Our Chemical Hearts

by Krystal Sutherland

  Regenerative chaos: things fall apart and then come back together and we move on. We had to absolve our own sins. We had to redeem ourselves.

  Sadie stood from where she’d been kneeling and turned around and—quite unexpectedly—grinned. “Jim!” she shouted when she saw the guard’s face. “No freakin’ way! It’s Sadie Page, man, remember me?”

  “You,” said Jim, tightening his pincer grip on my arm. Uh-oh. “They promised me you were gone for good.”

  “Oh, Jim,” said Sadie as she clapped him on the back and pried his fingers from my skin and led him to one of the benches that lined the building. “We’ve got some catching up to do.” And that’s how, ten minutes later—after slipping him a fifty-dollar bill and offering to make him coffee in the teachers’ lounge if he didn’t rat us out—Sadie convinced Jim Jenkins, long-suffering security guard of Westland High, to grant us unlimited access to the English department and, with it, the newspaper office.

  Ricky Martin Knupps II was swimming lazily in his bowl as the afternoon sun slanted through the blinds and turned the air into a swirling constellation of gold particles. The room still smelled of her—of us—but the scent had faded over the past week, the evidence of it slowly coming unstuck from the furniture and stacks of white paper and books and computer screens. Soon, it’d be as though we’d never been there at all.

  Lola sat at the Mac and got to designing the cover while I sifted through the poorly punctuated articles the juniors had submitted throughout the term, looking for anything that could be salvaged, anything that fit the theme. We worked in silence as we waited.

  Fifteen minutes after we broke into the school, the volunteers started to arrive.

  If you think the whole grade showed up, then you don’t know much about the apathy of teenagers. We can be roused, on occasion, like when a classmate’s parent dies or one of us makes it onto America’s Next Top Model. But failing newspapers don’t exactly inspire Braveheart levels of loyalty.

  Still, seven people showed up in the end, which was seven more than I was expecting (or deserved). All of them prefaced their presence with “I actually can’t write, but . . .” To which I explained that I truly, honestly, deeply did not give a shit. I’d already known that Muz and Maddy (as Madison Carlson had instructed me to call her—bizarre) would show, but Suki Perkins-Mugnai, Buck, Chance Osenberg and Billy Costa (of “the Trichomoniasis Trio” fame), and Heslin himself were a bonus. All of them, plus Galaxy and the three other juniors whom I’d sworn to personally murder if they didn’t come and help out, made for a motley crew of fourteen.

  Fourteen people to do three months of work in two days. How hard could it be?

  Sadie helped us lay out an assortment of snacks (the promised payment in the Facebook post) and then Lola and I took our places on the sex couch while everyone sat cross-legged on the office floor, eating Kit Kats and drinking Mountain Dew.

  “The theme, as you might’ve guessed from my Facebook post, is going to be ‘redemption,’” I said.

  “As in . . . Shawshank?” said Suki Perkins-Mugnai.

  “That’s a shit theme, mate,” said Murray. “I still vote for ‘species dysmorphia.’”

  “Is it really shit, though? Every high schooler wants redemption for something. Suki, I want redemption for that terrible touch football game. La, you should probably want redemption for murdering Ricky Martin Knupps. Chance and Billy, well . . . I mean, you know.”

  “Um, I thought we agreed to drop the charges to involuntary manslaughter?” Lola said. “As if I don’t feel bad enough about it already.”

  “Look, not everyone can write, but everyone has a story to tell, and everyone wants to be absolved of some sin. I don’t care if you write an acrostic poem, or draw a cartoon, or compose a score. Just give me something. Some sort of redemption.”

  Then I put on my Spotify playlist (no Strokes, no Pixies) and we got to work.

  Heslin left around three hours later to supervise (read: get hammered at) his party, but not before writing a soliloquy about how he’d finally redeemed himself in the eyes of his parents for the last party. Suki Perkins-Mugnai left not long after. She wrote two pieces—one, an article about the Gutcrushers, the other a poem about how she hadn’t called her granddad before he died because she thought she had more time, so much more time, and he’d used up his last breaths asking for her. Chance Osenberg and Billy Costa didn’t want to immortalize the Trichomoniasis Trio in print, but Chance had begged his dad for a new phone right after his parents had gotten a divorce, even though he knew he couldn’t afford it, so he wrote a short story about that.

  “I was thirteen,” said Chance as he emailed it to me. “I was a dick.”

  Billy wrote about getting so drunk the first time he met his girlfriend’s parents that he vomited in their bed. Murray drew a cartoon about dropbears, a thinly veiled metaphor for how much he missed his family in Australia. Madison wrote about losing her puppy when she was a kid, how she still couldn’t remember if she’d left the gate unlocked or not. Lola wrote a haiku about “the weenus” in penance for convincing her mother that that’s what elbow skin was called, and dedicated a whole double-page spread to the memory of Ricky Martin Knupps, forever swimming in the toxic murder castle in the sky. The juniors wrote about people they’d bullied in middle school, how they felt bad for disappointing their parents, the times they’d made their siblings cry.

  Due to the fact that he was largely illiterate, Buck wrote nothing, but he could freehand even better than Lola, so she assigned him to help her with the interior artwork. Until two a.m. he sketched watches and dogs and dead fish and a particularly gruesome anatomical rendering of Billy’s left elbow’s weenus, before he, too, had to go home.

  At three a.m., after two pizza deliveries (courtesy of Sadie) and several trips to the closest 7-Eleven for a grand total of four bottles of Dr Pepper, a carton of Red Bull, seven corn dog rollers, and a backpack full of candy, we finally decided to call it a night.

  Murray and Madison Carlson had fallen asleep together on the fake linoleum floor of the hallway. Murray’s jacket rolled up under Madison’s head, Madison’s hand pressed against Murray’s chest, very little space between them. An interesting development.

  Sadie had crashed on the couch with Ryan swaddled at her chest, the both of them resting slack-jawed as their eyes darted from side to side beneath their thin lids.

  “Suds,” I whispered as I poked her in the shoulder. “Time to go home.”

  “I set the home economics kitchen on fire on purpose,” said Sadie sleepily as she sat up, Ryan still pressed to her chest, her slender fingers supporting his head. “That’s what I’d want redemption for. From my teenage years, anyway.”

  “Not for all the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll?” La said as she stretched on her office chair. She looked how I felt: like 90 percent of my blood had been replaced with high fructose corn syrup, caffeine, and cement dust.

  “Oh hell no. I don’t want redemption for that. I don’t need redemption for that. The only thing that ever felt wrong was the fire. I don’t think Hotchkiss was ever the same.”

  “Mr. Hotchkiss was your home ec teacher?” I said.

  “Yeah. Dude loves baking. Like, does it as an actual hobby. But then one day I made these lemon curd cupcakes—you know the ones, Henry—and he gave me an A for them, but I was in a real ‘fuck the patriarchy’ mood and was pissed that Family and Consumer Sciences even existed as a subject, it’s the twenty-first goddamn century, you know . . . so I kind of . . . set the kitchen on fire.” Sadie yawned. “It was the worst thing I did as a teenager. The goddamn worst. I think I saw Hotchkiss’s heart break while he tried to fight the flames.”

  “We have spare pages,” Lola said, grabbing a pen and paper and pushing them toward Sadie. “I want to do a spread of handwritten confessions.”

  Sadie eyed the writing utensils. “What’s the s
tatute of limitations for arson?” she said, but she didn’t wait for us to Google the answer before she started writing. Ryan woke as she leaned forward.

  “Hi, Mama,” he said, touching her face.

  “Hey, baby,” she said as she handed the slip of paper back to Lola. “Ready to blow this Popsicle stand?”

  Ryan nodded. While Lola and I turned off the lights, they went and waited hand in hand in the dimly lit hall, the both of them chatting quietly about all the things they were going to do tomorrow. Zoo in the morning. Lunch at the park. A sleepover with Daddy while Mommy went to work.

  And I thought, as I watched them, about Grace’s accusation the night she’d been drunk at the fair. That I didn’t love the real her, just an idea that didn’t exist anymore, a shadow of who she really was.

  I’d loved the legend of Sadie when I was a kid. I’d loved the folklore that murmured around her like fireflies wherever she went. I still did. But I loved this version—the one that saved people’s lives, the one that looked at her tiny son like he was made of bright diamonds, pancakes in bed on Sunday morning, and a thunderstorm after a seven-year drought—even more.

  Maybe it was possible to love two different versions of someone at the same time. And maybe, just maybe, some people still wanted redemption for sins they didn’t need absolved anymore.

  • • •

  Sunday was grueling. I met Lola outside my house at seven a.m., the streetlights burning brighter than the watercolor sunrise. She pushed a large coffee into my gloved hands and said, “Do not speak to me for two hours,” so I didn’t.

  We met Jim Jenkins outside Hink’s office. We sat down. Turned on the computers. Tried not to die. Died a lot. My eyes had apparently lost the ability to produce their own moisture, so I spent the morning alternating between abusing my digestive system with mass amounts of Red Bull and rubbing my eyes red raw.

  When La was finally ready for human interaction, the first thing she did was show me the cover: a picture of a girl in black and white, a grayscale universe behind her, an exploding supernova where her head should be. It looked like an old penny dreadful novel. Even with THE WESTLAND REDEMPTION splashed across the image in orange letters, I could still tell that the girl had been traced from Grace, a ghostly imitation of her true form.

  “I still had photos left over from the shoot you guys did for me. I can use a different model, find someone on Flickr, if you want.”

  “It’s perfect,” I told her. “Print it out, tabloid-sized. Let’s stick it up and let everyone see.”

  So we did. And they did. The juniors arrived at ten a.m., Buck not long after. And then—curiously—two girls who’d been at Heslin’s party the night before. He’d told them what we were doing here, encouraged them to drop by. Most of the pages were filled by now, except for Lola’s spread of handwritten confessions, which the girls—in their deeply hungover state—thought was a great idea.

  They wrote down their sins. They gave them to us. We assured them they would be absolved.

  And then another person came. And then another. And then two more. After the eighth person, Lola made a sign that read Confess your sins for absolution and stuck it above a drop box in the hall. Murray got wind of the situation and turned up at lunchtime in a priest costume, complete with holy water, and then proceeded to sit by our makeshift confessional, greeting each wayward soul that came our way. We watched our classmates and friends and strangers from other grades come and go throughout the day as news of what we were doing spread on Facebook.

  At five p.m. I asked Lola: “How are we doing for pages?”

  She said: “We now only have one spare page.”

  I said: “Shit, what are we going to do with that?”

  She rolled her eyes and said: “It’s for your redemption, dingbat.”

  I said: “Oh.”

  And then I looked up at the supernova girl printed in black and white and thought about how, in retrospect, you can see that something is poison from the beginning. Grace had torn me apart and put me back together so many times that I’d started to believe that was what I wanted. A Kintsukuroi relationship, more beautiful for having been broken. But something can only be shattered so many times before it becomes irreparable, just as a piece of paper can only be folded so many times before it cannot be folded any more.

  While I sat there, that root canal pain sparking through my body, phrases like I wish I’d never met her and I wish she’d never kissed me started to cascade through my thoughts. I might’ve—had it been a viable option at that moment—gone all Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on her. Bleached her out of my memory. Ripped her from where she’d stitched herself into the lining of my soul.

  But I thought, again, of Kintsukuroi. That something must first be shattered for it to be put back together in a way that made it more beautiful than before. I thought of how I liked broken things, things that were blemished or dented or cracked, and why that was probably why I fell for Grace in the first place. She was a broken thing in human form, and now—because of her—I was too.

  Grace might always be broken, but I hoped that all my shattered pieces could be glued back together and mended with gold seams. That the tears in my heart would heal into scars that would glisten.

  And that’s when my phone vibrated in my pocket.

  GRACE TOWN:

  I’m outside Hink’s office.

  HENRY PAGE:

  Why?

  Lola told me about the theme. I have something I want to put in the newspaper.

  “You are a demon,” I said to La as I stood, my heart stripped and swollen inside my throat.

  To which she replied, “In the sack!”

  As I stepped out into the pale-pink-and-lemon-colored nightmare that was the hall, I hoped terrible things for Grace Town in spite of myself. I hoped that she would regret this decision for the rest of her life. That it would pierce her like a hot skewer until the day she died. I imagined her old and thin, her skin draped across her bones like damp paper. I saw her draw her final breath, a look of regret in her eyes for the life she could’ve had with me, and I felt vindicated.

  And in that moment I wanted things for myself that I’d never wanted before. I wanted to be rich. I wanted to be famous. I wanted to marry a supermodel and screw her lingerie-clad body every night. I wanted every achievement of my life to stand in testament as a grand “fuck you” to Grace Town. I wanted to destroy her with my extraordinariness.

  But by the time I’d reached the end of the hallway, some of the acid had washed away. Why is it, I thought, that we’re so willing to hurt the ones we care about the most? Two days ago I loved her, and now I wanted to carve away pieces of her soul. Why was that? Because she’d hurt me? Because she didn’t love me back?

  You can’t begrudge people their feelings. Grace had done what was right by her. I couldn’t ask for more than that.

  • • •

  She was sitting on the seat where we’d waited the afternoon we’d been called to Hink’s office. A beginning and an end, all in one place. “Henrik,” she said quietly, motioning to the space next to her, the spot where I’d folded my body awkwardly because of her presence. “I wanted to give you something.”

  “I can’t, Grace. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “I know. I know. Trust me: this is the end.”

  In a normal conversation, this would be the point that she would’ve apologized for ripping my heart out of my chest. But Grace was not a normal girl and she didn’t understand that the word sorry was sometimes enough. Instead, she handed me a small envelope with For the consideration of the editor written across the front and said, “You asked me, the day we started at the newspaper, why I’d changed my mind. I never answered you, but I should’ve, because I already knew.”

  “Okay.”

  “Every day since the day he died, all I thought about was him. For the firs
t few weeks after the accident, I expected the grief. I let myself feel every inch of it. I’d lost people I loved before. Almost everyone. I knew how grief worked. The only thing that numbs the pain is time, filling up your head with new memories, driving a wedge between yourself and the tragedy. I waited for things to get easier. I waited for the replays of our happiest days together to stop. I waited for my breath to stop catching in my chest whenever a thunderclap of misery would roll through me.

  “But it never got easier. After a while I realized it was because I didn’t want it to. I carried him with me heavily, and it exhausted me, but I did it because I deserved it. I deserved the weight of him, and the pain, and when his parents’ grief was too heavy, I carried some of theirs too.

  “And then I met you.

  “The first afternoon we talked, I didn’t think about him for twenty minutes. I know it doesn’t seem like a lot, but it was a record for me, and I felt so light and buoyant afterward. I slept for four hours that night without waking up once. And I knew it was because of you. I don’t know how, or why, but when I was with you, you made the grief go away.”

  “But that still isn’t enough.”

  “Oh, Henry,” she said, shuffling closer and taking my cheek in her hand. I closed my eyes at the gentleness of her touch and then her lips were moving against mine, impossibly soft.

  “Why do you kiss me like that?” I said when it was over.

  “Like what?” she said, pulling back from me slightly.

  “Like you’re in love with me.”

  Grace looked from my eyes to my lips and then back again. “It’s the only way I know how.”

  Because Dom had been her first and only everything, before me. When she’d first learned to kiss, it had been with the great love of her life.

  And it took until that moment for me to realize, finally, that I was a blip in someone else’s love story. That there was a grand love going on here, but it wasn’t my own, as I’d hoped; I was a side character in the peripheries, a plot device to keep the main characters apart. That if this were The Notebook and Dom were still alive, he would be Allie, Grace would be Noah, and I would be the redheaded chick whose name I can’t remember, the one who gets shafted and has to pretend like it’s no big deal.