Our Chemical Hearts (20 page)

When I got there, I almost didn't spot them because it was dark and Madison was lying down as well, using Murray's lower back as a pillow.

“I thought I might as well get comfortable while I waited for you,” she said.

“Sugar Gandhi really has a new boyfriend?” I said.

“If you're referring to Seeta, a) yes and b) that is incredibly racist.”

“How bad is he?”

“Watch this.” Madison stood and proceeded to kick Murray in the legs, to which he didn't react.

“Jesus, woman, stop. Don't kick a man when he's down.” I poked him in the neck to make sure he was still warm, which
he was. “Muz, buddy?” When he didn't respond, I instructed Madison to grab his legs as I took him by the shoulders and turned him over. Murray's eyes were open, staring unblinkingly at the night sky. I squeezed his cheeks together until he had fish lips.

“How you doing, man?” I said.

“Oh, hey, Henry. I didn't see you there,” he said without looking at me, his cheeks still squished together.

“You wanna maybe sit up?”

“Oh no, I'm gonna lie here until I decompose and carrion birds pick apart my innards.”

“I don't think the groundskeepers are gonna let that fly.”

“Drag me under the grandstand, then. Bury me next to Ricky Martin Knupps.”

“Is he high?” Madison asked. “Did you take something, Murray?”

“No, we buried a fish under the bleachers,” I explained. “It's a long story.”

“Racist fish murderers. Nice.”

Then someone shouted my name from across the field and a small, dark body sprinted toward us through the night. Lola skidded on the grass to Muz's side and took his head in her hands and turned it this way and that as she pushed his hair back and inspected him for injuries. “What happened? Do you have a concussion? Should I call an ambulance?” she said frantically.

“Not unless the docs can fix broken hearts,” Murray said.

Lola looked up at Madison and me, frowning.

“Seeta Ganguly,” Madison said in explanation, “has a boyfriend.”

“He's not even Indian!” Murray wailed. “His name's Taylor Messenger! Her parents don't care who she dates!”

“Your message,” La said, narrowing her eyes at me, “said he was hurt.”

“I said he
might
be hurt. Besides,” I said, gesturing to Murray's slumped form, “heartbroken is a kind of hurt.”

“The fucking pair of you.” Lola smacked the back of Murray's head as she stood. “I'm sick to goddamn death of all this hormonal teenage
bullshit
. You.” Lola jabbed her finger in my direction. “You will get your shit together. You will hand your essays in when they're due. You will
stop
obsessing about a girl who never asked you to love her.”

I nodded without speaking.

“And you,” Lola said, turning on Murray with even more ferocity. “It's been months. Frankly I find your behavior deplorable. Leave her alone. You're better than this.”

Murray started crying then, and proceeded to vomit in his own lap.

“Can we go to your party now?” said Madison.

“No! No parties for any of you! Get up off the ground right now, Murray Finch, or so help me Go
d . . 
.” Sobbing and covered in vomit that smelled strongly of tequila, Muz fumbled his way to his feet. La pushed his hair out of his eyes, not unkindly.
“We're going to get some Burger King, we're all going to sober up, and then we're going to Henry's house to do something productive with our lives.”

An hour and two Burger King meals later, I was sitting cross-legged beneath the elk head in my basement, twirling a cold onion ring around my finger. I had a dictionary in my lap, Lola was using a random word generator on the iMac, and Murray was browsing Urban Dictionary on his phone. Madison Carlson, who'd silently followed us back to my house (quite likely in fear of Lola's wrath if she tried to escape), was asleep in my bed. Which is not a place I ever imagined I would see teen goddess Madison Carlson. I tried not to notice the way her black jeans clung to the curves of her hips, or the way her hair fanned out across my sheets, or the way she smelled of vanilla and soft spices, the very antithesis of everything that was Grace Town.

“Survey say
s . . 
.
costumed
,” Lola said, who'd decided the best use of our Saturday night was to try and salvage the newspaper, which I already knew at this point was beyond salvaging, because it was too late to put together anything decent. “That could actually work. You could do articles about the masks we wear as high schoolers and other kinds of deep shit.”

“No, shh, this is way better,” Muz said. “You should make the theme ‘species dysphoria.' A feeling that one is in the body of the wrong species. We could finally address my transspecies desire to become a dragon. Think of the possible articles: ‘Six
Degrees of Smaug.' ‘Puff the Magic Dragon Gives First Post-Rehab Interview.' ‘Falkor the Luck Dragon: How the Story Finally Ended.'”

“Don't trivialize transspeciesism,” Lola said.

“Don't doubt me being dragon kin.”

Then Murray started crying again, so we stopped trying to save the newspaper I'd probably singlehandedly destroyed with my wantonness and put our energy into half inflating an air mattress, which we slept on together, the three of us curled around each other.

“Sorry we ruined your birthday, La,” I whispered to her, but she pressed her fingers to my lips and shook her head.

And I thought, even though the pain of wanting a girl who didn't exist had burrowed into my bones and infected the soft tissue of my lungs, that things could definitely be a lot worse.

THE NEXT TWO WEEKS
melted together in a blur of catching up on schoolwork, missing newspaper meetings with Hink, changing weather, and absence. The absence of orange leaves, for one, as fall went from “pumpkin spice everything” to “my entire Facebook newsfeed is one giant Ned Stark meme.”

And second, the absence of Grace Town.

“Where's that weird girlfriend of yours? Haven't seen her around here for a while,” said Sadie one afternoon as Murray, Lola, Madison Carlson (a strange new development), and I walked in the front door. La quickly did the “cut it out” hand motion across her neck, but it was too late. “Oh, shit.” Sadie bit her lip. “Sorry, kid. Did you and Grace break up?”

“We don't use the
G
-word anymore,” Murray said. “Please refer to her henceforth as She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

“Grace would've had to have been my girlfriend for us to break up,” I told Sadie as I unraveled the scarf from around my neck and hung it up.

“Dude, it's
She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named
,” Murray said. “Christ. Get it right.”

“What happened?” Sadie said.

The problem was, I wasn't really sure what'd happened. I knew I'd screwed up big-time by going into Dom's house, but I hadn't expected Grace to evaporate. I wanted to apologize to her, to pull her aside and say all the things I hadn't been able to say out loud, but Grace had stopped appearing outside my locker after school. Grace had stopped appearing, period.

The few times she bothered to turn up for class, our teachers, too, seemed determined to keep us apart.

“Hey,” I whispered to her in the second week, when she finally returned to drama and reclaimed her perch at the back of the room. “I've missed you.”

“Henry, pay attention, please,” Mrs. Beady said. “You can't afford to miss learning about Bertolt Brecht's dramatic theory.” Beady pointed to where the rest of the class was sitting at the foot of the stage. “Over here.”

“Can I talk to you after school?” I whispered as I stood. Grace Town looked at me but said nothing, and after school she was already gone.

I drove past her house sometimes when Mom let me borrow the car, but her Hyundai was never in the drive. I rode my bike by the cemetery in the afternoons, hoping to catch her laying flowers at Dom's grave, but—although fresh blooms appeared almost every day—I never saw her there. There was evidence of her everywhere. Sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of
the back of her head in the cafeteria, or find that someone had fed Ricky Martin Knupps II when I forgot, or
Seen 5:50 p.m.
,
Seen 11:34 a.m.
,
Seen 8:05 p.m.
would appear under the messages I sent her asking where she was, but she was never there. Not really. Not ever.

Grace Town had become the ghost she wanted to be, and the absence of her—the gouge wound she left behind when she ripped herself from my life—made my breath catch.

“Was she real?” I asked Lola one afternoon. We were sitting out on the football field with a flask of hot chocolate, watching thin clouds slip overhead. “Or did I make her up?”

“Christ, you're so melodramatic,” she said, flicking hot chocolate at me.

It was the smell, more than anything, that killed my soul bit by bit. The scent of her in my sheets, on my clothes, hanging heavily in the newspaper office. It made something inside me crumple in an explosive decompression every time I could smell her close by but not see her. There was a momentary temptation, no more than the space of a heartbeat, where I'd considered never washing anything I owned again, just to savor what I had left of her. But then, no. God no. Dom's room, Dom's tomb—I couldn't. So I stripped my bedding. Washed all my clothes. Avoided the office (and Mr. Hink) at all costs.

The bus was almost as bad. I'd only caught it a couple of times in the last few months, and hadn't been expecting to catch it that first afternoon Grace failed to materialize outside my locker. It was loud and cramped and smelled like a time
before her; smelled like her absence. There was no seat for me anymore, so I had to sit with a freshman girl at the front, who glared at me the entire way to my stop.

•   •   •

I shrugged at Sadie. “I probably fucked everything up.”

“Language, Henry,” said Dad from the kitchen. He was cooking tacos with Ryan, who was sitting on his shoulders and pulling at Dad's hair to direct him like the rat from
Ratatouille
.

“Can't you fix it?” Sadie said.

“I don't think so. I think she's gone.”

The four of us went down to the basement. Ever since the night Madison Carlson had slept at my house, Murray had started ironing his clothes and attempting to comb his wild hair, which made him look like he was getting ready to sit for his yearbook photo sometime in the mid-eighties. He was playing (and losing to) Madison in
Mario Kart
when all of our phones dinged at once. Lola checked hers first. Her face fell and her eyes darted up to meet mine.

The notification was from Grace Town, to attend her birthday party at the Thanksgiving fair on Saturday. A hundred or so people had been invited, most of them from East River. La launched out of her chair, but I pressed “Going” before she could snatch my phone out of my hands.

Lola sighed and shook her head. “There's a storm coming,” she said, even though my weather app predicted little more than light rain.

THE END OF NOVEMBER
brought with it an influx of eccentric relatives who came from all the far-flung corners of the country to a) attend the annual Thanksgiving weekend craft fair, b) eat all our food, and c) make my life a living hell.

Normally the parasites got free run of the house at Thanksgiving, meaning they usually set up their camp in the basement and kicked me out to sleep upstairs, but seeing as it was senior year and I had so much studying to do, the parasites had (much to their disgust) been relegated to sleeping in Sadie's old bedroom and on air mattresses in the living room.

The visitors included:

• My grandmother on Dad's side, Erica Page, a terrifying woman who'd supposedly been a spy during the Cold War and had a shady past she refused to talk about.
  
• Grandma's boyfriend, Harold, a meek, pleasant landscape architect who'd been following Erica around saying little more than “yes, dear” for the last decade.
  
• Dad's brother, Michael.
  
• Uncle Michael's “housemate,” Albert.
  
• Mom's sister, Juliette, and three of her five children, all of whom were named after fictional animals. Pongo, Duchess, and Otis were supposedly still too young to be left at home alone (even though Pongo was almost my age). Bagheera and Aslan had purposefully chosen colleges on the opposite side of the country to make the facilitation of easy travel impossible. Aunty Jules still couldn't understand why they never came home for the holidays, even after they legally changed their names to Bradley and Asher.
  
• Lola's aunt and uncle, Wing and Richard, who were inexplicably staying at our house this year instead of at Lola's. Plus their two kids, Sarah and Brodie.
  

Thanksgiving dinner went how most Thanksgiving dinners go in the Page household (or any household, for that matter). Albert left in tears after Uncle Michael introduced him to Lola's relatives as his “long-term housemate.” Aunt Juliette overcooked the turkey and also decided that halfway through the main meal was the perfect time to ask Pongo if he'd ever smoked pot. And Granny Page, when giving a demonstration
of what she'd been learning at her local YMCA, managed to knock Brodie momentarily unconscious with a Wiffle Ball bat.

But the cops weren't called and Uncle Nick, Juliette's ex, didn't show up at our house and break his restraining order this year, so it was pretty much a resounding success.

Black Friday brought with it another Page family tradition: going to stores at five a.m. in an attempt to satisfy all our most intense capitalist cravings in one day. Unfortunately, this was also the tradition of almost every other family in town. We all nearly got trampled in a small stampede, there'd been an altercation with pepper spray that left our eyes burning, Brodie had gone missing for several hours, and there were news reports that someone had been stabbed in a department store, but I got a GoPro and an animatronic Yoda for 85 percent off, so yay consumerism, I guess.

By Friday night, I'd taken to barricading myself in the basement to escape the upstairs carnage and questions from my aunt and grandmother about why I looked so glum.

“I see his skinny jeans and his long hair,” I overheard Grandma telling my parents. “He's been indoctrinated into an emo circle, that's the problem. I read all about them on the computers at the YMCA.”

“Oh no,” said Mom. “He's actually practicing Satanism.” Which shut Grandma up pretty quick.

Then it was Saturday. Cold. Dark. Miserable. Appropriate for Grace's birthday. Time for the oncoming storm: the Thanksgiving fair.

Although the craft fair had originally been designed to showcase livestock and fall produce, it had—since its inception some seventy years before—been a favorite annual social event of teens across the city. Something about the crisp, cool air, the twinkling carnival lights, and the scent of deep-fried food provided the perfect atmosphere for reckless teenage abandon.

I spent most of the day getting ready. Normally I didn't give much of a crap about how I looked, but tonigh
t . . .
Tonight it seemed important to look as attractive as possible. I got my hair cut short. I bought a new jacket—gray marl—new black skinny jeans, and a new black scarf. I didn't wear my dad's old clothes, but the expensive wool coat my parents had given me as an early Christmas present. I shined my shoes. I combed and parted and slicked down my new hair. I plucked a wayward strand from my eyebrow. By the evening, I looked like a different Henry. An older Henry, from an age long past.

I wrapped the present I'd bought for Grace as I waited for Lola and the others to arrive. In the end, I'd settled on a book as her gift, a kids' book called
You Are Stardust
by Elin Kelsey. It wasn't exactly metaphorical; the paper didn't represent the fragility of life or our relationship or anything like that. It was just something I thought she'd like.

I enclosed it in brown paper, a tradition started with Murray years ago after he'd watched
The Sound of Music
for the first time. We never gave each other cards. Instead we drew on the wrapping paper, sometimes deep and meaningful quotes, sometimes random patterns, sometimes Abe Lincoln riding
a velociraptor into battle. It varied. (For instance, this year Lola's had been the Magic: The Gathering symbols. She was not impressed.)

I thought about poetry at first, some romantic or moving quote, but it didn't fit. So I sketched Walter White in black pencil, the same rough image the Salamanca cousins used in
Breaking Bad
, and wrote “Happy Heisenbirthday, bitch” underneath.

“Holy,”
said a voice from the stairs. I turned to find Lola in her usual ASOS garb, looking like she'd time traveled here from the late nineties. “Henry, you look
hot
. Like,
super
hot. I don't normally find the male species attractive, but
damn
.”

“Your tone of absolute surprise is not good for my self-confidence.”

“Do a little turn for me, sugar tits.”

“How dare you treat me like an object,” I said, but I stood and turned for her and she whistled.

“You're a dapper young lady-killer.”

Then Georgia and Muz arrived and brought Pongo downstairs and we started playing Never Have I Ever with vodka shots, but by sunset my nerves were still getting the better of me, so I snuck a bottle of red wine from my parents' liquor cabinet and took it back to the basement and drank a glass. When that did nothing to calm my nerves, I drank another glass, and a third, until it was time to go and almost the whole bottle was gone. By the time we got there and the cool, pink-tinged light of sunset was settling over the fairground, we were all swaying,
drunk not only on booze but on the magical possibility of the night ahead.

La interlocked her arm with mine as we made our way into the fairground. “Are you ready for this?” she said.

“No.”

“What do you think she'll be like?”

“I can never predict what she's going to do. All her East River friends are going to be here, so I assume I'll say hello and happy birthday and that'll be it. That's all I want to do, really. Let's just have fun, La. You and me against the world. Screw the rest.”

“Sounds like a mighty fine plan, darling.”

I didn't know where Grace would be, only that she'd be here somewhere, surrounded by people I wouldn't recognize. The five of us made our way through the crowds toward the Ferris wheel, its multicolored baskets shining like hard candies in the evening light. The speakers of an antique carousel crackled out Glenn Miller's “Moonlight Serenade” while an old couple danced in line for fries at a food truck.

And as the music played, I saw her through the crowd. The people parted around us as if they could feel me staring at her.

Grace Town was not Grace Town.

She was dressed in a red coat with red lipstick on her lips. Her hair was washed and curled and honey blond and fell around her face in soft waves. There was color in her skin, like she'd been out in the sun all weekend. Blush on her cheeks, even, like she'd made a real effort with her appearance. I
could see what Lola meant when she said Grace looked like Edie Sedgwick. They both had that femme-fatale, might've-just-overdosed-on-heroin-and-been-brought-back-to-life-by-adrenaline look. She was set alight, shining, the stars that died to give her all the atoms that made her glowing from beyond the grave. I'd never seen anything so excruciatingly, heartbreakingly beautiful.

Grace was surrounded, as I knew she would be. I'd seen glimpses of the girl she'd been before—the type of girl who could fill a fairground with friends—but here was proof, in the flesh. Grace saw me staring then, and she smiled and beckoned me over.

“Henry,” whispered Lola, squeezing my arm. “Don't.”

“Look at her, Lola.”

“I
am
looking. All I see is bait.” I said nothing, but because La was my best friend, and because we'd known each other all our lives, she sighed and let me go. “Be careful.”

Grace and I walked toward each other through the crowd, our steps slower than the people bustling around us. Time seemed to slow, too, as if it were coated in honey, thick and sweet and golden.

“Look at you,” I said to her, and she smiled tiredly, the way she did.

“It's been a long time,” she said, smoothing out the red woolen fabric of her coat. I could tell from her lightness, the way her voice sounded so sweet and carefree, that she, too, was already drunk. “I hardly feel myself in these clothes.”

I ran my fingers across her cold cheek and Grace smiled and kissed my palm. “You're beautiful,” I said. “I missed you.”

“We can fix that.”

Then she took my hand and led me away from my friends and her friends. I'd expected to spend the evening at a distance from her, stealing glances across the fairground, maybe having a brief conversation. Now my hand was in hers, our fingers entwined, like they had been that one night we'd walked home from the movies together. The night I'd been sure we would be together.

It was like a montage out of a film, everything seen as if through a filter. We wandered the fairground for hours, me with my arm around her waist, and she didn't even seem to care that people would see us. That night, Grace was not Grace; she was effervescent, lighthearted, a character out of a book. We competed against each other at bumper cars. Fed each other cotton candy. At the top of the Ferris wheel, we took swigs of straight vodka from her flask. The city, sprawled out in the distance, looked small from up there, a collection of toy buildings in a tilt-shift photograph. I even won her a prize at the laughing clowns. And I lapped it up, every moment of it, thinking that this was how things would be from now on.

Grace took my hand again—God, why was it so easy for her to touch me when she'd been drinking?—and led me away from the crowds, down toward the empty field next to the Ferris wheel, where it was quieter and there were fewer people.

“I've changed my mind,” she said when we came to a stop.

My chest and face immediately started burning. My ears felt like they were on fire. For weeks I'd been working toward this moment, certain that it would never come, and now it was here and instead of feeling elated, I felt like I was going to vomit. I wanted so badly to stick to my guns, to make her feel bad for the weeks of hell she'd put me through when she chose her dead boyfriend over me.

You chose somebody else,
I said in my head, for the hundredth time.
How am I ever supposed to get over that?

But because she was beautiful and I wanted her so badly and here she was, finally saying the thing I desperately wanted her to say, I just said, “Grace, I really don'
t . . 
.” My voice trailed off and she started talking over the top of me and with every beautiful word that dripped from her mouth like poison, I grew sicker and sicker, like Murray had said I would, and wanted her more and more.

“I've never met anyone like you. I need you to know that,” she said. “I loved Dom, I really did, but there's something between us that there never was with him.”

“Grace.”

“I mean it, Henry. The way we get along, the chemistry we have. Dom and I were never like this. You're so special. The way we are togethe
r . . 
. After him, I never thought I'd give a shit about anyone again. I didn't
want
to give a shit about anyone again. But there you were. And I was afraid, because it was so soon after, but we work, Henry. God, I want you so badly, all the time.”

“I don't want to hear these things when you've been drinking. I want you to say them to me when you're sober.”

“I could see us together. Really together. I want to do this.”

“I want you to say these things to me tomorrow when you wake up. I want you to be sure.”

“And the way you handled seeing his room. I thought it would be shit, but the way you handled yourself made me want you more.”