Our Chemical Hearts

by Krystal Sutherland

  “What’s she doing?” said Muz as we watched her.

  Maybe it was because she was usually so pale and brittle—not fragile, not by a long shot, just hard somehow—but I’d never imagined her as capable of physical exertion. After she’d sprinted about one hundred feet, Grace stopped and screamed and pulled at her hair. She took up her cane from where it’d been cast trackside and hit it across her injured leg again and again and again before sinking to the ground in a sobbing heap. No wonder her limp remained pronounced.

  “Fucking Christ,” Murray said, pulling another cigar from his trench coat pocket. I didn’t stop him when he went to light this one. He took a long draw, like he really was some hard-ass detective from a crime novel.

  “Secondhand smoke, in the flesh,” he said in his American accent as he breathed out, swirling gray eddies slipping from his lips. “I didn’t want to say nothing to the kid, but I thought, as we watched her, that the more he breathed her in, the sicker and sicker he’d get.”

  WEDNESDAY

  “Ask her out,” Muz said to me the next afternoon. We’d decided not to tell Lola about seeing Grace at the track because a) she’d point out the obvious—that Grace was deeply emotionally damaged and clearly bad news—and be far too rational about reasons why I should stay away from her, and b) we already felt bad enough about what we’d done, what we’d seen. The memory of it had clung to me all day, sticking to my skin like I’d walked through a spiderweb, so now, like the graveyard, I was trying to repress it entirely. “You’re never gonna get in her pants if you mope around like a delicate sunflower all the time. Stop being such a pussy.”

  “Murray,” snapped Lola. “We talked about the ‘pussy’ thing.”

  “Oh, shit, right,” Muz said, genuinely apologetic. He left his CoD game and twisted around on the couch to face where Lola and I were lying in my bed. “Vaginas are pretty gnarly, and in no way was I insinuating that the female reproductive organs are weak. I was using it as it’s understood in its colloquial terms, but I realize that this might’ve been construed as offensive. I shall cease and desist from such usage in the future.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Anyway, you gotta do a grand gesture. That’s how I bagged Sugar Gandhi.”

  “Sugar Gandhi almost punched you in the face at Heslin’s when you started crying.” Lola shook her head and turned to me. “Henry, you need to tell her how you feel. None of this cryptic bullshit. If you want something, you say something. Send her a message right now that says: ‘So I liked kissing you and would be super into doing that again sometime. Sound good?’”

  “Do you even know what you want from this broad?” Murray said. “Like, do you really wanna start a relationship now when you’re going away to college next year anyway? Or are you only after a root?”

  “Eloquent as ever, my Australian friend,” I said. The trouble was, I did know what I wanted from Grace Town. I wanted to sleep with her, sure. I wanted her to be my girlfriend. A few years from now, I wanted to marry her. And then, when we were old, I wanted to drink peppermint tea and read Harry Potter to our grandchildren with her on the veranda of an old house out in the countryside as we watched a summer storm roll toward us. Was that so much to ask?

  “Maybe I’m doomed to be alone forever.” I pulled out my phone, opened the Notes app, and started writing.

  Draft Four

  Because it seems like a lot of hassle, liking someone. Your brain runs hot, the cogs inside your mind jarring together until all the oil of your thoughts is burned away. The fire spreads to your chest, where it chars your lungs and turns your heart to embers. And right when you think the flames have burned away everything but your skeleton, the spark skips from your bones to immolate not only your flesh, but your entire life.

  “Jesus, Henry,” Lola said, rolling her eyes as she read over my shoulder. “Very dramatic.”

  “Shut up, dude. You don’t know my struggle.”

  • • •

  Later in the afternoon, I messaged Grace and used the only excuse I could think of to start a conversation:

  HENRY PAGE:

  Is the first touch game tomorrow, do you know? Should I come prepared to kick ass and take names?

  GRACE TOWN:

  Yeah, it’s at 4 p.m. Start getting angry. I want to see you bring it.

  Oh, I’ll bring it. Maybe. Possibly.

  Your confidence is infectious.

  Okay, how about: “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to obstruct and forcefully contact my touch team. And you will know my name is Randy Knupps when I lay my vengeance upon thee.” Better? Better.

  Well, I’m glad you’re on my touch team, Mr. Winnfield.

  Say “touch” again. I dare you. I double dare you, motherfucker, say “touch” one more goddamn time!

  THURSDAY

  The afternoon rolled around far too quickly, as I’ve learned things you aren’t looking forward to tend to do. After last period, I went straight to the guys’ locker room and changed into what few pieces of clothing I owned that could pass for “athletic.” I’d hit the six-foot mark about a year ago, but my weight had yet to catch up with my height, despite the fact I consumed food like I was a garbage disposal. I looked especially lanky in my gym gear, all limbs, and I hoped Grace wouldn’t be too repulsed by my pale, spindly body.

  “This is not going to end well,” I said with a sigh, wishing I’d conned Muz into joining the team so everyone would be so awed by his athletic prowess that they might not notice me slinking away to hide under the bleachers.

  “Very fetching, Henrik,” Grace said with a suppressed grin when she saw me in my sports gear. Her limp was distinct again, like some kind of old-school Bond villain, and she winced when she walked. (“My rehab is really pushing me,” she’d explained the day before. I’d nodded and pretended not to notice how easy it was for her to lie.)

  “I hate you,” I said.

  The teachers organized friendly recreational games between themselves and teachers from other high schools on a weekly basis, but frequently brought along students to give their team an edge. Hink—who’d never played before and apparently had a competitive streak—thought injecting some young blood would be a good idea, so there were two other students on the team apart from Grace and me. Suki Perkins-Mugnai, who was apparently some kind of touch football whiz kid, and a dude who was repeating senior year for like the third time and who I’d only ever known as “Buck.” Buck, who was small and nuggety and had an even seedier teenage mustache than Murray, was, I suspected, only on the team because he looked like a thirty-year-old convicted felon.

  “Ready, team?” Hink said when he met us outside his office ten minutes later, dressed in athletic gear, the walking embodiment of Kip Dynamite when he went to meet LaFawnduh at the bus stop. All of us tried very, very hard not to laugh at his sweatband-and-knee-high-socks combo. At least I wouldn’t be the most ridiculous-looking person on the field.

  Hink walked with us to the football field, where the rest of our teachers were already warming up, stretching and practicing passes.

  “God, this is horrifying,” Suki said. “No high schooler is ever meant to see their teachers in these kinds of positions.”

  “If this were a movie,” I said, grimacing at the sight of our motley crew, “we’d be the underdogs who overcome great personal shortcomings to win this entire tournament at the end. Like DodgeBall.”

  “Yeah, I somehow don’t think dodging wrenches is going to help you much,” Grace said. “You guys are screwed.”

  “Tsk, tsk. Ye of little faith,” I said as I copied Hink’s stretches without him noticing, which made Suki double over with laughter.

  “More like ye of practicality,” Grace said. She nodded toward the other end of the field. “That’s who you’re playing.”

  As it turns out, it wa
s much more like DodgeBall than first anticipated, but without the happy ending. Instead of enrolling us in the Beginners or even Intermediate tier of recreational football, Hink had slotted us into the Advanced category, mostly (only) because Suki Perkins-Mugnai had played before and he thought that would be enough to get us through.

  The opposing team was composed entirely of gym teachers and lightly injured star athletes from Rockwood High, who all looked remarkably similar to the Mountain That Rides from Game of Thrones. They’d been playing (and winning) together for so long that they’d even invested in legit uniforms, black T-shirts emblazoned with red anatomical hearts being crushed by a hand.

  The game went pretty much how I expected it to go. Grace sat on the bleachers, waving a pom-pom attached to her cane to cheer us on as the Gutcrushers lived up to their name. (Our team name, thanks to Hink, was still “Hi, Maria, can we decide on this later and get back to you?”) Most of the opposing team were either ex or current football players and frequently forgot the “touch” aspect of the game and went in for tackles instead.

  The first time he was thrown the ball, Buck looked at it, looked up at the stampede coming in his direction, said, “Oh hell no,” turned around, and bolted. We didn’t see him again.

  I tried to touch the ball as little as possible and would always feed it through to Suki, who really was the only person who knew what she was doing. She scored our only two touchdowns, both of which the Gutcrushers were extremely unhappy about despite the fact that they were already slaughtering us.

  Hink was like a newborn gazelle that hadn’t quite yet learned to walk. Beady sprained her ankle after being on the field for seven minutes. My math teacher, Mr. Hotchkiss, seemed to hate me more during the game than he did in class, which was the exact opposite of my motivation to be there. And then, when the hell was nearly over and poor Suki looked close to death from carrying our entire team against a horde of wildebeests, I accidentally found myself with the ball and no one to pass it to.

  The impact made the horizon shift sideways in a violent tilt. One moment I was standing, panicking about what to do with the stupid ball, the next I was on the ground, unable to breathe.

  “Sorry, dude, momentum,” said the giant who’d plowed me over as he grabbed my arm and pulled me off the ground, which I suppose was meant to be friendly, but since I was winded, all I could do was flop my free hand in his general direction. “You guys should probably think about dropping down to Intermediate. Or Beginners.”

  Grace was, naturally, cackling her evil laugh as I stumbled toward the bleachers, sure at least some of my ribs were broken. I kept stealing glances at her as I staggered across the field, but there wasn’t even a shadow of the manic stranger she’d been at the track Tuesday night.

  “Never. Ever. Again” were the first words I said to her once I’d regained the ability to speak.

  After the Gutcrushers were through macerating us, Hink took us all out to dinner to apologize for what, in the end, had amounted to little more than a ritual sacrifice: sixteen touchdowns to two. What made the hell worth it, though, was sitting next to Grace at dinner. She was in one of the better moods I’d ever seen her in, playful as she teased me for being unable to eat my sushi with chopsticks, and wondering aloud if we’d ever see Buck again or if he was pulling a Forrest Gump and still running.

  Hotchkiss even remarked that I wasn’t doing as well as Sadie had in math class and I really needed to start handing in my homework if I wanted to scrape a pass, so that was nice. Maybe he was finally starting to get the message that we weren’t the same person and I wasn’t likely to light firecrackers under his desk.

  In the end, we made a pact to go to our graves without ever playing recreational football again, so the bruises and mild concussion were almost worth it for several more hours with Grace on a Good Day.

  FRIDAY

  We met in the library in the morning before homeroom, me with the pagination folded and tucked under my arm, her with a thermos and two delicate teacups with Alice in Wonderland illustrations on them and little tags on the handle that read Drink me. Lola had finally lost it and demanded that we pick a theme so she could start designing the front cover and main articles. We’d done as much as we could do with the Magic: The Gathering piece, several photo pages, and Galaxy Nguyen’s enthusiastic weekly recaps of the year so far. It was almost getting to crunch time.

  I followed Grace silently through the stacks, far deeper into the bowels of the library than we usually went, both of us too sleepy to talk.

  There were no chairs or tables set up back here, so we sat cross-legged on the carpet, the pagination on the floor between us. Grace poured us tea—caramel and vanilla, she told me, nowhere near caffeinated enough to dezombify me at this ungodly hour—and then we went about silently numbering the little boxes, 1 to 30, each one representing a page in what would eventually become a full-fledged, tabloid-sized newspaper. Laid bare before us, it became clear that all of the usable content we’d accumulated so far only filled up about a third of the available space, even if we included the nine-thousand-word Magic: The Gathering feature story.

  Fuck.

  At first it was strictly business. We sat apart from each other, Grace straight-backed and straight-faced, doodling in ideas. Possibly controversial sex ed feature? she wrote. Cliché spotlight on up-and-coming athlete/high school jock? As the hour passed and we both woke up, it became clear that today would be a Good Grace Day. She shuffled closer to me. Rested her head on my shoulder while she worked, like it was the most casual thing in the world, like we’d been this intimate one hundred times before.

  I distinctly remember thinking, God, she’s so confusing. Because she was. A week of barely anything, and now this, her (uncharacteristically) clean and brushed hair spilling down my back, her elbow resting on my knee, her fingers tracing small circles on my shoe. The smell of her, warm and heady and somehow stale, rising from her skin and filling up my head with rabid possibility. It felt almost like we were together.

  There was no work to be done after that. I kept my pencil in my hand but I didn’t make another mark on the paper. I didn’t want to move too much, lest Grace think I was uncomfortable. So I rested my head against hers and breathed quietly and steadily while she scribbled on the pagination, apparently unaware of the proximity of our bodies. We stayed like this for some time, until the bell rang, and Grace sat up slowly, yawning, as if waking from a dream.

  But it was the look she gave me when she turned to me, the same look I’d seen on her face after The Kiss, that really had me confused. It was a brief moment of confusion, of disbelief almost, like she’d been expecting to find someone else next to her and not me.

  How to reconcile that look? What did it mean? Or was I imagining things?

  “Lift this afternoon?” she said as she composed herself and folded the pagination and handed it to me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’d be great.”

  Grace just nodded before she stood and left, as indifferent as always.

  • • •

  I decided to skip my first two classes, because today was reckoning day. It had to be. I couldn’t make it through another weekend, let alone another week, unsure if she felt about me how I felt about her. So I went to our office and turned off all the lights and sat under my desk. While I was there, curled up in the fetal position, I wrote her a message, like Lola told me to, but it didn’t feel big enough somehow. It didn’t feel grand enough. If by some miracle we ended up together, I wanted the story of us to begin with something extraordinary, not just a Facebook chat.

  In the end, I settled on an appropriately Henryesque PowerPoint presentation entitled “Why You Should Date Me,” based on an extremely persuasive one I’d seen on Imgur. It wasn’t the sort of thing I ever would have done before meeting Grace, but I thought about the conversation we’d had that night at the secret fishpond, about cosmic redemption. How
Grace had talked about bravery and a blank slate at the end of time, about doing what you could while your atoms were in such a pattern that produced consciousness. In that moment, writing that PowerPoint, I thought I finally understood why she didn’t mind oblivion. How it could make you fearless, knowing that the universe had your back, in the end. Redemption for all the stupid shit you’d done. Total absolution of your sins.

  It didn’t matter if she said yes or no. Not in the end.

  So I wrote my PowerPoint while sitting under my desk. I barely even noticed when Lola came in, and she apparently didn’t find me being curled up on the floor under the furniture strange enough to question me about it, so I carried on silently until it was done. And then it was done. It was playful and silly and hopefully funny enough to make her laugh.

  I read it and reread it and reread it, thinking, Should I show her? Am I really going to show her?

  Then “Someday” by the Strokes came on Lola’s Spotify.

  My song for Grace.

  Our song.

  “I didn’t know you liked the Strokes,” I said to Lola.

  “Hmm?” Lola spun slowly around in her chair. “Oh, I don’t really know their stuff, but I heard Grace listening to this the other day and I liked it.”

  Screw it, I thought as I opened Facebook and typed:

  HENRY PAGE:

  Grakov. Meet me in the auditorium during last period. Say it’s for the newspaper to get out of class. I have something to show you.

  GRACE TOWN:

  Henrik. How devious. I shall see you there.

  I blinked several times and turned off my computer, then stayed in the office for the rest of the day. Principal Valentine walked past at one point and spotted me, my forehead pressed flat against my desk, and said, “Page. Aren’t you supposed to be in class?”