Our Chemical Hearts Page 37

When I came back inside, Mom and Dad were in the kitchen, stacking the dishwasher together. I sat quietly at the breakfast bar, waiting for their assessment, which I knew would come whether I wanted to hear it or not.

“She’s very brooding,” Mom said after a while. “Beautiful, but very brooding.”

“Do you think?” I said, puzzled. Brooding is the way I’d describe vampires, not Grace. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Pretty smile, though, when she does smile. Strange girl.”

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty,” Dad said, threading his arms around my mother’s waist. Mom nodded but pulled away from him, and as I watched them for the next ten minutes, watched as they moved around the kitchen but never touched, were never drawn to each other, I realized it’d been a long time since I’d seen them kiss or hold hands or slow dance together when they thought no one was watching, like they used to when I was a kid.

A long, long time.

• • •

For the next three days, hardly an hour went by when Grace and I didn’t see each other. In the mornings before school we sat in the office and worked on the newspaper and teased each other endlessly. We brought in a badminton kit and had silly framed family pictures of us with Ricky Martin Knupps II on our desks. At lunch we’d go to McDonald’s together, or read each other passages from books in the library (me: always Harry Potter, her: always poetry), or walk around the outermost boundary of the school grounds and kick the last of the leaf piles and brainstorm bullshit newspaper themes, neither of us realizing that we hadn’t actually eaten anything until the bell rang.

And then in the evenings, when school and work were done, we’d follow the routine that was now our ritual: We’d walk to her house and I’d wait outside while she fetched her keys, and she’d make me drive myself home in her car. And that’s where everything would change. The moment the sun set, it was like Grace became a different person, like the sunshine fueled her somehow and without it she powered down, empty. On Thursday she came inside and sat uncomfortably in the basement, clinging to Lola like she was a life preserver, barely speaking to Murray, and rarely engaging in any sort of group conversation. On her own, Grace could be effervescent, illuminating the entire room with her intelligence and wit. Around others she seemed to lose her luster.

“I swear I used to be good at this stuff,” she said to me after Muz left, by this time convinced that Grace hated him. “At socializing, I mean. I used to do it all the time.”

“I guess it must be harder. Without him. Right?” It was one of the rare instances that either of us acknowledged that there had been someone before me who wasn’t here now.

Grace shook her head. “Not harder, no. I just forget to do it. I slip into my head and keep falling deeper into the abyss. I forget the world exists.”

Which is the point when I probably should’ve said, “That sounds remarkably like some kind of mental illness that you should seek therapy and medication to help treat,” but I didn’t, because I didn’t want Grace to be sick or broken or depressed. I wanted her to brush her hair and wash her clothes and to be whole and full and happy.

So I pretended she was.

• • •

And slowly, hour by hour, the countdown to All Hallows’ Eve ticked away, until it finally arrived. My street turned into an annex of the cemetery, tombstones, cobwebs, and skeletons strewn everywhere. By midday on Saturday, it looked like some sort of kitsch apocalypse had exploded in our front yard. Sadie brought Ryan over to carve pumpkins on the lawn, but all I could think about was the party happening that night. Or rather what was happening after the party, which I felt wholly underprepared for.

“Dude, what the hell are you doing to that pumpkin?” Sadie said as she surveyed my handiwork. Sadie, with her piercings and dreads and leather jacket, looked maniacal with a carving knife in one hand and a pumpkin wedged between her knees. My pumpkin was a little soft and my knife was a little blunt, which combined to make it look like the face had been carved using a sawed-off shotgun at close range. “It’s worse than Ryan’s and he doesn’t even have fine motor skills yet. No offense, Ryan.”

“It’s a surrealist interpretation of the traditional jack-o’-lantern, thank you very much.”

“If it could speak, it would simply whisper, ‘Kill me,’ before vomiting seeds and pulp everywhere.”

I sighed and put my carving knife down. “Suds, I know it’s unethical, but do you think you could score me some Valium from the hospital?”

“Pray tell, what do you need Valium for?”

“Grace is kinda coming over tonight, after the party. Sleeping over, actually. For the first time.”

“Oh. Oh. My baby’s growing up so fast!”

“Get off me, She-Devil,” I said, trying to push Sadie away as she squashed my ribs in a bear hug, her pumpkin rolling across the grass. “Ugh, I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Don’t stress too much, man. People have been banging for millions of years. You got condoms?”

I grimaced. “Yeah.”

“You know how to use ’em?”

“Christ, Sadie. Yes.”

“And you want to have sex with this girl?”

“She’s a consenting human female and I’m a teenage boy. That’s an irrelevant question.”

“No, it’s not. Look, you don’t need to love someone to lose your virginity to them, but you should know them and trust them and feel comfortable with them and really, really want to sleep with them.”

“Well, yeah. I guess. I mean, yeah. I want to be with her.”

“And it’s a stupid cliché question, but do you feel ready? I mean, sex is not a big deal, but it’s not not a big deal, you know?”

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