Fuck.

At first it was strictly business. We sat apart from each other, Grace straight-backed and straight-faced, doodling in ideas. Possibly controversial sex ed feature? she wrote. Cliché spotlight on up-and-coming athlete/high school jock? As the hour passed and we both woke up, it became clear that today would be a Good Grace Day. She shuffled closer to me. Rested her head on my shoulder while she worked, like it was the most casual thing in the world, like we’d been this intimate one hundred times before.

I distinctly remember thinking, God, she’s so confusing. Because she was. A week of barely anything, and now this, her (uncharacteristically) clean and brushed hair spilling down my back, her elbow resting on my knee, her fingers tracing small circles on my shoe. The smell of her, warm and heady and somehow stale, rising from her skin and filling up my head with rabid possibility. It felt almost like we were together.

There was no work to be done after that. I kept my pencil in my hand but I didn’t make another mark on the paper. I didn’t want to move too much, lest Grace think I was uncomfortable. So I rested my head against hers and breathed quietly and steadily while she scribbled on the pagination, apparently unaware of the proximity of our bodies. We stayed like this for some time, until the bell rang, and Grace sat up slowly, yawning, as if waking from a dream.

But it was the look she gave me when she turned to me, the same look I’d seen on her face after The Kiss, that really had me confused. It was a brief moment of confusion, of disbelief almost, like she’d been expecting to find someone else next to her and not me.

How to reconcile that look? What did it mean? Or was I imagining things?

“Lift this afternoon?” she said as she composed herself and folded the pagination and handed it to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’d be great.”

Grace just nodded before she stood and left, as indifferent as always.

• • •

I decided to skip my first two classes, because today was reckoning day. It had to be. I couldn’t make it through another weekend, let alone another week, unsure if she felt about me how I felt about her. So I went to our office and turned off all the lights and sat under my desk. While I was there, curled up in the fetal position, I wrote her a message, like Lola told me to, but it didn’t feel big enough somehow. It didn’t feel grand enough. If by some miracle we ended up together, I wanted the story of us to begin with something extraordinary, not just a Facebook chat.

In the end, I settled on an appropriately Henryesque PowerPoint presentation entitled “Why You Should Date Me,” based on an extremely persuasive one I’d seen on Imgur. It wasn’t the sort of thing I ever would have done before meeting Grace, but I thought about the conversation we’d had that night at the secret fishpond, about cosmic redemption. How Grace had talked about bravery and a blank slate at the end of time, about doing what you could while your atoms were in such a pattern that produced consciousness. In that moment, writing that PowerPoint, I thought I finally understood why she didn’t mind oblivion. How it could make you fearless, knowing that the universe had your back, in the end. Redemption for all the stupid shit you’d done. Total absolution of your sins.

It didn’t matter if she said yes or no. Not in the end.

So I wrote my PowerPoint while sitting under my desk. I barely even noticed when Lola came in, and she apparently didn’t find me being curled up on the floor under the furniture strange enough to question me about it, so I carried on silently until it was done. And then it was done. It was playful and silly and hopefully funny enough to make her laugh.

I read it and reread it and reread it, thinking, Should I show her? Am I really going to show her?

Then “Someday” by the Strokes came on Lola’s Spotify.

My song for Grace.

Our song.

“I didn’t know you liked the Strokes,” I said to Lola.

“Hmm?” Lola spun slowly around in her chair. “Oh, I don’t really know their stuff, but I heard Grace listening to this the other day and I liked it.”

Screw it, I thought as I opened Facebook and typed:

HENRY PAGE:

Grakov. Meet me in the auditorium during last period. Say it’s for the newspaper to get out of class. I have something to show you.

GRACE TOWN:

Henrik. How devious. I shall see you there.

I blinked several times and turned off my computer, then stayed in the office for the rest of the day. Principal Valentine walked past at one point and spotted me, my forehead pressed flat against my desk, and said, “Page. Aren’t you supposed to be in class?”

To which I replied, without sitting up, “My teenage hormones have rendered me too emotionally fragile to be in a learning environment right now.”

Valentine was silent for a few seconds, and then she simply said, “Carry on.”

So I did.

I’M GOING TO have to kill myself, I thought as I paced back and forth onstage in the auditorium later that afternoon. I really couldn’t see any way around it. My plan, clearly, was spectacularly stupid, and I couldn’t imagine living with the humiliation of being turned down, universal redemption or not.

Grace was late, which made me panic and think she wasn’t coming, which actually would’ve been a good thing. I considered bailing, but then the door at the back of the auditorium creaked open and she was moving down the center aisle between rows and rows of seats, leaning heavily on her cane. She looked so small in the vast, empty space, her long shadow cast up behind her. Like a miniature figurine in a diorama.

“What’s this?” she said when I jumped off the stage and jogged up the aisle to meet her.

“A grand gesture I’m going to regret in about five minutes.”

“Oh.”

I clicked the power button for the projector and the title slide glowed to life on the screen.