“I think I feel ready?” I didn’t mean for it to sound so much like a question.

“Okay, good. That’s all that matters. Everything else is biology. Now give me that poor pumpkin before you make it any worse.”

• • •

Grace came to my house in the evening to do my makeup, a small yet ominous overnight bag in her hands.

“It still cool if I stay here tonight?” she said when she caught me staring at it.

“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex with her. I’d been thinking about having sex since I was about twelve years old.

“Good,” she said as she pulled a palette of face paint and a thirty-ounce bottle of fake blood out of her bag. “Now, do you want to be a zombie or a car crash victim? Because they’re the only special effects makeup I’m good at.”

My eyes flicked down to where her cane was resting across my bed. “Uh . . . I don’t . . .”

“That was a joke, Henry.”

“Oh . . .” I forced out a nervous ha sound. Making light of the horrific car accident that killed your boyfriend. Hilarious. “Zombie, I guess.”

For the next hour I sat on the edge of my bed while Grace moved around me, holding herself away from me in her usual rigid marionette fashion while she applied liquid latex wounds and decomposing special effects to my face. Which I know is not the most romantic of situations, but it felt almost clinical, the way she went about touching me as little as possible.

I expected her to go as something entirely weird, like a meme or an obscure literary character or a figure from an eighteenth-century impressionist artwork. But when she went upstairs to get dressed and do her makeup while I shredded an old T-shirt and drenched myself in fake blood, she came back down in a sexy vampire costume, a single trickle of red seeping from the corner of her mouth.

It was the first time I’d seen her in clothes that were made to fit a feminine figure, and it was shocking. Her legs were long and toned, encased in dark stockings, her breasts and waist accentuated by a black lace corset that gave her the kind of shape I’d never imagined a high school girl as capable of having. Her blond hair was brushed and curled and pinned back by black netting that covered her smoky eyes, and she’d even tied a red ribbon around her cane.

She was darkly beautiful, a femme fatale, a heroin junkie risen from the dead—and I could hardly recognize her.

“I didn’t really think much about a costume, so I recycled this from last year,” she said, shrugging. “It’s lame.”

“No. I approve wholeheartedly.”

“Really? ’Cause you look a little . . . shocked?”

“I guess I didn’t expect . . . It doesn’t seem like something you’d wear, that’s all. Not the you that I know, anyway. I was expecting something, I don’t know, weird or something that I’d have to ask you twenty questions to get. You look sexy as hell, though.”

“Grace this time last year was pretty different from the Grace I am now.”

I looked at her for a little longer and then nodded.

“Say it, Henry.”

“Say what?”

“Whatever it is that’s going on in that mysterious brain of yours. I can see the cogs furiously turning behind your eyes, but all you do is nod. So say it.”

“It’s just . . . I wonder sometimes . . . Man, I’m no good at this drafting business . . . If the person you were . . . What if that’s who you are? I mean, I don’t know her at all, I don’t know anything about her. I see her in you sometimes, I get these flashes of this girl you used to be, but . . . Was she an act and you’re more yourself now, or is the Grace I know an act until you feel comfortable being yourself again?”

“People change. There’s no way you’re the same person you were when you were sixteen.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t change schools and start wearing a dead guy’s clothes.”

There was a beat of silence. “So you know,” she said slowly, staring at me, unblinking. “The truth outs.”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“I know who you want me to be, Henry. It isn’t hard to see.”

“What does that—”

“You look at me differently sometimes. You think I don’t notice, but I do. There are times when you really like me, and others when you don’t so much. But I can’t pretend to be all better because that’s what you want.”

“Grace, it’s nothing like that, not at—”

“Look, let’s not talk about it tonight, okay?”

“I want you, all the time.”

“I know you think that. But sometimes I don’t know which version of me you want. The one I am. The one I was. Or the Kintsukuroi dream girl you think I’ll be a couple of months from now.”

“You were the one who said people can’t be melded back together with gold seams.”

“That’s exactly my point,” she said as she turned and started climbing, step by painful step, back up the stairs.

I typed my fifth draft of “Why Henry Page Is Single” as I followed her, dripping blood all over the floor as I went.

Draft Five

Because apparently you still have to chase girls who can’t even run.

THE FIRST HALF of the party, for the most part, was a lot like Heslin’s. We went to the football field to drink, not from a bathtub this time, but from—I’m not even kidding—an industrial rainwater tank. (The bathtub had ended up on Heslin’s roof. No one had claimed responsibility yet, but I very strongly suspected Murray.) The concoction this time was red-tinged and suspiciously frothy, like someone had cleaned the tank with dishwashing liquid and not rinsed it out before they’d sloshed in ten boxes of cheap wine. Still, it didn’t taste as poisonous as the last batch, and after two bottlefuls I was fairly intoxicated, and so was Grace, thank God, because we both seemed to be much nicer people when we were drunk.