The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily

by Laura Creedle

  He didn’t answer right away. “Yes.”

  “What are you thinking?” I whispered.

  An even longer pause. With my eyes closed, I heard the soft sound of bubbles popping in soda. Felt the crackle of energy between us. The warmth of his arm next to mine.

  Abelard bent his head toward me.

  “I think I should have kissed you when I had the chance,” he said. “But now it’s too late.”

  I lifted my face. I kept my eyes closed. Even through the dark glasses, my eyes searching his face might be too much sensation for him. The white of the afternoon sun through my eyelids. The whole world was a soft, lovely blur.

  “It’s not too late,” I said. “We could go slow. No expectations, right?”

  I thought he might kiss me. He was so close that I could have shifted slightly and my lips would have been on his, but I wasn’t going to do that. It had to be his choice.

  The door opened, and a small child chattered nonsense. And then the moment passed, like a change in air pressure. I opened my eyes.

  Abelard tilted his head away from me, and I suppressed the sudden, sharp taste of disappointment. No expectations. We might never kiss.

  Abelard walked with me to the bus stop, and then he walked back to school. I didn’t know how long we’d been gone, or if he would get in trouble. He had a doctor’s note, but it was probably time-stamped. Maybe Mrs. Treviño would ignore the time stamp. I hoped so. She was nice like that.

  “So you skipped school again,” Mom said. We were standing in the kitchen, Iris hovering nearby. “I’m dying to know what you think is more important than staying at school.”

  “My boyfriend,” I said. “Hello, there are other things in my life besides school.”

  Too much sarcasm. It earned me the full tirade.

  “What do think would happen if I left work every time I didn’t feel like being there? You have no idea what the real world is like, and I worry that . . .”

  Blah, blah, blah—real world. The real world is a glossy brochure for suicidal ideation. So done with the real world.

  “Dad doesn’t work chained to a desk,” I blurted out loudly.

  “Your dad isn’t here,” she said. “I am.”

  I didn’t stick around for her lecture on how goat farming was not a real job and how Dad skipped out on us. I was there, and I remember. Mom basically threw him out.

  I retreated to my room to be alone with my happier thoughts. Nothing could put a dent in my afternoon with Abelard. He texted at seven straight up. This was getting to be our thing—seven o’clock, every night. Turned out he didn’t get in trouble for staying out of school an extra hour. I think Abelard is immune to trouble, and he only ended up in detention that one time because I was involved.

  We didn’t talk about failing geography. Or kissing.

   Chapter 15

  Sometimes when the worst thing happens, it’s a relief. Knowing with utter certainty that I had failed geography freed me from thinking about geography ever again. Done with rubrics. Done with chemistry and algebra. Since I’d lost my chance to visit my dad, there was no point in trying to pass anything.

  School is not the place for bold action or creative thought—for cheating on the Kobayashi Maru. Humberto, the Star Trek therapist, introduced me to winning the no-win scenario of the Kobayashi Maru. Star Trek is filled with useful allegories. In school we were taught to think inside the box—the Fucking Craft Project diorama shoebox. Well, no more shoebox for this girl. I was done.

  Here was my own personal Kobayashi Maru maneuver: if I couldn’t pass all my classes, I would fail them all. Once I failed out of high school, Mom would be forced to pursue “alternative scholastic options.” Number one alternative option: send me to live with my father. What else could she do?

  I was up early, dressed and ready to go. I had important things to do at school. I had to work on my new Total Failure Plan, or TFP. I padded into the kitchen. Mom and Iris were there eating toast at the kitchen counter.

  “Lily, you’re awake.” She handed me a cup of weak tea with milk.

  I sipped.

  “Now the pill.”

  She handed me the pill, and I dutifully stuck it into my mouth. The toaster popped, and Mom turned her back. I fished the pill out from under my tongue and rammed it into the pocket of my jeans. Iris caught me spitting out the pill, and I gave her the look of doom. She got the message. If she told Mom that I wasn’t taking my drugs, I’d make the silent treatment an epic, semipermanent fixture in her life.

  No more Fucking Craft Projects. No more rubrics. No more drugs. No more worrying about school. Done.

  Wednesday I met Rosalind in the courtyard for lunch. Abelard was mysteriously absent from his usual spot under the crepe myrtles.

  Rosalind opened her black lacquer bento box filled with homemade vegetarian sushi—brown rice, seaweed, avocados. For some reason it looked really good. First day off the meds, and my appetite was already beginning to return.

  “Want one?” she asked.

  I reached over and popped a circle into my mouth. A tiny bit of wasabi cut through the creaminess of the avocado. Tasty.

  “Where’s Abelard?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, swallowing. “He didn’t say anything about being gone today when we talked last night.”

  “You guys text every night?” she asked.

  “Pretty much,” I replied. “How’s it going with Richard?”

  “So yesterday, I was in the middle of a scene, and he was in the wings working on a backdrop, and I looked over, and he was staring at me. Do you think it means anything?”

  “Weren’t you onstage?” I asked. “I mean, wasn’t everyone looking at you?”

  Rosalind put her bento box down and sighed. “What are you doing tomorrow after school?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said cautiously. Truthfully, since I’d formulated my Total Failure Plan, I had nothing pressing to do for the rest of my life. I wasn’t quite ready to admit that to Rosalind, though.

  “Can you come to the Blanton with me Thursday after school? Thursday is free day, and I have the day off from rehearsal.”

  The Blanton is an art museum on the grounds of the University of Texas. It’s a field-trip-in-middle-school kind of place: sprawling, memorable exhibits of giant colorful modern artwork and classical Greek statue replicas. The kind of place where you can really burn off some energy.

  “Sure I’ll go to the Blanton. But why?”

  “I was talking to Richard, and he said he hasn’t done his Experiencing Other Cultures assignment yet. I told him that I was going to the Blanton with some people, and I invited him to come along.”

  Once a semester, our school requires every student to attend an extracurricular cultural event and write a paper about it. The catch is, it can’t be in your home culture. Last year I made the case for attending church with a friend—because I’d never been to church in my life, and can I say it? So bored. Last semester I took the lazy route and wandered downtown for the Día de los Muertos parade, alongside all the goths in my school.

  “So if you’re Hispanic, museums count?” I asked. “What if you only go to the Latin American exhibit? And if you’re Hispanic, can you count everything that isn’t Hispanic? Could you watch Pretty Little Liars or wander around Whole Foods . . . ?”

  “You’re completely overthinking this,” Rosalind said. “And you’re missing the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “I said I was going with ‘some people.’ You are ‘some people.’ Anyone else I could ask was already in the theater with me. You have to come with me. Please?”

  “I’ll have to ask Mom. But sure.” Ostensibly I was grounded due to my recent attendance and academic difficulties. My mother grounded me a lot, but my activities with Rosalind were generally exempt. Since I don’t hang out with many people besides Rosalind, grounding me is pretty pointless.

  “Let me know what she says.”

  Wednesday was my nigh
t to cook dinner. I stood at the stove making an Alfredo sauce for pasta while Iris glued stuff to a posterboard at the dining table. The K-pop top one hundred whined away from her laptop, interrupting my thoughts of Abelard.

  “You’re burning the flour,” Iris said. “I can smell it from here.”

  “Do you want to cook?” I replied.

  “I have homework.”

  Iris was right. I hadn’t added the milk soon enough to my roux, and there was a nasty dark spot on the bottom of my pan. I wheeled toward the sink to wash away the burnt flour. The bottom of the pan skimmed the top of a glass on the counter and sent it crashing to the floor.

  Iris looked up from her laptop. “If you keep breaking things, Mom is going to know you aren’t taking your medication.”

  “I’m not breaking things.” I dropped the pan in the sink, and it landed with a dull crack. I looked in the sink. Underneath the pan was a dark blue salad plate, split neatly in two. I hadn’t noticed the plate there. As Iris pointed out, this happens when I go off my medication. I get too busy inside my own head to notice plates and glasses and doors. They just don’t register.

  “You just broke a glass,” Iris said. “And then you broke something in the sink.”

  Iris stood up and walked over to the sink.

  “People break glasses,” I said. “It happens all the time.”

  Iris found the broom behind the refrigerator and began sweeping up the glass. I dropped the two halves of the plate into the trash and began scrubbing the burnt flour out of the pan.

  “You broke a glass yesterday. We don’t have that many glasses left. Mom’s going to notice.”

  “Shut up, Iris.”

  Once Iris emptied the dustpan full of glass into the trash can, I ripped up a paper bag and scrunched up a couple of paper towels and put them in the trash can to hide the broken stuff. Iris rolled her eyes and went back to work. There’s something deeply humiliating about having to artfully arrange trash to disguise broken objects. I had no choice. Iris was right—infuriatingly right. If Mom noticed disappearing glasses, she’d figure it out.

  I had another pan of flour and butter on the stove when the front door opened. Mom stood in the doorway holding her weird unfortunate briefcase, somewhere between an oversize purse and carry-on luggage. The burgundy leather was scrubbed white from overuse at the edges, and she’d refastened a broken strap with a staple gun. If I ever won the lottery, the first thing I was going to do was buy my mother a new briefcase. Not that I played the lottery.

  “Hey, Mom, I haven’t done my Experiencing Other Cultures assignment yet, so I’m going to go to the Blanton tomorrow with Rosalind after school, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure.” She dropped the briefcase on the dining room table. “So did you talk to Coach Neuwirth today?”

  “No.” Not technically a lie, since I talked to him on Monday. It wasn’t yet time to introduce Mom to my Total Failure Plan.

  “Lily,” Mom said in a tone so weary it matched her unfortunate briefcase, “you promised you would talk to him.”

  I added milk to my roux, which meant I didn’t have to look my mother in the eye as I lied.

  “Yeah, but see, what you don’t get is that not everybody’s turned in their Populations in Peril project yet.”

  Apparently Mom was just as tired of talking about geography as I was. She turned to Iris.

  “So what are you doing?” Mom asked.

  “Fucking Craft Project,” Iris said, a tad too gleefully.

  “Great! You taught your sister the F-bomb,” Mom said, shaking her head. “Are you proud of yourself?”

  “Kind of,” I admitted. There was a guilty pleasure in taking the shine off of perfection.

  We ate dinner and watched an episode of Castle while Iris attacked her FCP with a variety of pens and colored pencils. I left before the murder was solved to read in my room and to organize my quotes from The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. And then, as if by magic, seven arrived.

  “Lily?”

  “Abelard. I looked for you at lunch.”

  “I’m in the robotics lab during lunch and after school.”

  “Trying to take over the world with your evil robots?”

  “No, just All-City Robot Competition. But your absence distracted me. I was so far from making any advances in the sciences that I lost all my taste of them; and when I was obliged to go from the sight of you to my philosophical exercises, it was with the utmost regret and melancholy.”

  I read the sentence from The Letters, and then read it again. Utmost regret and melancholy. I had to love that.

  “Oh, I hope I haven’t monkey-wrenched your robotics competition,” I texted.

  “Monkey-wrench. Sounds like two people trying to fix a sliding wall.”

  “You are fortunate that we didn’t break that wall sooner, otherwise I might have ‘helped’ with your robot. Breaking things is my hobby.”

  “I would gladly throw my robot into harm’s way for more time with you,” he texted.

  Abelard. I wanted to write his name in big scrolling letters with a feather pen in a lavender-scented notebook somewhere. Unfortunately, my own handwriting leans more closely to serial-killer modern block print. Dysgraphia. The inelegant affliction.

  “You could join robotics,” he texted.

  “I would, but I don’t think I’ll be in school much longer. I’m going to Portland. My dad lives there.”

  “Portland? Portland, Oregon?”

  I hadn’t really thought about how my Total Failure Plan would affect my relationship with Abelard. If I moved to Portland, I’d leave Abelard behind.

  “I’m not leaving right away,” I texted.

  There was a gap of a minute or more. I regretted telling Abelard that I was leaving. It felt like a mistake, one of those moments when you break something fragile and lovely that can’t be repaired or replaced. Thoughtless, impulsive brain!

  “When are you leaving?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t even know if I will go.”

  “So you might stay?”

  “Maybe,” I texted.

   Chapter 16

  When I got to the flagpole after school, Rosalind and Richard were already there waiting for me.

  “We all get out of school the same time. How come it takes you longer to get here?” she asked, squinting into the afternoon sun.

  Richard shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the finger and thumb of his left hand tapping as though ready to grip a phantom pencil. Nervous tic.

  “Are they closing the museum?” I asked. “Are we on a tight deadline?” Rosalind knows I can’t keep track of time.

  Rosalind pursed her lips. She wore cat’s-eye eyeliner and a new coat of dark magenta lipstick, the kind of color that only works on girls who are small and whimsical.

  We walked across the parking lot to Rosalind’s car. Yes, Rosalind had a car. Not a car she shared with her mother, not a maybe-you-can-use-the-car-on-Thursday-if-you’re-good car, but an actual car of her own. At some point her parents got tired of waiting in the school parking lot at six thirty while the drama teacher coaxed another version of that scene out of her. And they bought her a car.

  Rosalind popped the trunk of her bright blue eco-box, and we dropped our backpacks in.

  “This is a nice car,” Richard said, his eyes set in a frown. “It’s brand new.”

  Rosalind’s parents aren’t rich, but still. If your parents get tired of hauling you around and pop down to the dealership for a new car, you are rich to most people.

  “It’s my mother’s car,” Rosalind lied, blushing. For someone with such a complex range of emotions in her dramatic repertoire, she was a terrible liar.

  “Nice, right?” I said. “My mom drives an eight-year-old car, and not all the doors work. Well, I mean, that’s my fault. I broke the door, and then I tried to fix it and made it worse. And then I pulled down the headliner in the back. Also, I peeled up the trim strip on the—”

  Rosalind
shot me a look that said I was babbling. Richard stood with his arms folded like he was having second thoughts about getting in a car with the rich girl and her crazy friend. I lunged for the back seat so Richard would have to sit up front with Rosalind.

  At the inevitable line of cars waiting to exit the parking lot, Rosalind reached for the radio, and then pulled her hand back suddenly. If I strained I could practically hear her tortured inner dialogue—“What if Richard doesn’t like rock? What if he only listens to Tejano music?” The silence became so thick, like a living breathing thing, that I felt compelled to disrupt it with the first thought that popped into my mind.

  “So, Richard, how did you end up in detention?” I asked.

  “Lily, that’s kind of a personal question,” Rosalind said.

  “What?” I leaned over and craned my neck. “Everyone knows how I ended up in detention. It’s not like it’s a big deal.”

  “Still, Richard might not want to—”

  “Fighting in the hall,” Richard said. “But I didn’t start it.”

  Rosalind stiffened. This wasn’t the answer she’d wanted to hear. Honestly, though, I didn’t hold it against Richard. Rosalind is diminutive, feminine, and academically perfect, which means she has always been exempt from the occasional hallway bodychecks. She knows nothing about fighting back, because she’s never had to. Admittedly, I haven’t been in a hall fight since early middle school. There are some benefits to being a girl.

  More awkward silence. Unendurable.

  “So what do you think about the theater?” I blurted out.

  “I like it. I like places that are both dark and well lit.” Richard paused. He didn’t talk a lot, but when he did, you had the feeling he had thought it through first. “So when Rosalind was standing on the stage yesterday, and they turned on a light, and her hair was almost red—”

  “Auburn,” I said.

  “And the colors around you were very . . . strong.”

  “Trevor was testing the spotlights,” Rosalind said. “I think he had a pink gel on number fourteen.”

  Rosalind knows about blocking and lighting, and all sorts of theatery stuff. She knows that she can’t play twelve-year-olds forever, and so she plans to be a director someday. She thinks ahead like that.