Our Chemical Hearts Read Online Free PDF Page A

next-door neighbor.”
    â€œNeighbor. 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.
    â€œHey,” 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.
    â€œHola, 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.”
    â€œI already talked to Hink. I’m going to be assistant editor. You worked for this for years; it should be your baby.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œGood.”
    â€œWell, 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?”
    â€œHink gave me one before you walked in.”
    â€œYou’re good to go, then.”
    â€œStraight 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 firstsong to play was “Hey” by the Pixies.
Been trying to meet you,
crooned Black Francis. I turned up the