“Grace,” I said. “Something’s happened to Grace.”

Principal Valentine looked up from where she was reading on the sex couch. “I’m well aware that Miss Town is currently unaccounted for, but the matter is being handled by her family and the police.”

“You knew?” I said, in a tone I’d never used to address an adult before. “You knew and you didn’t tell us?”

“Your print deadline is Monday. You have less than seventy-two hours left to do months of work.”

“I have to go,” I said, grabbing my backpack. “I have to find her.”

“Henry, if you leave this office, I’ll have no choice but to dismiss you from your position as editor.”

I was already sprinting. Lola shouted after me, but I couldn’t open my mouth because I thought I might be sick.

Grace Town was dead.

I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, deep down in some forgotten corner of the soul where it was possible to know things without knowing how. I ran like I hadn’t been able to run in that stupid touch football game she dragged me to. Which, apparently, still wasn’t as fast as Lola.

“Henry, wait!” she said.

“Lola, go back.”

“Like hell I’m going back.” Which seemed like a good enough argument to me, so we ran together, and as we did, I thought, That coward. She’s gone and killed herself and left me here without her. If I ever had any doubts about whether I really, truly loved her or not, they were all dissolved by the excruciating ten minutes we spent sprinting to her house, knowing, knowing, knowing the news I’d get when I arrived.

There was a police car in the drive. The front door was splayed open in an unsettling manner, the way it is on detective shows when something terrible has happened inside. I stumbled in. There was a cop standing at the top of the stairs and worried-looking adults everywhere, two of whom were my parents. Gasping, my hands on my knees, I looked to the two of them and said, quite flatly, “Is . . . she . . . dead?” My words caused a middle-aged blond woman whom I’d never met before to burst into tears.

Mom came over and hugged me then and said, “No, no, no, no, no,” over and over again in that soothing voice moms use to calm their kids after nightmares. Dad went to comfort the bawling woman, who, at second glance, was very clearly Grace Town’s alcoholic mother. They had the same thin, hollow features that made them look like drug addicts in the wrong light but at the same time very beautiful. With her bright blond hair and smudged makeup and big doe eyes, she looked even more like a femme fatale than Grace herself did.

“What’s going on?” I said when I caught my breath and managed to detach myself from my mother. “Where’s Grace? Why are you here?”

“Grace is missing. She left the house around dawn without her phone and hasn’t come back. Martin came around to our place looking for you, thinking you might know where she is. We gave him your number and then came back here to wait for you. We’ve only been here for an hour.”

“The police car . . . I thought . . . You should’ve pulled me out of school as soon as you knew she was gone.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” said Dad.

Martin came over then, running his fingers through his hair. I’d never seen a human being look quite so haggard. He spoke to Grace’s mother, whose name I never learned. “The police think we should look for her at all her usual hangouts first. I know her and Dom were thinking about going away for his birthday up to the lake house, so Mary and I will drive up there now. I’m going to call some of her East River friends, get them to check out the library where she wrote and the café where she always got breakfast and maybe the houseboat down at the marina.”

All these places. All these places I never knew she’d been, she’d liked. Grace on a houseboat? Doing what? Having another existential crisis? Thinking about stardust and atoms and the meaninglessness of life? But no. Probably not. Probably sunbathing on a spring afternoon, Dom at her side, party music in the background, both of them sipping sweet wine, smiling their salad-eating smiles. Probably that. Probably Facebook Grace, the girl I’d never known.

Might never know, now.

Then came the question I’d been dreading. Martin turned to me. “Henry, can you think of anywhere she might be?” I desperately racked my brain for places I’d seen her. Grace in our fishbowl office. Grace in the black-walled drama room. Grace in my basement bedroom, curled up in my sheets, wearing only one of my T-shirts.

“Uh . . . maybe . . . uh . . . Have you checked the cemetery? Or the track?”

Martin nodded, but looked disappointed. “We went to both of those places this morning. And the crash site, up in the national park.”

“They crashed in the national park?”

“They were on their way to a restaurant up there for lunch,” said Martin. My chest constricted the same way it had when the Gutcrusher pulverized me during touch football. Grace had taken me on a date to the place where he died. Had collected flowers from the garden bed and left me alone next to the seaside while she wandered off to lay flowers at his roadside memorial. Jesus. “We can look again this afternoon, though, I suppose. Anywhere else?” I shook my head, keenly aware that Grace’s mother had stopped crying and was now staring at me, unblinking, the same way her daughter often did, the way that makes you feel like your skin is made of glass and every secret you’ve ever kept is engraved in script upon your bones. “Okay, well, if you think of anywhere she might be, let us know. Sorry, I better go make these phone calls.”

And then came the worst part.

The waiting.

Waiting as people were assigned locations to go out and look for her. Waiting as more police arrived and said comforting things in between asking questions that hinted at their thinly veiled belief that she’d probably killed herself. Waiting as we drove aimlessly around the suburbs, slowing the car to a crawl as we passed anyone who might be a teenage girl, looking like sexual predators out on the prowl. Waiting at home after the sun went down and the cops told us to get some rest, that Grace would show up “one way or another,” which was a fucked-up thing to say. Waiting, fully clothed in my bed, as the clock ticked past midnight and I’d still heard nothing. Waiting with nothing to do except imagine her body somewhere, plunged underwater like Ophelia or Virginia Woolf, because that’s how Grace would do it, if she did it, something dramatic and literary that would get people talking about the tragic but poetic nature of death. I was almost tempted to run upstairs and make sure she hadn’t put her head in my oven, Plath style. Then I started to think about how Manic Pixie Dream Girls committed suicide. Did they ride their Dutch bicycles on photographic train tracks until a midnight express came along to clean them up? Did they drown themselves in their secret fishponds?