“Exactly. It would be unconscionable.” Lola swung her arm around my shoulder and kissed my cheek. “I did love you when I kissed you, you know? I still do. Very much.”

“Thanks, La. Love you too.”

“Excellent. Now, let’s go track down some Burger King. I am fucking famished.”

• • •

When we got home, I didn’t go inside. I went to the backyard, into the shed where Dad did all his carpentry work. I found gasoline. I set up the fire pit my parents used when they were entertaining people in the colder months. I started a fire. One by one, I tore out the pages of You Are Stardust and fed them to the flames.

I didn’t think of it as destroying the book; I thought of it as setting its atoms free.

• • •

Lola and Georgia came over at lunchtime on Sunday (uninvited, naturally, each carrying handfuls of food they’d swiped from the kitchen upstairs).

“I’m thinking of a four-letter word that starts with an s and ends with a t and has an l in it,” La announced, spilling her contraband across my bed.

“Salt?” I said.

“Slut, you miserable addict. Slut.”

“My heart hurts, La.”

“Good. You deserve to be in pain,” she said as she crawled under the covers of my bed and hooked her legs through mine.

“Lola, we can’t flaunt our secret love affair in front of your girlfriend!” I said dramatically, taking her face in my hands.

“You can have her,” said Georgia as she turned on my TV and PlayStation and made her herself comfortable on my couch. “She’s hungover and whiny and generally being a pain in the ass. Did you hear about her admirer from last night? Samuel? Apparently he asked Murray for her number.”

“Pfft. As if that’s news,” said Lola. “Men fall at my feet all the time.” She unwrapped a candy cane, handed it to me, then unwrapped another one and started sucking on it. “Have you heard from She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?”

“Yeah. I texted her this morning.”

“Henry.”

“I know, I know.”

“And?”

“And it was like it always is. She said she was drunk and stupid and sorry, and by this point I should know better than to listen to her.”

“Fuck. You didn’t get angry at her for going all Mr. Darcy on you and pledging her undying love out of nowhere? And then going Exorcist and vomiting on my shoes?”

“No.”

Lola shuffled closer and patted my head. “You’ll be okay.”

“I know.”

La and I fell asleep to the sound of Georgia crushing skulls in BioShock Infinite.

ON THE FIRST FRIDAY in December, I was unceremoniously hauled out of Mr. Hotchkiss’s math class by Mr. Hink (who I’m sure thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to disrupt calculus). We walked in silence to Principal Valentine’s office, where Lola was already seated in front of her desk. Spread out in front of her were thirty tabloid-sized pages, half of them blank.

“Care to explain this, Page?” said Valentine.

I’d been waiting for this meeting for a while. I just hadn’t been able to muster the energy to care. Grace had been absent from school for the entire week after Thanksgiving, and despite Lola’s insistence that I needed to organize my shit or she was going to go directly to Valentine, I hadn’t done anything, because I couldn’t even force myself to walk into the newspaper office. “It looks like an unpolished printout of the paper.”

“I asked Lola for a printout this morning of everything you’ve finished so far,” said Hink. “This is what she gave me.”

Wantonness, mouthed Lola.

Traitor, I mouthed back. “Look, we do have more than that. There’s this whole massive feature story on Magic: The Gathering, and we’ve got a few other articles almost ready to go. We can have them to Lola in the next few days.”

“It’s too late for that,” said La. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I can’t do three months’ worth of design in a couple of days.”

“You go to print on Monday, Mr. Page. If it were solely my decision, I’d fire you from your position effective immediately, but Mr. Hink still has faith that you can slap something together. The printing has already been paid for, and let me tell you, never in its thirty-five years has the Westland Post not gone to print. You will not be the exception. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You are excused from class for the remainder of the day. Get your writers, get into your office, and get. The. Paper. Done.”

“Yes,” I said again. Lola marched me to the office then, and she called the classrooms of all the junior writers, and in the afternoon Hink and Principal Valentine came in to supervise and picked the theme “time of your life” for us to focus on. Even though it would be the worst issue ever produced in the already fairly unimpressive history of the Westland Post, I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d get my shit together long enough to get the damn newspaper to print. That is until I checked my phone and found two things:

 A message from my mother that read:

BIRTHGIVER:

 We’re at Grace’s house. Come straight here when you get this. Call if you need a ride.

 Which made exactly zero sense.

 And:

A voice message from an unknown number. I checked it quickly, still unsure as to why my mother was at my kind-of-ex-girlfriend’s house.

“Henry,” said a familiar voice through the phone, albeit panicked and teary. The speaker had been crying. It took a second for me to recognize him, to understand why the sound of him upset made my gut drop like a stone. “It’s Martin Sawyer, Dominic’s dad. Could you give me a call as soon as you get this, please? We just, uh.” He sobbed. “It’s an emergency. It’s . . . I don’t know if Grace has told you, but it’s Dom’s birthday today—his first birthday since he left us—and she’s . . . she’s . . .” I didn’t hear the rest of the message.