Our Chemical Hearts

by Krystal Sutherland

  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 tonight . . . 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 ma
de 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 together . . . 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.”

  “Are you even going to remember saying these things tomorrow?”

  “I need to know if you’re going to go away for college.”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “Because if we’re going to do this, you need to stay. I’m not ready to leave. So I need to know if you’re going or not.”

  “Grace . . . I don’t know yet. I haven’t decided.”

  “I know I’m being forward, and I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. I mean, I was pretty forward from the beginning.”

  “But that’s how it should be with feelings. People should be forward. I’m jealous that you can say exactly how you feel about me.”

  “I never can. Only sometimes. Only with you.”

  “Do you still want me?”

  “Nothing has changed for me,” I said, the last of my resolve crumbling. Because how could I blame her for still loving him. Because she was still shaky, still uncertain, and I wasn’t.

  I wasn’t.

  I never would be.

  And I wasn’t in any kind of position to play hard to get. I was afraid that if I did, Grace would walk away. I leaned against the wall, the fingers of my left hand in my hair, my eyes burning but dry. I couldn’t look at her.

  “Tell me how you feel about me,” Grace said, her head on my shoulder, her chest pressed against mine.

  “Grace.”

  “I want to hear it again.”

  “This isn’t fair.”

  “I know. But I miss hearing it, so I want you to say it anyway.”

  “I’ve never felt about anyone the way I feel about you.”

  “More.”

  Then Lola was there. La. A devil and an angel rolled into one. “There you two are!” she said, pulling Grace off me, detaching the source of poison. “Grace, darling, a smoking hot babe named Piper is looking for you.”

  Grace looked at me. “Come find me,” she said, leaning in to kiss my cheek. And then she was gone and I was sinking to the ground, my head in my hands, Lola at my side.

  “I think I’m going to have a psychotic break.”

  “That goddamn girl. Women, I swear. We should leave, right now.”

  But of course we didn’t. Grace was my drug of choice, and tonight the dealer was giving out hits for free. I’d stay until I overdosed.

  So La and I went back to the fair. We got Grace’s cousin to buy us drinks. And later in the night she found me again, and again she was her usual drunk self: flirty, chatty, giggling. She fawned over me. Ran her fingers through my hair. And I let her. Like an absolute idiot, I sat there and I let her do that to me and I let people see us together, all of her friends, and I felt my chest constricting but she’d said such nice things. Such pretty things. I thought that maybe we would be together after all. Because people don’t just do that to other people. People didn’t seek out people and then profess their feelings for them if they didn’t really mean it, right?

  “You need to go crazy, Henry,” Grace said suddenly. She was sitting on my lap, her lips against my temple. “You just need to go and fuck lots of girls. So I can hate you. It would be so much easier to hate you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This is so fucked. This whole thing is so fucked.” Her words were slurred, her posture slumped. Grace was drunk. Like actually, legitimately drunk. I’
d seen her tipsy before, but never wasted. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “Okay,” I said as she climbed off me and stumbled toward the bathroom, where I assumed she would vomit and sit and cry for a while. And maybe I should’ve got up and followed her, but I didn’t. I sat at the table by myself for twenty minutes, eating a corn dog, then I went to find one of her friends—Piper or whatever her name was—to go in after her and make sure she was still alive (she was).

  Piper came out ten minutes later and found me in the crowd, plucking yellow ducks out of a duck pond game with Lola. “Can you take her home?” she said. “She says she’ll only come out if you take her home.”

  “Look . . . I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

  “She said she still cares about you, Henry.”

  I know she still cares about me, I felt like saying. I had to hear all about it for the last two hours.

  “Yeah, okay, whatever. Bring her out. I’ll make sure she gets home safe.”

  La and I stood together near the fairground exit, waiting for Piper to extract Grace from the bathroom. She stumbled out another ten minutes later, mascara smudged around her eyes, her lips and eyes swollen from crying. I crossed my arms and watched as Piper sat her down in the grass and went to a cotton candy vendor to get her water. It wasn’t fair that some people could still be beautiful even when they were drunken messes.

  “Henry Page,” Grace said to me flatly when Piper finally managed to get her up and walking. “Take me home.”

  “Come on, we’ll get you out of here,” said Lola, slinging Grace’s arm around her neck.

  I didn’t want to take her home. I didn’t want her to come back to my place and take off her clothes and lie naked in my bed. It didn’t seem fair. That she could choose to have me anytime she wanted.

  It started drizzling out on the street, which seemed to revive Grace somehow. She peeled herself away from Lola and started turning in unsteady circles, sprinkles of water clinging to her hair and coat. Her cane was gone, abandoned at some point during the night, but she seemed more agile without it. Like she didn’t really need it, just kept it for security, the same way she kept his clothes.