Our Chemical Hearts

by Krystal Sutherland

  “I used to be a ballet dancer,” she said, extending her hands above her head as she moved. “I used to dance. I don’t think I ever told you that. Just another thing I can’t do anymore.”

  Lola held my hand, her head on my shoulder, as we both watched Grace dance in the rain, because you couldn’t not watch. You couldn’t not be enraptured by that. It was something close to reverie.

  After a minute, Grace curtsied, smiling. Lola clapped.

  “Oh, dear, Henrik doesn’t look happy with me,” Grace said to Lola, grinning. “I’ve been very mean to him. I probably deserve it.”

  “I think you should have this back,” I said, taking “I do not love you” out of its home in my wallet, where it had festered for months, a poem that had been a prophecy from the beginning.

  Grace took it from me and laughed and slung her arms around my neck. “I don’t want it back, my darling Henry. I gave this to you.”

  “You’re never going to be my girlfriend, are you?” I said flatly. Lola was standing right there next to us, but I was drunker than I realized, so I didn’t care. I didn’t care if she heard.

  “Jesus Christ,” Grace said, wrenching herself away from me. “Do you ever think about anything else? What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to be with me.” Ugh, so needy.

  “I am with you. Literally. Right now. We are together.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Why’d you have to write me that stupid letter? Why couldn’t we just keep doing what we were doing? I hate to go all Hollywood cliché on you, but why do we have to put a label on it?”

  “Oh my God. Do you realize how ridiculous you sound?”

  La, by this point, was making a very good show of looking like something on her phone was intensely interesting.

  “Me? What about you? What do you want? You want to make it Facebook official so all your friends and family can like it?” She tore the poem in half and in half and in half again and let the pieces fall to the dampened sidewalk. “You can’t project your fantasies onto people and expect them to play the part, Henry. People aren’t empty vessels for you to fill up with your daydreams.”

  “Come to Burger King with us,” Lola said, sliding between us, putting her hands on Grace’s waist. “Get something to eat. Come back to Henry’s or mine and sleep it off.”

  “If I go to Burger King, I will vomit on everyone there,” Grace said as she grasped Lola’s shoulder to steady herself. She looked back at me, blinking as she tried to focus her vision, her pale hair falling over her face. “I wanted to see how you’d react. If I forced myself to be her for a night. Kintsukuroi Grace, all stitched up with gold seams. You’ve never looked at me like that before, when you saw me through the crowd. I think you have feelings for someone who doesn’t exist.”

  Then Grace let go of Lola’s shoulder and threw up on the sidewalk and kind of disintegrated into a heap on the ground. It took us five minutes to get her back on her feet, and another five minutes to convince the Uber driver we’d requested that he wouldn’t need to call an old priest and a young priest if he drove her home.

  “Thanks for looking after me and stuff,” she said as she slid into the backseat.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Just . . . get home safe.”

  Then she said, “I love you, Dom,” right as I was swinging the car door closed. And in the moment that it thumped shut, I felt my heart tear a little bit more. The last thread that had been holding me together ripped away. I couldn’t breathe as I watched the Uber pull into traffic and ferry her away. I didn’t want to breathe anymore. I wanted to lie down on the sidewalk and be swallowed by the concrete.

  “Did she say what I think she said?” said Lola, who was collecting the torn pieces of Pablo Neruda off the ground and putting them in her bag. I’d been really hoping she hadn’t heard.

  “Yeah,” I said, staring after the car with my hands in my pockets, not entirely sure how I was still alive.

  “Look, don’t let it fuck you up. Falling for her was always gonna be a really shit time. Grace does love you, okay? In her own way. If you’d been first, if you’d been before him, she’d realize that what she feels for you is a kind of love. It’s just that what they had . . .”

  “Was bigger? Was better?”

  “People are perfect when all that’s left of them is memory. You’re never gonna measure up to a dead dude.”

  “Thanks for the honesty.” I shook my head. “When she’s sober, she’s so hot and cold. It’s only when she’s drunk that she makes me think she wants me.”

  “That’s when people are most truthful, though, right? When all the inhibition kinda melts away and people say what they really feel.”

  “Like that they love their dead ex-boyfriend?”

  “C’mon. You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I mean, you can’t just go around kissing people and taking their virginity if you’re not in love with them, right?”

  “Exactly. It would be unconscionable.” Lola swung her arm around my shoulder and kissed my cheek. “I did love you when I kissed you, you know? I still do. Very much.”

  “Thanks, La. Love you too.”

  “Excellent. Now, let’s go track down some Burger King. I am fucking famished.”

  • • •

  When we got home, I didn’t go inside. I went to the backyard, into the shed where Dad did all his carpentry work. I found gasoline. I set up the fire pit my parents used when they were entertaining people in the colder months. I started a fire. One by one, I tore out the pages of You Are Stardust and fed them to the flames.

  I didn’t think of it as destroying the book; I thought of it as setting its atoms free.

  • • •

  Lola and Georgia came over at lunchtime on Sunday (uninvited, naturally, each carrying handfuls of food they’d swiped from the kitchen upstairs).

  “I’m thinking of a four-letter word that starts with an s and ends with a t and has an l in it,” La announced, spilling her contraband across my bed.

  “Salt?” I said.

  “Slut, you miserable addict. Slut.”

  “My heart hurts, La.”

  “Good. You deserve to be in pain,” she said as she crawled under the covers of my bed and hooked her legs through mine.

  “Lola, we can’t flaunt our secret love affair in front of your girlfriend!” I said dramatically, taking her face in my hands.

  “You can have her,” said Georgia as she turned on my TV and PlayStation and made her herself comfortable on my couch. “She’s hungover and whiny and generally being a pain in the ass. Did you hear about her admirer from last night? Samuel? Apparently he asked Murray for her number.”

  “Pfft. As if that’s news,” said Lola. “Men fall at my feet all the time.” She unwrapped a candy cane, handed it to me, then unwrapped another one and started sucking on it. “Have you heard from She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?”

  “Yeah. I texted her this morning.”

  “Henry.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “And?”

  “And it was like it always is. She said she was drunk and stupid and sorry, and by this point I should know better than to listen to her.”

  “Fuck. You didn’t get angry at her for going all Mr. Darcy on you and pledging her undying love out of nowhere? And then going Exorcist and vomiting on my shoes?”

  “No.”

  Lola shuffled closer and patted my head. “You’ll be okay.”

  “I know.”

  La and I fell asleep to the sound of Georgia crushing skulls in BioShock Infinite.

  ON THE FIRST FRIDAY in December, I was unceremoniously hauled out of Mr. Hotchkiss’s math class by Mr. Hink (who I’m sure thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to disrupt calculus). We walked in silence to Principal Valentine’s office, where Lola was
already seated in front of her desk. Spread out in front of her were thirty tabloid-sized pages, half of them blank.

  “Care to explain this, Page?” said Valentine.

  I’d been waiting for this meeting for a while. I just hadn’t been able to muster the energy to care. Grace had been absent from school for the entire week after Thanksgiving, and despite Lola’s insistence that I needed to organize my shit or she was going to go directly to Valentine, I hadn’t done anything, because I couldn’t even force myself to walk into the newspaper office. “It looks like an unpolished printout of the paper.”

  “I asked Lola for a printout this morning of everything you’ve finished so far,” said Hink. “This is what she gave me.”

  Wantonness, mouthed Lola.

  Traitor, I mouthed back. “Look, we do have more than that. There’s this whole massive feature story on Magic: The Gathering, and we’ve got a few other articles almost ready to go. We can have them to Lola in the next few days.”

  “It’s too late for that,” said La. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I can’t do three months’ worth of design in a couple of days.”

  “You go to print on Monday, Mr. Page. If it were solely my decision, I’d fire you from your position effective immediately, but Mr. Hink still has faith that you can slap something together. The printing has already been paid for, and let me tell you, never in its thirty-five years has the Westland Post not gone to print. You will not be the exception. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are excused from class for the remainder of the day. Get your writers, get into your office, and get. The. Paper. Done.”

  “Yes,” I said again. Lola marched me to the office then, and she called the classrooms of all the junior writers, and in the afternoon Hink and Principal Valentine came in to supervise and picked the theme “time of your life” for us to focus on. Even though it would be the worst issue ever produced in the already fairly unimpressive history of the Westland Post, I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d get my shit together long enough to get the damn newspaper to print. That is until I checked my phone and found two things:

  A message from my mother that read:

  BIRTHGIVER:

  We’re at Grace’s house. Come straight here when you get this. Call if you need a ride.

  Which made exactly zero sense.

  And:

  A voice message from an unknown number. I checked it quickly, still unsure as to why my mother was at my kind-of-ex-girlfriend’s house.

  “Henry,” said a familiar voice through the phone, albeit panicked and teary. The speaker had been crying. It took a second for me to recognize him, to understand why the sound of him upset made my gut drop like a stone. “It’s Martin Sawyer, Dominic’s dad. Could you give me a call as soon as you get this, please? We just, uh.” He sobbed. “It’s an emergency. It’s . . . I don’t know if Grace has told you, but it’s Dom’s birthday today—his first birthday since he left us—and she’s . . . she’s . . .” I didn’t hear the rest of the message.

  “Grace,” I said. “Something’s happened to Grace.”

  Principal Valentine looked up from where she was reading on the sex couch. “I’m well aware that Miss Town is currently unaccounted for, but the matter is being handled by her family and the police.”

  “You knew?” I said, in a tone I’d never used to address an adult before. “You knew and you didn’t tell us?”

  “Your print deadline is Monday. You have less than seventy-two hours left to do months of work.”

  “I have to go,” I said, grabbing my backpack. “I have to find her.”

  “Henry, if you leave this office, I’ll have no choice but to dismiss you from your position as editor.”

  I was already sprinting. Lola shouted after me, but I couldn’t open my mouth because I thought I might be sick.

  Grace Town was dead.

  I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, deep down in some forgotten corner of the soul where it was possible to know things without knowing how. I ran like I hadn’t been able to run in that stupid touch football game she dragged me to. Which, apparently, still wasn’t as fast as Lola.

  “Henry, wait!” she said.

  “Lola, go back.”

  “Like hell I’m going back.” Which seemed like a good enough argument to me, so we ran together, and as we did, I thought, That coward. She’s gone and killed herself and left me here without her. If I ever had any doubts about whether I really, truly loved her or not, they were all dissolved by the excruciating ten minutes we spent sprinting to her house, knowing, knowing, knowing the news I’d get when I arrived.

  There was a police car in the drive. The front door was splayed open in an unsettling manner, the way it is on detective shows when something terrible has happened inside. I stumbled in. There was a cop standing at the top of the stairs and worried-looking adults everywhere, two of whom were my parents. Gasping, my hands on my knees, I looked to the two of them and said, quite flatly, “Is . . . she . . . dead?” My words caused a middle-aged blond woman whom I’d never met before to burst into tears.

  Mom came over and hugged me then and said, “No, no, no, no, no,” over and over again in that soothing voice moms use to calm their kids after nightmares. Dad went to comfort the bawling woman, who, at second glance, was very clearly Grace Town’s alcoholic mother. They had the same thin, hollow features that made them look like drug addicts in the wrong light but at the same time very beautiful. With her bright blond hair and smudged makeup and big doe eyes, she looked even more like a femme fatale than Grace herself did.

  “What’s going on?” I said when I caught my breath and managed to detach myself from my mother. “Where’s Grace? Why are you here?”

  “Grace is missing. She left the house around dawn without her phone and hasn’t come back. Martin came around to our place looking for you, thinking you might know where she is. We gave him your number and then came back here to wait for you. We’ve only been here for an hour.”

  “The police car . . . I thought . . . You should’ve pulled me out of school as soon as you knew she was gone.”

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” said Dad.

  Martin came over then, running his fingers through his hair. I’d never seen a human being look quite so haggard. He spoke to Grace’s mother, whose name I never learned. “The police think we should look for her at all her usual hangouts first. I know her and Dom were thinking about going away for his birthday up to the lake house, so Mary and I will drive up there now. I’m going to call some of her East River friends, get them to check out the library where she wrote and the café where she always got breakfast and maybe the houseboat down at the marina.”

  All these places. All these places I never knew she’d been, she’d liked. Grace on a houseboat? Doing what? Having another existential crisis? Thinking about stardust and atoms and the meaninglessness of life? But no. Probably not. Probably sunbathing on a spring afternoon, Dom at her side, party music in the background, both of them sipping sweet wine, smiling their salad-eating smiles. Probably that. Probably Facebook Grace, the girl I’d never known.

  Might never know, now.

  Then came the question I’d been dreading. Martin turned to me. “Henry, can you think of anywhere she might be?” I desperately racked my brain for places I’d seen her. Grace in our fishbowl office. Grace in the black-walled drama room. Grace in my basement bedroom, curled up in my sheets, wearing only one of my T-shirts.

  “Uh . . . maybe . . . uh . . . Have you checked the cemetery? Or the track?”

  Martin nodded, but looked disappointed. “We went to both of those places this morning. And the crash site, up in the national park.”

  “They crashed in the national park?”

  “They were on their way to a restaurant up there for lunch,” said Martin. My chest constricted the s
ame way it had when the Gutcrusher pulverized me during touch football. Grace had taken me on a date to the place where he died. Had collected flowers from the garden bed and left me alone next to the seaside while she wandered off to lay flowers at his roadside memorial. Jesus. “We can look again this afternoon, though, I suppose. Anywhere else?” I shook my head, keenly aware that Grace’s mother had stopped crying and was now staring at me, unblinking, the same way her daughter often did, the way that makes you feel like your skin is made of glass and every secret you’ve ever kept is engraved in script upon your bones. “Okay, well, if you think of anywhere she might be, let us know. Sorry, I better go make these phone calls.”

  And then came the worst part.

  The waiting.

  Waiting as people were assigned locations to go out and look for her. Waiting as more police arrived and said comforting things in between asking questions that hinted at their thinly veiled belief that she’d probably killed herself. Waiting as we drove aimlessly around the suburbs, slowing the car to a crawl as we passed anyone who might be a teenage girl, looking like sexual predators out on the prowl. Waiting at home after the sun went down and the cops told us to get some rest, that Grace would show up “one way or another,” which was a fucked-up thing to say. Waiting, fully clothed in my bed, as the clock ticked past midnight and I’d still heard nothing. Waiting with nothing to do except imagine her body somewhere, plunged underwater like Ophelia or Virginia Woolf, because that’s how Grace would do it, if she did it, something dramatic and literary that would get people talking about the tragic but poetic nature of death. I was almost tempted to run upstairs and make sure she hadn’t put her head in my oven, Plath style. Then I started to think about how Manic Pixie Dream Girls committed suicide. Did they ride their Dutch bicycles on photographic train tracks until a midnight express came along to clean them up? Did they drown themselves in their secret fishponds?