Our Chemical Hearts (18 page)

“I used to drive along this road all the time, even before I got my license,” she said, her words muffled. “I know it like the back of my hand. Actually, I know it better than the back of my hand. I could draw it from memory. I don't really know the back of my hand at all. I wonder why people say that?”

“You can't fucking drive like that after nearly dying in a car accident.”

“I wasn't the one who veered off the road, if you want to know. That was Dom. I loved this drive before he died. I should be able to love it again.”

The bitterness in her voice. Grace had never spoken of Dom in any negative light before, but here she was, blaming him for the crash that killed him. I suppose it made sense for her to be mad.

“I jus
t . . 
. You can't be with him, okay? You can't follow him where he went, as much as you might want to. So stop trying.”

“Shit, Henry. I didn't think—”

“That's exactly what I mean. You don't
think
. You're taking hairpin turns so fast, your tires are burning. That whole thing was not okay.”

“I just wanted to feel like myself again.” When I didn't say anything, Grace stood. “C'mon. There's a restaurant about ten minutes from here, tucked away in the trees. Let me buy you lunch to apologize.”

And with those words, the near-death horror of the last half hour melted away, replaced by the giddy feeling I got when Grace did the occasional nice thing that made me think she was falling for me too. Which was really messed up.

The restaurant was set on a cliff overlooking the seaside. She bought me lunch, like she said she would, and we ate outside together on the grass, basking in the sunshine.

Lola messaged me as we were eating.

LOLA LEUNG:

HENRY PAGE:

When the food was done, Grace and I lay together under the vast blue sky, neither of us talking until she said, “I'll be back soon.” I watched her as she stood and limped to the garden at the edge of the cliff and picked the last of the fall flowers. Then she walked back up the softly sloping hill of grass toward the restaurant, the small bunch of yellow blooms grasped in one hand, her cane in the other.

She was only gone for ten minutes. I thought nothing of it. Just another quirk of Grace Town.

•   •   •

On Thursday afternoon we stayed back late at the newspaper, then caught a bus to the little boutique movie theater near my house. We ate hot dogs for dinner before the movie. Grace spilled ketchup down the front of her oversized Ramones T-shirt but made no attempt to sponge it off.

“I'll pretend I have a stab wound,” she said as she licked ketchup off her fingers.

I stared at her lips and thought about her naked.

Inside the theater, we did what we always did in the dark. We pretended like we were together. She kissed me, once, before the movie started, and then she ran her fingers in soft circles around my palm. Like a palmist, uncertain of the future,
trying to divine her destiny from the wrinkles that cut through my skin.

I don't know what she read there. Maybe nothing at all.

We walked home together when the movie was over, each of us with our hands by our sides. Eventually, Grace grabbed mine with a sigh. It didn't feel like a victory. It felt like I'd failed a test.

We walked back to my place, her hand in mine, and for the first time, I felt like we were really a couple. That this was really, actually going somewhere.

My God,
I thought as we walked,
I'm really falling for her.

Don't be stupid,
said another voice in my head.
You can't fall for someone after knowing them for two months.

Jack and Rose were in love after, like, four days,
I argued.

You really wanna use
Titanic
as proof this is gonna end well?
the voice said.

Damn it.

“Well, thanks for inviting me, kid,” she said when we reached my house.

“Anytime, Town.”

Then she kissed me halfheartedly on the garden path that led to my front door, her body warm against mine despite the cold.

I'm going to marry her,
I thought as I watched her walk home, and I smiled to myself, because for the first time since The Kiss, I felt like I knew something in this world for certain.

A WEEK PASSED.
It was a good week, full of Good Grace Days. We were productive. Our junior writers submitted content for the newspaper that wasn't about cats. Lola had designed almost half the pages. Our Magic: The Gathering feature article had been edited down to five thousand words. I attempted some math homework. I didn't necessarily understand any of it, but there was an attempt nonetheless.

Grace and I also had sex again. She didn't cry this time, so that was nice.

Things were starting to look up.

On Thursday night she came to my house for dinner. We were sitting on my bed in the basement, laughing and teasing each other while Mom and Dad cooked dinner. I wondered if tonight would be the night we'd finally make it official.
Are you my girlfriend now?
I practiced it over and over again in my head, practiced the point I'd slip it into the conversation. And
then, of course, once she'd said yes, there would be the public aspect of it.

I imagined what people would say when we changed our Facebook relationship statuses. I mean, not that I
needed
that. But it was nice to fantasize about. The people who'd known from the start—Lola, Murray—would comment things like
Ugh, God, FINALLY
and
You're punching above your weight, mate
. The people who'd had no idea would be shocked. I thought about the
Um
 . . 
. WHAT?
s and the comments from Grace's friends who didn't know me.
So happy for you, Grace. So, so glad you've found someone.

We were—for reasons I can't remember now—curled around each other, both silently reading Matthew Broderick's Wikipedia page together on my iPhone. I was twirling a thread of her hair through my fingers as we read, baffled that I ever could've thought of her as anything other than obscenely beautiful. That first day I'd seen her in drama class, it was like she'd been jet-lagged—the way people looked after flying from one side of the world to the other, like they weren't just exhausted and dirty, but like every cell in their body was literally out of alignment with their surroundings. Now I liked that Grace's atoms buzzed at a different frequency.

Thinking about her atoms got me thinking about her skin, which got me thinking about her skin without any clothes on, which gave me a sudden gust of courage. I said, quite slowly: “So, regarding the whole
situation
 . . 
.”

The change in Grace was sudden but palpable. She drew
back from where she had been nestled into my shoulder. Stopped reading about Matthew Broderick. Stopped smiling. And I thought,
Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Not again. Please don't let me have been wrong
again.

“Yeah,” she said. But she knew why she was here, didn't she? She knew what I wanted. She'd known since the beginning how I felt. How could she turn so cold so quickly?

“I guess I want to know where we're at with that.”

“I don't really know what to tell you.”

“Last time we talked about this, you said you were gonna stop going to the cemetery.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah. At the Halloween party. You were kinda drunk, I guess.”

“I'm sorry. I always think stupid stuff when I've been drinking. I shouldn't have said that to you.”

“So yo
u . . 
. you're not going to stop?”

“Henry.”

“I hate talking about this as much as you do.”

“I can still feel him. He's in my bones. When I fall asleep, I can feel the warmth of his fingers on my skin.”

“I'm not asking you to let him go.”

“Then what do you want from me? I'm giving you all I've got.”

“I want, when someone asks us if we're dating, to be able to say yes. I don't want to have to hide it from my friends. I want people to know that we're together. I want to be able to
hold your hand and kiss you in public without worrying if I'm allowed to. I want this to be real.” Grace didn't say anything, just stared at the ceiling, until I eventually said, “What do you want to do?”

“Mayb
e . . 
.” There was a long pause as she breathed in and out several times, her eyes darting from side to side as she tried to find the words to say. “Maybe we should slow down. I mean, we fell into this so quickly. If we wind things back a bit, maybe it won't feel so wrong.”

“I feel
wrong
to you?”

“That's not what I meant. I mean
t . . 
. I'm not ready, to be better. Not yet.”

“I don't care. I want
you
, exactly as you are.”

“No, you don't. You want
her
. You're dating me on the hope that I'll one day become that girl. You've fallen for an idea, not an actual person, and it kills me when I see you looking at me but seeing someone else.”

“That's bullshit.”

“Is it, though?”

“God, I hate this. I hate this whole thing so much. I want
you
, Grace Town. I've wanted
you
since the beginning.”

I pulled her on top of me so she was sitting on my hips and she leaned down and kissed me the way she did, the way that made me sure she was in love with me even though I knew that she wasn't and probably never would be. I opened my eyes and watched her, like I did sometimes, to make sure the kiss was real. Grace drew away from me with her eyes still closed,
the smallest of smiles playing on her lips. And it took until then for me to realize that she wasn't kissing me, not ever, not really, at least not in her head.

Maybe we were both in love with ideas.

Grace's eyes flickered open slowly to find me staring at her. She looked momentarily confused, like she'd genuinely forgotten for a split second that she wasn't kissing Dom. Then a heaviness settled over her features, and she lifted herself off me and got out of bed.

“I should jet,” she said, slinging her bag over her shoulder without looking at me.

“I thought we were gonna do schoolwork.”

“It's not like I'm going to pass any of my classes anyway.”

“We haven't had dinner yet.”

“I'm not really hungry. I'll see you later.”

I didn't say good-bye.

After half an hour of letting the acid ball inside my chest slowly gnaw at the flesh of my trachea, I got up and dragged myself to the shower. I stood under the hot stream and tried to cup water in my fingers but it kept running through the gaps and it was all very metaphorical and it hurt like hell because I knew,
I knew
I was losing her. And it wasn't something I could fix.

Human beings could not be mended with gold seams.

I pressed my forehead against the cool white tiles of the shower wall. My head pounded like I was going to cry, but my eyes were dry.
Right girl, wrong time,
I thought, even though I
knew that was a delusion, because Grace would never be the right girl. But damn, I still wanted her so badly. I still needed her so deeply. My whole body ached at the thought of losing her and I suddenly felt like a real dick for judging the breakups of my friends so harshly. Is this what Murray felt like all the time because of Sugar Gandhi? Did he feel her sear across his very skin, hotter than boiling water?

There had to be,
had to be
a way to make her love me.

My eyes jolted open, my brain overcome by the kind of sudden epiphanic moment that can only be provoked by a long, hot shower. I turned the water off quickly and wrapped a towel around my pink-seared ass and stumbled, still dripping wet, downstairs into the hovel that was my basement bedroom, frantic that it might not be there. But it was, tucked neatly into the large bottom drawer of my desk, as though the space had been made for it.

A typewriter in duck-egg blue, a manual Olivetti Lettera 32. The same model that Cormac McCarthy used. I'd bought it off eBay three years earlier for thirty-five dollars after reading
The Road
and deciding that novels written on typewriters were vastly superior to novels written on computers (but still probably not as good as novels written by hand). I had not, as of yet, written anything more than
All work and no play makes Henry a dull boy
over and over again on both sides of a page to make sure the ribbon was working. After that it'd sat on my desk for six months next to the dying iMac, until the sight of the two of them together made me feel so guilty for writing on
neither that I shoved the typewriter in the bottom drawer and hadn't thought of it since.

In the top drawer of my desk was a ream of thick, canary-colored cotton typewriter paper, swiped from the set of
The Great Gatsby
by Murray the last time he'd visited Sydney. When held up to the light, the faintest hint of a translucent damask pattern was visible in the top corner. It was among the more beautiful things I owned.

Dear Grakov,
I wrote, my fingers punching the keys in a storm of mechanical sounds.

I would write Grace Town a letter. I would say all of the things I struggled to say out loud. I knew she preferred spoken drafts, but she'd never read my work, and maybe after she had, she'd understand why I preferred writing to talking.

I sent her a Snapchat of those first two words,
Dear Grakov,
and captioned it “Get ready to have your mind blown.” And then I wrote.

Dear Grakov,

For the last few months I've lived my life according to a simple truth: that, in the end, nothing we do here really matters. Some people fear oblivion. Some people are scared by the idea that their lives are meaningless. You taught me to find it beautiful. You taught me to let it give me courage.

The courage, for instance, to show a girl a PowerPoint presentation about dating me, knowing that if she said no, any proof of my embarrassment would one day be eaten up by the universe. It was you who taught me that oblivion is our reward for being human, that the very fabric of reality itself is kind enough to ensure that all our sins and silliness will be stripped away.

It's that same courage that I'm using to write you this letter, laying bare for you exactly how I feel. You're special, Grace Town. You're beautiful. You shine. I never get tired of looking at you, or being around you. Before you, I'd never been able to imagine wanting someone in my life the way that I want you. From the first day you made me drive myself home, there was chemistry unlike I'd ever felt for anyone before.

That's not the kind of thing you walk away from, even if the situation is difficult. Even if it's so messed up, you begin to believe you might be in
The Truman Show
because, goddamn, someone must be plotting this crap. I know you know this, because if you didn't,
one or both of us would've left by now, or we wouldn't have started. Because some things are worth fighting for.

There's still the problem of him, of course. I know you still love him, and I can understand that.

I'd never ask you to choose between us. I'd never give you an ultimatum, or a time frame, or hold you accountable if you couldn't let him go. Firstly, because to do so would be unreasonable and only make you resent me. Secondly, because I don't believe I should have to. I know who I am. I know my worth. I hope that you can see it as well.

So, Grace Town, that's how I feel. I wish I could be this eloquent when we talk, but I'm a writer at heart. I'm wasted on the spoken word, but there's a small piece of my soul in this letter. To surmise: I am here, I am game, I am staying, and I want you.

It's the end of the Earth and the death of the universe that give me the insane courage to say that I am yours, if you want me.

All that's left now is for you to decide
what you want. No mean feat, I'm aware, but something that must be done regardless.

Catch you on the flip side, kid.

Henrik

•   •   •

I reread the letter a dozen times, then folded it, put it in an envelope, and handwrote her name across the front. Then I put it and the typewriter back into the dark drawer of my desk and sat and waited for her to Snapchat me back. She didn't, even though I knew she'd opened it, so I messaged her.

HENRY PAGE:

GRACE TOWN: