Our Chemical Hearts (15 page)

THE FIRST THING
I did when I woke up in the morning was message her.

HENRY PAGE:

GRACE TOWN:

I considered tacking an
x
onto the end of the message, but I didn't quite know if we were at that level yet, and the thought of the
x
not being reciprocated was enough to discourage me from typing the
x
, so I didn't. I stayed in bed, slipping in and out of sleep, until Mom yelled, “Henry, are you alive?” down the stairs and I had to drag myself away from my comfortable tangle of sheets and begrudgingly dress for the day.

Upstairs, my parents were performing their usual morning routine: Mom was already dressed in a light blue suit, her pale hair pinned up in curls, ready for a day at the gallery. Dad was swaddled in an absurdly fluffy white bathrobe, black-rimmed glasses balancing on the end of his nose. They sat at opposite ends of the table, as far away from each other as possible, reading the morning news on their separate iPads.

“Mother. Father. I have news,” I announced.

Dad looked up from an article about one of the Kardashians. “You've been conscripted to the war? What decade are you speaking from?”

“Ugh, fine: Home-Daddy, Mama P., I got a live tweet coming at you. Better?”

“Oh God, go back to World War Two, please,” said Mom.

“What's up, kid?” Dad said.

“Can I cook dinner tonight?”

“Darling, the only thing you know how to make is mini pizzas,” said Mom.

“I know. I'm going to cook mini pizzas for everyone, if you
don't mind buying the ingredients. Also.” I cleared my throat. “There's a girl coming over.”

“Do you have a group assignment at school?” Mom asked.

“Is she tutoring you?” Dad said.

“Are you selling her something?”

“Did you lure her here under false pretenses?”

“Does she think you come from old money?”

“Are you blackmailing her?”

“Is she a heavy drug user?”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, ha-ha, you're both
very
funny.”

“We think so,” said Mom as Dad air-high-fived her. (Okay, so I take back what I said about them being cool.)

“Well, who is she?” Dad asked.

“Her name is Grace. We're, um, editing the newspaper together.”

“Oh, Henry. Have you never heard the saying ‘don't shit where you eat'?”

“Justin, that's disgusting,” Mom said.

“I'm not shitting anywhere,” I said.

“Well,” Dad said, “I suppose this would be the point when we'd normally say, ‘No sex, drugs, or rock 'n' roll under our roof,' but we raised your sister here, so I'm ninety-nine percent certain all of that's already happened.”

“I
did
find a baggie of white powder in the elk's mouth the other day,” I said, stroking my chin.

“My point exactly,” Dad said.

Mom stood and cleared her plate and kissed the side of my head as she made her way to the sink. “We'll buy the ingredients. You cook. And I
am
going to say, ‘No sex, drugs, or rock 'n' roll under our roof,' even if your father won't.”

I patted her on the back. “That's not going to stop me from doing lines of coke off a hooker while listening to Led Zeppelin, but hey, at least you tried.”

She shook her head. “God, sometimes I don't know where we went so, so wrong with you two.”

•   •   •

Mom and Dad were in the kitchen unpacking the dinner ingredients when Grace and I arrived, both of them dressed in full
Star Trek
uniforms, Vulcan ears and all.

“No,” I said when I saw them. “Dear God,
no
.”

It'd already been an odd sort of afternoon. We'd performed our usual routine of walking to Grace's, but as we'd turned onto her street, Grace had let out a long, thin breath and pushed her palm into my chest. We were still a far way off from her house, but Grace had sensed a disturbance in the Force—a small car with paneling in three different colors was parked in her driveway next to her Hyundai.

“Stay here,” she'd whispered.

“Who is that?” I'd said.

“Stay here if you want a lift.”

It wasn't lost on me how close it sounded to
Stay here if you want to live.

So I sat in the gutter and watched Grace as she limped
wildly down the street and into her sad gray house. She was gone for a long time, maybe forty-five minutes, long enough that I thought I'd better either call the cops or start walking home, before a woman with bleached-blond hair slammed the front door open and stalked across the lawn to the car. She backed the shabby vehicle so quickly and violently out of the driveway that she hit a trash can on the opposite side of the road before smoking the tires as she took off.

“Was that your mom?” I'd said when Grace finally emerged with her car keys another ten minutes later, her jaw clenched, her lips a hard line.

“No. Yes. It doesn't matter.”

“You look like her.”

“I look like a forty-five-year-old alcoholic slash casual meth user?”

“Jesus, Grace, I didn't—”

“I
know
you didn't. It's fine. Just drive.”

“Do you live with your dad?”

Grace was silent.

“I don't know anything about you and you won't even tell me when I ask.”

“You know my favorite song and my favorite color.”

“We aren't in kindergarten. I want to know real things about you. I want to know the shit stuff too.”

“There's more beauty in mystery.”

“I don't want you to be a mystery.”

“Yes, Henry. You do.”

And maybe the thing that stung the most was that Grace was right. My best friends and I had never had to deal with unstable parents or broken homes. Lola, Murray, and I were the blessed three. The most gut-wrenching fight any of us had had with our families was when La was eleven and she'd run away from home (all the way to my house). During her weekly English lesson at the YMCA, Lola's pint-sized Haitian mother, Widelene, had proudly announced to the class that the loose skin on your elbow was called “the weenus”—a fact taught to her by her preteen daughter, who was in a lot of trouble from her dad when he found out. Lola and I had hid under my bed eating Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and looking at pictures of boobs on Sadie's laptop. Which, in retrospect, left no excuse for me not guessing that Lola had a penchant for the ladies
way
sooner.

Grace and I hadn't spoken for the entire drive to my house. And now here were my parents trying to embarrass me, and I wanted to be pissed at them, but neither of them was an alcoholic or a casual meth user, and I'd never taken the time to be truly appreciative of that fact before, so when Dad said, “Live long and prosper,” and did the Vulcan salute, I held up my hands in surrender and said weakly: “Please. Stop.”

Grace's lips were pulled into a tight line, her attempt at a smile, but her eyes were glassy and she had the thousand-yard stare of a battle-weary general who disapproves of everyone's bullshit. Jesus. This was gonna be fun.

I cleared my throat and continued. “Grace, parentals. Parentals, Grace.”

While Grace was shaking my mom's hand, Dad said, “Henry, catch,” and because I'd obviously developed lightning-fast reflexes from that one game of touch football, I caught what he threw me without a second thought. Which turned out to be a box of Trojan condoms. “Just in case. I don't want you to have to endure the hell of an unexpected pregnancy like we had to. The pregnancy I'm referring to, of course, is yours. We wanted Sadie.”

“You know, I tell people that you're cool and then you consistently manage to make me look like a delusional liar.”

“You tell people we're cool?” said Mom. “Well, beam me up, Scotty!”

“We don't need his approval,” said Dad. “I already know we're the most illogical Vulcans in town.”

“Oh my good God. Grace, please, move away from them slowly.”

“Later, gators,” said Dad as I took Grace's hand and dragged her away from them.

“It was nice to meet you,” Grace said over her shoulder.

“No, no, it was not nice, don't lie to them.”

“No copulation in the house, please,” Mom yelled after us in a sweet voice. Then, much quieter, “Why does no one tell you that being a parent is so much fun?”

I poked my tongue out at her as I closed the basement door.

“I'm
so
sorry about my parents,” I said.

“Don't be sorry. Not about that.”

“Do you want to talk about your mom or—”

“Highly presumptuous of you,” Grace said as she took the box of condoms out of my hands while I walked down the stairs with her, one step at a time. “I was thinkin
g . . 
. maybe I could stay over after the Halloween party this weekend?” Grace shook the box of condoms. “These might come in handy.”

“U
m . . 
. u
h . . 
.”

“This is the point where you say something smooth to seduce me.”

“If you were a carrot, you'd be a good carrot?”

Grace burst out laughing and chucked the condoms across the room. “Well, I guess we won't be needing those.”

I picked them up and put them on my bedside table. “Let's not rule anything out,” I said.

Grace sat on the side of my bed and pulled me down next to her and kissed me. “I'm serious. About Halloween. If you want me to stay, I'll stay.”

“I'm not really good at this whole subtle-seduction thing, so I'm gonna come right out and say it: I assume you're alluding to sexual intercourse?”

Grace rolled her eyes. “Yes, Henrik. Well done.”

“I see. Well, that sounds fine by me.”

“Excellent.”

“You're
a . . 
. I mean, you an
d . . 
.
him
?” He was rarely referred to by name. “I assume you're no
t . . 
. ?”

“I'm not a virgin, no.”

“Okay. Just checking.”

“And have yo
u . . 
. ?”

“I am, u
h . . 
. I mean, I haven'
t . . 
. made the beast with two backs.”

Grace collapsed into laughter, burying her face into my chest. Man, I was doing well tonight. “It's even harder for you to talk about sex than it is for you to talk about yourself.”

“What can I say, I'm a gentleman.”

“No, you're a weirdo. Sex is a basic human function. Do you have trouble talking about breathing or blinking?”

“My respiratory function is extremely private information. Wait, where are you going?” I said, tugging Grace's wrist as she made to stand up.

“I haven't finished judging your room yet.”

“Always with the judging,” I said as she stood and started to wander in a slow circle around the basement.

“You can tell a lot about a person from their bedroom, don't you think? Bedrooms are like crime scenes. So many clues to be uncovered.”

“What's your bedroom like?”

“Maybe you'll find out one day. For now, let me use my
CSI
-level investigative skills to determine exactly who you are.”

“Well?” I said after a few minutes of listening to her hum the
CSI
theme tune. “Who am I?”

Grace cleared her throat. “Judging by the decor and the decades-old electronics,” she said, sliding on my sunglasses and doing a fairly convincing impression of Horatio Caine, “I conclude that this is some kind of conspiracy theorist's
bunker and you probably believe the president is a reptilian shapeshifter.”

“That's crazy talk. The
royal family
are reptilian shapeshifters. The president is your plain old run-of-the-mill warlock.”

“Oh, of course. My apologies. What's this, though?” Grace gestured to the small antique display cabinet that my great-grandfather had kept his absinthe collection and drinking paraphernalia in before it was outlawed in the Netherlands, at which point he'd promptly moved the cabinet and his entire family to the States.

A plaque in the shape of a banner had been nailed to the top.
Matigheid is voor de døden
, it read.
Moderation is for the dead
. Johannes van de Vliert, true to his life philosophy, died at the age of forty-seven from alcoholic hepatitis. He was far and away my favorite ancestor.

“Only the best thing in this room. Apart from you, of course.”