We were—for reasons I can’t remember now—curled around each other, both silently reading Matthew Broderick’s Wikipedia page together on my iPhone. I was twirling a thread of her hair through my fingers as we read, baffled that I ever could’ve thought of her as anything other than obscenely beautiful. That first day I’d seen her in drama class, it was like she’d been jet-lagged—the way people looked after flying from one side of the world to the other, like they weren’t just exhausted and dirty, but like every cell in their body was literally out of alignment with their surroundings. Now I liked that Grace’s atoms buzzed at a different frequency.

Thinking about her atoms got me thinking about her skin, which got me thinking about her skin without any clothes on, which gave me a sudden gust of courage. I said, quite slowly: “So, regarding the whole situation . . .”

The change in Grace was sudden but palpable. She drew back from where she had been nestled into my shoulder. Stopped reading about Matthew Broderick. Stopped smiling. And I thought, Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Not again. Please don’t let me have been wrong again.

“Yeah,” she said. But she knew why she was here, didn’t she? She knew what I wanted. She’d known since the beginning how I felt. How could she turn so cold so quickly?

“I guess I want to know where we’re at with that.”

“I don’t really know what to tell you.”

“Last time we talked about this, you said you were gonna stop going to the cemetery.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah. At the Halloween party. You were kinda drunk, I guess.”

“I’m sorry. I always think stupid stuff when I’ve been drinking. I shouldn’t have said that to you.”

“So you . . . you’re not going to stop?”

“Henry.”

“I hate talking about this as much as you do.”

“I can still feel him. He’s in my bones. When I fall asleep, I can feel the warmth of his fingers on my skin.”

“I’m not asking you to let him go.”

“Then what do you want from me? I’m giving you all I’ve got.”

“I want, when someone asks us if we’re dating, to be able to say yes. I don’t want to have to hide it from my friends. I want people to know that we’re together. I want to be able to hold your hand and kiss you in public without worrying if I’m allowed to. I want this to be real.” Grace didn’t say anything, just stared at the ceiling, until I eventually said, “What do you want to do?”

“Maybe . . .” There was a long pause as she breathed in and out several times, her eyes darting from side to side as she tried to find the words to say. “Maybe we should slow down. I mean, we fell into this so quickly. If we wind things back a bit, maybe it won’t feel so wrong.”

“I feel wrong to you?”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant . . . I’m not ready, to be better. Not yet.”

“I don’t care. I want you, exactly as you are.”

“No, you don’t. You want her. You’re dating me on the hope that I’ll one day become that girl. You’ve fallen for an idea, not an actual person, and it kills me when I see you looking at me but seeing someone else.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Is it, though?”

“God, I hate this. I hate this whole thing so much. I want you, Grace Town. I’ve wanted you since the beginning.”

I pulled her on top of me so she was sitting on my hips and she leaned down and kissed me the way she did, the way that made me sure she was in love with me even though I knew that she wasn’t and probably never would be. I opened my eyes and watched her, like I did sometimes, to make sure the kiss was real. Grace drew away from me with her eyes still closed, the smallest of smiles playing on her lips. And it took until then for me to realize that she wasn’t kissing me, not ever, not really, at least not in her head.

Maybe we were both in love with ideas.

Grace’s eyes flickered open slowly to find me staring at her. She looked momentarily confused, like she’d genuinely forgotten for a split second that she wasn’t kissing Dom. Then a heaviness settled over her features, and she lifted herself off me and got out of bed.

“I should jet,” she said, slinging her bag over her shoulder without looking at me.

“I thought we were gonna do schoolwork.”

“It’s not like I’m going to pass any of my classes anyway.”

“We haven’t had dinner yet.”

“I’m not really hungry. I’ll see you later.”

I didn’t say good-bye.

After half an hour of letting the acid ball inside my chest slowly gnaw at the flesh of my trachea, I got up and dragged myself to the shower. I stood under the hot stream and tried to cup water in my fingers but it kept running through the gaps and it was all very metaphorical and it hurt like hell because I knew, I knew I was losing her. And it wasn’t something I could fix.

Human beings could not be mended with gold seams.

I pressed my forehead against the cool white tiles of the shower wall. My head pounded like I was going to cry, but my eyes were dry. Right girl, wrong time, I thought, even though I knew that was a delusion, because Grace would never be the right girl. But damn, I still wanted her so badly. I still needed her so deeply. My whole body ached at the thought of losing her and I suddenly felt like a real dick for judging the breakups of my friends so harshly. Is this what Murray felt like all the time because of Sugar Gandhi? Did he feel her sear across his very skin, hotter than boiling water?

There had to be, had to be a way to make her love me.

My eyes jolted open, my brain overcome by the kind of sudden epiphanic moment that can only be provoked by a long, hot shower. I turned the water off quickly and wrapped a towel around my pink-seared ass and stumbled, still dripping wet, downstairs into the hovel that was my basement bedroom, frantic that it might not be there. But it was, tucked neatly into the large bottom drawer of my desk, as though the space had been made for it.