Our Chemical Hearts

by Krystal Sutherland

  “Why?” Murray said.

  “I think I like her.” It wasn’t easy for me to say. It wasn’t something I’d normally admit to. Maybe, because it was senior year, I wanted some scandal. Not “contracting an STD from my shared love interest and earning the nickname the Trichomoniasis Trio” levels of scandal, but something. I was always on the outskirts of the teenage drama, always listening to Lola’s and Murray’s stories of love found and love lost, but I was never a participant.

  For the first time, I wanted in. For the first time, someone might be worth it.

  “Oh boy,” Lola said.

  Muz wiped a fake tear from his eye. “I’ve waited so long for this auspicious moment. Our little ankle biter finally becomes a man.”

  “What do I do?” I said.

  “Does she like you? I mean, could you see something happening?” Lola said.

  “Well, she did take me to her secret fishpond and talk to me about death. Maybe, in her brain, that means she’s super into me?”

  “Not necessarily. If she is an MPDG, she probably takes everyone there.”

  “Grace isn’t a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, okay? If she were, she would wear sundresses and have bangs and ride a Dutch bike with baguettes in the basket and smile a lot. She’s not quirky; she’s straight-up weird. Actually, I think she might be depressed.”

  “Okay, lover boy, I wasn’t trying to insult you.”

  I didn’t tell La what I was really thinking: that Grace had turned up at school that morning in the same clothes she’d worn last night, her hair a nest piled at the top of her skull, her eyes rimmed red and puffy from a sleepless night. Girls who lied about having family in the city and occasionally slept in the streets hardly seemed capable of fitting the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype.

  Murray swung his arm over my shoulder. “Look, mate. The most important thing is to not be too hasty. You get one opportunity with this. You balls it up and you’ll be in some strife. Give it time. You only met her a week ago. Just assess the situation. Take note of her body language. Get to know her before you crack onto her, right?”

  “That is strangely the wisest thing you’ve ever said,” said Lola.

  “As we’d say Down Under, there’s no point pushing shit uphill with a rubber fork on a hot day.”

  “Are these real Australian sayings or do you come up with this stuff yourself?” I said.

  “It’s genetic,” Muz said, grinning. “We’re born with it already in our blood.”

  “And what’s this crap about ‘I go somewhere in the afternoons’?” Lola said. “What does that even mean?”

  I shrugged. “No idea. She gets out of the car, wanders down the street, and disappears. Two or three hours later, the car vanishes too. I don’t know if she comes back for it or if someone else drives it away or what.”

  “That’s some enigmatic fuckery right there,” Murray said.

  “Grace Town is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” I said.

  “We could solve it. I mean, I know we ain’t no Madison Carlson, but we could give it a red-hot go.”

  “We could,” La said slowly. “Follow her. See where she goes. Suss out the sitch.”

  “That’s a bit Christian Grey–ish, don’t you think?” I said.

  “Dude, you aren’t gonna sniff her hair while she sleeps. We’re just gonna trail her for five minutes to see where she goes. She might be visiting her boyfriend or something.” I could tell by the way Murray enunciated the word boyfriend that he knew the mere mention of a possible lover would be enough for me to agree. He was right.

  “Seventeen goddamn years without peer pressure and suddenly I get smacked down with it twice in two days. Fine. Let’s get our creep on.”

  Muz clapped his hands. “It’s settled, then. Tomorrow afternoon, after school, we shall be parked and ready in a car outside your house to begin our stealth operation.”

  “I’m the only one with a license, though,” I pointed out, “and I very much intend to be hiding on the floor of the backseat. So which one of you cretins, exactly, is going to drive?”

  “Don’t worry,” Lola said, unlocking her phone. “I have a brilliant idea.”

  • • •

  “I. Cannot. Fucking. Believe I let you talk me into this,” Sadie said from the driver’s seat as I scrabbled into the foot well of the backseat of her SUV. Lola and Murray were already strapped in and ready to go. “I’m a twenty-nine-year-old neuroscientist and I’m aiding and abetting my teenage hoodlum brother to stalk his disabled crush. What went so drastically wrong in my life?”

  “Dude, what shoes are you wearing, pointed rodeo boots with spurs?” I said to Murray as he pulled the door closed and I tried to get comfortable on his feet, which was difficult, because his shoes were trying to eviscerate my kidneys.

  “They’re kicks, bro, calm your tits. Stop being dramatic and sit next to me.”

  “Never! I must protect my identity. La, I really wish you’d climb in the back so Grace can’t see you.”

  “And miss seeing this train wreck unfold firsthand? Not likely,” Lola said.

  I twisted around, unable to find a spot that didn’t feel like I was being filleted. “Ugh, Sadie, just drive!”

  “Patience, John Hinckley Jr. 2.0, we’re following a girl who walks with a cane,” said Sadie as she started the car and slowly pulled away from the curb.

  I conceded to being uncomfortable for the entire trip and rested my cheek in the dirty foot well. “I swear I’m not going to shoot the president anytime soon.”

  “Say what you will, but if you book flights to Washington and start watching a lot of Jodie Foster movies, we will report you to the NSA,” Lola said.

  “What’s happening?” I said as the car rolled to a slow stop. “Can you see her?”

  “Yeah, she’s right up ahead. Just picked a few flowers from someone’s front garden. Freakin’ MPDGs.” I could practically hear Lola shaking her head. “Don’t worry, I don’t think she’s gonna shake us.”

  “I’m more worried about her seeing us than shaking us.”

  “If we get busted, we’ll tell the cops that Sadie is obsessed with Grace and made us come along for the ride so she could slaughter us all in some kind of violent Satanic ritual.”

  “Oh, ha-ha,” Suds said. “I hate you all, bunch of little weirdos.”

  “Sounds like something a Satanist would say. Do you frequently have congress with the beast or is it on more of a casual basis?”

  Sadie mussed Lola’s hair. La laughed and swatted her away.

  “Damn, she’s taking a shortcut,” Murray said. “Where does that alley lead?”

  “Only thing on the other side of the alley is the cemetery,” Sadie said.

  Murray jabbed me in the ribs. “I flippin’ knew it! She goes to a boneyard every afternoon? We’re dealing with some kind of genre fiction here for sure. Anybody wanna stack bets? What do we think? Is she a vampire? A ghost? One of those new age zombies that can love?”

  “I’ll wager ten dollars on fallen angel,” Sadie said. “They’re so hot right now.”

  “I’m gonna go out on a limb here. What’s mermaid paying, Muz?” Lola said.

  “Mermaids don’t live in graveyards, you bloody drongo.”

  “Fine. Demon mermaid from hell who haunts the cemetery swamp that floods whenever it rains. What are the odds?”

  “One hundred thousand to one.”

  “Excellent. Put me down for ten. Can almost taste dem dolla dolla bills.”

  “What about you, lover boy?” Murray said, leaning down. “What do you think your girl is? Witch? Alien? Werewolf? . . . Weredropbear?”

  “Weredrop what?” Lola said.

  “Real problem back home. Sydney’s bloody infested with ’em. Everyone walks ’round with Vegemite rubbed behind their ears to keep from gett
ing mauled. It’s a flippin’ tragedy, the amount of good blokes and sheilas we’ve lost to weardropbearism.”

  I lifted my head from the foot well. “Would you all please shut up and remember that we’re on a very serious intelligence gathering slash stalking mission? Suds, go around to the end of Beauchamp Road—we can catch her on the other side.”

  “Way ahead of you, pipsqueak,” Sadie said as I felt the car cut a wide U-turn onto the appropriately yet unimaginatively named Cemetery Drive.

  “There it is,” Lola said. “The dead center of town.”

  “I hear people are dying to get in,” Murray said.

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I hear everyone inside is pretty stiff.”

  “There she is,” Lola said, smacking my shoulder. “Henry, get up, she’s far enough away that she won’t see us.”

  Murray yanked me up from the foot well by my coat and—with much effort and grunting—I eventually sat up beside him. Grace was a little ways away, walking along a row of headstones, the cluster of motley garden flowers grasped in her left hand. She’d taken her knit cap off and let her hair out so that the breeze caught it and it reflected the afternoon light and took on the color of sour buttercream. She stopped and tucked a wayward strand behind her ear and knelt at a grave that was already garlanded with dozens of blooms in various stages of decomposition. And then she sunk down into the grass on her stomach, her head resting on one arm, her fingers twirling blades of grass, her feet kicked up behind her. Even at this distance I could see her lips moving—Grace was talking, singing maybe, to an invisible someone beneath the earth.

  All of us sat transfixed for a minute, sedated by the stillness that comes with seeing an intensely private moment that doesn’t belong to you. Then Sadie shook her head and put the car into drive. “We weren’t meant to see this, Henry. This wasn’t for us.”

  I nodded. “Take us home, Suds.”

  • • •

  I sat on the front windowsill all afternoon, reading a book and watching a storm roll in, waiting for the mystery of the disappearing car to be solved. Just after sunset, when the sky was bruised with a lightning storm, a car slowed in front of our house. I watched through the glass as a short bald man got out of the passenger side and ran through the rain to Grace’s Hyundai. As he opened the door, he looked up, saw me looking at him, and raised his hand. I mirrored his gesture. The man nodded and got into the car and turned it around and drove off into the bucketing downpour, his brake lights like a demon’s eyes in the darkness.

  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 freakin
g 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.