Kyle, who wore a cape to school and hung a Guy Fawkes mask in the newspaper office, pushed the boundaries with abstract themes like “circles,” “red” (Taylor Swift made many appearances), “uncanny,” and “faded.” This was frowned upon by the teachers, who preferred the newspaper to be nothing but hardcore “your teenage years are the best of your life” propaganda, but beloved by the students, who got to read about something other than “forging lifelong bonds” and “marching triumphantly into the future” for a change. And when I say beloved, I mean that at least 45 percent of them bothered to pick up a copy, which, if you know anything about teenagers and their penchant for not giving a shit about anything school related, kind of means Kyle’s papers were runaway best sellers.

In pursuit of a Perfect Theme that would blow Kyle’s legacy out of the water, the newspaper required a lot of work in closed spaces. Hink let us have free rein over the content (“You’re both good kids; I trust you’ll keep to the charter,” he said in our first and only planning meeting, perhaps rather foolishly), which required Grace and me to have regular after-school brainstorming sessions. I’d roll my office chair over to her small desk and we’d sit side by side, me drinking Red Bull or coffee (we had special access to the teachers’ lounge, aw yiss), her drinking peppermint tea, each of us filling in the newspaper’s pagination with our increasingly shitty ideas. “New beginnings”? “Fresh starts”? “Becoming the person you’re meant to be”? “Forever young”?

I wondered, during the long, hazy afternoons of those first couple of weeks, if she was as hyperaware of her body as I was of mine. Every accidental brush of skin as we reached over each other, every bout of raucous laughter that would leave one of us burying their forehead into the other’s shoulder. Some days, Grace instigated the accidental contact. Other days she held herself like a marionette, every movement deliberate and measured to ensure our skin never touched, that we weren’t sitting too close to each other.

Normally I was pretty good at reading people, but Grace Town was an anomaly, a black spot on my radar. I hate to go all Twilight, but I could suddenly empathize with how Edward found such a dullard interesting (not that Grace was dull—she was sharp and witty, with a humor so dark it could’ve played Batman). But I finally understood Old Sparkly’s attraction to Bella. The less I could read Grace—the less I understood about her—the more enraptured I became. I needed, desperately, to understand what was going on in the dark, twisted, hilarious halls of her mind.

Some days we felt like old friends. Some days she put in her earbuds and didn’t speak to Lola or me except to say good-bye. Some days she didn’t show up at all. I took the good with the bad, all the while getting sucked deeper into the tornado that was Grace Town.

On the Good Grace Days, the days when she was willing to engage, I was able to ascertain that:

 Grace Town used to run track (like, for fun). Or at least she had before the accident.

 Grace Town did not drink coffee.

 Grace Town spent her free time reading Wikipedia pages about serial killers and plane crashes.

 Grace Town’s birthday was the weekend after Thanksgiving.

 Grace Town liked Breaking Bad and Star Wars and Game of Thrones, but not Star Trek or Doctor Who (which was almost a deal breaker, but not quite).

We only had one class together (drama), which I was fairly sure she was going to fail because she never left her seat at the back of the room and Beady never made her participate. Despite it being senior year and everyone freaking out about college acceptances, GPAs, and SAT scores, my first few weeks of classes went okay. I knew I’d get A’s from the teachers who’d taught me before (Beady, Hink, my Spanish teacher Señor Sanchez), but the rest were all new to me and required a fair amount of buttering up to ensure I got anything close to good grades, because most were still—more than a decade later—holding a grudge against the Page family name.

The start of every school year was the same. The teachers who’d been at Westland long enough to have taught my sister always had the same reaction when taking attendance for the first time. They’d call my name. Recognize the last name Page. Look up in horror. See me, see how much I looked like Sadie, know for certain that we were siblings. Mom hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said Suds had been arrested three times by the time she was my age, but she got into even more trouble at school than she did with the law. Expelled (informally) and reenrolled five times for (among other things): selling cigarettes, stealing a video camera, setting a home economics kitchen on fire (Sadie maintained that this was a legitimate accident), successfully distilling moonshine (for eight months) in a science classroom cupboard, and finally, successfully growing marijuana (for three years) in the science department’s greenhouse. (Perhaps it’s no surprise she ended up a scientist—she did spend a lot of time working on “science projects” as a teenager, albeit illegal ones.)

The reason she was allowed to return time and time again? Because Sadie Page was, for all intents and purposes, a genius. I guess Westland wasn’t ready to dump their one shot at having a Nobel Prize–winning graduate, no matter how much trouble she was. Principal Valentine had a soft spot for her less destructive shenanigans (legend has it she took Sadie’s moonshine home after it’d been confiscated and still has a shot of it at the end of every school year), and Sadie’s grades weren’t just exceptional, they were astounding. Her report cards, along with the words deviant and nuisance, also said things like mathematically precocious and disturbingly brilliant. So, yeah. Being a Page came with a reputation for being an evil genius, neither of which I was, so I had to work my ass off to be seen as a) not a juvenile delinquent and b) slightly above average in the intelligence department.

I’d always hated this fact before. Now it gave me an excuse to spend as much time as possible studying, which of course required company, which of course included Grace. The last week in September, we walked to McDonald’s together most lunchtimes to “study,” which generally consisted of silly literature deconstructions (“What I like most about Animal Farm is that there is no frou-frou symbolism. It’s just a good, simple tale about animals who hate humans,” I said, echoing Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec, which earned a laugh and a forehead buried into my shoulder) and even sillier math problems (“What did you get for question six?” I said. Grace checked her book. “Purple, because aliens don’t wear hats.”)