Those first few weeks of working on the newspaper were the best. Something about the three of us being holed up in that little fishbowl of a room together was magic. Not a lot of work got done, but that didn’t matter, because our print deadline was months away. The leaves had only just started to change color and the sun was still warm in the middle of the day, which meant we had all the time in the world. All the time in the world to wait for the Perfect Theme to fall into our brains. We knew it would be awesome when it came to us, and we’d be so consumed by its brilliance that we’d get the newspaper done in no time. So we advised our junior writers (four had eventually volunteered—a new record) to concentrate on the content that didn’t have to fit the theme: interviews, event recaps, photo pages. Mostly we didn’t work at all, because—on the Good Grace Days anyway—just being around each other was way more fun.

We made each other watch a slew of YouTube videos. The girls had never seen Liam Neeson going to Ricky Gervais for advice on “improvisational comedy” but we all watched it together, three times over, in fact, because it was so funny. We traded memes. We sent each other Snapchats ten times a day. In-jokes fell into place as easily as breathing. I was amazed at how quickly a person could become an essential part of your life. By early October, only four short weeks after meeting her, Grace and I practically had our own language. We could speak entirely in movie quotes or GIFs if required. We snuck Nerf guns into the office and had mini wars before and after school. We swapped our favorite books (mine: The Road by Cormac McCarthy, hers: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff), both horrified that the other had not yet read such a staggering work of literary perfection.

One afternoon in the first week of October when Lola was feeling particularly generous toward my cause, she announced that she needed Grace and me to model as guides for cartoons she was drawing for art class. The three of us went out into the empty football field at dusk, Lola with her camera around her neck, and proceeded to take a set of progressively more ridiculous photographs. They weren’t as animated as La wanted them—Grace couldn’t do the Dirty Dancing–style pose with her injury—but we all ended up collapsed in a laughing fit on the grass by the end of it.

“You owe me big-time,” Lola said the next morning before class, pressing a photograph to my chest as she stalked past my locker. It was a candid moment captured in black and white. Me with my eyes closed, my head tilted downward, a small smile playing on my lips. Grace had her arm slung around my neck and was looking directly into the camera, in the middle of a laugh that crinkled her nose. I’d never seen her smile so wide. I hadn’t known she was capable.

I quickly hid the picture in my biology textbook, sure that if Grace ever caught me with it, she’d file a restraining order. But when I got to the newspaper office in the afternoon, something had changed. It took me a few minutes to figure out what. There was a small rectangle taped to the glass in front of Grace’s desk. A photograph. I had to get out of my chair and go over to it to see what it was. A blond girl and a dark-haired boy captured in gray scale, the girl kissing the boy’s cheek while he grinned, his chin grasped loosely in her hand. They didn’t look like us. Not a lanky, awkward kid and an unwashed tomboy who walked with a cane. Lola had captured something I’d never seen in either of us before.

We were characters out of a movie.

We were thoroughly alive.

And we were absolutely beautiful.

• • •

“I think I need a pseudonym,” I said that Thursday, talking to Grace across our office. “I don’t know, it feels like now that I’m so busy and important as editor, I shouldn’t really be writing under my own name.” We still had not, in fact, managed to be particularly productive. The Plastic Stapler’s Revenge had finally been interviewed by an overenthusiastic junior, Galaxy Nguyen (he’d been allowed to choose his own name when he came over from China as a kid—badass), and we had a handful of articles submitted by our three other volunteer writers (usually covering topics they were unsettlingly passionate about, like Magic: The Gathering or cats).

Still, there was no need to panic yet.

“I accept the challenge of finding you an incredible nom de plume,” Grace said with a small, seated bow. And that is how, some fifteen minutes later, I started composing my first article under the name of Randy Knupps (I’d bargained Grace down from Randy Nips, which Hink, although naïve, probably would’ve picked up on). But it was the moment she said, “I wanna get in on this pseudonym business. Maybe we can make it a family affair? I’ll be Dusty Knupps, your Knupply wife, and Lola can be Candy Knupps, our Knupply daughter,” that got my heart pulling two beats a second.

“The Knupps family newspaper. I like it.”

“Actually, you know what? I think I’m ready to take our relationship to the next level.”

“Oh?” I said, my heart beating so fast I couldn’t discern one beat from the next.

“I think it’s time we gave Lola a little brother or sister. Let’s adopt a fish.”

So we spent the rest of the day preparing for the arrival of our adopted aquatic baby. Lola made it a grand fishy palace out of clay in art class, Grace and I went to the pet store and bought it a tank and a water plant, and we even drew up a custody agreement, stating that our as of yet unnamed fish child would live at the office during the week and then at Grace’s and my houses on alternating weekends.

In the evening, the three of us broke into the abandoned train station, and Grace used her skills as a fish whisperer (i.e., she fed them lots of bread) to gather a school of quicksilver bodies at the foot of the stairs.

“I am Grace of House Town, mother of gill-bearing aquatic animals,” she said as she slipped the net we’d bought at the pet store into the water and scooped up a small, shimmering fish.

“What should we call it?” I said as Grace transferred it into a plastic bag already filled with basement water.

“It looks like a he,” Lola said, taking the bag from Grace and examining the fish swimming lazily inside. “An exotic, fabulous male. Let’s call him Ricky Martin.”