Our Chemical Hearts (24 page)

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON
when I committed breaking and entering for the fifth time in my life. School on the weekend felt like being aboard the
Mary Celeste
—there was the sense that people had been here recently, but that some uncanny tragedy (i.e., exams) had befallen them, driven them away from this place. It was dim and quiet, and even in the parking lot, our footfalls cast up eerie echoes all around us.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Lola said as we scaled the outer fence. Ryan was clinging to Sadie's neck like a baby monkey and giggling like this was the best adventure ever. “Nobody's gonna come.”

“They'll come,” I said. “Somebody will come.”

Earlier that week, Heslin had finally been ungrounded for throwing The Party a few months earlier, so naturally a rumor had begun circulating that another party of equal or greater proportions was in store for tonight. Heslin's parents, either idiots or far too trusting of their delinquent son, had
gone away and left him in charge of the house. Sure enough, by that very afternoon, there was a Facebook event with some three hundred students attending—excluding me, excluding Lola, excluding Murray. Excluding—surprisingly—Madison Carlson.

We had shit to do.

An hour ago, I'd made a post in Heslin's event.
To all those seeking redemption,
it began, and it ended with a plea to please, for the love of all that was holy, help us save the
Westland Post
from certain destruction. Twenty-five people had liked it so far.

“They'll come,” I muttered again as we made our way across the grounds toward Hink's office. They had to.

The locks, it turns out, had been upgraded since Sadie's years as a teenage, prank-pulling delinquent, as had—unbeknownst to us—the video surveillance. So while Sadie knelt at the door trying to pick the lock and Lola and I took turns giving Ryan piggyback rides, none of us spotted the burly security guard jogging toward us.

“Freeze, all of you!” he said.

I caught the momentary flicker in Sadie's eyes as she considered making a run for it but didn't—probably something to do with the fact that her son was still clinging to my back and it'd be less than stellar parenting to abandon him.

So I froze. And Lola froze. And Sadie froze.

It doesn't matter,
I thought, over and over again.
It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
It didn't matter that
the newspaper wouldn't go to print, that I'd singlehandedly destroyed a thirty-five-year-old school tradition, that I'd let Hink down at every opportunity. It didn't matter that the three of us would probably be arrested and charged with breaking and entering, that Lola and I wouldn't get into college because of our criminal records, that Sadie would lose her job. It didn't matter—the sun would swallow the Earth and everything we did here didn't matter, shouldn't matter—but it did.

It did.

Grace was wrong, I realized in the half heartbeat of time it took for the wheezy security guard to grab my arm, even though I made no attempt to run. On a grand scale, entropy ruled, but humans were so small that the largest laws of the universe didn't apply to us. They couldn't apply to us. We were too tiny; our lives passed too quickly. None of us would be there for our great cosmic redemption when the sun expanded and ate the Earth and gave all our atoms back to the cosmos. None of us could wait that long.

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, bu
t . . 
.” 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 i
n . . 
.
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, wel
l . . 
. 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 kno
w . . 
. so I kind o
f . . 
. 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 statute 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.