Our Chemical Hearts

by Krystal Sutherland

  “I did notice a bit of hand-holding going on.”

  “Then why the hell did you come over?”

  “Because she’s drunk, and so are you, and I think this is a very bad idea.”

  “Lola.”

  “Have you found out who she visits at the cemetery every day? Because the more I think about it, the more messed up it seems.”

  “Lola.”

  “Are you falling for her, Henry? For the Grace we know? Or for the girl in her Facebook profile picture? Because that’s clearly not who she is anymore, as much as you might want it to be.”

  “Lola.”

  “Fine! But when this ends with her gouging your heart out through your kneecaps, I won’t be your shoulder to cry on.”

  “Yeah, you will. Because that’s what best friends do.” I nodded over Lola’s shoulder at Murray and Sugar Gandhi, who were arguing quite animatedly at the bottom of the garden, Muz still dressed as a pirate.

  “God.” Lola shook her head. “Men.”

  When our respective love interests returned, La stood and kissed Georgia on the cheek and said, “Come, my darling, we must go see a man about a dog.”

  And then, finally, it was just us. Just us, and the universe.

  Grace pulled me to my feet and we wandered, holding hands, through the crowd for a few minutes, waiting for the alcohol to seep back into our bloodstreams and return us to the blissful haze we’d been in thirty minutes ago.

  I don’t know who led who, or if we both had the same idea, but suddenly we were in the dark corridor that ran up the side of the house. I leaned against the bricks to steady myself, and before I had time to really comprehend what was happening, Grace was on me, her mouth moving against mine, her fingers in my hair. And my first thought was, Damn. I don’t even know what song’s playing, but soon that didn’t matter, because Grace Town was kissing me and it was everything I thought it would be. The weeks of Does she even like me? melted away because she did, she must, she had to.

  My drink was sloshing in one hand but I didn’t want to interrupt the kiss, so I wrapped my free arm around her waist and tried to keep the red soda from spilling down her back. We moved against each other like tessellating shapes. I wanted to pick her up and for her to wrap her legs around my hips but I was aware that people could see us and I didn’t want to be the couple that practically had sex in public.

  The kiss went on for two songs, both of which I didn’t know, then Grace broke away and bit her bottom lip and looked at me like she wanted to tell me something, her palms pressed into my chest, but eventually she just said, “I should go home.”

  “I can walk you, if you’d like.”

  “Okay.”

  I grabbed our bags and coats from Heslin’s little sister’s bedroom (there was a NO SEX IN HERE YOU FUCKING HEATHENS sign taped to the door) while Grace called her parents to let them know she was walking home, like she was trying to make it clear that when we got there, I wasn’t coming inside. Which was fine by me, really, because I’d never had sex before and I didn’t think being this drunk would be very conducive to giving a great performance, virgin or not. So I walked with her in the cold, not touching her, not holding her hand, the both of us brainstorming inane themes for the newspaper (“school spirit”? “the story so far”? “leave your mark”?) like we hadn’t been making out.

  When we got to her place, she waved good-bye and said she’d see me on Monday and that was that.

  Still drunk enough to be courageous, I messaged her as I wandered toward Murray’s house, which was easy enough to break into and way closer than mine.

  HENRY PAGE:

  Okay, Dusty Knupps. It’s probably pretty obvious by now that I kinda maybe sorta think you’re a babe.

  GRACE TOWN:

  Well, that’s good to hear! I wouldn’t have chased you if I didn’t feel the same way.

  Good to hear, Knupps. Good to hear. I’ll keep you posted on stuff and things and whatnot over the weekend.

  Haha yeah. Be good to hear about all the stuff and things.

  Excellent. I shall ensure you’re well informed. Adieu, Mrs. Knupps. It was a pleasure.

  Indeed it was, Mr. Knupps. Indeed it was.

  “Muz,” I whispered when I got to Murray’s house and started tapping at his bedroom window. No one came to answer, so I lifted the window, hauled myself inside, and fell asleep, alone and fully clothed on Murray’s bed, thinking of Grace Town and how, if people really were assembled from pieces of the universe, her soul was made of stardust and chaos.

  OUR PARENTS HAD become entirely accustomed to coming into our bedrooms in the mornings and not finding their own children there, but someone else’s. Murray’s dad, Baz (short for Sebastian, not Barry—he was always sure to tell people this when he introduced himself), roused me from sleep with the smell of bacon and coffee. I came to with my brain detached from its tethers. Whenever I moved, it moved, too, smacking around the inside of my skull like an angry jellyfish, stinging as it went.

  I carried my thumping head out to the dining room, where Murray’s mom and three younger sisters were already sitting around the table.

  “Morning, Henry,” the girls sang in unison, giggling as they went. They all looked like Muz, all blond perms and blue eyes (minus the seedy teenage ’stache, of course).

  “Hush, hell beasts,” I said to them as I sank into a dining room chair and laid my forehead gently against the wooden table, which only made them giggle more. “Why is the sunshine so bright?” It seemed to be streaming in from everywhere, searing my vodka- and punch-soaked veins, burning through me like wildfire. “Maybe Dracula wasn’t a vampire, just a raging alcoholic who was constantly hungover.”

  “Now, that is a story I would read,” said Baz.

  “I don’t suppose you know where our child is?” said Sonya, Murray’s mom. Keeping my head on the cool wood of the table, I checked my phone. There were three messages:

  LOLA LEUNG:

  Right on goddamn schedule.

  This was followed by a picture of a very drunk Murray, half-conscious and crying violently on Lola’s kitchen floor, hugging what appeared to be a plush kangaroo toy.

  LOLA LEUNG:

  (I put the kangaroo there for effect, but I’m not going to tell him that when I show him this picture in the morning.)

  And then, at 4:03 a.m.:

  MUZ FINCH:

  I escaped Lola’s despotic rule. Your dad let me in to your house. I’m about to have drunk reconciliation sex in your bed. Hope that’s cool!

  I closed my eyes and groaned. “That Australian bastard.”

  “Henry,” said Baz, nodding to the girls. “Language.”

  “Oh, sorry. Yeah, Murray’s at my place.”

  “Musical beds again, is it?”

  “As always. He originally fell asleep at Lola’s. Possibly on the kitchen floor. Possibly with a kangaroo. Your son is a miscreant.”

  “And that’s why we allow him to hang out with you lot. Because you use words like miscreant in general conversation,” Sonya said, mussing my hair and pouring me a glass of orange juice.

  We ate breakfast together in the too-bright sun, and then the girls dragged me into their playroom to watch Avatar: The Last Airbender until my parents brought Murray home. I let the girls paint my fingernails with silver glitter in exchange for them covertly fetching me snacks from the kitchen. They tried to braid my hair, but none of them were good enough at it yet to get it to stay.

  Finally, Mom and Dad arrived to trade children with Muz’s parents. Murray wandered in barefoot, still dressed as a pirate, carrying an empty baking tray and a sign around his neck that read FREE HUGS AND COOKIES.

  I didn’t ask. I didn’t need to.

  My folks decided to stick around for lunch, so I lay in Murray’s bed for the next hour and a half, slipping in and out of sleep as he tidied his room
and told me about how he’d made up with Sugar Gandhi (twice) in my bed. Which I wasn’t very happy about, but he pointed out that my sheets were offensive and long overdue for a wash anyway, which was true. And I told him about Grace, about the kiss, about the message she’d sent me afterward. I wouldn’t have chased you if I didn’t feel the same way. About how, all this time, when I thought she’d been indifferent, she’d actually been pursuing me in her own strange, quiet style. It wasn’t the sort of thing Murray and I normally talked about, because it wasn’t the sort of thing I normally did, but I liked it. It was nice to have something to share for a change.

  “Look at us—two fools in love,” Muz said as he flopped down on the bed next to me, wrapped his leg over my hips, and nuzzled into my neck like a shaggy dog, as he was wont to do.

  I wasn’t sure about the love part yet, but the fool part, certainly, was true.

  AND THEN THERE was nothing.

  I don’t know exactly what I expected. I knew a single, drunken kiss didn’t mean Grace had to pledge herself to me body and soul, but I at least thought we’d be more, like, obvious about our feelings. That, now that I knew she liked me, it would be easier to draw her out of herself on the days when she switched off, easier to be around her even when she pretended she was the only person in the world, easier to accidentally brush her arm and not have her go rigid, like an electric current was twisting through her spine. I thought that after people made out with each other, things kind of fell in place around them. I was, naturally, very wrong.

  The week after our first kiss went something like this.

  SATURDAY

  When I got home from Muz’s in the early afternoon, I sent Grace a message (after I’d peeled the sheets off my bed and stuffed them in the washing machine while wearing gloves and a surgical mask).

  HENRY PAGE:

  Ugh. Woke up feeling like I gargled a dead hamster. I heard Heslin got grounded, poor kid. How is Grakov? Let me know if you wanna hang this weekend.

  GRACE TOWN:

  I am feeling all right this morning. I will let you know about this weekend. Have a good day.

  SUNDAY

  Despite what she’d said, Grace Town did not let me know about that weekend. I know, because I spent most of the those forty-eight hours waiting for her to message me, but she didn’t, so I went to bed at eight p.m. on Sunday night but didn’t fall asleep until the sky was turning pale pink with sunrise through the basement windows.

  MONDAY

  Grace Town walked into the newspaper office in the morning before class, nodded at me, collected a stack of papers off her desk, and left. It was at this point that I became fairly certain that The Kiss (as it would come to be known) had been little more than a hallucination caused by mild methanol poisoning from the punch. I spent the day wanting to go home and research new schools that didn’t frown on senior-year transfers.

  Unfortunately I had to stay after school to finish (read: begin) my first English assignment for Hink, catch up on my math homework, open my Spanish textbook for the first time, and start thinking about college applications, which is why I was still in the library when I received Grace’s message and felt my heart kick up into my neck. It was much, much worse than I thought it would be.

  GRACE TOWN:

  Do you want to play touch football Thursday nights? Hink is putting a rec team of teachers and students together “for fitness” and wants to know if you’re in? Sounds like everyone else (i.e., all the teachers) is. I won’t be playing, but I’m gonna come and cheer you guys on.

  I’d been expecting a “Friday night was a mistake” or “I don’t want things to be weird” type message, but this? This was torture. On the one hand, joining the teachers’ recreational football team had two benefits:

  Grace Town, obviously. Obligatory social events meant more obligatory time spent together, outside of school and the newspaper office and Grace’s car.

  The chance to prove to my teachers, especially the ones who still thought I was Sadie Page’s male equivalent, that I was neither criminally devious nor psychotically brilliant.

  On the other hand, there was one massive downside:

  Sports.

  The cons almost won. The thought of Grace having to witness my fumbled attempts at hand-eye coordination made me cringe. But I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend more time with her. So I typed:

  HENRY PAGE:

  I guess I could use it as an opportunity to get within three feet of Mr. Hotchkiss. In class he makes me sit all the way at the back, but he won’t be able to hide from me on the field!

  Do you know what time they’re planning on playing? And how is your Monday going?

  Game will be at 4 p.m. Thursday each week. Today was okay. I helped Lola with design stuff for the articles we’ve already got. Do we really want to run that 10,000-word piece on Magic: The Gathering tournaments . . . ?

  Oh! Maybe “Magic: The Gathering” could be the overall theme?

  Sorry I couldn’t be there to help out, assignments and all that.

  Didn’t I tell you I made “Magic: The Gathering” the theme, like, a week ago? That epic piece of literature is going to be the magnum opus of the Westland Post.

  (Although maybe we should trim it to 9,000 words.)

  What are you up to tonight?

  I just left the office and I’m on my way to hang out with a couple of girls from East River who I used to run track with. Might need a beer or three after attempting to edit Galaxy’s grammar.

  That beer fridge I suggested might not be such a good idea. I’m probably going to be an alcoholic by the end of the year, no joke.

  All the best writers are! Hemingway would be proud. Also . . . shots before football? They do call booze liquid courage for a reason.

  Drinking before football is going to be 95% of my strategy.

  And the other 5%?

  1% pure, unadulterated athletic talent. 4% luck.

  It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off.

  Indeed it is. 60% of the time, it works every time.

  TUESDAY

  At lunchtime we went to a café near the mall and stood in line together, in silence, because it was a Bad Grace Day and she’d barely said more than a word to me for hours and it’s hard to bounce off someone who isn’t there. The song over the loudspeaker changed to “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” the Elvis version, and it was so ridiculously cliché that I had to press my lips together to keep from laughing.

  When we reached the counter, I ordered a tea. Grace didn’t want anything, but she insisted on paying for my drink, which I let her do, because I liked the way it made me feel. People didn’t buy hot beverages for just anybody, right?

  In that moment, with Elvis crooning Take my hand, take my whole life too over the speaker, tea was so much more than leaves steeped in boiling water. It was a symbol, after half a week of nothingness, that Grace Town was still interested in me, even if she couldn’t find the words to say so.

  • • •

  “What part of that outfit, exactly, will help us blend in while we’re shadowing her?” I said.

  It was Tuesday night, one week since Madison Carlson had provided us with insider intel, and I was driving toward East River High. Murray was sitting next to me in the passenger seat, wearing a trench coat and a fedora, an unlit cigar wedged between his lips.

  “The rain was falling like bullets,” said Murray around his cigar, continuing his hard-boiled narration of the evening’s events in a fifties American accent. It was not, in fact, raining at all. “I turned to the kid”—Murray turned to me—“and said, ‘I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into.’ He was a good guy, six feet of skin and bones, with a decent head screwed on his shoulders. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the dame he was chasing was like secondhand smoke: beautiful but deadly.”

 
“Secondhand smoke isn’t beautiful.”

  “The kid said something stupid, but I ignored him. ‘We’re coming up on East River now,’ I said as we rounded the corner and the acrid lights of the school came into view. ‘Park here or they’ll have eyes on us in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’”

  “Seriously, if you don’t shut up and take that hat off, I’m gonna leave you in the car.”

  “I couldn’t take any more of the kid’s whining. I needed a smoke, and badly.” Murray struck a match and went to light his cigar, in my mother’s car no less. I smacked him across the back of the head.

  “Ow, fuck, all right, all right!” he said, shaking the match until the flame flicked out. He took the hat off and left the cigar in the car, and we walked toward the white lights of East River’s track. The wind picked up, carrying with it the clean, crisp smell of fall. Dead leaves crunched under our feet. Streetlights burned in the dimness, but the roads were empty and quiet. I dug my hands into my pockets and speculated as to what the hell Madison Carlson had sent us here to see.

  When we reached the track, we found the bleachers deserted, so we hung back in the shadows. Muz nudged me in the ribs and pointed across the field and said, “Over there,” which was entirely unnecessary, because she was the only one there, a small figure cast up against a galaxy of fluorescent light.

  Grace was dressed in her usual oversized, boyish attire, but there was something different about her tonight. Her hair was pulled back and her face was pink and glazed with sweat and she was bent over, hands on her knees, heaving breaths. After a minute she stood and limped—caneless—back to the starting line, where she knelt. Took a breath. Started running, her limp haphazard, her face set in a grimace that deepened each time her injured leg impacted the red rubber of the track.