Our Chemical Hearts

by Krystal Sutherland

  We wore the same scent.

  A snapshot of a lifetime, boiled down to the size of a bedroom. I stood there for a few minutes, taking in the stillness of the place. Here he was, laid out before me, everything he’d been, everything he was.

  I wondered if Grace felt close to death in this room, like I did, or if she felt close to life. And I marveled at the unfairness of it all. How a person could be so tethered to this world one moment, and gone from it the next.

  I wandered into the walk-in wardrobe and pulled the cord for the light. Here was more of his tomb. All of his clothes. A pressed suit, probably in preparation for prom. A football jersey from the East River team. Half a dozen pairs of shoes. Unlabeled boxes on the overhead shelves.

  The gray band shirt Grace had worn to the movies was folded on the shelf. There was a dark smudge where she’d spilled the ketchup, almost as if she’d sponged it off instead of . . .

  Then it dawned on me.

  “Oh God . . . ,” I whispered as I picked the shirt up. The stain had been sponged away, but the shirt hadn’t been washed. The fabric still smelled of Grace. Of Dom. Of me.

  Grace didn’t wash Dom’s clothes. She didn’t wash his sheets. There was always that musty, boyish smell that hung on her wherever she went. I’d assumed it was a natural quirk, or that she had lackluster hygiene practices, but standing in her dead boyfriend’s closet was a great way to provoke an epiphany.

  Grace lived in him. Every hour of every day, he was there with her. The scent of him on her skin. Grace was the ghost, not Dom. Two people had died that day, but one of them still had a body.

  I looked around the room again, trying to find any sign of something that belonged to her. There was nothing of Grace here except for an envelope on the dresser that bore her name. The letter I’d written her, still unopened. There was no girls’ clothing, no girls’ shoes, no makeup, none of the things you’d find in your sister’s or mother’s or friends’ bedrooms.

  She wore his clothes and his deodorant and she slept in his tangled sheets every night. Whoever she had been—the bright, beautiful girl in her Facebook profile picture—that person was gone now, replaced by this Dom impostor.

  You can tell a lot about a person from their bedroom, she’d said to me once. What was there for me to discern from this room apart from the fact that Grace Town did not exist at all?

  “So now you know,” said Grace quietly.

  I spun around to find her staring at me from the door frame, Dom’s shirt still crumpled up in my shaking fingers. Looking at her then, it was easy to understand that she wasn’t of the corporeal realm. Her skin was as translucent as perfumed paper, and her blond hair fell in ashen curtains to settle blunt and dead about her shoulders. There were whispers of bruises beneath the skin of her eyes, like she cried so much it made her bleed. Grace was a lost soul, a ghost adrift, the human embodiment of secondhand smoke.

  I wanted to touch her. I couldn’t remember if she’d ever felt warm beneath my fingertips, or if she’d always been spun from something more ethereal than skin. “Grace, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  “I moved in a month before the accident,” she said, taking the dirty shirt from me and folding it and placing it back on its shelf in the wardrobe. She smoothed the fabric out with her hands, then placed her forehead against the shelf, her eyes closed. “The Sawyers had been trying to get me here for years. I finally worked up the guts to run away from my mom. It was the best worst day of my life.”

  “That’s awful. Grace . . . I don’t . . . I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to help you.”

  Grace looked up at me. “I’m not broken, Henry. I’m not a piece of pottery out of your cabinet. I don’t need to be fixed.”

  “I know that. I didn’t mean that. But—you can tell a lot about a person from their bedroom, remember?” It went so much deeper than she’d ever been willing to tell me. Grace hadn’t only lost him in the physical sense—she’d lost the promise he held as well. It wouldn’t just be his corpse that would haunt us, but the ghost of the life they could’ve had together. He knew everything about her, all the bad, all the good, and I was only allowed the occasional glimpse. All the potential energy Dom had held had been dispersed back into the universe when he died, and she was scrabbling to hold on to it. “So what does your bedroom look like?”

  “That’s what you want to know? I don’t have one, okay? My ‘bedroom’ before I moved in here was a couch in my mother’s husband’s basement.”

  “Sometimes I feel like you don’t exist.”

  “Get out.”

  “You keep everything from me. You don’t tell me anything.”

  “Get out, get out, get out!”

  Then Martin Sawyer was at the door. He looked from Grace to me and back again and said, “Henry,” and I said, “I’m going.” I stalked out of the house, down the hallway filled with pictures of him that greeted her, smiling, every morning and every night. I was hurt and angry and stupidly, stupidly jealous, which was dumb, because worms were probably eating his eyeballs right now, or maybe they were done with his eyeballs and had moved onto his brain, or his heart, or his testicles, and that wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time. He couldn’t love her anymore and he still got to keep her and it all just seemed so desperately unfair to everyone involved.

  I was sitting in the gutter outside her house when my phone rang. Murray. I smudged a tear from my eye and answered. “Yeah, I know, I’m on my—”

  “Hello, Henry. It’s Maddy.”

  “Who?”

  “Madison Carlson. From school.”

  “Oh . . . Why are you calling me from Murray’s phone?”

  “I think I broke Murray.”

  “I can’t deal with this right now. I have to get to Lola’s party.”

  “No, seriously, he’s lying facedown in the grass and he hasn’t moved for, like, twenty minutes and Lola’s gone.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Well, he asked me if I’d heard anything more from Seeta, so I told him about her new boyfriend, and then he kind of sank to his knees and laid down and refused to get up. I think he might be dead. I can’t deal with a dead body, Henry.”

  “Christ. Send me a drop pin of your location. I’ll come and get him.”

  “We’re at the football field. Everyone’s gone. You need to get here ASAP.”

  I didn’t get there ASAP. I hung up and wandered slowly from Grace’s house to the school, hoping Murray would grow up before I got there so I could go home and die in peace. While I walked, I messaged La and told her I might not make it to her party because Murray had been injured at the pregame.

  When I got there, I almost didn’t spot them because it was dark and Madison was lying down as well, using Murray’s lower back as a pillow.

  “I thought I might as well get comfortable while I waited for you,” she said.

  “Sugar Gandhi really has a new boyfriend?” I said.

  “If you’re referring to Seeta, a) yes and b) that is incredibly racist.”

  “How bad is he?”

  “Watch this.” Madison stood and proceeded to kick Murray in the legs, to which he didn’t react.

  “Jesus, woman, stop. Don’t kick a man when he’s down.” I poked him in the neck to make sure he was still warm, which he was. “Muz, buddy?” When he didn’t respond, I instructed Madison to grab his legs as I took him by the shoulders and turned him over. Murray’s eyes were open, staring unblinkingly at the night sky. I squeezed his cheeks together until he had fish lips.

  “How you doing, man?” I said.

  “Oh, hey, Henry. I didn’t see you there,” he said without looking at me, his cheeks still squished together.

  “You wanna maybe sit up?”

  “Oh no, I’m gonna lie here until I decompose and carrion birds pick apart my innards.”
r />   “I don’t think the groundskeepers are gonna let that fly.”

  “Drag me under the grandstand, then. Bury me next to Ricky Martin Knupps.”

  “Is he high?” Madison asked. “Did you take something, Murray?”

  “No, we buried a fish under the bleachers,” I explained. “It’s a long story.”

  “Racist fish murderers. Nice.”

  Then someone shouted my name from across the field and a small, dark body sprinted toward us through the night. Lola skidded on the grass to Muz’s side and took his head in her hands and turned it this way and that as she pushed his hair back and inspected him for injuries. “What happened? Do you have a concussion? Should I call an ambulance?” she said frantically.

  “Not unless the docs can fix broken hearts,” Murray said.

  Lola looked up at Madison and me, frowning.

  “Seeta Ganguly,” Madison said in explanation, “has a boyfriend.”

  “He’s not even Indian!” Murray wailed. “His name’s Taylor Messenger! Her parents don’t care who she dates!”

  “Your message,” La said, narrowing her eyes at me, “said he was hurt.”

  “I said he might be hurt. Besides,” I said, gesturing to Murray’s slumped form, “heartbroken is a kind of hurt.”

  “The fucking pair of you.” Lola smacked the back of Murray’s head as she stood. “I’m sick to goddamn death of all this hormonal teenage bullshit. You.” Lola jabbed her finger in my direction. “You will get your shit together. You will hand your essays in when they’re due. You will stop obsessing about a girl who never asked you to love her.”

  I nodded without speaking.

  “And you,” Lola said, turning on Murray with even more ferocity. “It’s been months. Frankly I find your behavior deplorable. Leave her alone. You’re better than this.”

  Murray started crying then, and proceeded to vomit in his own lap.

  “Can we go to your party now?” said Madison.

  “No! No parties for any of you! Get up off the ground right now, Murray Finch, or so help me God . . .” Sobbing and covered in vomit that smelled strongly of tequila, Muz fumbled his way to his feet. La pushed his hair out of his eyes, not unkindly. “We’re going to get some Burger King, we’re all going to sober up, and then we’re going to Henry’s house to do something productive with our lives.”

  An hour and two Burger King meals later, I was sitting cross-legged beneath the elk head in my basement, twirling a cold onion ring around my finger. I had a dictionary in my lap, Lola was using a random word generator on the iMac, and Murray was browsing Urban Dictionary on his phone. Madison Carlson, who’d silently followed us back to my house (quite likely in fear of Lola’s wrath if she tried to escape), was asleep in my bed. Which is not a place I ever imagined I would see teen goddess Madison Carlson. I tried not to notice the way her black jeans clung to the curves of her hips, or the way her hair fanned out across my sheets, or the way she smelled of vanilla and soft spices, the very antithesis of everything that was Grace Town.

  “Survey says . . . costumed,” Lola said, who’d decided the best use of our Saturday night was to try and salvage the newspaper, which I already knew at this point was beyond salvaging, because it was too late to put together anything decent. “That could actually work. You could do articles about the masks we wear as high schoolers and other kinds of deep shit.”

  “No, shh, this is way better,” Muz said. “You should make the theme ‘species dysphoria.’ A feeling that one is in the body of the wrong species. We could finally address my transspecies desire to become a dragon. Think of the possible articles: ‘Six Degrees of Smaug.’ ‘Puff the Magic Dragon Gives First Post-Rehab Interview.’ ‘Falkor the Luck Dragon: How the Story Finally Ended.’”

  “Don’t trivialize transspeciesism,” Lola said.

  “Don’t doubt me being dragon kin.”

  Then Murray started crying again, so we stopped trying to save the newspaper I’d probably singlehandedly destroyed with my wantonness and put our energy into half inflating an air mattress, which we slept on together, the three of us curled around each other.

  “Sorry we ruined your birthday, La,” I whispered to her, but she pressed her fingers to my lips and shook her head.

  And I thought, even though the pain of wanting a girl who didn’t exist had burrowed into my bones and infected the soft tissue of my lungs, that things could definitely be a lot worse.

  THE NEXT TWO WEEKS melted together in a blur of catching up on schoolwork, missing newspaper meetings with Hink, changing weather, and absence. The absence of orange leaves, for one, as fall went from “pumpkin spice everything” to “my entire Facebook newsfeed is one giant Ned Stark meme.”

  And second, the absence of Grace Town.

  “Where’s that weird girlfriend of yours? Haven’t seen her around here for a while,” said Sadie one afternoon as Murray, Lola, Madison Carlson (a strange new development), and I walked in the front door. La quickly did the “cut it out” hand motion across her neck, but it was too late. “Oh, shit.” Sadie bit her lip. “Sorry, kid. Did you and Grace break up?”

  “We don’t use the G-word anymore,” Murray said. “Please refer to her henceforth as She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

  “Grace would’ve had to have been my girlfriend for us to break up,” I told Sadie as I unraveled the scarf from around my neck and hung it up.

  “Dude, it’s She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” Murray said. “Christ. Get it right.”

  “What happened?” Sadie said.

  The problem was, I wasn’t really sure what’d happened. I knew I’d screwed up big-time by going into Dom’s house, but I hadn’t expected Grace to evaporate. I wanted to apologize to her, to pull her aside and say all the things I hadn’t been able to say out loud, but Grace had stopped appearing outside my locker after school. Grace had stopped appearing, period.

  The few times she bothered to turn up for class, our teachers, too, seemed determined to keep us apart.

  “Hey,” I whispered to her in the second week, when she finally returned to drama and reclaimed her perch at the back of the room. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Henry, pay attention, please,” Mrs. Beady said. “You can’t afford to miss learning about Bertolt Brecht’s dramatic theory.” Beady pointed to where the rest of the class was sitting at the foot of the stage. “Over here.”

  “Can I talk to you after school?” I whispered as I stood. Grace Town looked at me but said nothing, and after school she was already gone.

  I drove past her house sometimes when Mom let me borrow the car, but her Hyundai was never in the drive. I rode my bike by the cemetery in the afternoons, hoping to catch her laying flowers at Dom’s grave, but—although fresh blooms appeared almost every day—I never saw her there. There was evidence of her everywhere. Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of the back of her head in the cafeteria, or find that someone had fed Ricky Martin Knupps II when I forgot, or Seen 5:50 p.m., Seen 11:34 a.m., Seen 8:05 p.m. would appear under the messages I sent her asking where she was, but she was never there. Not really. Not ever.

  Grace Town had become the ghost she wanted to be, and the absence of her—the gouge wound she left behind when she ripped herself from my life—made my breath catch.

  “Was she real?” I asked Lola one afternoon. We were sitting out on the football field with a flask of hot chocolate, watching thin clouds slip overhead. “Or did I make her up?”

  “Christ, you’re so melodramatic,” she said, flicking hot chocolate at me.

  It was the smell, more than anything, that killed my soul bit by bit. The scent of her in my sheets, on my clothes, hanging heavily in the newspaper office. It made something inside me crumple in an explosive decompression every time I could smell her close by but not see her. There was a momentary temptation, no more than the space of a heartbeat, where I’d consider
ed never washing anything I owned again, just to savor what I had left of her. But then, no. God no. Dom’s room, Dom’s tomb—I couldn’t. So I stripped my bedding. Washed all my clothes. Avoided the office (and Mr. Hink) at all costs.

  The bus was almost as bad. I’d only caught it a couple of times in the last few months, and hadn’t been expecting to catch it that first afternoon Grace failed to materialize outside my locker. It was loud and cramped and smelled like a time before her; smelled like her absence. There was no seat for me anymore, so I had to sit with a freshman girl at the front, who glared at me the entire way to my stop.

  • • •

  I shrugged at Sadie. “I probably fucked everything up.”

  “Language, Henry,” said Dad from the kitchen. He was cooking tacos with Ryan, who was sitting on his shoulders and pulling at Dad’s hair to direct him like the rat from Ratatouille.

  “Can’t you fix it?” Sadie said.

  “I don’t think so. I think she’s gone.”

  The four of us went down to the basement. Ever since the night Madison Carlson had slept at my house, Murray had started ironing his clothes and attempting to comb his wild hair, which made him look like he was getting ready to sit for his yearbook photo sometime in the mid-eighties. He was playing (and losing to) Madison in Mario Kart when all of our phones dinged at once. Lola checked hers first. Her face fell and her eyes darted up to meet mine.

  The notification was from Grace Town, to attend her birthday party at the Thanksgiving fair on Saturday. A hundred or so people had been invited, most of them from East River. La launched out of her chair, but I pressed “Going” before she could snatch my phone out of my hands.

  Lola sighed and shook her head. “There’s a storm coming,” she said, even though my weather app predicted little more than light rain.

  THE END OF NOVEMBER brought with it an influx of eccentric relatives who came from all the far-flung corners of the country to a) attend the annual Thanksgiving weekend craft fair, b) eat all our food, and c) make my life a living hell.