“Because . . . So many reasons. Because I’m seventeen. Because I don’t mind being alone. I like it actually. I’ve been surrounded by teenagers who are always in and out of these dramatic, toxic relationships and that’s never held any appeal for me. I want what my parents have. Extraordinary love.”

“You understand that you’re missing out on a lot of awesome stuff by choosing to be that way, though, right? Sometimes you don’t know things are going to be extraordinary until they are.”

“Well, yeah. I mean . . . I guess.”

“As long as you’re aware. That was a decent first draft, by the way. You can revise your answer and give it to me again in text form if you feel the need.”

“I’ll keep you posted. I might send you an essay sometime in the next few days.”

“Okay, Henry Page, I have asked you three questions now. The magic number. It’s your turn to ask me something.”

“What should I ask you?”

“Asking what to ask me kind of defeats the purpose of the game. Ask me something you want to know.”

“What happened to your leg?”

Grace turned her head to face me. We were only inches apart. I could feel the warmth of her breath on my lips. “That is a boring question.”

“Why?”

“Because the answer has no relevance to me as a human being. Here I am asking you very deep stuff about your favorite color and song and singledom, and you go straight for the obvious physical stuff.”

“I can ask something else if you’d like.”

Grace looked toward the stars. “I was in a car accident like three months ago. It was bad. The car flipped hood to trunk seven times. I spent about a month in the hospital afterward, getting pins and skin grafts and stuff in my leg. For a week I was mostly unconscious, for a week I wanted to die to end the pain. And then I started to get better. I learned to walk again. I have a series of gnarly scars. No, you cannot see them. Did I cover everything for you?”

“That sucks.”

“It really does. But everything happens for a reason and all that jazz, yada, yada, yada.” She rolled her eyes.

“You don’t believe everything happens for a reason?”

Grace snorted. “Look up at that, Henry. Look up at that, honestly, and tell me you believe that our lives are anything more than a ridiculous cascade of random chances. A cloud of dust and gas forms our planet, a chemical reaction creates life, and then all of our cavemen ancestors live just long enough to bone each other before they die awful deaths. The universe is not the magical place people like to paint it as. It’s excruciatingly beautiful, but there’s no magic there, just science.”

I stared at the stars for a little while longer, mainly thinking about caveman sex. “How’d you find this place anyway?”

Grace sat up a little, opened her chips, and started eating them. “A friend brought me here years ago, when we were kids. We were both troublemakers and breaking in here made us feel like rebels. We used to come here all the time and talk for hours. Now I come here whenever I want to be reminded of how insignificant I am in the grand scale of the universe.”

“Sounds like lots of fun.”

“Space is the best cure for sadness that I know.”

“Feeling insignificant isn’t exactly a great cure for unhappiness.”

“Hell yeah it is. When I look up into the night sky, I remember that I’m nothing but the ashes of long-dead stars. A human being is a collection of atoms that comes together into an ordered pattern for a brief period of time and then falls apart again. I find comfort in my smallness.”

“I don’t think you’re on the same page as the rest of humanity, Town. You’re supposed to be terrified of oblivion, same as the rest of us.”

“The best thing the universe ever gave us is that we’ll all be forgotten.”

“Oh, come on. Nobody wants to be forgotten.”

Grace leaned back again and looked up at the sky. The quote “I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night” came to mind. My spine shuddered slightly as I watched her. “I kinda like the idea,” she said. “That when we die, despite any pain or fear or embarrassment we experienced during our lives, despite any heartbreak or grief, we get to be dispersed back into nothingness. It makes me feel brave, knowing I’ll get a blank slate at the end. You get a brief glimmer of consciousness to do with what you will and then it’s given back to the universe again. I’m not religious, but even I can appreciate that that’s redemption, on the grandest scale. Oblivion isn’t scary; it’s the closest thing to genuine absolution of sin that I can imagine.”

“Jesus. No wonder Hink wanted you on the newspaper.”

“See? Good things come out of first drafts sometimes.”

“I bet your writing is incredible. Why’d you stop?”

“Oh, you know. The usual cliché. Post-traumatic stress disorder, I suppose. Very boring, plot wise.”

I wanted to say You’re kind of extraordinary—I mean, seriously weird, but also extraordinary, but instead I said, “What sins does a seventeen-year-old girl need absolved?”

“You’d be surprised.” Grace sat up, a small, mischievous smile on her face. “Do you want to know a dark secret from my past?”

“Oh God, I knew it. You buried a body down here, didn’t you?” I said as she stood and held out her hand and pulled me to my feet. “Who was it? A random homeless person? A teacher from your old school? Is that why you transferred?”

We walked together, slowly, her still holding my hand, halfway back up the spiral staircase, where she crouched to show me something scratched into the metal.

“I was, once upon a time, a vandal.” Grace moved her hands aside to reveal a set of crudely engraved letters. It read G + D 4evr. “Voilà.”