I wasn’t just her second choice, which I’d convinced myself I could live with: I was a cameo, a walk-on role, a guest star, and it killed me that it had taken me this long to realize it.

And my first immediate thought, because I’m an idiot, was how much I’d make her work if she decided she wanted me back. That a month from now or a year from now or a decade from now, Grace Town would walk back into my life after paying off her debt to her dead boyfriend, after feeling all the pain his death deserved, and I’d make her chase me the way I’d chased her. She’d come to my house in the middle of a thunderstorm with a boom box held over her head, and I’d finally get to see her sopping wet, drenched in rain, the way I’d wanted to from the beginning. And she’d fling herself into my arms and, my God, it would be so grand.

But as I watched her watch me, I knew it would never happen. As I looked at her looking into my eyes, I realized how very little I knew about her. All the things I’d been desperate to ask her about, to know about her—her childhood, her mom, her future—I’d never gotten around to asking.

Grace waited for me to speak, but I didn’t, because everything there was to say had already been said a hundred times before, and I was tired, so tired, of saying the same things over and over again and them making no difference. So she put her hands on top of her head and exhaled loudly. And then she did something I wasn’t expecting. Grace Town smiled. It was a smile that stretched across her whole face, crinkled the corners of her eyes. The sunlight caught her irises and made them almost crystal clear and my heart trembled at how achingly beautiful she was and how much I hated her for not being mine.

“You’re an extraordinary collection of atoms, Henry Page,” she said, and her smile stretched wider and she laughed that silent laugh that’s more of an exhale through the nose than anything else. Then she put her arms down by her side and pursed her lips and nodded once, her smile entirely faded.

And as I watched her stand and leave—again, again, again—I finally understood that I loved a multiverse of Graces.

The flesh-and-blood her, the version of her that still wore Dom’s unwashed clothes and slept in unwashed sheets and ran on her injured leg to make sure it didn’t heal too quickly. A tithe of guilt paid in pain. The only justice she could offer him; the only redemption she could offer herself.

The version she’d been, the ethereal creature that now existed only in photographs and half-remembered fantasies.

And the Kintsukuroi dream girl, stitched together with gold seams. The version that was clean and whole and dressed in floral, backlit by the setting sun. The version that hummed the Pixies and the Strokes as we slow danced together under string lights. The one I helped put back together.

A multiverse bound up in the skin of a single girl.

I opened her contribution to the Post. It was a piece of paper that’d been torn into little pieces and stuck back together with a patchwork of clear tape on the back. All the little jagged scars that broke up the text had been gone over with gold ink. Pablo Neruda’s poem, Kintsukuroi in paper form. Lola must’ve given it back to Grace, bless her. La. A devil and an angel in one. The title, “I do not love you,” had been circled in gold, which I expected to hurt like hell, but it didn’t. So I read it again, for the last time.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I can’t lie to you and tell you that standing in front of someone and offering them your soul and having them reject you is not gonna be one of the worst things that ever happens to you. You will wonder for days or weeks or months or years afterward what it is about you that was so wrong or broken or ugly that they couldn’t love you the way you loved them. You will look for all the reasons inside yourself that they didn’t want you and you will find a million.

Maybe it was the way you looked in the mornings when you first woke up and hadn’t showered. Maybe it was the way you were too available, because despite what everyone says, playing hard to get is still attractive.

Some days you will believe that every atom of your being is defective somehow. What you need to remember, as I remembered as I watched Grace Town leave, is that you are extraordinary.

Grace Town was a chemical explosion inside my heart. She was a star that’d gone supernova. For a few fleeting moments there was light and heat and pain, brighter than a galaxy, and in her wake she left nothing but darkness. But the death of stars provides the building blocks of life. We’re all made of star stuff. We’re all made of Grace Town.

“My redemption,” I said to Lola as I slipped her the envelope from Grace.

She opened it. She read it. She grinned.

THE REMAINDER OF the semester went like this: One week later, when I woke up in the morning, Grace Town was not the first thing I thought about when I opened my eyes, but the second. I don’t remember what the first thing was exactly, only that she hadn’t been it. She didn’t split through me like lightning, searing my veins. The infection had begun to clear. The wound was healing.

I knew then that I would survive.

And I did.

If you thought The Westland Redemption turned out to be a resounding success, then you haven’t been paying attention. The document that went to the printer (two hours early, might I add) was somewhere between catastrophe and disaster on the Shit-o-Meter. It was the Frankenstein’s monster of student publications, which—to be honest—aren’t exactly known for their style and clarity in the first place.

It was clearly assembled by a dozen or so people who had differing ideas of what the end product should look like. Buck’s hand-drawn sketches clashed with Lola’s sleek design, and I hadn’t had enough time to edit all the juniors’ copy, so most of their work read like postmodern interpretations of classical grammar at best. But it was big, and it was bold, and its orange, black, and white color scheme was eye-catching, and the drawings were beautiful, and the confessions were funny and stupid and heartbreaking, and Lola had organized it all in such a way that, yes, the more I looked at it, yes, it was actually pretty damn good. Yes, there was real redemption there.