“What is there to edit? We’ve done everything we can do without a theme. Why don’t you just make it ‘failure’?”

“Because I can’t handle that amount of irony.”

Then she looked pissed and I wanted to kiss her to make her (and maybe myself) feel better, but I was afraid that if I tried, she’d pull away from me, and I didn’t want to be saddled with that feeling all afternoon, so I didn’t.

“I’m gonna go,” she said. “I have stuff to do this afternoon.”

“Wait a sec,” I said, and I turned and jogged over to my backpack to retrieve the letter from where it had been lodged in my copy of 84, Charing Cross Road all day. I hadn’t forgotten it. Not for a single moment. It’d hung over me like a small storm cloud. I’d waited for the right moment all day, hoping an insane rush of courage would wash over me.

“Oh yeah. This. The Letter,” she said, taking the envelope from me and folding it and putting it into her bag. And I knew. I knew that this moment would either be our last as we’d been or our first as something more. A beginning or an ending. It couldn’t be anything in between. I said I’d never make her choose between us and now I was because I couldn’t stand it anymore. She loved him; she still loves him. I knew that.

But wasn’t I worth something too?

“Can you read it now?” I said.

“You want me to read it in front of you?”

“Uh . . . yeah?”

“Can’t you say it? Everything that’s in the letter is inside of you right now. I don’t want the filtered version. I don’t want the pretty words, the final draft. I want you to say something raw. Something real.”

“I can read it out to you, if you’d like.”

“That is not what I said.”

“Come on, at least let me skim it, remember what I wrote.”

“You don’t remember how you feel?”

“Of course I do, I just don’t know how to put it into words.”

“Try.”

“You’re . . . You’re special.”

Grace sighed. “I’m a beautiful and unique snowflake? I complete you?”

“No! It says . . . Look, everything’s in there, okay? It’s all in there, everything I want you to know. You just have to read it.”

Grace didn’t read it. She simply said, “I’ll see you tomorrow night for Lola’s thing,” and pulled the door open and walked out. It all felt so strangely, ominously final. I tried to remember the last kiss we’d shared, many hours ago now, but I couldn’t recall the specifics of it, which upset me, because I knew it might very well be our last.

I stepped out into the hall and watched her limp across the linoleum-clad floor toward the door, breaking every few steps to rest her leg.

After she’d left my house last night, she must’ve gone to the East River track to push her injury until it hurt her again. Maybe it was something like cutting. Maybe slowing down the healing process was the only thing that made her feel in control. Maybe the injury was the last thing that tied her to the accident, and therefore to Dom, and she wasn’t ready to let it go yet.

Or maybe she just hated herself so much, she thought she deserved to be in pain.

Finally, Grace made it to the exit and the door swung closed behind her and she disappeared into the school grounds. She didn’t look back once.

As if, one way or another, she’d already made up her mind.

• • •

Lola’s birthday was the next day. Georgia drove in from her hometown and arrived at my place as the sun was rising. Lola’s parents, Han and Widelene, let us into their house, and the four of us quietly went about blowing up and filling the hallway, living room, and kitchen with about two hundred–odd balloons. We were all giddy by the end of it, our heads spinning from lack of oxygen, but it was worth it to hear La say, “What the hell?” in her raspy, half-asleep voice, then start giggling like a maniac.

“Happy birthday!” we shouted in unison as she wandered into the kitchen in her very un-Lola pink nightdress, her hand held over her mouth, an impressively large cowlick giving her a Mohawk.

After she’d showered and changed, we picked up Muz and all went to breakfast together in the city. Georgia gave Lola a cactus. (“That’s romantic as fuck,” was her reaction upon unwrapping it. “Taking our relationship to the next level.”) Muz gave her a set of oil paints in a bamboo box, and I got her a skeleton cat candle, one of those ones that burn down to bones when all the wax is gone.

Lola and I both highly believed in the value of metaphorical gifts, so while everyone else saw a demonic-looking cat skeleton dripping wax on the packaging, Lola saw the message: Our friendship is like this feline-shaped candle—burn away all the shit, and you and me are still solid underneath. Always.

“Henry, you magnificent creature,” she said, pressing her forehead to my temple. “What grand deed did I do in a past life to deserve the fortune of living next to you in this one?”

“You two are so cute, sometimes I wish you weren’t a raging lesbian so you could get married and generally live an adorable life together,” Georgia said. “I mean, I’m glad you are a raging lesbian, but I digress.”

I started thinking about what kind of gift to give Grace for her birthday at the end of the month. None of the usual presents boyfriends bought for their girlfriends would do, because a) Grace Town was not my girlfriend and b) I was fairly certain she would’ve dry retched at the sight of flowers, chocolate, or jewelry. It didn’t have to be something grand; it only needed to mean something.

But what do you give a girl whose mind is like the universe, when the brain inside your own head is stuck firmly on planet Earth?

Draft Six