“I see. Well, that sounds fine by me.”

“Excellent.”

“You’re a . . . I mean, you and . . . him?” He was rarely referred to by name. “I assume you’re not . . . ?”

“I’m not a virgin, no.”

“Okay. Just checking.”

“And have you . . . ?”

“I am, uh . . . I mean, I haven’t . . . made the beast with two backs.”

Grace collapsed into laughter, burying her face into my chest. Man, I was doing well tonight. “It’s even harder for you to talk about sex than it is for you to talk about yourself.”

“What can I say, I’m a gentleman.”

“No, you’re a weirdo. Sex is a basic human function. Do you have trouble talking about breathing or blinking?”

“My respiratory function is extremely private information. Wait, where are you going?” I said, tugging Grace’s wrist as she made to stand up.

“I haven’t finished judging your room yet.”

“Always with the judging,” I said as she stood and started to wander in a slow circle around the basement.

“You can tell a lot about a person from their bedroom, don’t you think? Bedrooms are like crime scenes. So many clues to be uncovered.”

“What’s your bedroom like?”

“Maybe you’ll find out one day. For now, let me use my CSI-level investigative skills to determine exactly who you are.”

“Well?” I said after a few minutes of listening to her hum the CSI theme tune. “Who am I?”

Grace cleared her throat. “Judging by the decor and the decades-old electronics,” she said, sliding on my sunglasses and doing a fairly convincing impression of Horatio Caine, “I conclude that this is some kind of conspiracy theorist’s bunker and you probably believe the president is a reptilian shapeshifter.”

“That’s crazy talk. The royal family are reptilian shapeshifters. The president is your plain old run-of-the-mill warlock.”

“Oh, of course. My apologies. What’s this, though?” Grace gestured to the small antique display cabinet that my great-grandfather had kept his absinthe collection and drinking paraphernalia in before it was outlawed in the Netherlands, at which point he’d promptly moved the cabinet and his entire family to the States.

A plaque in the shape of a banner had been nailed to the top. Matigheid is voor de døden, it read. Moderation is for the dead. Johannes van de Vliert, true to his life philosophy, died at the age of forty-seven from alcoholic hepatitis. He was far and away my favorite ancestor.

“Only the best thing in this room. Apart from you, of course.”

“It’s a display cabinet . . . full of broken junk . . .”

“It’s not junk!” I sprang off the bed and went over to her and the cabinet, which I’d been filling with various treasures since I was in elementary school. “Grakov Town, you filthy casual. It’s a cabinet of curiosities. The bowls here are my favorite. I read about this technique called Kintsukuroi in an art book in middle school. Have you heard of it?” Grace shook her head. “So basically it’s this old-school Japanese art form where they mend broken pottery with seams of gold. Like, they glue all the shattered pieces back together, and when it’s done, it’s covered in these webs of gold veins. They do it because they believe that some things are more beautiful when they’ve been broken.”

Grace picked up one of the Kintsukuroi pieces. I had eleven in total now, some of them gifts from Lola over the years, some from Mom after art acquisition trips to Japan, some purchased on eBay or Craigslist with my allowance. There were other things in the cabinet as well, all of them broken or crooked or wrong somehow. A silver bangle that Sadie had been given as a gift, the joint warped. A can of Coke with a misprinted label.

“It’s a shame people can’t be melded back together with gold seams,” Grace said, turning the bowl over in her hands. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about herself or her mother or some other person in her life, and I probably never would, because Grace Town liked being a mystery. And then, realizing the lighthearted nature of a minute before was gone, weighed down now by something much heavier, she put the bowl back and said, “You know this is only slightly less creepy than collecting Cabbage Patch Kids, right?”

“You know nothing, Grace Town. The ladies love Kintsukuroi.”

Grace tried and failed to fake a smile. “Can we make dinner? I’m starved.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure.”

Grace helped me prepare the mini pizzas. Well, sort of. The kitchen seemed like an alien place she’d never set foot in before, and I had to direct her on how to assist. Would you mind cutting the tomatoes? You can grate some cheese if you’d like. After every small job, she’d stand out of the way and watch me quietly, awkwardly waiting for her next instruction.

While the pizzas were in the oven, we ventured back downstairs and lay on my bed, not touching, the both of us staring at the ceiling.

“What do you want from this?” I said, overcome by a sudden rush of courage, because I was genuinely curious. What did she want from me? What did she hope to gain from all this?

Grace didn’t look at me. “I don’t know. What do you want?”

“You know what I want.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“I want you.”

She smiled a little then, but she never said, “I want you too.”

At dinner, Grace was odd around my parents, the way she was around almost everyone except me, all of the warmth drained out of her. She spoke only when spoken to and didn’t laugh or smile at the appropriate times. She ate little and spoke less.

By the time I walked her to the door at eleven p.m. and watched her disappear into the darkness toward the graveyard, I was almost glad to see her go, worried that my parents would find the first girl I’d ever brought home to be lacking somehow.