Free Our Chemical Hearts by Krystal Sutherland Page A

This new ritual began much the same way that her driving me home had: the day after the graveyard incident, out of nowhere, Grace materialized at our table in the cafeteria and asked if she could sit with us.
    Vampire,
mouthed Murray as Grace sat down next to Lola. I kicked him under the table.
    With Murray’s pep talk about body language in my head,I tried to take note of how Grace held herself around me. I found myself pulled toward her—I leaned across tables, angled my legs in her direction. Grace never mirrored my movements. She always sat straight or bent back, her legs crossed away from me. Every time I fell into her gravity, betrayed by my own body language, I drew back, careful not to give too much of myself away.
    The editorial process worked like this: each year, four newspapers were released, one at the start of each term. The one in circulation now was the final one that last year’s editor, Kyle (the aforementioned couch defiler), had put together. The last issue Grace and I would preside over would be released the summer after both of us had graduated. It would be our legacy, the wisdom we would impart to the fresh batch of seniors.
    As well as recapping important events from throughout the term, each issue had a theme, usually some variant of one of four übervanilla high school flavors: “Friendship!” “Journeys!” “Acceptance!” “Harmony!”
    Kyle, who wore a cape to school and hung a Guy Fawkes mask in the newspaper office, pushed the boundaries with abstract themes like “circles,” “red” (Taylor Swift made many appearances), “uncanny,” and “faded.” This was frowned upon by the teachers, who preferred the newspaper to be nothing but hardcore “your teenage years are the best of your life” propaganda, but beloved by the students, who got to read about something other than “forging lifelong bonds” and “marching triumphantly into the future” for a change. And when I say
beloved
, I mean that at least 45 percent of them bothered to pick up a copy, which, if you know anything about teenagers and their penchant for not giving a shit about anything school related, kind of means Kyle’s papers were runaway best sellers.
    In pursuit of a Perfect Theme that would blow Kyle’s legacy out of the water, the newspaper required a lot of work in closed spaces. Hink let us have free rein over the content (“You’re both good kids; I trust you’ll keep to the charter,” he said in our first and only planning meeting, perhaps rather foolishly), which required Grace and me to have regular after-school brainstorming sessions. I’d roll my office chair over to her small desk and we’d sit side by side, me drinking Red Bull or coffee (we had special access to the teachers’ lounge,
aw yiss
), her drinking peppermint tea, each of us filling in the newspaper’s pagination with our increasingly shitty ideas. “New beginnings”? “Fresh starts”? “Becoming the person you’re meant to be”? “Forever young”?
    I wondered, during the long, hazy afternoons of those first couple of weeks, if she was as hyperaware of her body as I was of mine. Every accidental brush of skin as we reached over each other, every bout of raucous laughter that would leave one of us burying their forehead into the other’s shoulder. Some days, Grace instigated the accidental contact. Other days she held herself like a marionette, every movement deliberate and measured to ensure our skin never touched, that we weren’t sitting too close to each other.
    Normally I was pretty good at reading people, but GraceTown was an anomaly, a black spot on my radar. I hate to go all
Twilight
, but I could suddenly empathize with how Edward found such a dullard interesting (not that Grace was dull—she was sharp and witty, with a humor so dark it could’ve played Batman).