“Muz raises a very good point, though,” La said. “Who was the strange girl you were sprinting after? Did you think to yourself, ‘Here’s finally one that can’t get away,’ but then she proved you wrong?”

“Ha-ha. I can’t believe you both saw that.” I grabbed a can of Coke from the refrigerator and went back to the computer, where Facebook was loading pixel by painful pixel. “Her name is Grace Town. She’s new. Hink offered her editor but she turned it down, so I got pissed and went after her.”

“Her name is Grace Town? Like Gracetown?” said Murray as he, too, cracked a can of Coke and took a swig. “Christ. Poor chick.”

Lola was already on her feet. “Hink offered her editor over you? That bastard. No way am I designing that glorified newsletter if you’re not in charge!”

“No. Calm down. He gave it to us both but she turned it down because she—and I quote—‘doesn’t write anymore.’ The way she said it was so ominous.”

“Oh,” Lola said. Murray yanked her back down to the couch. “Maybe bad things happen when she writes. Oh! Maybe the things she writes come true? Or maybe she has a voodoo curse on her so that every word she writes breaks a bone in her leg and that’s why she walks with a cane?”

“Let’s take a shufti at old FB, shall we?” Murray said. “Nothing like a little cyberstalking to clear these things up.”

“Way ahead of you.” When I typed Grace’s name in the search field and hit return, a list of all the people I knew with Grace in their name showed up. Sadie Grace Elizabeth Smith was the first, followed by Samantha Grace Lawrence (we went to elementary school together), Grace Park (some kind of distant relative) and Grace Payne (I had no idea). Underneath them was a list of exact matches—five or so genuine Grace Towns—none of whom I had mutual friends with, and only one of whom lived in my geographical area.

I slouched forward. “None of them are her.”

“Wait, what about that one?” Lola said, pointing.

I clicked the profile picture of the closest geographical Grace Town, a girl in a red dress with red lipstick and loose curls in her honey-blond hair. She was smiling brilliantly, her eyes closed, her head tilted back in laughter so that the sharp lines of her collarbones were visible beneath her skin. It was a good handful of seconds before any of us recognized her. Because it was her. It was the same Grace Town who had driven me home. The lips were the same, the shape of her face.

“Holy shit,” Murray said. “Blokes would be on her like seagulls at a tip.”

“Translation: She’s an attractive female who likely gets a lot of attention from males,” Lola said. “And lesbians,” she tacked on after a moment, leaning closer to the screen. “Damn. She’s got that Edie Sedgwick thing going on. That girl is stupid hot.”

And she was. On Facebook, Grace Town was tall and lean and tan, with the kind of limbs that makes you think of words like gracile and swanlike and damn, son. It must be an old picture, I thought, but no. According to the date it was uploaded, it’d only been a little over three months since Grace had changed it. I scrolled through the five other public profile pictures, but each of them told the same story. None were more than a few months old, but the person in them was very different from the one I’d met. Her hair was much longer, down to her waist, and fell in soft, clean curls. There were pictures of her at the beach, pictures of her in makeup, pictures of her smiling this incredibly wide smile, the kind that models smile in ads when they’re super jacked up about eating salad. There was no cane at her side, no black circles under her eyes, no layers upon layers of guys’ clothing.

What had happened to her in the last three months that’d left her so changed and broken?

Sadie called us upstairs then, to help Dad finish dinner before Mom got home from the art gallery she curated in the city. (“Thank Christ. I could chew the crutch out of a low-flying vulture,” Murray said.) All of us quickly forgot about the mystery of Grace Town for a few hours as we ate and did the dishes and watched Netflix together, as was our Thursday-night routine. It was only after I’d said good-bye to my friends and gone back down into the basement and noticed the screen of the poor iMac still wheezing with life that I thought of her again, but once I did, I was hooked.

I didn’t brush my teeth that night. I didn’t shower or change out of my clothes from school or go to say good-bye to Sadie and Ryan when they finally left around midnight. Instead, I stayed in the basement and spent the rest of my night listening to every song the Strokes had on Spotify.

You say you wanna stay by my side, crooned Julian Casablancas. Darlin’, your head’s not right.

If I’d been older or wiser or if I’d paid more attention to the dramatic teenage feelings my peers had described to me the first time they’d had crushes, I might not have misdiagnosed the burning, constricting sensation in my chest as indigestion from the four overfried chicken chimichangas I’d had for dinner instead of what it actually was: an affliction far more serious and far more painful.

That was the first night I dreamed of Grace Town.

WHEN I KNOCKED on Hink’s open door the following morning before school, he smiled and waved me into his office.

“Good job with convincing Town to take the job, Henry,” he said. “That was a very nice thing of you to do. She’s had a rough time, the poor kid.”

“Wait, she’s doing it?” I said.

“She came to see me half an hour ago to tell me you’d changed her mind. I don’t know what you said to her, but it had an impact.”

I raised my eyebrows. “She said I changed her mind?”

“The two of you should start planning your first issue ASAP. December seems a long way off, but it’ll catch up to you. I put the fear of God into some of my juniors in English yesterday, so you should get a handful of volunteer writers to help you out. Mainly the ones who need extracurricular activities to scrape their way into college, so I can’t guarantee they’ll submit anything legible, but it’s a start.”