Free Our Chemical Hearts by Krystal Sutherland Page B

But I finally understood Old Sparkly’s attraction to Bella. The less I could read Grace—the less I understood about her—the more enraptured I became. I needed, desperately, to understand what was going on in the dark, twisted, hilarious halls of her mind.
    Some days we felt like old friends. Some days she put in her earbuds and didn’t speak to Lola or me except to say good-bye. Some days she didn’t show up at all. I took the good with the bad, all the while getting sucked deeper into the tornado that was Grace Town.
    On the Good Grace Days, the days when she was willing to engage, I was able to ascertain that:
Grace Town used to run track (like, for
fun
). Or at least she had before the accident.
Grace Town did not drink coffee.
Grace Town spent her free time reading Wikipedia pages about serial killers and plane crashes.
Grace Town’s birthday was the weekend after Thanksgiving.
Grace Town liked
Breaking Bad
and
Star Wars
and
Game of Thrones
, but not
Star Trek
or
Doctor Who
(which was almost a deal breaker, but not quite).
    We only had one class together (drama), which I was fairly sure she was going to fail because she never left her seat at the back of the room and Beady never made her participate. Despite it being senior year and everyone freaking out about college acceptances, GPAs, and SAT scores, my first few weeks of classes went okay. I knew I’d get A’s from the teachers who’d taught me before (Beady, Hink, my Spanish teacher Señor Sanchez), but the rest were all new to me and required a fair amount of buttering up to ensure I got anything close to good grades, because most were still—more than a decade later—holding a grudge against the Page family name.
    The start of every school year was the same. The teachers who’d been at Westland long enough to have taught my sister always had the same reaction when taking attendance for the first time. They’d call my name. Recognize the last name
Page
. Look up in horror. See me, see how much I looked like Sadie, know for certain that we were siblings. Mom hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said Suds had been arrested three times by the time she was my age, but she got into even more trouble at school than she did with the law. Expelled (informally) and reenrolled five times for (among other things): selling cigarettes, stealing a video camera, setting a home economics kitchen on fire (Sadie maintained that this was a legitimate accident), successfully distilling moonshine (for eight months) in a science classroom cupboard, and finally, successfully growing marijuana (for three years) in the science department’s greenhouse. (Perhaps it’s no surprise she ended up a scientist—shedid spend a lot of time working on “science projects” as a teenager, albeit illegal ones.)
    The reason she was allowed to return time and time again? Because Sadie Page was, for all intents and purposes, a genius. I guess Westland wasn’t ready to dump their one shot at having a Nobel Prize–winning graduate, no matter how much trouble she was. Principal Valentine had a soft spot for her less destructive shenanigans (legend has it she took Sadie’s moonshine home after it’d been confiscated and still has a shot of it at the end of every school year), and Sadie’s grades weren’t just exceptional, they were astounding. Her report cards, along with the words
deviant
and
nuisance
, also said things like
mathematically precocious
and
disturbingly brilliant
. So, yeah. Being a Page came with a reputation for being an evil genius, neither of which I was, so I had to work my ass off to be seen as a) not a juvenile delinquent and b) slightly above average in the intelligence department.
    I’d always hated this fact before. Now it gave me an excuse to spend as much time as possible studying, which of course required company, which of course included Grace. The last week in September,