Our Chemical Hearts (2 page)

GRACE WAS ALREADY
waiting outside Hink's office when I got there. She was dressed in guys' clothing again today, different stuff this time, but she looked a lot cleaner and healthier. Her blond hair had been washed and brushed. It made a remarkable difference to her appearance, even if having clean hair made it fall in uneven chunks around her shoulders, like she'd cut it herself with a pair of rusted hedge trimmers.

I sat down next to her on the bench, entirely too aware of my body, so much so that I forgot how to sit casually and had to purposefully arrange my limbs. I couldn't get my posture right, so I kind of slumped forward into an awkward pose that made my neck ache, but I didn't want to move again because I could see her looking at me out of the corner of her eye.

Grace was sitting with her knees pressed up against her chest, her cane wedged between them. She was reading a book with tattered pages the color of coffee-stained teeth. I couldn't
see the title, but I could see that it was full of poems. When she caught me looking over her shoulder, I expected her to close the book or angle it away from me, but instead she turned it ever so slightly toward me so that I could read too.

The poem Grace was reading, I assumed over and over again because the page was dog-eared and food-stained and in generally bad shape, was by a guy called Pablo Neruda, whom I'd never heard of before. It was called “I do not love you,” which intrigued me, so I started to read, even though Hink had not yet succeeded in making me like poetry.

Two lines in particular had been highlighted.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

Hink stepped out of the office then, and Grace snapped the book shut before I could finish.

“Oh, good, I see you've met,” said Hink when he saw us together. I stood up quickly, keen to unravel myself from the weird position I'd folded my body into. Grace shuffled to the edge of the bench and rose slowly, carefully distributing her weight between her cane and her good leg. I wondered for the first time how bad her injury was. How long had she been like this? Was she born with a bad leg or did some tragic accident befall her in childhood? “Well, come inside.”

Hink's office was at the end of a hall that might've been considered modern and attractive sometime in the early
eighties. Pale pink walls, fluorescent lighting, painfully obvious fake plants, that weird linoleum that's supposed to look like granite but is actually made up of hundreds of little bits of plastic filled in with clear laminate. I followed Hink, my steps slower than they normally would be, because I wanted Grace to walk next to me. Not because I wanted her to, like,
walk next to me
, you know, but I thought she might like it, that it might be a nice thing to do, for her to be able to keep up with someone. But even when my pace felt maddeningly slow, she still hung back, hobbling two steps behind me, until it felt like we were in a race to see who could go the slowest. Hink was ten steps in front of us by then, so I sped up and left her behind and must've looked like a total weirdo.

When we reached Hink's office (small, bland, green-tinged; so depressing it made me think he was probably part of a fight club on the weekends), he ushered us inside and motioned for us to sit in the two chairs in front of his desk. I frowned as we sat down, wondering why Grace was here with me.

“You're both here, of course, because of your exceptional writing abilities. When it came time to pick our senior editors for the newspaper, I could think of no two better—”

“No,” said Grace Town, cutting him off, and her voice was such a shock to me that I only just realized it was the first time I'd heard her speak. She had this strong, clear, deep voice, so different from the broken and timid image she portrayed.

“I beg your pardon?” said Hink, clearly taken aback.

“No,” Grace said again, as if this were explanation enough.

“
I . . 
. I don't understand,” said Hink, his gaze flicking to me with this pleading look in his eyes. I could practically hear his silent scream for help, but all I could do was shrug.

“I don't want to be an editor. Thank you, really, for thinking of me. But no.” Grace collected her bag from the floor and stood.

“Miss Town. Grace. Martin came to me specifically before the start of the school year and asked me to look at your work from East River. You were going to take over as editor of their newspaper this year, I believe, if you hadn't transferred. Isn't that right?”

“I don't write anymore.”

“That's a shame. Your work is beautiful. You have a natural gift for words.”

“And you have a natural gift for clichés.”

Hink was so shocked that his mouth popped open.

Grace softened a little. “Sorry. But they're just words. They don't mean anything.”

Grace looked at me with this kind of disapproving expression I wasn't expecting and didn't understand, then slung her backpack over her shoulders and limped out. Hink and I sat there in silence, trying to process what'd just happened. It took me a good ten seconds to realize that I was angry, but once I had, I, too, collected my bag and stood quickly and made my way toward the door.

“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” I said to Hink, who must've guessed that I was going after her.

“Yes, yes, of course. Come and see me before class.” Hink shooed me out and I jogged down the corridor, surprised to find that Grace wasn't there. When I opened the far door and stepped out of the building, she was already at the edge of the school grounds. She could move goddamn fast when she tried. I sprinted after her, and when I was within earshot, I shouted, “Hey!” She turned briefly, looked me up and down, glared, and then kept on walking.

“Hey,” I said breathlessly when I finally caught up with her and fell in step beside her.

“What?” she said, still speed walking, the end of her cane clicking against the road with every step. A car behind us beeped. Grace pointed violently at her cane and then waved them around. I'd never seen a vehicle move in a way I'd describe as
sheepish
before.

“Wel
l . . .
,” I said, but I couldn't find the words to say what I wanted to say. I was a decent enough writer, but talking? With sounds? From my mouth? That was a bitch.

“Well what?”

“Well, I hadn't really planned this far into the conversation.”

“You seem pissed.”

“I am pissed.”

“Why?”

“Because people work their asses off for years to get editor, and you waltz in at the beginning of senior year and have it offered to you on a platter and you turn it down?”

“Did you work your ass off?”

“Hell yeah. I've been buttering Hink up, pretending I'm a tortured teen writer who really relates to Holden Caulfield since I was, like, fifteen.”

“Well, congratulations. I don't understand why you're angry. There's normally only one editor anyway, right? The fact that I said no doesn't impact you at all.”

“Bu
t . . 
. I mea
n . . 
. Why would you say no?”

“Because I don't want to do it.”

“Bu
t . . 
.”

“And without me there, you'll get to make all the creative decisions and have the newspaper exactly how you've probably been envisioning it for the last two years.”

“Wel
l . . 
. I gues
s . . 
. Bu
t . . 
.”

“So you see, this is really a win-win for you. You're welcome, by the way.”

We walked on in silence for a couple of minutes longer, until my anger had entirely faded and I could no longer remember exactly why I'd chased after her in the first place.

“
Why
are you still following me, Henry Page?” she said, coming to a stop in the middle of the road, like she didn't give a shit that a car could come hurtling toward us at any second. And I realized that, although we'd never been introduced and never spoken before today, she knew my full name.

“You know who I am?” I said.

“Yes. And you know who I am, so let's not pretend we don't. Why are you still following me?”

“Because,
Grace Town
, I've walked too far from school now
and my bus has probably already left and I was looking for a smooth way to exit the conversation but I didn't find one, so I resigned myself to my fate.”

“Which is?”

“To walk in this general direction until my parents report me missing and the police find me on the outskirts of town and drive me home.”

Grace sighed. “Where do you live?”

“Right near the Highgate Cemetery.”

“Fine. Come to my place. I'll drop you.”

“Oh. Awesome. Thanks.”

“As long as you promise not to push the whole editor thing.”

“Fine. No pushing. You want to turn down an awesome opportunity, that's your decision.”

“Good.”

It was a humid afternoon in suburgatory, the clouds overhead as solid as cake frosting, the lawns and trees still that bright, golden green of late summer. We walked side by side on the hot asphalt. There were five more minutes of awkward silence where I searched and searched for a question to ask her. “Can I read the rest of that poem?” I said finally, because it seemed like the least worst of all my options. (Option one: S
o . . 
. are you, like, a cross-dresser or something? Not that there's anything wrong with that; I'm just curious. Option two: What's up with your leg, bro? Option three: You're definitely
some kind of junkie, right? I mean, you're fresh out of rehab, yeah? Option four: Can I read the rest of that poem?)

“What poem?” she said.

“The Pablo whoever one. ‘I do not love you.' Or whatever it was.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Grace stopped and handed me her cane and swung her backpack onto her front and fished out the threadbare book and pushed it into my hands. It fell open to Pablo Neruda, so I knew then for sure that it was something she read over and over again. It was the line about loving dark things that I kept coming back to.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

“It's beautiful,” I said to Grace as I closed the book and handed it back to her, because it was.

“Do you think?” She looked at me with this look of genuine questioning on her face, her eyes narrowed slightly.

“You don't?”

“I think that's what people say when they read poems they don't understand. It's sad, I think. Not beautiful.” I couldn't see how a perfectly nice love poem was sad, but then again, my significant other was my laptop, so I didn't say anything. “Here,” Grace said as she opened the book again and tore out the page with the poem on it. I flinched as though I were in
actual pain. “You should have it, if you like it. Pretty poetry is wasted on me.”

I took the paper from her and folded it and slipped it into my pocket, half of me horrified that she'd injured a book, the other half of me elated that she'd so willingly given me something that clearly meant a lot to her. I liked people like that. People who could part with material possessions with little or no hesitation. Like Tyler Durden. “The things you own end up owning you” and all that.

Grace's house was exactly the type of place I expected her to live. The garden was overgrown, gone to seed, the lawn left to grow wild for some time. The curtains on the windows were drawn and the house itself, which was two stories tall and made of gray brick, seemed to be sagging as if depressed by the weight of the world. In the driveway there was a solitary car, a small white Hyundai with a Strokes decal on the back windshield.

“Stay here,” she said. “I've got to get my car keys.”

I nodded and stood by myself on the front lawn while I waited for her. The car, like everything else about her, was strange. Why did she walk (or hobble, rather) fifteen minutes to school every day if she had a license and a readily available vehicle? Every other senior I knew was desperate for the privilege of driving to the mall or McDonald's during lunch, escaping the confines of the school grounds. And then, in the afternoons, bypassing the bus line and rolling right on home to food and PlayStations and sweet, sweet comfortable sweatpants.

“Do you have your license?” Grace said from behind me. I jumped a little, because I hadn't even heard her come out of the house, but there she was, car keys dangling off her pinkie finger. These, too, had Strokes paraphernalia attached to them. I'd never really listened to their stuff before, but I made a mental note to look them up on Spotify when I got home.

“Uh, yeah, actually. I got it a couple of months ago, but I don't have a car yet.”

“Good.” She threw me the keys and walked to the passenger side of the car and pulled out her phone. After twenty seconds or so, she looked up from her screen, her eyebrows raised. “Well? Are you going to unlock the car or not?”