She smiled a little then, but she never said, “I want you too.”
At dinner, Grace was odd around my parents, the way she was around almost everyone except me, all of the warmth drained out of her. She spoke only when spoken to and didn’t laugh or smile at the appropriate times. She ate little and spoke less.
By the time I walked her to the door at eleven p.m. and watched her disappear into the darkness toward the graveyard, I was almost glad to see her go, worried that my parents would find the first girl I’d ever brought home to be lacking somehow.
When I came back inside, Mom and Dad were in the kitchen, stacking the dishwasher together. I sat quietly at the breakfast bar, waiting for their assessment, which I knew would come whether I wanted to hear it or not.
“She’s very brooding,” Mom said after a while. “Beautiful, but very brooding.”
“Do you think?” I said, puzzled. Brooding is the way I’d describe vampires, not Grace. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Pretty smile, though, when she does smile. Strange girl.”
“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty,” Dad said, threading his arms around my mother’s waist. Mom nodded but pulled away from him, and as I watched them for the next ten minutes, watched as they moved around the kitchen but never touched, were never drawn to each other, I realized it’d been a long time since I’d seen them kiss or hold hands or slow dance together when they thought no one was watching, like they used to when I was a kid.
A long, long time.
• • •
For the next three days, hardly an hour went by when Grace and I didn’t see each other. In the mornings before school we sat in the office and worked on the newspaper and teased each other endlessly. We brought in a badminton kit and had silly framed family pictures of us with Ricky Martin Knupps II on our desks. At lunch we’d go to McDonald’s together, or read each other passages from books in the library (me: always Harry Potter, her: always poetry), or walk around the outermost boundary of the school grounds and kick the last of the leaf piles and brainstorm bullshit newspaper themes, neither of us realizing that we hadn’t actually eaten anything until the bell rang.
And then in the evenings, when school and work were done, we’d follow the routine that was now our ritual: We’d walk to her house and I’d wait outside while she fetched her keys, and she’d make me drive myself home in her car. And that’s where everything would change. The moment the sun set, it was like Grace became a different person, like the sunshine fueled her somehow and without it she powered down, empty. On Thursday she came inside and sat uncomfortably in the basement, clinging to Lola like she was a life preserver, barely speaking to Murray, and rarely engaging in any sort of group conversation. On her own, Grace could be effervescent, illuminating the entire room with her intelligence and wit. Around others she seemed to lose her luster.
“I swear I used to be good at this stuff,” she said to me after Muz left, by this time convinced that Grace hated him. “At socializing, I mean. I used to do it all the time.”
“I guess it must be harder. Without him. Right?” It was one of the rare instances that either of us acknowledged that there had been someone before me who wasn’t here now.
Grace shook her head. “Not harder, no. I just forget to do it. I slip into my head and keep falling deeper into the abyss. I forget the world exists.”
Which is the point when I probably should’ve said, “That sounds remarkably like some kind of mental illness that you should seek therapy and medication to help treat,” but I didn’t, because I didn’t want Grace to be sick or broken or depressed. I wanted her to brush her hair and wash her clothes and to be whole and full and happy.
So I pretended she was.
• • •
And slowly, hour by hour, the countdown to All Hallows’ Eve ticked away, until it finally arrived. My street turned into an annex of the cemetery, tombstones, cobwebs, and skeletons strewn everywhere. By midday on Saturday, it looked like some sort of kitsch apocalypse had exploded in our front yard. Sadie brought Ryan over to carve pumpkins on the lawn, but all I could think about was the party happening that night. Or rather what was happening after the party, which I felt wholly underprepared for.
“Dude, what the hell are you doing to that pumpkin?” Sadie said as she surveyed my handiwork. Sadie, with her piercings and dreads and leather jacket, looked maniacal with a carving knife in one hand and a pumpkin wedged between her knees. My pumpkin was a little soft and my knife was a little blunt, which combined to make it look like the face had been carved using a sawed-off shotgun at close range. “It’s worse than Ryan’s and he doesn’t even have fine motor skills yet. No offense, Ryan.”
“It’s a surrealist interpretation of the traditional jack-o’-lantern, thank you very much.”
“If it could speak, it would simply whisper, ‘Kill me,’ before vomiting seeds and pulp everywhere.”
I sighed and put my carving knife down. “Suds, I know it’s unethical, but do you think you could score me some Valium from the hospital?”
“Pray tell, what do you need Valium for?”
“Grace is kinda coming over tonight, after the party. Sleeping over, actually. For the first time.”
“Oh. Oh. My baby’s growing up so fast!”
“Get off me, She-Devil,” I said, trying to push Sadie away as she squashed my ribs in a bear hug, her pumpkin rolling across the grass. “Ugh, I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Don’t stress too much, man. People have been banging for millions of years. You got condoms?”
I grimaced. “Yeah.”
“You know how to use ’em?”
“Christ, Sadie. Yes.”
“And you want to have sex with this girl?”
“She’s a consenting human female and I’m a teenage boy. That’s an irrelevant question.”
“No, it’s not. Look, you don’t need to love someone to lose your virginity to them, but you should know them and trust them and feel comfortable with them and really, really want to sleep with them.”
“Well, yeah. I guess. I mean, yeah. I want to be with her.”
“And it’s a stupid cliché question, but do you feel ready? I mean, sex is not a big deal, but it’s not not a big deal, you know?”
“I think I feel ready?” I didn’t mean for it to sound so much like a question.
“Okay, good. That’s all that matters. Everything else is biology. Now give me that poor pumpkin before you make it any worse.”
• • •
Grace came to my house in the evening to do my makeup, a small yet ominous overnight bag in her hands.
“It still cool if I stay here tonight?” she said when she caught me staring at it.
“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex with her. I’d been thinking about having sex since I was about twelve years old.
“Good,” she said as she pulled a palette of face paint and a thirty-ounce bottle of fake blood out of her bag. “Now, do you want to be a zombie or a car crash victim? Because they’re the only special effects makeup I’m good at.”
My eyes flicked down to where her cane was resting across my bed. “Uh . . . I don’t . . .”
“That was a joke, Henry.”
“Oh . . .” I forced out a nervous ha sound. Making light of the horrific car accident that killed your boyfriend. Hilarious. “Zombie, I guess.”
For the next hour I sat on the edge of my bed while Grace moved around me, holding herself away from me in her usual rigid marionette fashion while she applied liquid latex wounds and decomposing special effects to my face. Which I know is not the most romantic of situations, but it felt almost clinical, the way she went about touching me as little as possible.
I expected her to go as something entirely weird, like a meme or an obscure literary character or a
figure from an eighteenth-century impressionist artwork. But when she went upstairs to get dressed and do her makeup while I shredded an old T-shirt and drenched myself in fake blood, she came back down in a sexy vampire costume, a single trickle of red seeping from the corner of her mouth.
It was the first time I’d seen her in clothes that were made to fit a feminine figure, and it was shocking. Her legs were long and toned, encased in dark stockings, her breasts and waist accentuated by a black lace corset that gave her the kind of shape I’d never imagined a high school girl as capable of having. Her blond hair was brushed and curled and pinned back by black netting that covered her smoky eyes, and she’d even tied a red ribbon around her cane.
She was darkly beautiful, a femme fatale, a heroin junkie risen from the dead—and I could hardly recognize her.
“I didn’t really think much about a costume, so I recycled this from last year,” she said, shrugging. “It’s lame.”
“No. I approve wholeheartedly.”
“Really? ’Cause you look a little . . . shocked?”
“I guess I didn’t expect . . . It doesn’t seem like something you’d wear, that’s all. Not the you that I know, anyway. I was expecting something, I don’t know, weird or something that I’d have to ask you twenty questions to get. You look sexy as hell, though.”
“Grace this time last year was pretty different from the Grace I am now.”
I looked at her for a little longer and then nodded.
“Say it, Henry.”
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is that’s going on in that mysterious brain of yours. I can see the cogs furiously turning behind your eyes, but all you do is nod. So say it.”
“It’s just . . . I wonder sometimes . . . Man, I’m no good at this drafting business . . . If the person you were . . . What if that’s who you are? I mean, I don’t know her at all, I don’t know anything about her. I see her in you sometimes, I get these flashes of this girl you used to be, but . . . Was she an act and you’re more yourself now, or is the Grace I know an act until you feel comfortable being yourself again?”
“People change. There’s no way you’re the same person you were when you were sixteen.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t change schools and start wearing a dead guy’s clothes.”
There was a beat of silence. “So you know,” she said slowly, staring at me, unblinking. “The truth outs.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
“I know who you want me to be, Henry. It isn’t hard to see.”
“What does that—”
“You look at me differently sometimes. You think I don’t notice, but I do. There are times when you really like me, and others when you don’t so much. But I can’t pretend to be all better because that’s what you want.”
“Grace, it’s nothing like that, not at—”
“Look, let’s not talk about it tonight, okay?”
“I want you, all the time.”
“I know you think that. But sometimes I don’t know which version of me you want. The one I am. The one I was. Or the Kintsukuroi dream girl you think I’ll be a couple of months from now.”
“You were the one who said people can’t be melded back together with gold seams.”
“That’s exactly my point,” she said as she turned and started climbing, step by painful step, back up the stairs.
I typed my fifth draft of “Why Henry Page Is Single” as I followed her, dripping blood all over the floor as I went.
Draft Five
Because apparently you still have to chase girls who can’t even run.
THE FIRST HALF of the party, for the most part, was a lot like Heslin’s. We went to the football field to drink, not from a bathtub this time, but from—I’m not even kidding—an industrial rainwater tank. (The bathtub had ended up on Heslin’s roof. No one had claimed responsibility yet, but I very strongly suspected Murray.) The concoction this time was red-tinged and suspiciously frothy, like someone had cleaned the tank with dishwashing liquid and not rinsed it out before they’d sloshed in ten boxes of cheap wine. Still, it didn’t taste as poisonous as the last batch, and after two bottlefuls I was fairly intoxicated, and so was Grace, thank God, because we both seemed to be much nicer people when we were drunk.
We slipped away from the group and made our way to a friend of a friend of someone’s cousin who graduated three years ago’s house, where the party was going down in the basement. We got there earlier than everyone else and Grace found us a suitably dark and secluded corner where we weren’t likely to be spotted making out, but all I could think about was the sex we were supposed to be having later, so I just kept drinking.
The music grew louder and the basement slowly filled up with zombies and witches and pirates and sexy iterations of entirely unsexy things, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a papier-mâché planet Pluto in a bikini, and Madison Carlson—for reasons I will never understand—as a slutty corncob.
Grace leaned in and kissed me quickly, then went back to watching costumed people cram into the space.
“I’m going to stop going to the graveyard,” she said quietly, her words ever so slightly slurred. “That’s something I’ve never told you. I visit him almost every day, at the place where he’s buried. I’m going to stop, though. For you.”
I was taken aback. I’d come to accept Dom’s ghostly presence as a fact of life, a condition of dating Grace Town. She would always dress like him. She would always smell like him. She would always visit his grave. But here she was, giving up a small piece of him already.
“I’d like that,” I said quickly, without thinking, because now that she’d offered it, I realized it was something I wanted. I wanted her to stop spending so much time with her dead boyfriend, lying on the grass above his decomposing corpse, crying tears that seeped into the earth to rest upon his coffin.
“And I don’t want you to feel like I’m, like, settling for you or whatever,” she continued, still staring straight ahead. “I’ve never gotten along with anyone the way I get along with you.”
I had to resist the temptation, in that moment, to ask her if Dom and I were standing side by side, both whole, both alive, which one of us she would choose. Because I knew, still, that it would be him. For a long time, it would be him. Maybe always. And I felt the tear in my heart rip open a little bit more. Here she was, doing her best to declare her feelings to me, and all it did was make the hurt pierce a little deeper.
“You’ve been drinking. I don’t want you to make any decisions tonight. Wait until you’re sober. Think it over. I want you to be sure.” I want you to be sure that you can let him go.
Grace turned to me and looked at me for a long time, her focus moving from one of my eyes to the other and then back again every few seconds.
“What?” I said after a while.
“Most guys would be assholes about all this. You’ve been so cool.”
“Why would I be an asshole?” I was forcing myself to be cooler about it than I actually felt, but I couldn’t say that—being a dick would only make her run in the other direction. “You’ve been up-front about everything since the beginning.” Except the car crash and dead boyfriend and the graveyard and the clothes, that is.
She did the eye thing again twice more, then closed hers and leaned in and kissed me. I watched her the whole time to make sure she didn’t open her eyes, like this was some kind of indicator of whether she really meant what she was saying. Grace kept her eyes closed, and when I could feel the kiss coming to an end, I jammed mine shut as she pulled away. And I thought, How could anyone kiss anyone like that and not mean it?
“How long do we have to wait here before we go back to your place?” Grace said.
My heart kicked into a gallop. Oh yes. The losing of the virginity. I’d momentarily forgotten about it.
�
��I want to see everyone first. Hang out for a bit. Wait until my parents are asleep.”
What I really wanted—what I didn’t tell Grace that I wanted—was for people to see us together, to catch us, to accuse us of being more than friends with sly smiles on their faces. I wanted our relationship to have solid tethers outside of us, like the more people who knew about us, the more reasons she’d have to stay. We were in a Schrödinger’s cat relationship, neither dead nor alive because we had not been observed. And maybe it was better that way. Maybe it was better to be unobserved, to be in flux, because there was every chance that being observed would kill us. I knew it was dangerous. After all, if nobody knew, then nobody would know if it didn’t work out. My heartache would be private. But it was a gamble I was willing to take.
So, as the room grew loud with chatter, I kissed her. We talked and drank and flirted, Grace becoming more light and open with each sip of alcohol, and I kissed her, hoping that someone we knew would see, would point, would shout our names.
And eventually, an hour or so later, someone did.
“I knew it!” shouted Heslin, and some great coil of tension that had been sprung tightly inside of me all night was released. We had been seen. We had been observed. There was someone outside of us who could testify that we were real. That we had been here. “I fucking knew it!”
“Shh,” I hissed at Heslin, because even though I wanted him to know, I didn’t want Grace to know I wanted him to know.
Grace pulled back from me immediately and stood up and said, “You ready to go? I’m gonna go get my things.”
I nodded and watched her weave her way through the costumed crowd to get her coat.
Heslin was still grinning at me. “How long have you been banging her for?”
“Please don’t tell anyone, we’re trying to keep it quiet.” It didn’t seem necessary to inform him that I had not, as of yet, banged her at all.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” said Heslin as he leaned down to muss my hair. We rarely spoke at school, but apparently this insider knowledge of my almost sex life somehow warranted a closer bond.
Our Chemical Hearts Page 13