I shut my eyes and thought. I tried to remember a period of more than a few hours that I’d been truly happy with Grace. I remembered anxiety, stress, pain, sadness, the acid from my stomach eating away at my lungs. I remembered loving her, desperately. There was the night we walked home together from the movies, hand in hand, when I’d been sure I was going to marry her. There was the Thanksgiving fair, only the second time I’d seen her wear clothes that didn’t belong to Dom. Brief, bright flashes of happiness, no more than lightning strikes in the dark.

I opened my eyes. “Oh, shit,” I said quietly.

“That’s what I thought.”

“I don’t know if I can accept that it was all a waste of time, though. That all this pain was for nothing. That what we had was never real.”

Sadie flicked my temple. “Aren’t you listening, doofus? Love doesn’t need to last a lifetime for it to be real. You can’t judge the quality of a love by the length of time it lasts. Everything dies, love included. Sometimes it dies with a person, sometimes it dies on its own. The greatest love story ever told doesn’t have to be about two people who spent their whole lives together. It might be about a love that lasted two weeks or two months or two years, but burned brighter and hotter and more brilliantly than any other love before or after. Don’t mourn a failed love; there’s no such thing. All love is equal in the brain.”

“Doesn’t stop it from hurting.”

Sadie smudged a tear from the corner of my eye and ran her fingers through my hair. “I know, kid. Sometimes shit just doesn’t work out, you know? Plus, how can she be your soul mate? Didn’t you tell me she’d never read Harry Potter? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life with someone like that? I mean, for God’s sake, think of your children. What kind of environment would they be growing up in with such a mother?”

I laughed then and Sadie laughed and I closed my eyes and hugged her.

She stayed curled up with me, stroking my hair, the way we’d always done for as long as I could remember.

As I stared at the ceiling with Sadie humming Taylor Swift songs into my skin, I thought of Grace and felt the root canal pain Sadie had talked about ping through my entire body. We had a heavy love, Grace and I, the type of love that would drown you if you waded into it too deep. It was a love that tied little sinkers to your heart one at a time, until the organ was so heavy, it ripped right out of your chest.

“Suds . . . I know it’s been a long time since you’ve been a juvenile delinquent, but do you still remember how to break into the English department at school?”

Sadie grinned her wicked grin. “Old habits die hard.”

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when I committed breaking and entering for the fifth time in my life. School on the weekend felt like being aboard the Mary Celeste—there was the sense that people had been here recently, but that some uncanny tragedy (i.e., exams) had befallen them, driven them away from this place. It was dim and quiet, and even in the parking lot, our footfalls cast up eerie echoes all around us.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Lola said as we scaled the outer fence. Ryan was clinging to Sadie’s neck like a baby monkey and giggling like this was the best adventure ever. “Nobody’s gonna come.”

“They’ll come,” I said. “Somebody will come.”

Earlier that week, Heslin had finally been ungrounded for throwing The Party a few months earlier, so naturally a rumor had begun circulating that another party of equal or greater proportions was in store for tonight. Heslin’s parents, either idiots or far too trusting of their delinquent son, had gone away and left him in charge of the house. Sure enough, by that very afternoon, there was a Facebook event with some three hundred students attending—excluding me, excluding Lola, excluding Murray. Excluding—surprisingly—Madison Carlson.

We had shit to do.

An hour ago, I’d made a post in Heslin’s event. To all those seeking redemption, it began, and it ended with a plea to please, for the love of all that was holy, help us save the Westland Post from certain destruction. Twenty-five people had liked it so far.

“They’ll come,” I muttered again as we made our way across the grounds toward Hink’s office. They had to.

The locks, it turns out, had been upgraded since Sadie’s years as a teenage, prank-pulling delinquent, as had—unbeknownst to us—the video surveillance. So while Sadie knelt at the door trying to pick the lock and Lola and I took turns giving Ryan piggyback rides, none of us spotted the burly security guard jogging toward us.

“Freeze, all of you!” he said.

I caught the momentary flicker in Sadie’s eyes as she considered making a run for it but didn’t—probably something to do with the fact that her son was still clinging to my back and it’d be less than stellar parenting to abandon him.

So I froze. And Lola froze. And Sadie froze.

It doesn’t matter, I thought, over and over again. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter that the newspaper wouldn’t go to print, that I’d singlehandedly destroyed a thirty-five-year-old school tradition, that I’d let Hink down at every opportunity. It didn’t matter that the three of us would probably be arrested and charged with breaking and entering, that Lola and I wouldn’t get into college because of our criminal records, that Sadie would lose her job. It didn’t matter—the sun would swallow the Earth and everything we did here didn’t matter, shouldn’t matter—but it did.

It did.

Grace was wrong, I realized in the half heartbeat of time it took for the wheezy security guard to grab my arm, even though I made no attempt to run. On a grand scale, entropy ruled, but humans were so small that the largest laws of the universe didn’t apply to us. They couldn’t apply to us. We were too tiny; our lives passed too quickly. None of us would be there for our great cosmic redemption when the sun expanded and ate the Earth and gave all our atoms back to the cosmos. None of us could wait that long.