Our Chemical Hearts (8 page)

THERE WAS NO WAY
for me to broach the subject of the cemetery with Grace without admitting that we'd followed her there, so, like a sane, logical, and emotionally healthy person, I decided to try and forget what I'd seen. Instead I followed Murray's advice about getting to know her, which turned out to be harder than it sounded, because Grace Town was possibly the strangest human being alive.

Over the next couple of weeks, we ate lunch together almost every day, sometimes with my friends, sometimes—when I got the feeling that she didn't want to be around other humans—alone. This new ritual began much the same way that her driving me home had: the day after the graveyard incident, out of nowhere, Grace materialized at our table in the cafeteria and asked if she could sit with us.

Vampire,
mouthed Murray as Grace sat down next to Lola. I kicked him under the table.

With Murray's pep talk about body language in my head,
I tried to take note of how Grace held herself around me. I found myself pulled toward her—I leaned across tables, angled my legs in her direction. Grace never mirrored my movements. She always sat straight or bent back, her legs crossed away from me. Every time I fell into her gravity, betrayed by my own body language, I drew back, careful not to give too much of myself away.

The editorial process worked like this: each year, four newspapers were released, one at the start of each term. The one in circulation now was the final one that last year's editor, Kyle (the aforementioned couch defiler), had put together. The last issue Grace and I would preside over would be released the summer after both of us had graduated. It would be our legacy, the wisdom we would impart to the fresh batch of seniors.

As well as recapping important events from throughout the term, each issue had a theme, usually some variant of one of four übervanilla high school flavors: “Friendship!” “Journeys!” “Acceptance!” “Harmony!”

Kyle, who wore a cape to school and hung a Guy Fawkes mask in the newspaper office, pushed the boundaries with abstract themes like “circles,” “red” (Taylor Swift made many appearances), “uncanny,” and “faded.” This was frowned upon by the teachers, who preferred the newspaper to be nothing but hardcore “your teenage years are the best of your life” propaganda, but beloved by the students, who got to read about something other than “forging lifelong bonds” and “marching triumphantly into the future” for a change. And when I say
beloved
, I mean that at least 45 percent of them bothered to pick up a copy, which, if you know anything about teenagers and their penchant for not giving a shit about anything school related, kind of means Kyle's papers were runaway best sellers.

In pursuit of a Perfect Theme that would blow Kyle's legacy out of the water, the newspaper required a lot of work in closed spaces. Hink let us have free rein over the content (“You're both good kids; I trust you'll keep to the charter,” he said in our first and only planning meeting, perhaps rather foolishly), which required Grace and me to have regular after-school brainstorming sessions. I'd roll my office chair over to her small desk and we'd sit side by side, me drinking Red Bull or coffee (we had special access to the teachers' lounge,
aw yiss
), her drinking peppermint tea, each of us filling in the newspaper's pagination with our increasingly shitty ideas. “New beginnings”? “Fresh starts”? “Becoming the person you're meant to be”? “Forever young”?

I wondered, during the long, hazy afternoons of those first couple of weeks, if she was as hyperaware of her body as I was of mine. Every accidental brush of skin as we reached over each other, every bout of raucous laughter that would leave one of us burying their forehead into the other's shoulder. Some days, Grace instigated the accidental contact. Other days she held herself like a marionette, every movement deliberate and measured to ensure our skin never touched, that we weren't sitting too close to each other.

Normally I was pretty good at reading people, but Grace
Town was an anomaly, a black spot on my radar. I hate to go all
Twilight
, but I could suddenly empathize with how Edward found such a dullard interesting (not that Grace was dull—she was sharp and witty, with a humor so dark it could've played Batman). But I finally understood Old Sparkly's attraction to Bella. The less I could read Grace—the less I understood about her—the more enraptured I became. I needed, desperately, to understand what was going on in the dark, twisted, hilarious halls of her mind.

Some days we felt like old friends. Some days she put in her earbuds and didn't speak to Lola or me except to say good-bye. Some days she didn't show up at all. I took the good with the bad, all the while getting sucked deeper into the tornado that was Grace Town.

On the Good Grace Days, the days when she was willing to engage, I was able to ascertain that:

• Grace Town used to run track (like, for
  fun
  ). Or at least she had before the accident.
  
• Grace Town did not drink coffee.
  
• Grace Town spent her free time reading Wikipedia pages about serial killers and plane crashes.
  
• Grace Town's birthday was the weekend after Thanksgiving.
  
• Grace Town liked
  Breaking Bad
  and
  Star Wars
  and
  Game of Thrones
  , but not
  Star Trek
  or
  Doctor Who
  (which was almost a deal breaker, but not quite).
  

We only had one class together (drama), which I was fairly sure she was going to fail because she never left her seat at the back of the room and Beady never made her participate. Despite it being senior year and everyone freaking out about college acceptances, GPAs, and SAT scores, my first few weeks of classes went okay. I knew I'd get A's from the teachers who'd taught me before (Beady, Hink, my Spanish teacher Señor Sanchez), but the rest were all new to me and required a fair amount of buttering up to ensure I got anything close to good grades, because most were still—more than a decade later—holding a grudge against the Page family name.

The start of every school year was the same. The teachers who'd been at Westland long enough to have taught my sister always had the same reaction when taking attendance for the first time. They'd call my name. Recognize the last name
Page
. Look up in horror. See me, see how much I looked like Sadie, know for certain that we were siblings. Mom hadn't been exaggerating when she'd said Suds had been arrested three times by the time she was my age, but she got into even more trouble at school than she did with the law. Expelled (informally) and reenrolled five times for (among other things): selling cigarettes, stealing a video camera, setting a home economics kitchen on fire (Sadie maintained that this was a legitimate accident), successfully distilling moonshine (for eight months) in a science classroom cupboard, and finally, successfully growing marijuana (for three years) in the science department's greenhouse. (Perhaps it's no surprise she ended up a scientist—she
did spend a lot of time working on “science projects” as a teenager, albeit illegal ones.)

The reason she was allowed to return time and time again? Because Sadie Page was, for all intents and purposes, a genius. I guess Westland wasn't ready to dump their one shot at having a Nobel Prize–winning graduate, no matter how much trouble she was. Principal Valentine had a soft spot for her less destructive shenanigans (legend has it she took Sadie's moonshine home after it'd been confiscated and still has a shot of it at the end of every school year), and Sadie's grades weren't just exceptional, they were astounding. Her report cards, along with the words
deviant
and
nuisance
, also said things like
mathematically precocious
and
disturbingly brilliant
. So, yeah. Being a Page came with a reputation for being an evil genius, neither of which I was, so I had to work my ass off to be seen as a) not a juvenile delinquent and b) slightly above average in the intelligence department.

I'd always hated this fact before. Now it gave me an excuse to spend as much time as possible studying, which of course required company, which of course included Grace. The last week in September, we walked to McDonald's together most lunchtimes to “study,” which generally consisted of silly literature deconstructions (“What I like most about
Animal Farm
is that there is no frou-frou symbolism. It's just a good, simple tale about animals who hate humans,” I said, echoing Ron Swanson from
Parks and Rec
, which earned a laugh and a forehead buried into my shoulder) and even sillier math problems
(“What did you get for question six?” I said. Grace checked her book. “Purple, because aliens don't wear hats.”)

Those first few weeks of working on the newspaper were the best. Something about the three of us being holed up in that little fishbowl of a room together was magic. Not a lot of work got done, but that didn't matter, because our print deadline was months away. The leaves had only just started to change color and the sun was still warm in the middle of the day, which meant we had all the time in the world. All the time in the world to wait for the Perfect Theme to fall into our brains. We knew it would be awesome when it came to us, and we'd be so consumed by its brilliance that we'd get the newspaper done in no time. So we advised our junior writers (four had eventually volunteered—a new record) to concentrate on the content that didn't have to fit the theme: interviews, event recaps, photo pages. Mostly we didn't work at all, because—on the Good Grace Days anyway—just being around each other was way more fun.

We made each other watch a slew of YouTube videos. The girls had never seen Liam Neeson going to Ricky Gervais for advice on “improvisational comedy” but we all watched it together, three times over, in fact, because it was so funny. We traded memes. We sent each other Snapchats ten times a day. In-jokes fell into place as easily as breathing. I was amazed at how quickly a person could become an essential part of your life. By early October, only four short weeks after meeting her, Grace and I practically had our own language. We could speak
entirely in movie quotes or GIFs if required. We snuck Nerf guns into the office and had mini wars before and after school. We swapped our favorite books (mine:
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy, hers:
84, Charing Cross Road
by Helene Hanff), both horrified that the other had not yet read such a staggering work of literary perfection.

One afternoon in the first week of October when Lola was feeling particularly generous toward my cause, she announced that she needed Grace and me to model as guides for cartoons she was drawing for art class. The three of us went out into the empty football field at dusk, Lola with her camera around her neck, and proceeded to take a set of progressively more ridiculous photographs. They weren't as animated as La wanted them—Grace couldn't do the
Dirty Dancing
–style pose with her injury—but we all ended up collapsed in a laughing fit on the grass by the end of it.

“You owe me big-time,” Lola said the next morning before class, pressing a photograph to my chest as she stalked past my locker. It was a candid moment captured in black and white. Me with my eyes closed, my head tilted downward, a small smile playing on my lips. Grace had her arm slung around my neck and was looking directly into the camera, in the middle of a laugh that crinkled her nose. I'd never seen her smile so wide. I hadn't known she was capable.

I quickly hid the picture in my biology textbook, sure that if Grace ever caught me with it, she'd file a restraining order. But when I got to the newspaper office in the afternoon,
something had changed. It took me a few minutes to figure out what. There was a small rectangle taped to the glass in front of Grace's desk. A photograph. I had to get out of my chair and go over to it to see what it was. A blond girl and a dark-haired boy captured in gray scale, the girl kissing the boy's cheek while he grinned, his chin grasped loosely in her hand. They didn't look like us. Not a lanky, awkward kid and an unwashed tomboy who walked with a cane. Lola had captured something I'd never seen in either of us before.

We were characters out of a movie.

We were thoroughly alive.

And we were absolutely beautiful.

•   •   •

“I think I need a pseudonym,” I said that Thursday, talking to Grace across our office. “I don't know, it feels like now that I'm so busy and important as editor, I shouldn't really be writing under my own name.” We still had not, in fact, managed to be particularly productive. The Plastic Stapler's Revenge had finally been interviewed by an overenthusiastic junior, Galaxy Nguyen (he'd been allowed to choose his own name when he came over from China as a kid—badass), and we had a handful of articles submitted by our three other volunteer writers (usually covering topics they were unsettlingly passionate about, like Magic: The Gathering or cats).