“I’ve never met anyone like you. I need you to know that,” she said. “I loved Dom, I really did, but there’s something between us that there never was with him.”

“Grace.”

“I mean it, Henry. The way we get along, the chemistry we have. Dom and I were never like this. You’re so special. The way we are together . . . After him, I never thought I’d give a shit about anyone again. I didn’t want to give a shit about anyone again. But there you were. And I was afraid, because it was so soon after, but we work, Henry. God, I want you so badly, all the time.”

“I don’t want to hear these things when you’ve been drinking. I want you to say them to me when you’re sober.”

“I could see us together. Really together. I want to do this.”

“I want you to say these things to me tomorrow when you wake up. I want you to be sure.”

“And the way you handled seeing his room. I thought it would be shit, but the way you handled yourself made me want you more.”

“Are you even going to remember saying these things tomorrow?”

“I need to know if you’re going to go away for college.”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Because if we’re going to do this, you need to stay. I’m not ready to leave. So I need to know if you’re going or not.”

“Grace . . . I don’t know yet. I haven’t decided.”

“I know I’m being forward, and I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. I mean, I was pretty forward from the beginning.”

“But that’s how it should be with feelings. People should be forward. I’m jealous that you can say exactly how you feel about me.”

“I never can. Only sometimes. Only with you.”

“Do you still want me?”

“Nothing has changed for me,” I said, the last of my resolve crumbling. Because how could I blame her for still loving him. Because she was still shaky, still uncertain, and I wasn’t.

I wasn’t.

I never would be.

And I wasn’t in any kind of position to play hard to get. I was afraid that if I did, Grace would walk away. I leaned against the wall, the fingers of my left hand in my hair, my eyes burning but dry. I couldn’t look at her.

“Tell me how you feel about me,” Grace said, her head on my shoulder, her chest pressed against mine.

“Grace.”

“I want to hear it again.”

“This isn’t fair.”

“I know. But I miss hearing it, so I want you to say it anyway.”

“I’ve never felt about anyone the way I feel about you.”

“More.”

Then Lola was there. La. A devil and an angel rolled into one. “There you two are!” she said, pulling Grace off me, detaching the source of poison. “Grace, darling, a smoking hot babe named Piper is looking for you.”

Grace looked at me. “Come find me,” she said, leaning in to kiss my cheek. And then she was gone and I was sinking to the ground, my head in my hands, Lola at my side.

“I think I’m going to have a psychotic break.”

“That goddamn girl. Women, I swear. We should leave, right now.”

But of course we didn’t. Grace was my drug of choice, and tonight the dealer was giving out hits for free. I’d stay until I overdosed.

So La and I went back to the fair. We got Grace’s cousin to buy us drinks. And later in the night she found me again, and again she was her usual drunk self: flirty, chatty, giggling. She fawned over me. Ran her fingers through my hair. And I let her. Like an absolute idiot, I sat there and I let her do that to me and I let people see us together, all of her friends, and I felt my chest constricting but she’d said such nice things. Such pretty things. I thought that maybe we would be together after all. Because people don’t just do that to other people. People didn’t seek out people and then profess their feelings for them if they didn’t really mean it, right?

“You need to go crazy, Henry,” Grace said suddenly. She was sitting on my lap, her lips against my temple. “You just need to go and fuck lots of girls. So I can hate you. It would be so much easier to hate you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This is so fucked. This whole thing is so fucked.” Her words were slurred, her posture slumped. Grace was drunk. Like actually, legitimately drunk. I’d seen her tipsy before, but never wasted. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Okay,” I said as she climbed off me and stumbled toward the bathroom, where I assumed she would vomit and sit and cry for a while. And maybe I should’ve got up and followed her, but I didn’t. I sat at the table by myself for twenty minutes, eating a corn dog, then I went to find one of her friends—Piper or whatever her name was—to go in after her and make sure she was still alive (she was).

Piper came out ten minutes later and found me in the crowd, plucking yellow ducks out of a duck pond game with Lola. “Can you take her home?” she said. “She says she’ll only come out if you take her home.”

“Look . . . I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

“She said she still cares about you, Henry.”

I know she still cares about me, I felt like saying. I had to hear all about it for the last two hours.

“Yeah, okay, whatever. Bring her out. I’ll make sure she gets home safe.”

La and I stood together near the fairground exit, waiting for Piper to extract Grace from the bathroom. She stumbled out another ten minutes later, mascara smudged around her eyes, her lips and eyes swollen from crying. I crossed my arms and watched as Piper sat her down in the grass and went to a cotton candy vendor to get her water. It wasn’t fair that some people could still be beautiful even when they were drunken messes.