I’d seen a gravestone once where a pair of lovers had been buried in the same plot, fifty-four years apart. For fifty-four years the woman had lived on, alone and heartbroken, waiting for the day she got to join her beloved beneath the dirt.

Would Grace be buried here? In sixty or seventy years, would she come back to this spot and lie with her young, dead boyfriend? Even if she loved again, married, had children, would this be where her body would dissolve back into the universe? Could I handle that? If by some crazy miracle Grace and I did work out, if we went to college together and got married and traveled the world and had kids, would I be able to handle her getting buried with him at the end? How lonely would I be, alone in my grave, the love of my life intertwined with the bones of someone else?

Could I handle being jealous of a dead guy for the rest of my life? And even after my death?

I sat cross-legged on his grave in the dark and picked at the grass, trying to remember—now that I was there—what the hell I’d come to say.

“You absolute dick,” I said after a while. It kind of spewed out of me, filled with so much more anger and venom than I expected. “God, she loves you so much, and you went and left her here alone. Do you know how fucking broken she is? I mean, if you’re there—if you can hear this—you need to get your ghost ass into gear and go all Patrick Swayze on her right now, because she’s hurting like hell and there’s nothing . . . there’s nothing . . .”

I jammed my eyes closed and took a few deep breaths. It was too cold to cry.

“I can’t help her, Dom. I want to help her but I can’t because I’m not you. So if you’re there—I mean it, for real, I don’t care about any ghost code and the natural order of things and all that shit—if you’re there, you need to show yourself right now. This is a corporeal realm emergency. Get your cowardly, haunted ass out of that headstone and tell me why the hell you left her.”

I waited for over an hour in the dark, until my eyes had adjusted to the deep blackness and my ribs were shivering. Ghost Dom never showed. Zombie Dom never rose from the dead.

“Well, screw you too,” I said as I stood up to leave. I walked home in the cold instead of driving, determined to prove to myself—just like Grace was—that feeling pain meant I was somehow, in some way, doing something right.

WHEN I WOKE up in the morning, Grace was the first thing I thought about, this involuntary, gut-wrenching ache that spasmed from my brain into my chest. Grace, and the newspaper, and sucking at English and math because I couldn’t make myself care, and how any colleges that might’ve taken me would see my first semester grades and stamp my application with a big OH HELL NO because I’d screwed everything up, let everything slip so far, and for what? For what?

Mom and Dad, unsurprisingly, chose that Saturday to start doing the concerned-parent routine they hadn’t had to do since Sadie left for Yale. They came downstairs not long after sunrise and started lurking around the basement, assessing the damage I’d done to my life. They opened the curtains. Made me get out of bed and out of my pajamas. Put a bowl of cereal in front of me and refused to stop singing “Baby Got Back” until I agreed to eat it, which I did, because God.

Under their watchful eyes, I vacuumed the carpets, washed my clothes, tidied my bookshelves, and transported all my schoolwork upstairs to the kitchen table so they could continue to supervise me while I caught up on the last couple of weeks of Hotchkiss’s demonic math problems and the English essay I felt too empty to bullshit my way through. At eleven o’clock, Mom made me go for a jog with her. At lunchtime, Dad made me eat again. Sadie had the day off and came over at around two o’clock, by which point my request for a nap had been granted and I was lying spread-eagle on my bed.

“Hey, Henry, have you seen . . . Are you listening to Taylor Swift?” said Suds from the foot of the stairs.

“Yes, Sadie. This is the second straight hour I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift. She’s the only one who understands me.”

“Oh God.”

“Who hurt you, Taylor?!” I yelled, gesturing at the ceiling. “How can one person endure so much heartbreak?!”

“Good lord. Scooch. It’s time for a chat.”

“Suds . . . I really don’t want to talk about it. I’m not good at sharing.”

“I’m your sister, douche canoe. You don’t talk to your friends, you don’t talk to your parents. Are you gonna keep all this bottled up inside until it manifests as mental illness?”

“That’s pretty much the plan.”

“How long have you been lying in that bed for, anyway? You’re going to get deep vein thrombosis.”

“Leave, Sadie. Leave me to my heartache and my DVT.”

Sadie ignored my protests and flopped down on my bed on top of my rib cage, winding me in the process. Then she poked my cheek over and over again in the same spot, saying, “Speak, speak, speak,” until I eventually spoke and said, “Ugh, fine, you wretched woman. It’s . . . Grace, and I . . . I don’t know what’s going on.”

“I gathered that from the Taylor Swift marathon.” Sadie waited for me to continue. “Care to elaborate?”

“I’m just . . . so confused by it all. And I think I’ve done some kind of permanent damage to my respiratory system. My chest is tight, like, all the time.”

“That’s probably the ribs I cracked when I jumped you.”

“Is love supposed to feel like this?”

“No, it’s not, kid. I don’t know about the whole ‘love lifts us up where we belong’ crap, but it isn’t supposed to screw you up either.”

“I know. I mean, look at Mom and Dad.”

“Mom and Dad are a fairy tale. They don’t exist.”

“You loved Chris, though.”