“Sounds like something a Satanist would say. Do you frequently have congress with the beast or is it on more of a casual basis?”

Sadie mussed Lola’s hair. La laughed and swatted her away.

“Damn, she’s taking a shortcut,” Murray said. “Where does that alley lead?”

“Only thing on the other side of the alley is the cemetery,” Sadie said.

Murray jabbed me in the ribs. “I flippin’ knew it! She goes to a boneyard every afternoon? We’re dealing with some kind of genre fiction here for sure. Anybody wanna stack bets? What do we think? Is she a vampire? A ghost? One of those new age zombies that can love?”

“I’ll wager ten dollars on fallen angel,” Sadie said. “They’re so hot right now.”

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here. What’s mermaid paying, Muz?” Lola said.

“Mermaids don’t live in graveyards, you bloody drongo.”

“Fine. Demon mermaid from hell who haunts the cemetery swamp that floods whenever it rains. What are the odds?”

“One hundred thousand to one.”

“Excellent. Put me down for ten. Can almost taste dem dolla dolla bills.”

“What about you, lover boy?” Murray said, leaning down. “What do you think your girl is? Witch? Alien? Werewolf? . . . Weredropbear?”

“Weredrop what?” Lola said.

“Real problem back home. Sydney’s bloody infested with ’em. Everyone walks ’round with Vegemite rubbed behind their ears to keep from getting mauled. It’s a flippin’ tragedy, the amount of good blokes and sheilas we’ve lost to weardropbearism.”

I lifted my head from the foot well. “Would you all please shut up and remember that we’re on a very serious intelligence gathering slash stalking mission? Suds, go around to the end of Beauchamp Road—we can catch her on the other side.”

“Way ahead of you, pipsqueak,” Sadie said as I felt the car cut a wide U-turn onto the appropriately yet unimaginatively named Cemetery Drive.

“There it is,” Lola said. “The dead center of town.”

“I hear people are dying to get in,” Murray said.

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I hear everyone inside is pretty stiff.”

“There she is,” Lola said, smacking my shoulder. “Henry, get up, she’s far enough away that she won’t see us.”

Murray yanked me up from the foot well by my coat and—with much effort and grunting—I eventually sat up beside him. Grace was a little ways away, walking along a row of headstones, the cluster of motley garden flowers grasped in her left hand. She’d taken her knit cap off and let her hair out so that the breeze caught it and it reflected the afternoon light and took on the color of sour buttercream. She stopped and tucked a wayward strand behind her ear and knelt at a grave that was already garlanded with dozens of blooms in various stages of decomposition. And then she sunk down into the grass on her stomach, her head resting on one arm, her fingers twirling blades of grass, her feet kicked up behind her. Even at this distance I could see her lips moving—Grace was talking, singing maybe, to an invisible someone beneath the earth.

All of us sat transfixed for a minute, sedated by the stillness that comes with seeing an intensely private moment that doesn’t belong to you. Then Sadie shook her head and put the car into drive. “We weren’t meant to see this, Henry. This wasn’t for us.”

I nodded. “Take us home, Suds.”

• • •

I sat on the front windowsill all afternoon, reading a book and watching a storm roll in, waiting for the mystery of the disappearing car to be solved. Just after sunset, when the sky was bruised with a lightning storm, a car slowed in front of our house. I watched through the glass as a short bald man got out of the passenger side and ran through the rain to Grace’s Hyundai. As he opened the door, he looked up, saw me looking at him, and raised his hand. I mirrored his gesture. The man nodded and got into the car and turned it around and drove off into the bucketing downpour, his brake lights like a demon’s eyes in the darkness.

THERE WAS NO WAY for me to broach the subject of the cemetery with Grace without admitting that we’d followed her there, so, like a sane, logical, and emotionally healthy person, I decided to try and forget what I’d seen. Instead I followed Murray’s advice about getting to know her, which turned out to be harder than it sounded, because Grace Town was possibly the strangest human being alive.

Over the next couple of weeks, we ate lunch together almost every day, sometimes with my friends, sometimes—when I got the feeling that she didn’t want to be around other humans—alone. This new ritual began much the same way that her driving me home had: the day after the graveyard incident, out of nowhere, Grace materialized at our table in the cafeteria and asked if she could sit with us.

Vampire, mouthed Murray as Grace sat down next to Lola. I kicked him under the table.

With Murray’s pep talk about body language in my head, I tried to take note of how Grace held herself around me. I found myself pulled toward her—I leaned across tables, angled my legs in her direction. Grace never mirrored my movements. She always sat straight or bent back, her legs crossed away from me. Every time I fell into her gravity, betrayed by my own body language, I drew back, careful not to give too much of myself away.

The editorial process worked like this: each year, four newspapers were released, one at the start of each term. The one in circulation now was the final one that last year’s editor, Kyle (the aforementioned couch defiler), had put together. The last issue Grace and I would preside over would be released the summer after both of us had graduated. It would be our legacy, the wisdom we would impart to the fresh batch of seniors.

As well as recapping important events from throughout the term, each issue had a theme, usually some variant of one of four übervanilla high school flavors: “Friendship!” “Journeys!” “Acceptance!” “Harmony!”