Our Chemical Hearts

by Krystal Sutherland

  To which I replied, without sitting up, “My teenage hormones have rendered me too emotionally fragile to be in a learning environment right now.”

  Valentine was silent for a few seconds, and then she simply said, “Carry on.”

  So I did.

  I’M GOING TO have to kill myself, I thought as I paced back and forth onstage in the auditorium later that afternoon. I really couldn’t see any way around it. My plan, clearly, was spectacularly stupid, and I couldn’t imagine living with the humiliation of being turned down, universal redemption or not.

  Grace was late, which made me panic and think she wasn’t coming, which actually would’ve been a good thing. I considered bailing, but then the door at the back of the auditorium creaked open and she was moving down the center aisle between rows and rows of seats, leaning heavily on her cane. She looked so small in the vast, empty space, her long shadow cast up behind her. Like a miniature figurine in a diorama.

  “What’s this?” she said when I jumped off the stage and jogged up the aisle to meet her.

  “A grand gesture I’m going to regret in about five minutes.”

  “Oh.”

  I clicked the power button for the projector and the title slide glowed to life on the screen.

  “You’re a ridiculous human being,” Grace said, but it was playful, and she smiled, and then she limped to the front row of seats with me by her side and put down her bag and took a seat. “Well, let’s get the regret train rolling, then.”

  Grace watched it from between her fingers like it was a horror movie, and said things like, “I’m so embarrassed for you right now,” as she laughed. I clicked the Next button again and again until the Pros and Cons of Dating Me slide popped up and I watched her eyes flick from side to side as she read, her grin growing wider. But when she reached the second-to-last Pro (I won’t abandon you like your grade school boyfriend did.), Grace immediately went cold.

  “Stop,” she said, her voice strong and clear, but I didn’t have time to stop because she was already on her feet, her backpack already slung over her shoulders as she reeled toward the closest exit. It was Groundhog Day of the first afternoon I’d followed her from Hink’s office: I grabbed my things and went after her, but she was fast, her movements wild as she raced across the school grounds.

  “Wait!” I said, but she didn’t wait, didn’t stop, not until I caught up to her and put my hand on my shoulder, at which point she sank to the ground right near the bus stop. It was like freaking Obi-Wan in A New Hope—she seemed to fold into a pile of clothes, her body gone.

  “This is not going at all how I envisioned it,” I said as I sat next to her, running my hands through my hair, and Grace was kind of laugh-sobbing then, something between a manic cackle and hyperventilation.

  “He was driving,” she said between breaths. “Dom was driving. I messed up my leg, but he . . . he . . .” Grace couldn’t say the words, but I didn’t need her to. My insides shriveled, my stomach and lungs compacting to the size of pennies. I’d had asthma as a kid. That thick feeling in your throat, the way the spot behind your sternum turns to concrete and each breath becomes a battle.

  It all made sudden, shocking sense. The graveyard. The clothes. The car. The track. The abandoned train station. Jesus Christ, even the Strokes.

  It hadn’t been her music I’d been listening to. It’d been his. Our song. Fuck. Our song wasn’t even our song, it was their song. I had the sudden urge to vomit Julian Casablancas out of my bloodstream.

  Grace buried her head against my shoulder, more for stability than anything else, like she might actually sink into the earth if she didn’t. “That’s why I transferred. I needed a fresh start, away from all the places we’d been together. I was trying to keep my shit together and then all of a sudden there you were, and I didn’t plan to like you and I didn’t plan to kiss you and I didn’t plan for . . . I didn’t want to be the girl with the dead boyfriend, I just wanted . . . I wanted . . .”

  “Jesus. Grace. I don’t even know what to say. Jesus.” My face was on fire. Murray and Lola were standing in the bus line, watching us with frowns on their faces, and I really wanted to get on the bus and get out of there and go home and start researching methods of suicide. Self-immolation seemed preferable at this point in time. I held up my hand to them and mouthed, Wait for me.

  Grace lifted her heavy head from my shoulder, her breathing still ragged.

  “I understand if you don’t want—” I started, but then she had me by the collar and was kissing me like I was oxygen and she was drowning, so I let her draw all the breath from my lips to save herself.

  I somehow knew, in that moment, that Grace Town was a jagged piece of glass that I’d cut myself on again and again if I let myself get involved with her. That the way forward would be pockmarked by sadness and grief and jealousy.

  I thought about Pablo Neruda’s poem, still folded where I’d nestled it in my wallet the first day she’d given it to me. I thought about loving her in secret, between the shadow and the soul. Maybe I should do that. Maybe that was where my feelings for Grace Town belonged, in the darkness, never to be realized.

  But I’d never had a crush on a girl before, not like this, anyway, and as selfish as it sounds, I worried that I might never again. What if my family had some long-forgotten voodoo curse on them so that the firstborn male could only be attracted to someone every seventeen years? Dad’s older brother, Uncle Michael, had never (as far as I was aware) had a serious girlfriend. (He did have a live-in “housemate” named Albert who seemed to come to a lot of family gatherings, but I digress.) If the spark of attraction only came along every seventeen years for me, I’d be thirty-four before I found another girl I liked. And if she didn’t work out, the next one wouldn’t come along until I was fifty-one. That seemed like a long time to wait to have your first relationship.

  Grace liked me. We worked well together. And I wanted her. God, I wanted her. But was I really willing to throw all caution to the wind and get involved with someone who was still clearly very deep in mourning?

  Then a teacher said, “Leave room for Jesus,” over a megaphone. (Our school had a “no loving, no shoving” policy in place in an attempt to curb teen pregnancy and fights. Students were supposed to retain a two-foot no-touching radius at all times.) Grace broke away from me and scrabbled to her feet and all of the kids were on the bus and the driver was honking the horn and Murray was yelling at me to “get a bloody move on, you drongo!” I thought Grace might offer me a lift home so we’d have more time to talk, but she didn’t, so I just said, “I want you anyway.” And then I turned and ran shakily to the bus, sucking in breaths through my mouth like I’d done as a child before the inhaler kicked in.

  As the bus pulled out of the school grounds, it drove past her, already limping toward the road. She was running the fingers of her free hand through her hair, her head drooped toward the ground like she’d recently been told some terrible, tragic news. And I thought, as a sting of misery murmured through my veins, that I’d never seen a human being look quite so sad as Grace Town did in that moment.

  THERE WAS NO MENTION, the following Monday, of the events that transpired the Friday before. In fact, I don’t believe it was ever mentioned again. I’d decided, over the weekend, not to solidly make up my mind about how to move forward until I saw Grace again in the flesh. I was still uncertain, leaning more toward saying “let’s just be friends,” because it was stupidly complicated and rocky and I didn’t know if I could deal with that.

  It was senior year. Between school, the newspaper, deciding which colleges to apply to (hint: any one that would take me), and maintaining the slim resemblance of a social life, my existence was already busy and knotted enough.

  And then, of course, I’d Googled the crash. It had taken a while to find the article, because Grace’s name was never used, and I didn’t know her boyfriend’s full name. When I
found it, I didn’t want to read it. It felt like getting a shitty mark back on an essay and seeing a wall of text from the teacher about everything you’d done wrong, everything you couldn’t change now, so what was the point?

  Still, I skimmed it, picked up quotes here and there, tried to read as little as possible because the words stung me like barbs.

  Classes at East River High School were suspended on Wednesday after a junior died and a second was severely injured—

  Skipped to next paragraph.

  The unnamed passenger, a 17-year-old girl believed to be the driver’s girlfriend, remained in critical condition Friday with major injuries to her—

  Skipped to next paragraph.

  The car skidded off the road and flipped several times before impacting a tree near—

  Skipped to next paragraph.

  It’s believed that the 17-year-old driver, Dominic Sawyer, died on impact, while the passenger was rushed to—

  Skipped to next paragraph.

  “The car is just destroyed,” said the officer. “There’s nothing left—

  Skipped to next paragraph.

  At East River, school counselors are on hand today to provide support to students and—

  Skipped to next paragraph.

  Jeffers said Sawyer “was one of the kindest students I’d ever taught. Brilliant at everything and—

  Skipped to next paragraph.

  Plans for a memorial service for the popular East River student are—

  Closed website.

  By the time I reached my afternoon drama class, I’d all but decided that we couldn’t be together. We couldn’t make it work. Grace was too broken. Too weird. How could you move on from that? What she needed was a friend, not a boyfriend. I could be that for her. I could be a good friend. God knows she needed one. So I sat where I normally sat in the black-walled drama room, across from the door, close to the stage, waiting for her to arrive. Surely it wasn’t too late to nip it in the bud. Feelings could be suppressed if you tried hard enough, right?

  Grace got there late, as she always did, and Mrs. Beady didn’t say anything, because she never did.

  Nothing about her had changed, specifically. Her hair was still a mess. Her skin was still sallow. She still had guys’—her dead boyfriend Dom’s—clothes on. She still walked with a limp that was in no way attractive. But the moment our eyes met across the room and her hard expression softened at the sight of me, I knew.

  I knew I wanted to try.

  So she was grieving and broken and it would almost definitely end in one or both of us getting destroyed. But some things were worth fighting for, right?

  BECAUSE I’M A COWARD, I didn’t ask her about him. Maybe it would have been the best thing for both of us to sit down and for her to talk about him and cry about him and tell me that she still regularly visited his grave.

  There were things I was curious about, of course. How long had they dated? How long had they known each other? Had they slept together?

  Had she loved him?

  But Grace didn’t belong to me. She wasn’t my girlfriend. I’d only kissed her twice. In fact, she’d asked me not to tell anyone about us, to keep it on the down-low, at least until she knew for sure what she wanted, because it was generally considered poor taste to date someone so soon after your significant other had died. I tried my best not to feel hurt that she wanted to keep me a secret, because, well, fair enough.

  So it didn’t feel like my place to ask about him, and I think, deep down, I kind of didn’t want to know. The Grace I’d fallen for hadn’t been a girl in mourning for someone else; she’d been a mystery to be unraveled, and part of me wanted to keep it that way.

  The trick to dating, I figured, was to have some kind of activity to do. Going to the movies seemed kind of lame and antisocial, but there was a new Liam Neeson action flick out, and we had the whole Liam-Neeson-improvisational-comedy in-joke thing going, so I decided to message her on Monday afternoon to see what she was doing.

  HENRY PAGE:

  Are you busy tonight?

  GRACE TOWN:

  Nothing at the moment. What are you up to?

  Was thinking of going to see that new Liam Neeson flick. There will no doubt be much improvisational comedy involved. I mean, I’m pretty sure it has the same plot line as all of Liam Neeson’s other movies, but I’m okay with that.

  Where and what time?

  Well, I would normally suggest the theater near my place, but Regal is probably going to be easier if you’re busing it like us peasants. 7:45 p.m.

  Yeah, I may have to. But that sounds good. Liam Neeson vs. the world. My money’s on the big man.

  No one messes with Neeson! Meet you there at like 7:30 p.m.?

  Sounds good, Henrik Page. See you then.

  • • •

  Grace was waiting outside the theater when I arrived, hunched over her phone, unkempt as ever.

  “Hey,” I said when she looked up and saw me. Was I supposed to kiss her? We’d already kissed before, but did that mean I was allowed to kiss her whenever I wanted to now? Were we allowed to be affectionate in public places, or did that break the down-low rule?

  “Henry Page,” Grace said. Why had I still not kissed her? “Shall we get our tickets?”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Normally, on Good Grace Days, conversation between us flowed pretty easily. There were still awkward silences sometimes, when I couldn’t rack my brain for words to save my life, but tonight felt different. There was a new tension that’d never been there before, because this was a date date (wasn’t it?). Something had shifted between us. Attraction had been acknowledged, and it somehow made everything more difficult.

  When the lights went down, I tried to decide if I should hold her hand. I’d held hands with Lola at the movies once, during the week that’d ultimately culminated with the kiss that had determined her homosexuality for her once and for all. I really hoped this would end differently.

  It took until all the trailers and ads for the concession stand were over for the skin of our fingers to finally meet, slow-moving magnets drawn together in the dark.

  We held hands the entire movie, Grace tracing slow circles on my skin with her fingertips. Occasionally she’d lift my hand to her lips and kiss me. I stared at the screen for two hours, vaguely aware that Liam Neeson was kicking someone’s ass, but if you’d asked me afterward what the movie had been about, I would’ve had very sketchy details about the plot at best.

  After it was finished, we walked back to the bus stop together, both of us with our hands tucked into our pockets because it was almost November and too cold to have them out. Or maybe it wasn’t because of the cold. Maybe it was because our relationship (was it even a relationship?) was supposed to be a secret. It was fine to make out at dark parties and hold hands in dark movie theaters, but out in the open, out where other people could see us, Grace and I were still only friends.

  “Liam Neeson,” Grace said when we slowed at the bus stop. “What a badass.”

  “I know, right.”

  “Best comedian in the world.”

  “Too bad all his jokes are about AIDS.”

  “What are you talking about? AIDS is comedy gold. Oh, look, it’s your bus.”

  Damn. Already? I’d been hoping Grace’s bus would show up first. That, while we waited, we’d sit on the low stone wall that surrounded the city park and talk and laugh and make out.

  “Rats. Well, bye,” I said. Smooth, Page. So smooth.

  I leaned in. Kissed her quickly. Pressed my forehead against hers for a second, hoping this small gesture would convey what I couldn’t say aloud: I like you very much.

  Then I turned and went, unsure if anything I’d done all night had been right. The caustic lights of the bus stripped away the haze of darkness I’d been in for the last few
hours, and the whole situation suddenly looked far uglier. I stared out the window the entire trip home, my phone clutched in my hand, wondering if I was supposed to message her and tell her what a great time I’d had and how much I liked her. But it felt tacky somehow. Like a cheap shot at her dead boyfriend, still not fully decomposed in his grave.

  And I realized then that this would never be a normal love story, if there is such a thing. Even if neither of us wanted to talk about him, Dom would always be there, a ghostly presence neither of us could escape. I’d felt him in the theater, wedged between us. I could feel him now, his half-rotten body in the empty bus seat across the aisle from me. He was shaking his head and saying, “Dating my girlfriend while my eyeballs putrefy? Dick move, bro.”

  But it could get easier. Grace could get better. She could go back to the girl she’d been before, in time. The girl I caught glimpses of sometimes.

  My phone buzzed in my hand.

  GRACE TOWN:

  I’ve been inspired by Mr. Neeson to take up the position of voluntary undercover bus marshal. No suspicious action yet. I’ll keep you updated.

  HENRY PAGE:

  I still think the kid being the terrorist would’ve been an awesome plot twist.

  Yes. Definitely.

  I’m still of the opinion that Neeson should play Qui-Gon Jinn in all of his movies from now on.

  It would be a lot easier to be a bus marshal if I could use the Force.

  Wait, let me try.

  Well?

  No luck.

  I’ve been trying for years. One day. One day.