“What do you mean by ‘She’s had a rough time’?”

“Oh, you know. Changing schools in senior year. Always tough. Anyway, go get set up in your office. Your log-in details are on a Post-it note in front of your computer. Town’s already in there. And Leung as well. You already know each other, I believe?” Hink gave me the look that people always gave me when they knew I’d been the last male to put my lips on Lola Leung’s lips before she’d gone AWOL from the masculine species.

“Yeah.” I cleared my throat instead of doing what I wanted to do, which was to say, She was always a lesbian! Don’t you know how human biology works? “Lola’s my next-door neighbor.”

“Neighbor. Yes, of course. No need for introductions, then. Go settle into your office and we’ll have a meeting early next week to get started on the first issue.” Hink went back to whatever was on his computer screen then (fight club scheduling? haikus?) like he hadn’t just dropped a Grace-sized bombshell.

I turned and walked numbly to the small office that the student newspaper staff worked out of. It was a fishbowl. The wall parallel to the corridor was all glass and the door (also glass) didn’t lock, presumably to prevent any rabid teenage coitus from taking place on the furniture, a strategy that had failed spectacularly with last year’s editor, who used to have sex with his girlfriend on the couch on a regular basis. There was, thank God, a blanket now covering the suspicious stains that had accumulated on the upholstery by the start of summer vacation.

Lola was sitting at the Mac reserved for the designer, her chunky-booted feet up on the desk as she browsed ASOS and sucked a lollipop. Grace was sitting at a small desk pressed up against the glass wall, away from the editor’s desk. I guessed it’d been shoved in the room sometime in the last half hour, in an effort to accommodate Grace Town’s sudden change of mind.

“Hey,” I said as I walked into the room, feeling a strange, unfamiliar pang of excitement at the sight of her. There was something deeply confusing about looking at Grace, like that feeling you get when you see a colorized photograph of the Civil War or the Great Depression and realize for the first time that the people in them were real. Except it was reversed, because I’d seen the colorized Grace on Facebook, and here was the sepia version—the hard-to-grasp version—ghostlike and ashen in front of me.

Grace nodded without speaking.

“Hola, hombre!” Lola said, waving her lollipopped hand in my direction without looking away from her screen.

I sat at the editor’s desk. Turned on the editor’s computer. Logged in to the editor’s account. Savored, for a moment, the feeling I had worked for two years to achieve.

It was quickly interrupted when Grace turned around on her computer chair to face me. “I’m not going to write anything. That’s the deal. No editorials. No opinion pieces. You want something said, you say it yourself. Everything else I’ll help you with, but I don’t write any words.”

I glanced sidelong at La, who was concentrating very intently on looking like she was ignoring our conversation. The voodoo-curse theory was starting to look more and more plausible. “I can deal with that. I’m hoping not to do much writing myself, actually. Hink said we should be able to get some juniors to volunteer.”

“I already talked to Hink. I’m going to be assistant editor. You worked for this for years; it should be your baby.”

“Okay.”

“Good.”

“Well, uh, I guess you should read our policies and procedures, our editorial guidelines and our charter. They’re all saved in the shared drive.” Lola and I had both read them when we’d volunteered at the paper the previous year. “You get a log-in yet?”

“Hink gave me one before you walked in.”

“You’re good to go, then.”

“Straight to the point. I like it.” Grace swung back around on her chair, opened the shared drive, found the documents I’d been talking about, and started to read them.

Lola did one slow, deliberate three-hundred-sixty-degree swing around on her office chair, her eyes wide and brows raised, but I shook my head at her and she sighed and went back to ASOS.

There wasn’t much to do that first morning except for planning, so I put my Spotify playlist on shuffle. The first song to play was “Hey” by the Pixies. Been trying to meet you, crooned Black Francis. I turned up the volume a little and hummed along to the tune as I logged into my email (thinking about how I should really rewatch The Devil Wears Prada now that I was editor, get some tips) until I caught a tiny movement in the corner of my eye. I looked up to find Grace Town mouthing the words. If you go, I will surely die, she mimed absentmindedly, scrolling through the newspaper’s thirty-page policy and procedures document about topics we weren’t allowed to cover (no sex, no drugs, no rock ’n’ roll, nothing relevant to real-life teens in general, etc.).

“You know the Pixies?” I asked her after the first chorus. Grace looked up and over her shoulder at me but didn’t speak right away.

“‘You met me at a very strange time in my life,’” she said eventually. When I said nothing, she cocked her head slightly and said, “Fight Club? ‘Where Is My Mind?’?”

“I know. I got it. Fight Club is, like, one of my favorite movies.”

“Me too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Why are you so surprised?”

“Most girls—” I began. Lola snapped up her hand.

“Be very careful what you say next, Henry Page,” she said. “Very few good things come out of sentences that begin with ‘Most girls.’”

“This is true,” Grace agreed.

“Uh. Well. I was going to say that a lot—not most, but a lot—of the girls I know don’t like Fight Club.”