Sadie's old room. The kid had been, much the same as me, an accident and a surprise. Mom and Dad had only ever planned to have one child: twelve years after they had Sadie, they got stuck with me.

“Ryan, man, what's up?” I said when I pushed open the door to find my two-and-a-half-year-old nephew, whom Dad babysat on weekdays.

“Henwee,” he rasped, rubbing his eyes. “Where's Mama?”

“Come on, I'll take you to her.”

“Who's the girl, by the way?” Sadie asked as I walked back down the hallway holding Ryan's hand.

“The girl?”

“The one who drove you home.” As she scooped Ryan up, Sadie had this thin, lopsided grin on her face. I'd seen that look many times before, when she was a teenager. It always meant trouble.

“Oh. Grace is her name. She's new. I missed my bus, so she offered me a ride.”

“She's cute. In a weird, Janis Joplin, will probably die at twenty-seven kind of way.”

I shrugged and pretended I hadn't noticed.

ONCE RYAN WAS
settled, I went down to the basement, which Sadie had turned into her teenage den of iniquity more than a decade ago (and I'd inherited upon her departure for college). It wasn't fancy. It kind of looked like a postapocalyptic fallout shelter. None of the furniture matched, the concrete floor was covered with a patchwork of faux-Persian carpets, the refrigerator was older than my parents, and there was a poorly taxidermied elk head on the wall. Everyone claimed not to know where it came from, but I had a sneaking suspicion Sadie had stolen it as a teenager and my parents were either too embarrassed or too impressed to return it to its rightful owner. Maybe both.

My two best friends were, as always, already down there, playing
GTA V
on my PS4. They were, in order of appearance (i.e., seating order on the couch):

• Murray Finch, 17, Australian. Tall and tan and muscular with curly blond hair to his shoulders and a seedy teenage mustache. His parents had immigrated to the States like six years ago, but Muz still (purposefully) sounded like Steve Irwin and said things like “g'day” and “drongo” and “struth” on a regular basis. He was of the strong opinion that
  Crocodile Dundee
  was the best thing to ever happen to Australians. Girls loved him.
  
• Lola Leung, 17. Dark-skinned, dark-eyed, dark-haired (cropped short). My next-door neighbor for my entire life, and a self-described “diversity triple threat”: half Chinese on her dad's side, half Haitian on her mom's, and one hundred percent gay. For as long as I could remember, La had been “randomly selected” to appear front and center in all of our school's promotional material, including but not limited to front cover of the yearbook, on the billboard outside school, on the website, and even on bookmarks that were handed out at the library. She'd also been my first kiss three years ago. Two weeks later she'd come out as a lesbian and entered into a long-term, long-distance relationship with a girl named Georgia from the next town over. People still thought my kissing skills were the reason she decided to start batting for the other team. I
  was still trying not to be offended. (Girls also loved her.)
  

At the foot of the stairs, I leaned on the banister and watched them. “I love that even though I failed to make it onto the bus and was possibly dead and/or dying, you two still saw fit to come to my house, eat my food, and play my games without me. Did my father even notice I wasn't with you?”

“Let's be honest,” Lola said, twisting around on the couch to grin at me. “Justin does love us more than he loves you.”

“Who's the sheila, mate?” said Murray without looking away from the screen, where he was plowing a tank over a line of police cars. “Saw you going off after her like a raw prawn.”

“Roll back the slang, Kangaroo Jack,” I said, crossing the room to boot up Sadie's old iMac computer, which was, after almost two decades of service, still wheezing along with life. “There are no unsuspecting American girls in the room for you to charm.” Murray was, for the most part, capable of speaking like a normal human being, but he'd discovered somewhere along the way that sounding like a bushman from the outback endeared him to the womenfolk. Sometimes he forgot to turn it off.

There was only one folder on the iMac's desktop, entitled “Missing/Funeral/Manhunt Headshots,” that contained attractive pictures of everyone in the room (plus Sadie), to be used in the event that any of us disappeared/died/became
wanted felons. Our parents had strict instructions to access the photos and provide them to the media before journalists went snooping on Facebook and picked random, unfortunate-looking pictures we'd been tagged in against our will.

“Muz raises a very good point, though,” La said. “Who was the strange girl you were sprinting after? Did you think to yourself, ‘Here's finally one that can't get away,' but then she proved you wrong?”

“Ha-ha. I can't believe you both saw that.” I grabbed a can of Coke from the refrigerator and went back to the computer, where Facebook was loading pixel by painful pixel. “Her name is Grace Town. She's new. Hink offered her editor but she turned it down, so I got pissed and went after her.”

“Her name is Grace Town? Like
Gracetown
?” said Murray as he, too, cracked a can of Coke and took a swig. “Christ. Poor chick.”

Lola was already on her feet. “Hink offered her editor over you? That
bastard
. No way am I designing that glorified newsletter if you're not in charge!”

“No. Calm down. He gave it to us
both
but she turned it down because she—and I quote—‘doesn't write anymore.' The way she said it was so ominous.”

“Oh,” Lola said. Murray yanked her back down to the couch. “Maybe bad things happen when she writes. Oh! Maybe the things she writes come true? Or maybe she has a voodoo curse on her so that every word she writes breaks a bone in her leg and that's why she walks with a cane?”

“Let's take a shufti at old FB, shall we?” Murray said. “Nothing like a little cyberstalking to clear these things up.”

“Way ahead of you.” When I typed Grace's name in the search field and hit return, a list of all the people I knew with Grace in their name showed up. Sadie Grace Elizabeth Smith was the first, followed by Samantha Grace Lawrence (we went to elementary school together), Grace Park (some kind of distant relative) and Grace Payne (I had no idea). Underneath them was a list of exact matches—five or so genuine Grace Towns—none of whom I had mutual friends with, and only one of whom lived in my geographical area.

I slouched forward. “None of them are her.”

“Wait, what about that one?” Lola said, pointing.

I clicked the profile picture of the closest geographical Grace Town, a girl in a red dress with red lipstick and loose curls in her honey-blond hair. She was smiling brilliantly, her eyes closed, her head tilted back in laughter so that the sharp lines of her collarbones were visible beneath her skin. It was a good handful of seconds before any of us recognized her. Because it
was
her. It was the same Grace Town who had driven me home. The lips were the same, the shape of her face.

“Holy
shit
,” Murray said. “Blokes would be on her like seagulls at a tip.”

“Translation: She's an attractive female who likely gets a lot of attention from males,” Lola said. “And lesbians,” she tacked on after a moment, leaning closer to the screen. “Damn. She's got that Edie Sedgwick thing going on. That girl is stupid hot.”

And she was. On Facebook, Grace Town was tall and lean and tan, with the kind of limbs that makes you think of words like
gracile
and
swanlike
and
damn, son
.
It must be an old picture,
I thought, but no. According to the date it was uploaded, it'd only been a little over three months since Grace had changed it. I scrolled through the five other public profile pictures, but each of them told the same story. None were more than a few months old, but the person in them was very different from the one I'd met. Her hair was much longer, down to her waist, and fell in soft, clean curls. There were pictures of her at the beach, pictures of her in makeup, pictures of her smiling this incredibly wide smile, the kind that models smile in ads when they're super jacked up about eating salad. There was no cane at her side, no black circles under her eyes, no layers upon layers of guys' clothing.

What had happened to her in the last three months that'd left her so changed and broken?

Sadie called us upstairs then, to help Dad finish dinner before Mom got home from the art gallery she curated in the city. (“Thank Christ. I could chew the crutch out of a low-flying vulture,” Murray said.) All of us quickly forgot about the mystery of Grace Town for a few hours as we ate and did the dishes and watched Netflix together, as was our Thursday-night routine. It was only after I'd said good-bye to my friends and gone back down into the basement and noticed the screen of the poor iMac still wheezing with life that I thought of her again, but once I did, I was hooked.

I didn't brush my teeth that night. I didn't shower or change out of my clothes from school or go to say good-bye to Sadie and Ryan when they finally left around midnight. Instead, I stayed in the basement and spent the rest of my night listening to every song the Strokes had on Spotify.

You say you wanna stay by my side,
crooned Julian Casablancas.
Darlin', your head's not right.

If I'd been older or wiser or if I'd paid more attention to the dramatic teenage feelings my peers had described to me the first time they'd had crushes, I might not have misdiagnosed the burning, constricting sensation in my chest as indigestion from the four overfried chicken chimichangas I'd had for dinner instead of what it actually was: an affliction far more serious and far more painful.

That was the first night I dreamed of Grace Town.