“Don’t trivialize transspeciesism,” Lola said.

“Don’t doubt me being dragon kin.”

Then Murray started crying again, so we stopped trying to save the newspaper I’d probably singlehandedly destroyed with my wantonness and put our energy into half inflating an air mattress, which we slept on together, the three of us curled around each other.

“Sorry we ruined your birthday, La,” I whispered to her, but she pressed her fingers to my lips and shook her head.

And I thought, even though the pain of wanting a girl who didn’t exist had burrowed into my bones and infected the soft tissue of my lungs, that things could definitely be a lot worse.

THE NEXT TWO WEEKS melted together in a blur of catching up on schoolwork, missing newspaper meetings with Hink, changing weather, and absence. The absence of orange leaves, for one, as fall went from “pumpkin spice everything” to “my entire Facebook newsfeed is one giant Ned Stark meme.”

And second, the absence of Grace Town.

“Where’s that weird girlfriend of yours? Haven’t seen her around here for a while,” said Sadie one afternoon as Murray, Lola, Madison Carlson (a strange new development), and I walked in the front door. La quickly did the “cut it out” hand motion across her neck, but it was too late. “Oh, shit.” Sadie bit her lip. “Sorry, kid. Did you and Grace break up?”

“We don’t use the G-word anymore,” Murray said. “Please refer to her henceforth as She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

“Grace would’ve had to have been my girlfriend for us to break up,” I told Sadie as I unraveled the scarf from around my neck and hung it up.

“Dude, it’s She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” Murray said. “Christ. Get it right.”

“What happened?” Sadie said.

The problem was, I wasn’t really sure what’d happened. I knew I’d screwed up big-time by going into Dom’s house, but I hadn’t expected Grace to evaporate. I wanted to apologize to her, to pull her aside and say all the things I hadn’t been able to say out loud, but Grace had stopped appearing outside my locker after school. Grace had stopped appearing, period.

The few times she bothered to turn up for class, our teachers, too, seemed determined to keep us apart.

“Hey,” I whispered to her in the second week, when she finally returned to drama and reclaimed her perch at the back of the room. “I’ve missed you.”

“Henry, pay attention, please,” Mrs. Beady said. “You can’t afford to miss learning about Bertolt Brecht’s dramatic theory.” Beady pointed to where the rest of the class was sitting at the foot of the stage. “Over here.”

“Can I talk to you after school?” I whispered as I stood. Grace Town looked at me but said nothing, and after school she was already gone.

I drove past her house sometimes when Mom let me borrow the car, but her Hyundai was never in the drive. I rode my bike by the cemetery in the afternoons, hoping to catch her laying flowers at Dom’s grave, but—although fresh blooms appeared almost every day—I never saw her there. There was evidence of her everywhere. Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of the back of her head in the cafeteria, or find that someone had fed Ricky Martin Knupps II when I forgot, or Seen 5:50 p.m., Seen 11:34 a.m., Seen 8:05 p.m. would appear under the messages I sent her asking where she was, but she was never there. Not really. Not ever.

Grace Town had become the ghost she wanted to be, and the absence of her—the gouge wound she left behind when she ripped herself from my life—made my breath catch.

“Was she real?” I asked Lola one afternoon. We were sitting out on the football field with a flask of hot chocolate, watching thin clouds slip overhead. “Or did I make her up?”

“Christ, you’re so melodramatic,” she said, flicking hot chocolate at me.

It was the smell, more than anything, that killed my soul bit by bit. The scent of her in my sheets, on my clothes, hanging heavily in the newspaper office. It made something inside me crumple in an explosive decompression every time I could smell her close by but not see her. There was a momentary temptation, no more than the space of a heartbeat, where I’d considered never washing anything I owned again, just to savor what I had left of her. But then, no. God no. Dom’s room, Dom’s tomb—I couldn’t. So I stripped my bedding. Washed all my clothes. Avoided the office (and Mr. Hink) at all costs.

The bus was almost as bad. I’d only caught it a couple of times in the last few months, and hadn’t been expecting to catch it that first afternoon Grace failed to materialize outside my locker. It was loud and cramped and smelled like a time before her; smelled like her absence. There was no seat for me anymore, so I had to sit with a freshman girl at the front, who glared at me the entire way to my stop.

• • •

I shrugged at Sadie. “I probably fucked everything up.”

“Language, Henry,” said Dad from the kitchen. He was cooking tacos with Ryan, who was sitting on his shoulders and pulling at Dad’s hair to direct him like the rat from Ratatouille.

“Can’t you fix it?” Sadie said.

“I don’t think so. I think she’s gone.”

The four of us went down to the basement. Ever since the night Madison Carlson had slept at my house, Murray had started ironing his clothes and attempting to comb his wild hair, which made him look like he was getting ready to sit for his yearbook photo sometime in the mid-eighties. He was playing (and losing to) Madison in Mario Kart when all of our phones dinged at once. Lola checked hers first. Her face fell and her eyes darted up to meet mine.

The notification was from Grace Town, to attend her birthday party at the Thanksgiving fair on Saturday. A hundred or so people had been invited, most of them from East River. La launched out of her chair, but I pressed “Going” before she could snatch my phone out of my hands.