Two minutes passed before Abelard texted me.
“Good. I had always an aversion for those light women whom it is a reproach to pursue; I was ambitious in my choice.”
“Ambitious in your choice? Hardly.”
A long pause.
“Are you disappointed?” he asked.
I thought of the warmth of his chest pressed against mine, the confusing moment when I thought he might kiss me but instead slid his face past mine.
“Because we didn’t kiss?”
“Yes.”
I considered lying. I didn’t want Abelard to feel bad, but I’m a terrible liar. It takes long-term memory and considerable impulse control to lie effectively. I just don’t have these things.
“I was a little disappointed. I thought you wanted to kiss me.”
“I did. But then I was anxious. Usually I don’t like to kiss. It’s too much sensation.”
Usually. Like kissing was a normal daily activity in his life. I wondered how many girls Abelard had kissed. I’d only kissed three boys—including Abelard.
I didn’t know what to say.
“Does it matter to you?” he texted.
Yes—no. Maybe. I wanted something better than a monosyllabic answer. I wanted to kiss Abelard. I thought about kissing him—a lot.
“A little. But I’m okay with it.”
“I never want to disappoint you.”
I flipped through The Letters of Abelard and Heloise and found the quote I was looking for.
“You can’t. In spite of all our misfortunes, we may be what we please in our letters. Letters were first invented for comforting solitary wretches such as myself.”
“Charming Lily,” he texted. “Your beauty alone hath fired my soul.”
Charming Lily. I’d never expected anyone to call me Charming Lily or to effuse about my beauty. It was almost enough.
Chapter 13
“Lily! Come on!” Iris pulled my covers off and shook me.
“Why are you bothering me? It’s Sunday.”
“No it’s not. It’s Monday. Mom’s already gone—and Maggie is holding the bus for me. You have to get up.”
Iris turned and left. I stood and went to the window, watched as Iris bounded out the front door. One of the benefits of attending LAMEA is curbside service and a bus driver who knows that Iris would crawl across broken glass to get to school in the morning. Iris is an educational flower tended by many patient gardeners who want only the best for her.
My bus driver never holds the bus for anyone. I don’t know his name, but he knows mine—Monster. He calls us all little monsters, but sometimes he slips and calls us something worse. So, I barely had time to throw on clothes and grab my backpack before my own bus showed. I couldn’t find a clean shirt and had to borrow one from Iris—a pink kitty shirt, a little too tight. I forgot my cup of tea, my toast, and my drugs.
After English class, Mrs. Rogers-Peña called me to her desk. She was typing on her laptop, glasses low on her nose.
“How did your apology to Abelard go?” she asked.
“Good.” It seemed like a million years since she had asked me to apologize to Abelard. I wanted to tell her that the world had turned upside down. That Abelard and I had found each other, like two people feeling their way through the darkest dungeon of despair. I couldn’t find the words. My brain was sluggish.
“I’m glad,” she said. “By the way, Lily, if I ever see you in that shirt again, I’m going to have to send you to the office. Dress code.”
I glanced down at Iris’s low-cut pink kitty shirt stretched tight across my breasts, and I felt embarrassed. Like I’d lost all my feminist cred because of dirty laundry.
“I don’t normally dress like this,” I said. “This is my sister’s shirt.”
“Okay, then.” Mrs. Rogers-Peña eyed me sadly. “Just keep it in mind.”
I’d promised to see Coach Neuwirth about my Populations in Peril project. I arrived at geography early, hoping I could talk to him about my grade before anyone else showed up. I knew I would have to eat a giant pile of “I suck” and “Yes, you’re right, I didn’t pay attention” just to get the information about how to improve my grade from him.
I stood by his desk in full awkward display in my tight pink shirt.
“Miss Michaels-Ryan,” he said, “that shirt is—”
“I know,” I replied quickly. “But I didn’t have anything clean, and so I had to borrow a shirt from my sister, and she’s smaller than me so . . . you know.”
Coach Neuwirth frowned.
“I wanted to talk about my grade,” I said.
“Fine.” Coach Neuwirth glanced at my chest and looked away. “Let me pull up GradeSpeed.”
It didn’t take him very long. I sat in a chair next to his desk, trying not to read over his shoulder, trying not to twitch, while people filtered in to the room.
“Here it is,” he said. “I’ve just finished the grades for this six weeks. You received a zero for your Populations in Peril project. It’s forty percent of your grade.”
A zero. So it wasn’t a mistake. The air left my lungs.
Coach Neuwirth is one of those lazy teachers who teach via what I like to call the FCP, or the Fucking Craft Project. I was raised on Elmer’s glue, and I can collage with the best of them, but the FCP is a peculiar form of grade torture.
My craft project was one of my best FCPs. I’d made a Bangladeshi village on stilts, midflood. I thought long and hard about how to represent the water, and I came up with a mixture of sand, dirt, glue, and water. I worked hard to get the viscosity of the mixture just right. After I built my village on very short stilts on a found piece of board, I tilted the board slightly and ran the mixture down the side until it looked like fast-moving water, bunching up around the stilts. After my sand and mud mixture dried, I built a half-destroyed hut breaking apart and floating downstream alongside tiny little bloated corpses I made out of modeling clay. As disaster dioramas went, it was “thought-provoking and poignant.” No less a critic than Rosalind gave it “two thumbs way up.” Coach Neuwirth chose it to put on display in the hall by the office, alongside five other really good examples of Populations in Peril.
If I were being graded for my work alone, I would have nailed the Populations in Peril module. But this isn’t the way a Fucking Craft Project works. By definition, an FCP will have some tiny specification that will also disqualify my work from consideration. Perhaps I exceeded the width allowed for this particular FCP. Perhaps I was supposed to turn my paper in online, not in hard copy. There was no way of anticipating the multivariate ways one could possibly screw up a Fucking Craft Project, until it was too late. Still, I had to make my case.
“I did the Populations in Peril project,” I said. “You liked my diorama. I thought my paper was good.”
“It was. One of the best in the class. But you didn’t finish the project. You didn’t turn in everything.”
Coach Neuwirth stopped, a smug look on his face. This was the pivotal moment in our conversation. He knew it, and I knew it. If I could tell him the one thing I forgot and make it seem like just one of those things that normal people do, he might let me turn it in late for partial credit. If, on the other hand, I continued to act like I had no idea what he was talking about, I was screwed. So of course, I was screwed.
“Think about it,” he said. “What did you not turn in?”
If I’d been sitting at home in a cool dark room, working on my breathing, I might have had a chance to remember what the hell he was talking about. If I hadn’t forgotten to take my drugs, I might have had a clue.
But now I would never be able to remember, even if I did manage to “monitor my breathing” as my therapist had suggested. My breathing was a runaway freight train, careening down the track alongside my racing heart. I couldn’t slow my breathing. If I was lucky, I wouldn’t cry. If I was lucky. Dakota Smith hovered nearby, pretending she had a burning question to ask Coach Neuwirth. She was there to rubber
neck at the scene of my own personal accident.
“You received a rubric on dark green paper. You were supposed to follow all of the instructions on that paper.”
“I did,” I bleated out. Trying not to cry had left me with nothing other than short-form answers.
“Not all of them,” Mr. Neuwirth said. “Where is your rubric?”
This is like asking, What did you eat for lunch four weeks ago Thursday? What kind of shoes was the guy who died in the first ten minutes of the movie you watched last night wearing? It’s impossible to say.
Mr. Neuwirth sighed, like I was so much trouble for him. “I happen to have a copy of the rubric here. Will you please read what it says on the top line?”
I picked up the paper. The text was hard to read, because it was on a dark green background and the special instructions on the top were written in italics. Italics. Colored paper. Coach Neuwirth could write a textbook on how to format things so they are difficult, nay, impossible for dyslexics to read.
“‘All students must fill out the self-evaluation form on the back of the rubric. Any project turned in without an attached rubric WILL RECEIVE AN AUTOMATIC 0. No exceptions.’”
“It’s right there, written on the top of the rubric.”
“Well, can I turn a rubric in now?”
“That wouldn’t be fair to the other students who read the instructions and followed them,” Coach Neuwirth said.
Fair. I hated this word. Fair was what teachers said when they didn’t mean fair, they meant something else entirely.
“So, you’re just going to fail me?” I said. “Even though I did one of the best projects?”
Coach Neuwirth put on his pretend-to-care-deeply face. “Lily, everyone has to do paperwork. Everyone has to follow instructions. If I let you slide on this, you’ll never learn the things you need to know as an adult—”
I stood up. If Coach Neuwirth wasn’t going to let me pass his class, then I wasn’t going to listen to his humiliating and discouraging meditation on the total craptacularness of adulthood. Really, this grueling reminder that real adult life is a farce and nothing you do matters as long as you fill out the forms correctly, had all the appeal of an angry suicide note. The world is impossible and untenable, and we all suffer, and therefore we make others suffer to ease our own misery. Like we exist solely to propagate paperwork, because paperwork is infinitely more important than actual human beings. Paperwork demands suffering.
My feet pointed toward the door. Door. Just ten steps away. Cool and dark in the hall, empty. Turn.
Walk.
Breathe.
Count to four on the in breath, hold for two, exhale on the count of four. Hold the positive thought in my mind. I could still pass this idiotic class. Happy thoughts. Something could be done. Happy thoughts.
I turned and walked stiffly to my desk, knowing that every eye in the room was on me. Because if I left class, it really would all be over.
Tears congealed in my eyes. I wrapped my arms tightly around my chest.
People watched me. I wanted them to stop. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this. I was an animal thing, all limbic brain, full of rage and the desire to bite anyone who came near me. Frankenstein’s monster crawling out from a hiding place and into the light to face ridicule and contempt. I wanted to turn over desks and throw books, to run from the room. Rampage through the village. Share my suffering.
Coach Neuwirth went to his podium in front of the class and began to talk about the Columbian Exchange, and I realized that I couldn’t endure an hour of listening to him talk about smallpox and potatoes. It wasn’t humanly possible to remain in my seat. I grabbed my books and half walked, half ran for the door. Free.
So that was it. I’d failed geography. And I wouldn’t be allowed to go to Portland to visit my father. Nothing mattered.
I walked down the stairs with my geography notebook clutched to my chest, and I didn’t stop walking. I threw open the front door of the school and practically ran into Abelard.
Chapter 14
Abelard had on Wayfarer sunglasses, a dark blue windbreaker over a blue striped shirt, like he was on his way to a casual day of yachting. He looked cool and collected. The very opposite of me.
The heavy metal door clicked shut behind me. The door buzzed loudly to let Abelard in, but he ignored it. I was in his way.
I stood facing him under the small entrance porch, my breath coming in ragged spurts, anger and frustration still coursing through my veins like some terrible drug. And now here, in the worst possible place and time, was Abelard. All my clever words—gone.
“I have to go.” I glanced up at the shiny black dome covering the security cam. Someone in the office was probably watching us. And still, Abelard didn’t move.
“I can’t be here,” I said. “I’m ditching school. If I stay here, someone will come and force me to go back to geography, and I’m not going back to geography.”
I wanted Abelard to understand, but he’d probably only been in trouble once in his life—when we broke the wall. That was mostly my fault, and anyway, he was never going to understand how it felt to be a caged animal. If you managed to escape, you had to run.
And then I did the stupidest thing ever. I put my shoulder into his chest and pushed. Impulse control—offline. The laminar boundary between thought and action—dissolved. I was all monster.
Fortunately Abelard was bigger than me. Not easy to move out of the way.
“Sorry,” I said to his chest, feeling tears sting my eyes. Mortified to have become marginally violent with my now soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. “I’m really sorry.”
Abelard wrapped an arm around me. I lowered my head to his shoulder and felt my heart rate slow to near normal. All the drugs and breathing techniques, all the adaptive strategies in the world, could never have soothed me half as much as being close to him. I was alone in my misery, and then I wasn’t. A miracle.
“I’ll go with you,” he said.
We walked into sunshine side by side. We didn’t talk, which was great. Abelard didn’t ask me why I left school. He didn’t ask me what happened in geography. He didn’t even ask me what I planned to do next. Instead, I asked the questions.
“Why were you out of school?” I asked.
“Doctor’s appointment.”
“How lucky for me. What kind of doctor? Neurologist? Psychologist?”
“Psychiatrist. To talk about my medications.”
“I’ve had that conversation: How’s your appetite? How are you sleeping? Do you have any strange random thoughts about self-harm? Only a few? Good enough!”
Yes,” Abelard said. “Just like that.”
We walked several blocks away from school toward Dan’s Hamburgers. I was suddenly tired and thirsty, experiencing that post-drama letdown when all the rage hormones have run their course, and there’s nothing left to do but find a cool dark place to hide. I wondered if Bruce Banner felt this way.
“Do you want a Coke?” I asked. “I have some money. I’ll buy you a Coke, because I’m really thirsty, and I’d like to sit down, if that’s okay.”
I lunged through the door of Dan’s and ordered two Cokes. Abelard trailed behind me. It was the middle of the afternoon, and Dan’s was mostly empty. I took our Cokes to the back, and we sat next to each other in a red vinyl booth. I sipped my drink, enjoying the cool burn, the black-and-white-checkerboard signs, the strange fifties decor. Two hours later, our classmates would pile in, bringing the endless din of the lunchroom with them. For now, the restaurant was ours.
“So, I failed geography,” I said. Thirty minutes earlier, failing geography had been the end of the world, but now it hardly seemed to matter. “I really do suck at school.”
“I’m good at school,” Abelard said. “Nothing else.”
“You should live with my mother. She says there is nothing else.”
I studied his face. I could have stared at him all day. In a windbreaker and dark glasses, he looked less l
ike a medieval saint and more like one of those impossibly gorgeous hoodlums from a fifties movie. The little scar on his cheek only added to the mystique. Here I was, having a Coke at the neighborhood malt shop with my rebel boyfriend. Kind of delicious.
“People are important,” he said. “If you can’t talk to people, it doesn’t matter how good you are in school.”
“Now you sound like my therapist.”
I used to have a Star Trek–obsessed therapist named Humberto. I actually liked talking to Humberto; I liked his collection of vintage robot toys and his sci-fi metaphors and random quotes from different iterations of the TV shows and movies. I often complained about Humberto, but I didn’t really mean it.
I relaxed into the red vinyl. Perfect afternoon. Abelard had arrived to soothe the monster, and we were together in the quiet cool of Dan’s. And Abelard was different somehow. After a moment’s reflection, I figured out it out.
“Abelard, you’re talking now. Quicker than usual. Why is that?”
“It’s the sunglasses. They diminish sensory input.”
“Like being in a dark room.” I closed my eyes and lifted my face. Through my eyelids I felt the glow of the sunshine through the windows. Lovely and calm. I kept my eyes shut. “You should wear them all the time. What about earplugs?”
“Same thing,” he said.
Sensory input. The phrase Ping-Ponged through my head. Sensory, sensation, sensual, sense, sense, sense. Somehow, we’d drifted closer on the vinyl bench, so close that I was conscious of my breath. I forgot what we were talking about. I was distracted by the weight of his arm against mine, the nearness of Abelard.
“I’ve heard there are restaurants where they put you in the dark and you aren’t allowed to talk. You just have taste and smell, and that’s all you have. Disorienting, but it heightens the senses.” I kept my eyes closed.
Abelard didn’t reply. He was staring at me. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell.
“You’re looking at me,” I said.
The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily Page 8
