“So you see, this is really a win-win for you. You’re welcome, by the way.”
We walked on in silence for a couple of minutes longer, until my anger had entirely faded and I could no longer remember exactly why I’d chased after her in the first place.
“Why are you still following me, Henry Page?” she said, coming to a stop in the middle of the road, like she didn’t give a shit that a car could come hurtling toward us at any second. And I realized that, although we’d never been introduced and never spoken before today, she knew my full name.
“You know who I am?” I said.
“Yes. And you know who I am, so let’s not pretend we don’t. Why are you still following me?”
“Because, Grace Town, I’ve walked too far from school now and my bus has probably already left and I was looking for a smooth way to exit the conversation but I didn’t find one, so I resigned myself to my fate.”
“Which is?”
“To walk in this general direction until my parents report me missing and the police find me on the outskirts of town and drive me home.”
Grace sighed. “Where do you live?”
“Right near the Highgate Cemetery.”
“Fine. Come to my place. I’ll drop you.”
“Oh. Awesome. Thanks.”
“As long as you promise not to push the whole editor thing.”
“Fine. No pushing. You want to turn down an awesome opportunity, that’s your decision.”
“Good.”
It was a humid afternoon in suburgatory, the clouds overhead as solid as cake frosting, the lawns and trees still that bright, golden green of late summer. We walked side by side on the hot asphalt. There were five more minutes of awkward silence where I searched and searched for a question to ask her. “Can I read the rest of that poem?” I said finally, because it seemed like the least worst of all my options. (Option one: So . . . are you, like, a cross-dresser or something? Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I’m just curious. Option two: What’s up with your leg, bro? Option three: You’re definitely some kind of junkie, right? I mean, you’re fresh out of rehab, yeah? Option four: Can I read the rest of that poem?)
“What poem?” she said.
“The Pablo whoever one. ‘I do not love you.’ Or whatever it was.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Grace stopped and handed me her cane and swung her backpack onto her front and fished out the threadbare book and pushed it into my hands. It fell open to Pablo Neruda, so I knew then for sure that it was something she read over and over again. It was the line about loving dark things that I kept coming back to.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
“It’s beautiful,” I said to Grace as I closed the book and handed it back to her, because it was.
“Do you think?” She looked at me with this look of genuine questioning on her face, her eyes narrowed slightly.
“You don’t?”
“I think that’s what people say when they read poems they don’t understand. It’s sad, I think. Not beautiful.” I couldn’t see how a perfectly nice love poem was sad, but then again, my significant other was my laptop, so I didn’t say anything. “Here,” Grace said as she opened the book again and tore out the page with the poem on it. I flinched as though I were in actual pain. “You should have it, if you like it. Pretty poetry is wasted on me.”
I took the paper from her and folded it and slipped it into my pocket, half of me horrified that she’d injured a book, the other half of me elated that she’d so willingly given me something that clearly meant a lot to her. I liked people like that. People who could part with material possessions with little or no hesitation. Like Tyler Durden. “The things you own end up owning you” and all that.
Grace’s house was exactly the type of place I expected her to live. The garden was overgrown, gone to seed, the lawn left to grow wild for some time. The curtains on the windows were drawn and the house itself, which was two stories tall and made of gray brick, seemed to be sagging as if depressed by the weight of the world. In the driveway there was a solitary car, a small white Hyundai with a Strokes decal on the back windshield.
“Stay here,” she said. “I’ve got to get my car keys.”
I nodded and stood by myself on the front lawn while I waited for her. The car, like everything else about her, was strange. Why did she walk (or hobble, rather) fifteen minutes to school every day if she had a license and a readily available vehicle? Every other senior I knew was desperate for the privilege of driving to the mall or McDonald’s during lunch, escaping the confines of the school grounds. And then, in the afternoons, bypassing the bus line and rolling right on home to food and PlayStations and sweet, sweet comfortable sweatpants.
“Do you have your license?” Grace said from behind me. I jumped a little, because I hadn’t even heard her come out of the house, but there she was, car keys dangling off her pinkie finger. These, too, had Strokes paraphernalia attached to them. I’d never really listened to their stuff before, but I made a mental note to look them up on Spotify when I got home.
“Uh, yeah, actually. I got it a couple of months ago, but I don’t have a car yet.”
“Good.” She threw me the keys and walked to the passenger side of the car and pulled out her phone. After twenty seconds or so, she looked up from her screen, her eyebrows raised. “Well? Are you going to unlock the car or not?”
“You want me to drive?”
“No, I thought it would be hilarious to hand you the keys and stand here until someone invents teleportation. Yes, Henry Page, I want you to drive.”
“Uh, okay, I guess. I’m a bit rusty, but yeah. Okay.” I unlocked the car and opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat. The inside of the car smelled like her, the musky, masculine scent of a teenage boy. Which was very confusing for me, to say the least. I started the engine—so far, so good—and took a deep breath.
“I’ll try my best not to kill us both,” I said. Grace Town did not reply, so I laughed at my own joke—a single, awkward “ha”—and then I put the car in reverse.
My grandmother would’ve looked cooler driving than I did on the journey home. I hunched over the steering wheel, sweating, hyperaware that I a) was driving someone else’s car, b) hadn’t driven any car at all for months, and c) had only scraped through my driving test because my instructor was my violently hungover second cousin twice removed, and I’d had to stop three times to let him vomit on the side of the road.
“Are you sure you passed your driving test?” Grace said, leaning over to check the speedometer, which revealed I was sitting five miles under the speed limit.
“Hey, I only had to bribe two officials. I earned my license.” I swear I might’ve almost seen her smile. “So you came from East River, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Why’d you change schools in senior year?”
“I’m all about adventure,” she said dryly.
“Well, we are a particularly thrilling institution. I can definitely see the appeal.”
“Hink seems like a riot. I bet he gets into all sorts of shenanigans.”
“Life of the party, that one.”
And then, thank God, it was over. I pulled up in front of my house and relaxed my fingers from the steering wheel, aware for the first time of how tightly I’d been clenching my muscles.
“I don’t think I’ve seen anyone drive that tensely since . . . Do you need a minute to compose yourself?” she said.
“What can I say? I’m a rebel without a cause.”
I expected Grace to slide over to the driver’s side, but she told me to turn the car off. We both got out and I handed her the keys and she locked the door like she meant to come inside. I hesitated. Was I supposed to invite her in? But then she turned to me and said, “Okay. Good-
bye. I’ll see you tomorrow. Or maybe not. Who knows where I’ll be,” and she started hobbling down the street in the complete opposite direction from which we’d come.
“There’s not much down there but a storm-water drain and a cemetery a block away.” (The graveyard was close enough that its proximity had resulted in several counseling sessions in elementary school due to a brief yet intense period when I was convinced my great-grandfather Johannes van de Vliert’s ghost was trying to kill me.) Grace didn’t say anything, didn’t look back, just lifted the hand that wasn’t holding her cane as if to say I know and kept on walking.
I watched her, entirely puzzled, until she disappeared around the next street corner.
• • •
“Hola, broseph,” said my sister, Sadie, the moment I closed the front door behind me.
“Jesus, Suds, you scared the crap outta me,” I said, clutching at my chest. Sadie was twelve years older than me, a celebrated neuroscientist, and was generally considered both the golden child and black sheep of the family simultaneously. We looked a lot alike: black hair, slightly buggy eyes, dimples when we smiled. Except Suds was slightly more cutting edge than me with her septum piercing, tattoo sleeve, and intricate dreadlocks, all souvenirs from her rocky teenage years.
“Haven’t seen or heard from you in, like, two days, kid. I was starting to think Mom and Dad had murdered you and buried you in a shallow grave.” This was, of course, a strategic lie. Suds was going through a fairly shitty divorce from her fairly shitty doctor husband, which meant she spent about 90 percent of the time she didn’t spend at the hospital at our house.
“Sadie, don’t be ridiculous,” Dad said from the kitchen, dressed in his usual getup of a Hawaiian shirt, male short shorts, and black spectacles. (His fashion sense had rapidly declined after he’d moved his carpentry workshop into the backyard three years ago. Honestly it was a miracle to find him in something other than pajamas.) Sadie and I got our hair from him. Or at least, I assumed we did. The ever-present stubble on his chin was dark, but he’d been bald for the majority of my life. “We’d make his grave at least four or five feet deep. We don’t half-ass murder in this house.”
“Toby and Gloria can attest to that,” Sadie said, referring to an event six years prior to my birth that involved a pair of goldfish, insect spray, and the accidental yet untimely death of her aquatic pets.
“Twenty-three years, Suds. It’s been twenty-three years since your goldfish died. Are you ever going to let it go?”
“Not until I have my vengeance!” Sadie yelled dramatically. A toddler started crying from the back of the house. Sadie sighed. “You’d think after three years I’d start getting used to this whole motherhood thing, but I keep forgetting about the damn kid.”
“I’ll get him,” I said, dumping my schoolbag and heading down the hallway to where Ryan usually slept in Sadie’s old room. The kid had been, much the same as me, an accident and a surprise. Mom and Dad had only ever planned to have one child: twelve years after they had Sadie, they got stuck with me.
“Ryan, man, what’s up?” I said when I pushed open the door to find my two-and-a-half-year-old nephew, whom Dad babysat on weekdays.
“Henwee,” he rasped, rubbing his eyes. “Where’s Mama?”
“Come on, I’ll take you to her.”
“Who’s the girl, by the way?” Sadie asked as I walked back down the hallway holding Ryan’s hand.
“The girl?”
“The one who drove you home.” As she scooped Ryan up, Sadie had this thin, lopsided grin on her face. I’d seen that look many times before, when she was a teenager. It always meant trouble.
“Oh. Grace is her name. She’s new. I missed my bus, so she offered me a ride.”
“She’s cute. In a weird, Janis Joplin, will probably die at twenty-seven kind of way.”
I shrugged and pretended I hadn’t noticed.
ONCE RYAN WAS settled, I went down to the basement, which Sadie had turned into her teenage den of iniquity more than a decade ago (and I’d inherited upon her departure for college). It wasn’t fancy. It kind of looked like a postapocalyptic fallout shelter. None of the furniture matched, the concrete floor was covered with a patchwork of faux-Persian carpets, the refrigerator was older than my parents, and there was a poorly taxidermied elk head on the wall. Everyone claimed not to know where it came from, but I had a sneaking suspicion Sadie had stolen it as a teenager and my parents were either too embarrassed or too impressed to return it to its rightful owner. Maybe both.
My two best friends were, as always, already down there, playing GTA V on my PS4. They were, in order of appearance (i.e., seating order on the couch):
Murray Finch, 17, Australian. Tall and tan and muscular with curly blond hair to his shoulders and a seedy teenage mustache. His parents had immigrated to the States like six years ago, but Muz still (purposefully) sounded like Steve Irwin and said things like “g’day” and “drongo” and “struth” on a regular basis. He was of the strong opinion that Crocodile Dundee was the best thing to ever happen to Australians. Girls loved him.
Lola Leung, 17. Dark-skinned, dark-eyed, dark-haired (cropped short). My next-door neighbor for my entire life, and a self-described “diversity triple threat”: half Chinese on her dad’s side, half Haitian on her mom’s, and one hundred percent gay. For as long as I could remember, La had been “randomly selected” to appear front and center in all of our school’s promotional material, including but not limited to front cover of the yearbook, on the billboard outside school, on the website, and even on bookmarks that were handed out at the library. She’d also been my first kiss three years ago. Two weeks later she’d come out as a lesbian and entered into a long-term, long-distance relationship with a girl named Georgia from the next town over. People still thought my kissing skills were the reason she decided to start batting for the other team. I was still trying not to be offended. (Girls also loved her.)
At the foot of the stairs, I leaned on the banister and watched them. “I love that even though I failed to make it onto the bus and was possibly dead and/or dying, you two still saw fit to come to my house, eat my food, and play my games without me. Did my father even notice I wasn’t with you?”
“Let’s be honest,” Lola said, twisting around on the couch to grin at me. “Justin does love us more than he loves you.”
“Who’s the sheila, mate?” said Murray without looking away from the screen, where he was plowing a tank over a line of police cars. “Saw you going off after her like a raw prawn.”
“Roll back the slang, Kangaroo Jack,” I said, crossing the room to boot up Sadie’s old iMac computer, which was, after almost two decades of service, still wheezing along with life. “There are no unsuspecting American girls in the room for you to charm.” Murray was, for the most part, capable of speaking like a normal human being, but he’d discovered somewhere along the way that sounding like a bushman from the outback endeared him to the womenfolk. Sometimes he forgot to turn it off.
There was only one folder on the iMac’s desktop, entitled “Missing/Funeral/Manhunt Headshots,” that contained attractive pictures of everyone in the room (plus Sadie), to be used in the event that any of us disappeared/died/became wanted felons. Our parents had strict instructions to access the photos and provide them to the media before journalists went snooping on Facebook and picked random, unfortunate-looking pictures we’d been tagged in against our will.
“Muz raises a very good point, though,” La said. “Who was the strange girl you were sprinting after? Did you think to yourself, ‘Here’s finally one that can’t get away,’ but then she proved you wrong?”
“Ha-ha. I can’t believe you both saw that.” I grabbed a can of Coke from the refrigerator and went back to the computer, where Facebook was loading pixel by painful pixel. “Her name is Grace Town. She’s new. Hink offered her editor but she turned it down, so I got
pissed and went after her.”
“Her name is Grace Town? Like Gracetown?” said Murray as he, too, cracked a can of Coke and took a swig. “Christ. Poor chick.”
Lola was already on her feet. “Hink offered her editor over you? That bastard. No way am I designing that glorified newsletter if you’re not in charge!”
“No. Calm down. He gave it to us both but she turned it down because she—and I quote—‘doesn’t write anymore.’ The way she said it was so ominous.”
“Oh,” Lola said. Murray yanked her back down to the couch. “Maybe bad things happen when she writes. Oh! Maybe the things she writes come true? Or maybe she has a voodoo curse on her so that every word she writes breaks a bone in her leg and that’s why she walks with a cane?”
“Let’s take a shufti at old FB, shall we?” Murray said. “Nothing like a little cyberstalking to clear these things up.”
“Way ahead of you.” When I typed Grace’s name in the search field and hit return, a list of all the people I knew with Grace in their name showed up. Sadie Grace Elizabeth Smith was the first, followed by Samantha Grace Lawrence (we went to elementary school together), Grace Park (some kind of distant relative) and Grace Payne (I had no idea). Underneath them was a list of exact matches—five or so genuine Grace Towns—none of whom I had mutual friends with, and only one of whom lived in my geographical area.
I slouched forward. “None of them are her.”
“Wait, what about that one?” Lola said, pointing.
I clicked the profile picture of the closest geographical Grace Town, a girl in a red dress with red lipstick and loose curls in her honey-blond hair. She was smiling brilliantly, her eyes closed, her head tilted back in laughter so that the sharp lines of her collarbones were visible beneath her skin. It was a good handful of seconds before any of us recognized her. Because it was her. It was the same Grace Town who had driven me home. The lips were the same, the shape of her face.
“Holy shit,” Murray said. “Blokes would be on her like seagulls at a tip.”
Our Chemical Hearts Page 2
