Our Chemical Hearts (9 page)

Still, there was no need to panic yet.

“I accept the challenge of finding you an incredible nom de plume,” Grace said with a small, seated bow. And that is
how, some fifteen minutes later, I started composing my first article under the name of Randy Knupps (I'd bargained Grace down from Randy Nips, which Hink, although naïve, probably would've picked up on). But it was the moment she said, “I wanna get in on this pseudonym business. Maybe we can make it a family affair? I'll be Dusty Knupps, your Knupply wife, and Lola can be Candy Knupps, our Knupply daughter,” that got my heart pulling two beats a second.

“The Knupps family newspaper. I like it.”

“Actually, you know what? I think I'm ready to take our relationship to the next level.”

“Oh?” I said, my heart beating so fast I couldn't discern one beat from the next.

“I think it's time we gave Lola a little brother or sister. Let's adopt a fish.”

So we spent the rest of the day preparing for the arrival of our adopted aquatic baby. Lola made it a grand fishy palace out of clay in art class, Grace and I went to the pet store and bought it a tank and a water plant, and we even drew up a custody agreement, stating that our as of yet unnamed fish child would live at the office during the week and then at Grace's and my houses on alternating weekends.

In the evening, the three of us broke into the abandoned train station, and Grace used her skills as a fish whisperer (i.e., she fed them lots of bread) to gather a school of quicksilver bodies at the foot of the stairs.

“I am Grace of House Town, mother of gill-bearing aquatic
animals,” she said as she slipped the net we'd bought at the pet store into the water and scooped up a small, shimmering fish.

“What should we call it?” I said as Grace transferred it into a plastic bag already filled with basement water.

“It looks like a he,” Lola said, taking the bag from Grace and examining the fish swimming lazily inside. “An exotic, fabulous male. Let's call him Ricky Martin.”

“Ricky Martin
Knupps
,” I corrected. “Don't exclude your brother like that, La.”

Ricky Martin Knupps, tragically, didn't live out the night. It turned out that the clay Lola had used to make his grand palace wasn't exactly fish-safe, and we found him floating belly-up in the morning, already long gone from this world.

“It's me,” I whispered when Grace showed me his tiny corpse. “It's my fault. There's a fish-killing curse upon my family.”

“He's with Toby and Gloria now,” La said, resting a hand on my shoulder.

Grace carried RMK in a Tupperware container in her backpack until lunchtime, and we held a small yet solemn funeral for him under the bleachers, all of us humming “Livin' la Vida Loca” as we filled in his tiny grave, which is marked to this day with a fishing hook (poor taste, I know).

After scrubbing out the tank and ditching the murder castle in favor of several more plants and some aquarium-safe Ewok figurines, we finally brought home our forever baby,
Ricky Martin Knupps II, also captured from the train station fishpond.

“He has your eyes,” Grace said as we all sat in the office and watched him swim around his new nontoxic home.

“He has your fins and gills,” I said, and the playfulness of the situation sent a surge of adrenaline through me and I reached out and held her hand, like new parents might, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“You guys are really fucking weird,” Lola said.

“You're going to be a great dad to Ricky Martin Knupps II,” Grace said, her fingers still knotted with mine. I wondered, in that moment, if it was possible for human beings to go supernova—my atoms felt like they were emitting a shock wave of heat and light as they came unstuck from each other. “Let's never tell him about the first Ricky Martin Knupps, though.”

After that, I decided unconscious body language was bullshit, probably dreamed up by some crackpot psychologist that'd been dead for half a century (I'm looking at you, Freud). Grace never really gave me any solid hints that she
like
liked me, and she never asked me to hang out alone again like we had the first night we went to the abandoned train station. But she drove me home every day after school. And on the weekends we texted constantly, even though we didn't see each other.

So body language must be crap. It didn't matter that she didn't unconsciously cross her legs toward me; she
consciously
held my hand as we watched the fish swim around his bowl, for much longer than she needed to, the pad of her thumb moving back and forth across my skin.

Fake family noms de plume and adopted pets were what really counted, and in the world of Randy Knupps, Grace was already my wife and the mother of our fabulous aquatic child, Ricky Martin Knupps II.

THE DECISION TO
engage the services of Madison Carlson, supersleuth/interschool rumrunner, came about on a Tuesday in the second week of October, after Murray had failed to hear from his ex-girlfriend for nine consecutive days, and playing “Wonderwall” (very poorly) on his guitar outside her house had resulted not in reconciliation but several phone calls to the police and a low-speed foot chase through suburbia.

Sugar Gandhi, the love of Murray's life (who'd broken up with him at the end of junior year), was a girl actually named Seeta Ganguly, whose name he'd either misheard entirely or flat-out refused to pronounce. Either way, he'd taken to calling her Sugar Gandhi (I was 99 percent sure it was super racist, but Sugar Gandhi had insisted we call her that after she'd heard it for the first time, so I
guess
it was okay?) and so had we. Their relationship had been brief—five months of Murray learning to cook biryani and samosas, and “You're a top sheila, honest” posted to her Facebook wall on a fairly regular basis.

Alas, as teenage relationships are wont to do, their grand love story didn't last. Seeta told Murray her parents wanted her to date a “nice Indian boy” (this was, I suspect, an elaborate lie inspired by
Bend It Like Beckham
, constructed in order to spare Murray his feelings).

Muz had been trying to win her back ever since, but to do that, he needed insider information. Enter Madison Carlson.

Of all the girls in our high school, Madison was the most terrifying, the most blond, the most curvy, the girl who made you feel the shittiest about yourself just by existing because girls like her and guys like you were creatures from different tiers of the animal kingdom. Her Instagram account had an absurd amount of followers, and designers sent her free stuff all the time, and she flew to New York every month to do fashion shoots and have meetings with Very Important People. Rumor had it she already made more money than her parents and was going to pay for her college degree outright.

“Uh,” I said when I approached her at her locker on Tuesday morning.

“Hey,” said Madison, giving me a weird look, which I suppose was warranted considering my smooth greeting.

“Christ, Henry, you're never gonna cop a root at this rate,” Murray said, elbowing me out of the way before taking Madison's hand and curtsying deeply. “Miss Carlson. Like a boomerang, I keep coming back to you.”

“What do you want?” Madison said.

“Intel. From East River. Price is no object, and by that I
mean we have eight dollars and seventy-five cents between us and will happily treat you to a supersized meal at a fast-food chain of your choosing.”

“You want
gossip
? We aren't in middle school, Murray. I don't do that anymore.”

“Mads. Mate. You still date that clodhopper of a bloke that goes there—which is a travesty, by the way—so that means you know a thing or two. Seeta Ganguly. Senior at East River. Suss out the sitch with her love life. Your payment”—Murray slipped something into Madison's jeans pocket—“will be lucrative.”

Madison took out the folded paper and inspected it. “This is an expired coupon for Pizza Hut.”

“There's plenty more where that came from.” Murray leaned in and whispered close to Madison's ear. “Rendezvous tomorrow afternoon at your locker. You know where it is. Oh, and if anyone asks—we were never here.” Murray walked backward into the crowd then, and tried to do one of those Jason Bourne disappearing-into-thin-air tricks, but we both saw him dive into the girls' bathroom.

“He's not funny,” Madison said. “Can you please tell him that he's not funny?”

“Sorry you had to witness that.”

“I'll ask about Seeta. And tell Murray I actually broke up with Sean, like, two months ago.”

“Sure. Uh, an
d . . 
. could you also mayb
e . . 
. Grace Town. Murray wants to know why she left East River.”

“Murray wants to know, does he?”

“He's a passionately curious man.”

Madison closed her locker. “I'll see what I can do.”

Approximately twenty-four hours later (Madison Carlson really didn't screw around when it came to gossip), we were back in front of her locker.

“Did you speak to Seeta?” Murray said. “Has she taken a lover? Who must I kill?”

“When I talked to her, she mentioned a psychotic Australian ex-boyfriend who her dad called the cops on, but apart from that, no, Seeta is single,” said Madison.

“Everything's coming up Milhouse.”

“You're going to go to jail, Murray. Your obsession isn't romantic, it's disturbing.”

“Hey, it was her old man who called the cops, not her. She messaged me and said she wanted to talk, but then her folks confiscated her phone.”

“Whatever.”

“And Grace?” I said.

“Leave her alone, Henry. Trust me. You don't want to get mixed up in that.”

“Now come on, Mads,” Murray said. “Don't be cliché. You know your reluctance to divulge information is only going to make us more inquisitive. Help the plot move a little faster and spill the bloody beans already.”

“All I know is that her family's screwed up, and there was something about a car accident a few months ago. That's everything, okay?”

“For your time,” Murray said as he handed Madison another Pizza Hut coupon.

“Wow, this one is actually still valid.”

“Don't say I never get you anything nice.”

Madison sighed and looked from the coupon to me and then back again. “Definitely don't go to the East River track around nine p.m. on Tuesday nights. You definitely won't see anything there.”

“East River track. Nine p.m. on Tuesday. Thanks,” I said. “Hey, while we're her
e . . 
. would you wanna write for the newspaper? We need something along the lines of a
Gossip Girl
–style column.”

“I'd rather write film reviews or something.”

“Oh yeah? What would you want to review?”

“Modern classics, maybe?
Fight Club
,
Inception
,
The Matrix
,
Pulp Fiction
. All the good ones.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Did Lola put you up to this?”

“Up to what?”

“Uh. Never mind. That'd be awesome. No rush, we don't go to print until early December. Thanks.”

“Yeah, thanks, cobber,” Murray said. He clapped her on the back.

“I hate you both,” said Madison, but her gaze lingered on Murray for a heartbeat too long, and I got the distinct impression that Madison Carlson did not hate him—not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.

•   •   •

It came that Wednesday evening. The first ever personal message from Grace, unprompted and not about the newspaper, popped up on my phone as I caught a bus home from Murray's place close to midnight.

GRACE TOWN:

I'd been to see
The Lion King
musical with Sadie and Ryan the night before. I'd only mentioned it to Grace once, in passing, maybe a week ago. It'd been a fun night. After the show we'd posed with a statue of Rafiki and gone to a place that made ice cream with liquid nitrogen near the theater in the city.

“Look, Henwee, look!” Ryan had said when the lady handed him a paper bowl of mint ice cream bigger than his head. “Life is grand,” he'd said very seriously as he inspected his dessert. Sadie and I had almost fallen over laughing.

HENRY PAGE:

And then, on Thursday, like a miracle descending from the heavens, there came news of The Party. (Much like World War I, it only became known as The Party later on in the year. Before it had actually occurred, The Party [i.e., WWI] was known as Heslin's Party [i.e., the Great War].) Heslin's Party/The Party began as a rumor that escalated to a lunchtime conversation topic that escalated to a full-fledged event when James Heslin made it Facebook official less than twenty-four hours after the initial speculation had begun. The whole year was invited, along with half the juniors (the hot, female half, naturally). Us seniors, despite the occasional personality clash, generally all got along pretty well. Maybe we were an anomalous bunch, or maybe high school movies have been lying to us all along, but all I know is that the “jocks” sometimes hung out with the “nerds” and that most people were nice to most other people most of the time.

Anyway, The Party, to be held on Friday night, was all anyone was talking about for the rest of the day. Lola and Murray were going, naturally. La's girlfriend, Georgia, was even driving over from the next town to attend. I wasn't much for parties normally, but this one. This one.

I wanted desperately for Grace Town to go and I wanted to sit with her all night while music thumped through my chest, away from the quiet, fishbowl room that was our office and the quiet, boyish room that was Grace's car.

I opened the Notes app on my phone, and under the second draft I wrote:

Draft Three

Because I never realized that you could fall in love with humans the same way you fall in love with songs. How the tune of them could mean nothing to you at first, an unfamiliar melody, but quickly turn into a symphony carved across your skin; a hymn in the web of your veins; a harmony stitched into the lining of your soul.