Our Chemical Hearts

by Krystal Sutherland

  Well la-di-da, Page. Us plebs bow down to you and your shiny script paper. We are not worthy.

  Don’t worry, you’re at least 15% classy by association with me. You might even gain a temporary percentage point or two after you touch the Gatsby paper.

  Cool. Well. I’ll read it tomorrow after school, I guess.

  • • •

  “Mr. Page,” said Hink at the end of the next day’s English lesson. I was sitting at my usual desk in the front row, between La and a girl named Mackenzie who’d once asked me if very was spelled with one or two r’s. “A word, if you will.”

  “Sure.”

  I stayed at my desk as the rest of the class filed out to lunch, trying to guess if Hink was going to chew me out for a) not doing the homework assignment, b) staring at the dandruff dusting his shoulders and imagining them as Sea-Monkeys trapped in a tar pit for the entirety of the lesson, or c) both.

  Once the classroom was empty, Hink walked around to the front of his desk and sat on it with his legs crossed, his hands resting on his knee. I wondered if, in the bizarro world of Alistair Hink, this was supposed to be a sign of intimidation. “Do you want to explain to me where your essay is?”

  “Essay?”

  “The one that was due last week. The one that you failed to hand in.”

  “Oh.” Shit. That essay. The one I’d eschewed in favor of nearly getting killed in a national park and writing a stupid grandiose love letter.

  “What’s going on with you, Henry? You’re missing newspaper meetings, you haven’t done any of the required reading or homework assignments for class this week, and now this. I had a chat with Mrs. Beady and Señor Sanchez and some of your other teachers as well, and everyone is concerned. Mr. Hotchkiss says you’re frequently distracted in math.”

  God, Hotchkiss, what a dick. “That’s nothing out of the ordinary, to be honest.”

  “I know we expect a lot from you. Maybe more than we expect of most other students. So if things are getting to be too much—if everything is piling up and you can’t handle it—you need to tell me. We can find ways to help you.”

  “It’s fine, really. I’m fine.”

  “Miss Leung came to see me yesterday. She subtly implied that the newspaper might be suffering due to a misguided relationship between you and Miss Town.”

  Damn it. She actually did it. “I doubt Lola ‘subtly implied’ anything.”

  “Well, yes, her exact words were ‘they’re destroying the very fabric of this publication with their wantonness,’ but I thought it best left unsaid. She actually said ‘wantonness’ so much that I had to Google it after she’d left to check it was a real word. ‘Their wantonness, Mr. Hink, their wantonness. They’re ruining everything with their wantonness!’”

  “Please stop saying wantonness.”

  “You and Grace have missed or rescheduled every meeting I’ve planned to discuss the newspaper. Without a theme or enough content, Lola can’t finish the design on time. I’m starting to get worried.”

  “I’ll get it under control. I promise.”

  “Good. Because if the two of you can’t get it sorted out by the end of the month, I’m going to have to replace you as editor.”

  “But . . . I worked my ass off for two years.”

  “You did. But that doesn’t mean you get to stop working your ass off now. Now go adjust your attitude. And for God’s sake, butter Hotchkiss up a little bit, won’t you?”

  • • •

  “Judas,” I hissed when I walked into the newspaper office after school and found Lola lazing on the sex couch, reading a dictionary.

  “Which would imply that you’re Jesus?” she said. “Ego much?”

  “I can’t believe you went to Hink. Also, did you know we had an essay due last week? I totally spaced on that one.”

  “I told you I was going to rat you out if you didn’t get your act together.” Lola stood and walked over to me and grabbed my shoulders. “I know you’re the captain of a sinking ship and you’re determined to go down with it. That’s admirable as fuck, but when this baby goes belly-up, I’m going to be on a goddamn lifeboat.”

  “Who’s Grace in this analogy?”

  “Those dudes on the Titanic who played violin until the very end.”

  “Strangely accurate.”

  La picked up the dictionary and smacked it into my chest. “Pick a theme. Just close your eyes and open it up to any page and point at something. It’s my birthday tomorrow and all I want from you is. One. Goddamn. Word.”

  Grace came in then and looked from Lola to me to the dictionary aggressively forced into my chest. “A strange tableau,” she said as she put her bag down and leaned on her cane and waited.

  “Lola’s forcing me to pick a theme for the paper.” I took the dictionary from her and scrunched my eyes closed and did as she instructed. “Fail,” I read. “Verb. Definition one: ‘To be unsuccessful.’ Definition two: ‘To be less than expected.’ Sounds about right.”

  “I don’t know if you did that on purpose or not, but that’s actually a good theme, so damn well use it. You,” said Lola, letting go of me and digging her talons into Grace’s shoulders instead. “Life is a crapfest and you’re having a really, really tough time, but you can’t go down with the ship. Get in a lifeboat. Shape up or ship out.” Lola did the “I’m watching you” gesture to Grace and me in turn, then grabbed her backpack and stalked out of the office, grumbling something under her breath that sounded very much like “wantonness.”

  “Well, that was incredibly surreal,” Grace said. “What was all that about lifeboats?”

  “Hink’s pissed because we’ve done jack on the newspaper.”

  “Have we?”

  “Christ, Grace, I need help with this. You’re supposed to be assistant editor, so why don’t you assist me with editing?”

  “What is there to edit? We’ve done everything we can do without a theme. Why don’t you just make it ‘failure’?”

  “Because I can’t handle that amount of irony.”

  Then she looked pissed and I wanted to kiss her to make her (and maybe myself) feel better, but I was afraid that if I tried, she’d pull away from me, and I didn’t want to be saddled with that feeling all afternoon, so I didn’t.

  “I’m gonna go,” she said. “I have stuff to do this afternoon.”

  “Wait a sec,” I said, and I turned and jogged over to my backpack to retrieve the letter from where it had been lodged in my copy of 84, Charing Cross Road all day. I hadn’t forgotten it. Not for a single moment. It’d hung over me like a small storm cloud. I’d waited for the right moment all day, hoping an insane rush of courage would wash over me.

  “Oh yeah. This. The Letter,” she said, taking the envelope from me and folding it and putting it into her bag. And I knew. I knew that this moment would either be our last as we’d been or our first as something more. A beginning or an ending. It couldn’t be anything in between. I said I’d never make her choose between us and now I was because I couldn’t stand it anymore. She loved him; she still loves him. I knew that.

  But wasn’t I worth something too?

  “Can you read it now?” I said.

  “You want me to read it in front of you?”

  “Uh . . . yeah?”

  “Can’t you say it? Everything that’s in the letter is inside of you right now. I don’t want the filtered version. I don’t want the pretty words, the final draft. I want you to say something raw. Something real.”

  “I can read it out to you, if you’d like.”

  “That is not what I said.”

  “Come on, at least let me skim it, remember what I wrote.”

  “You don’t remember how you feel?”

  “Of course I do, I just don’t know how to put it into words.”

  “Try.”

  “
You’re . . . You’re special.”

  Grace sighed. “I’m a beautiful and unique snowflake? I complete you?”

  “No! It says . . . Look, everything’s in there, okay? It’s all in there, everything I want you to know. You just have to read it.”

  Grace didn’t read it. She simply said, “I’ll see you tomorrow night for Lola’s thing,” and pulled the door open and walked out. It all felt so strangely, ominously final. I tried to remember the last kiss we’d shared, many hours ago now, but I couldn’t recall the specifics of it, which upset me, because I knew it might very well be our last.

  I stepped out into the hall and watched her limp across the linoleum-clad floor toward the door, breaking every few steps to rest her leg.

  After she’d left my house last night, she must’ve gone to the East River track to push her injury until it hurt her again. Maybe it was something like cutting. Maybe slowing down the healing process was the only thing that made her feel in control. Maybe the injury was the last thing that tied her to the accident, and therefore to Dom, and she wasn’t ready to let it go yet.

  Or maybe she just hated herself so much, she thought she deserved to be in pain.

  Finally, Grace made it to the exit and the door swung closed behind her and she disappeared into the school grounds. She didn’t look back once.

  As if, one way or another, she’d already made up her mind.

  • • •

  Lola’s birthday was the next day. Georgia drove in from her hometown and arrived at my place as the sun was rising. Lola’s parents, Han and Widelene, let us into their house, and the four of us quietly went about blowing up and filling the hallway, living room, and kitchen with about two hundred–odd balloons. We were all giddy by the end of it, our heads spinning from lack of oxygen, but it was worth it to hear La say, “What the hell?” in her raspy, half-asleep voice, then start giggling like a maniac.

  “Happy birthday!” we shouted in unison as she wandered into the kitchen in her very un-Lola pink nightdress, her hand held over her mouth, an impressively large cowlick giving her a Mohawk.

  After she’d showered and changed, we picked up Muz and all went to breakfast together in the city. Georgia gave Lola a cactus. (“That’s romantic as fuck,” was her reaction upon unwrapping it. “Taking our relationship to the next level.”) Muz gave her a set of oil paints in a bamboo box, and I got her a skeleton cat candle, one of those ones that burn down to bones when all the wax is gone.

  Lola and I both highly believed in the value of metaphorical gifts, so while everyone else saw a demonic-looking cat skeleton dripping wax on the packaging, Lola saw the message: Our friendship is like this feline-shaped candle—burn away all the shit, and you and me are still solid underneath. Always.

  “Henry, you magnificent creature,” she said, pressing her forehead to my temple. “What grand deed did I do in a past life to deserve the fortune of living next to you in this one?”

  “You two are so cute, sometimes I wish you weren’t a raging lesbian so you could get married and generally live an adorable life together,” Georgia said. “I mean, I’m glad you are a raging lesbian, but I digress.”

  I started thinking about what kind of gift to give Grace for her birthday at the end of the month. None of the usual presents boyfriends bought for their girlfriends would do, because a) Grace Town was not my girlfriend and b) I was fairly certain she would’ve dry retched at the sight of flowers, chocolate, or jewelry. It didn’t have to be something grand; it only needed to mean something.

  But what do you give a girl whose mind is like the universe, when the brain inside your own head is stuck firmly on planet Earth?

  Draft Six

  Because you’re worth nothing less than stardust, but all I can give you is dirt.

  DAD DROPPED ME OFF at Grace’s place on Saturday evening as the sky split and rain began to fall. I ran for shelter under the tall elm tree that stood in front of her house. As I got there, my hair already dripping, my phone buzzed in my hand.

  GRACE TOWN:

  I’m running 10 minutes late. Stay on the lawn. Don’t go inside.

  I looked up at the sad, gloomy house with its drawn curtains and overgrown garden and thought back to how Murray had wondered if Grace was some kind of supernatural creature. A vampire. A fallen angel. There were definitely secrets inside these walls that she didn’t want me to know, but what kind of secrets were they?

  The door cracked open and a small, balding man appeared from the shadows. The same man who always came by in the afternoons to pick up Grace’s car.

  “Henry Page?” he said, squinting at me in the low light. “Is that you?”

  “Uh, yes,” I said quietly. And then, louder, “Yes, I’m Henry Page.”

  “Oh, wonderful. Yes, wonderful. Come inside, come inside. My name is Martin.”

  An irrational pang of fear shot through me. Stay on the lawn. Don’t go inside. What if Grace’s message hadn’t been a request so much as a warning? What if Martin was a werewolf or something? And then, under the irrational fear was the real fear. Of betraying Grace. Whatever was in this house, she didn’t want me to see it yet. Or maybe ever.

  “Uh . . . I don’t mind staying out here. Grace will be home in a few minutes.”

  “Don’t be silly, the rain is getting heavier. Come in and get warm.” Martin beckoned me with one hand, his other pressed against the screen door to keep it open. So I went. Mostly because it was cold and dark and raining, but a little bit because I wanted to know what she was keeping from me. I thought again of Sully Sullenberger, how he would never do what I was doing, how I was falling further and further from his white-mustachioed grace.

  “Shut up, Sullenberger,” I muttered to myself.

  “Henry,” said Martin, shaking my hand. “We’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “Good things, I hope.” Which was the cliché thing you were supposed to say when people said that to you. But it gave me a little thrill. For someone so close to Grace to know that I existed.

  “Mostly, mostly,” he said with a chuckle. “Please, make yourself at home. You can wait in Dom’s room, if you like,” he said, and then he faltered. “Well, Grace’s room now, I suppose.”

  “I’m sorry? Dom. Lived. Here?” I said it in this weird staccato way, a pause between each word as my brain tried to process the meaning attached to the sentence.

  Martin frowned. “Lived here? Grace has told you that we’re not her parents, hasn’t she?”

  “Um . . . no. I kind of assumed you were her dad.”

  “No, no. My name is Martin Sawyer. Dominic was our son. We had Grace move in with us about a month before the crash. I’m sure she’s told you all about her troubles with her mother? After Dom was gone, Mary and I insisted she stay with us. They were together for so long, so many years. Grace is practically our daughter.”

  “Grace . . . lives . . . in Dom’s room?”

  “I thought she would’ve told you this.”

  “Uh.” I shook my head, licked my lips, and looked around for the first time. The walls were this off-cream color, almost pale orange, and all the furniture was made of dark wood. The stairs were carpeted, worn bare in patches with age, and on the wall were dozens of photographs. Smiling graduation portraits and faded wedding snaps and he was in all of them, Dominic, over and over again.

  The closest photo of him was with Grace seated atop his broad shoulders, his hands resting on her uninjured calves. It was the first time I’d seen a picture of him. The sight of him stung me like venom. Dom was broad and built and classically handsome. The exact opposite of me. In the picture with Grace, he was wearing a football jersey and grinning widely. Grace had her head tipped back in laughter, shrieking with delight inside his football helmet, her fingers in his hair.

  I felt bile bubble up from somewhere in the black, destroyed remains of my gut. Not jealousy. Not anxi
ety. Just sadness.

  “Dom was our youngest,” said Martin, leading me away from the torture wall. “Bit of a gap between him and Renee. The older two had already moved out by the time of the crash. It’s been nice having Grace here. I don’t know if I could handle the silence.”

  “I’m so sorry. I had no idea this was his house.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for, kid. You’ve been a good friend to her. You and your girlfriend, Lola. We appreciate everything you’ve done for her.”

  “My. Girlfriend. Lola?” I said, again in staccato, and Martin was looking at me then like I was a little bit slow. Grace had been lying to him. Had been lying about what we were. But then again, why wouldn’t she? How exactly would you tell your dead boyfriend’s dad that you were sleeping with someone else? “Yeah. My girlfriend, Lola. We love Grace.”

  Martin nodded to a door at the end of the hall. “You can wait in there. Grace will be here soon. I’ll send her to find you.”

  “Thanks.” I waited for Martin to leave and then opened the door slowly, with one hand, hesitant to step over the threshold into his tomb. The air was heavy and smelled distinctly like Grace.

  No.

  Like Dom.

  I wanted to vomit. Or take a scalding-hot shower. Or vomit while taking a scalding-hot shower. But my curiosity was still stronger, so instead I turned on the light and stepped inside.

  It was a fairly typical teenage boy’s room, filled with the same sort of clutter and haphazard order as my own. The checked duvet was crumpled and unmade at the foot of the bed. There was a bookcase filled with the likes of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. An acoustic guitar resting on a chair. A record player with stacks of old vinyl. A globe. A skateboard. A backpack. A desk and a laptop and sports magazines and trophies from his childhood. A chalkboard and a canvas with a portrait of Mozart on it and trinkets from faraway lands. On the dresser was Dom’s jewelry—an assortment of long leather necklaces with anchors and crosses and skulls—and his deodorant.