Henry Page and Lola Leung’s lifelong friendship

Henry Page and Lola Leung’s lifelong friendship gives Henry a source of familiarity and unsparing honesty as his infatuation with Grace Town grows into heartbreak. Next-door neighbors since childhood, they share a first kiss, years of private jokes, and a fluency that makes a nod legible to Lola when Henry cannot bring himself to speak. She does not spare him from his own mistakes, but her rebukes come with the assurance that she will remain beside him.

A friendship built over a lifetime

Lola is Henry’s next-door neighbor and one of his two best friends, a place in his life established so long ago that their shared history is part of the ordinary furniture of the story. At seventeen, she is dark-skinned, dark-eyed, and dark-haired, with cropped hair. She describes herself as a “diversity triple threat”: half Chinese on her father’s side, half Haitian on her mother’s, and gay. At school, she is repeatedly selected to represent the institution in promotional material, appearing on the yearbook cover, its billboard and website, and even library bookmarks. That public visibility contrasts with the private, familiar ease of her friendship with Henry.

Their past includes a kiss three years before the main events. Two weeks afterward, Lola came out as a lesbian and began a long-distance relationship with Georgia, a girl from the neighboring town. Other people turned the sequence into gossip, implying that Henry’s kissing had driven Lola away from men. Henry admits to feeling offended by the joke, but their own exchange makes clear that the friendship survives the teasing. He needles Lola about having stolen his first kiss and “forever emasculat[ed]” him; she answers with a deliberately outrageous joke about telling Madison Carlson that Henry had a crooked penis. The humor allows them to revisit the kiss without treating it as a claim on Lola or as an obstacle to her identity. Henry also recognizes that Lola was already a lesbian when they kissed.

Shared language and private understanding

The ease between them appears in their banter, but it is not merely comic. After Grace leaves, Lola tells Henry that she likes her and senses something compelling about her. Henry answers only with a nod. Because they have known each other all their lives, Lola understands what he means without requiring him to say it aloud: he likes Grace too. Their silence functions as communication, a small but telling instance of the attentiveness that underlies their teasing.

That closeness also gives Lola a clear view of Henry’s developing attachment. At Heslin’s party, she notices the hand-holding between him and Grace. When Grace and Georgia move out of earshot, Henry asks Lola to leave because he thinks something is happening with Grace. Lola points out that she had already seen the hand-holding; her presence is not the result of missing the signs. The exchange shows that their friendship can accommodate Henry’s urgent wish for privacy while also letting Lola register what he is trying to manage around her.

Lola’s warning about Grace

Lola’s most important counsel comes at the party, when she asks whether Henry is falling for the Grace he knows or for the girl in Grace’s Facebook profile picture. She stresses that the radiant online image is not who Grace is now, even if Henry would like it to be. Her warning draws on the contrast Henry himself has encountered: Grace’s old photographs show a smiling, dressed-up young woman, while the person he has met is injured, withdrawn, and visibly changed. Lola does not tell him that his feelings are false; she challenges the version of Grace he may be loving and the gap between a remembered image and the person actually beside him.

The warning is blunt enough to sting. Lola tells him that if Grace ends up tearing his heart out, she will not be his shoulder to cry on. Henry answers that she will be there because that is what best friends do. The moment captures the particular trust of their relationship: Lola can predict the danger and threaten to withhold comfort, while Henry can confidently invoke the loyalty beneath her threat. Her skepticism is not indifference. It is the frankness of someone who expects to be present after the consequences arrive.

Candor, correction, and loyalty

Lola’s support also takes practical and disciplinary forms. On the eve of her birthday, she forces Henry to choose a theme for the school paper, insisting that all she wants from him is “One. Goddamn. Word.” She presses a dictionary into his chest and makes him open it at random. The chosen word is “Fail,” which Henry reads as an apt verdict. The scene places their friendship in everyday school life: even when Henry turns a simple assignment into a struggle, Lola is willing to make him get on with it.

Later, when Henry and Murray Finch are both behaving badly over romantic disappointments, Lola rebukes them without softening her language. She orders Henry to get himself together, hand in his essays on time, and stop obsessing over a girl who never asked him to love her. She then turns on Murray, telling him that months of his behavior toward Madison Carlson are deplorable and that he should leave her alone. Lola is not simply Henry’s cheerleader; she holds him accountable alongside their friend and distinguishes loyalty from approval. Her intervention connects emotional honesty to concrete responsibilities he has neglected.

The friendship’s lasting role

Lola’s importance to Henry lies partly in her ability to puncture the stories he tells himself. She questions whether he loves the real, changed Grace or an idealized image, and later names the cost of his obsession in missed schoolwork and unfinished essays. Yet her criticism is framed by longstanding intimacy: she knows his habits, recognizes feelings he does not voice, and expects him to trust that she will remain his friend. Their relationship is not presented as a second romance competing with his attachment to Grace. Their childhood kiss belongs to their shared history, while Lola’s coming out and relationship with Georgia are treated as facts of her own life, not as consequences of Henry’s actions. The result is a friendship sturdy enough to make room for embarrassment, disagreement, and painful advice without dissolving its underlying loyalty.