The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily

by Laura Creedle

  “Pink gel?” Richard turned toward Rosalind, his face in perfect profile, wide cheekbones, dark brown eyes with those crazy long eyelashes. He wasn’t Abelard, but still.

  “Gel. It’s colored cellophane you tape to the lights,” Rosalind said.

  The car inched forward.

  “You know so much about theater,” he said. “How did you learn all that?”

  “Well, I . . .” Rosalind began.

  Rosalind must have pulled her foot off the brake pedal because the car crept forward, coming dangerously close to the bumper of the Toyota in front of us.

  “Rosalind!” I yelled.

  She slammed on the brakes, and we lurched to a stop.

  Then for some reason, both she and Richard laughed. It was nice to see my best friend distracted for a change.

  At the museum, Richard and Rosalind walked side by side out of the parking garage, past the forest of yellow rubber hoses by the path. Their hands brushed past each other like meteors exploring the possibility of gravity. I veered off and walked through the installation, eager to feel the slap of rubber against my hands and face.

  We stepped into the Grecian cool of the lobby to the echo of voices. The entire two-story entrance hall was covered in watery blue acrylic tiles, like the bottom of a swimming pool.

  “Do you have a favorite work of art?” Richard asked.

  Rosalind said something I didn’t catch. Too much background noise, plus I was busy examining one of the blue vinyl tiles on the wall. Up close each one was swirled like a flattened, oceanic bowling ball, perfectly hard and smooth. My fingernails itched to pry a tile free. I put my hand to the wall and . . .

  “Lily, don’t touch the art!” Rosalind said.

  I turned around. “Should we go upstairs? Hey—we could go to the bones and pennies. Talk about dark and well lit—just like the theater. I know you would—”

  “I think Richard and I are going to stay down here and wander through European paintings,” Rosalind said quickly. “If you don’t mind?”

  She wrapped her hand around Richard’s arm to guide him in the right direction. A sudden look of surprise passed through Rosalind and ended up on Richard’s face, as though neither of them expected physical contact this early in the game. I watched them walk away hand in hand.

  And I felt a sudden wave of jealousy or loneliness, because I would probably never walk hand in hand with Abelard through a museum. Too many people, too much noise, too much stimulation. Richard and Rosalind hadn’t said more than a few sentences to each other, and yet this part was easy. Holding hands would never be that easy for Abelard and me.

  I walked upstairs past a gallery full of installations and paintings I’d return to see after I’d been to my favorite place in the museum. In a small room at the back was a pool of bright copper pennies illuminated by a chandelier made of thighbones. The whole pool was surrounded by black net, and dead center of the pool was a towering stack of communion wafers. The rest of the room was pitch-dark.

  Really, if anyone asked me about the quickest way to improve our school, I’d have to say installation art. Just pick this piece up and put it in some fundamentally useless space like the girls’ locker room. And then anyone who felt bullied by peers or tormented by rubrics could come bask in the quiet copper glow under the bones and contemplate. Breathe.

  After a while, I wandered through the contemporary collection, past violent paintings and crayon-colored sculptures on a polished wood floor, and into the Greek and Roman statues. And then I went downstairs and looked at impressionists. I didn’t see Rosalind and Richard anywhere. I circled the entire museum again, but didn’t find them.

  I went out to the grounds and found them sitting in the grass behind the yellow tubing sculpture. Richard had gotten his backpack from the car, and he had a pad of sketch paper. He’d traced the outlines of Rosalind’s hair, roughed out the delicate shape of her face and her lips. He was working on her eyes, catching a look both expectant and knowing. The rest of the drawing might have been a picture of your standard twelve-year-old, but he’d completely captured the lovestruck glow of her eyes.

  She looked up as I approached and mouthed, Best day ever.

   Chapter 17

  Third period, Friday. I had the feeling Mrs. Rogers-Peña wanted to talk to me. After class, I kept my head low and made an early dive for the door. Not that it helped.

  “Lily, can I talk to you for a second?” Mrs. Rogers-Peña said as I rushed past her desk.

  I turned back. Mrs. Rogers-Peña wore a navy blazer and a silky blouse. She didn’t usually dress like she was filling in for the vice principal. Her blazer reminded me that she is, in fact, sort of old.

  “Hi,” I said. “You look different.”

  She ignored my comment.

  “You do know that you were supposed to hand in your Macbeth rough draft yesterday?”

  “I forgot.”

  This was a truthful statement. When I decided on my failing course of action, all deadlines left my brain like startled birds. None of my former obligations had since flown back to roost. Normally, I’d have had a better explanation, but her jacket was distracting me. It had sharp, unforgiving shoulders, a merciless perma-press quality.

  “That’s a lazy excuse,” she said.

  “You can fail me. It’s fine. Mea culpa and all.”

  Mrs. Rogers-Peña sighed. “I really don’t want to fail you, Lily.”

  Last thing I wanted was for Mrs. Rogers-Peña to share in my failure. Some teachers take this kind of thing personally.

  “Don’t worry about it.” And then—because, Macbeth—I added, “Screw your courage to the sticking-place.”

  Mrs. Rogers-Peña pursed her lips in a tight line and shook her head. “Thank you, Lady Macbeth. Clearly you’ve read the play, so here’s what you’re going to do: Monday—rough draft. Or you and I will go down to Dr. Krenwelge’s office for a chat about Macbeth together.”

  I nodded. When I’d formulated my Total Failure Plan, it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would actually notice or care. A lot of teachers live by the torturous rubric-fail-trap method of teaching. They smirk and twirl their mustaches like cartoon villains as they hand out F’s, all the while explaining how you could have avoided your fate. Like Coach Neuwirth.

  But every once in a while, you get a Mrs. Rogers-Peña. This is the problem with school—no real consistency. So I was caught. I had to write a Macbeth paper. It was only fair.

  Iris and I were cutting up vegetables when Mom arrived home that evening. Mom deposited her hideous bag on the dining room table. She looked more weary than usual, if that was possible.

  “Lily, could I talk to you in my room for a moment?”

  Warning bells and klaxons, flashing lights and sirens. I braced myself for the inevitable conflict. Mom must have found out that I failed geography. I wasn’t really ready to unveil my Total Failure Plan to the world, so I prepared myself for some awkward lying.

  “Sure.” I followed Mom into her room, the designated quiet place to talk. I slumped on her bed, waiting.

  “I got a call from your guidance counselor today,” she began.

  Unexpected. Some part of my brain shut down. A call from the guidance counselor is never good. Even worse than failing geography.

  “People are worried about you, Lily. She’s worried about you.”

  “Worried”—code for suicide watch.

  Okay. I saw this movie once. A woman worked in a nuclear power plant, and she set off the radiation detectors at work, two or three times. And every time she set off the radiation alarms, people in HAZMAT suits whisked her away to a shower room to be stripped naked, hosed down, and scrubbed forcibly with the kind of long-handled brushes they normally use at car washes.

  This is what it feels like to be put on suicide watch. I know because someone put me on suicide watch last year, too.

  Now that I was back on suicide watch, I had to talk about my feelings about being on suicide watch. Again.
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br />   “It’s okay, Mom. I’m fine.”

  Mom frowned like she didn’t believe me.

  “Really.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “So why do you think people are worried about you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been super happy lately. I have a boyfriend.”

  “Lily, you can’t rely on another person for happiness. What if you and Abelard break up?”

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.

  Mom is hardly an expert on interpersonal happiness. She has been on approximately zero dates in the last year and a half. After the divorce, she went out a lot more and even had a boyfriend for a year or so, a funny, pudgy guy named Stan. Stan wasn’t a reader and therefore—doomed from the start. She shouldn’t have left Dad. You probably shouldn’t break up with anyone who can discuss nineteenth-century women authors over coffee, even if he can’t manage to finish a doctoral dissertation.

  Mom sat on the bed beside me.

  “What do you think we should do about this?” she asked softly.

  “I could go back to Humberto,” I said, trying to inject a note of hopefulness into the suicide discussion.

  I actually wanted to see Humberto. I wanted to tell him all about Abelard and ask his advice about managing a physical relationship with someone who doesn’t like to kiss and who isn’t great with communicating in real time. Humberto would have perspective. It’s his job description—providing perspective.

  “You can’t,” Mom said. “My insurance only gives you six visits a year, which we’ve already used. And I’m not sure Humberto helped you all that much.”

  I didn’t agree with her assessment of Humberto. To be fair, school is a pretty hopeless and depressing situation, and there wasn’t anything Humberto could do about that. I liked Humberto because he kept the “adaptive strategy” talk to an absolute minimum, and he let me ramble on and on about the inherent contradiction of being forced to spend all my time at tasks I absolutely sucked at. Because—school. Being lousy at your “job” is a recipe for feeling worthless.

  I said, “Help me what? Get my homework turned in on time? Be a straight-A student like Iris?”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said.

  “Really? Then what are we talking about?”

  I realized that I didn’t know. I had something to say about happiness, but I couldn’t find the words. My head hurt. I didn’t want to think anymore. And I felt angry. I had to go to school—I got that. But it was unfair to expect me to be happy about it.

  “I’ll find someone else, Lily. We’ll work this out.”

  I ate dinner with Mom and Iris even though I didn’t feel like it, but I realized that if I didn’t eat, Mom and Iris would read some deeper meaning into my rejection of stir-fried vegetables. Everything I did for the next couple of weeks, from the TV I watched to the way I brushed my teeth, would be interpreted by the general public as either a troubling sign, or a renewed embrace of continuation on this mortal plane.

  Suicide watch. World of suck! I would trade it in a flash for a naked shower scrubbing by HAZMAT-suited individuals. I really would.

  I thought seven would never come. But then it did.

  “Lily?”

  “Abelard.”

  There was a long pause. I didn’t have anything to say. Maybe I’d run out of clever things to say, and all that was left was the real me: unclever, unfunny.

  “Are you really moving to Portland?” he asked.

  “I don’t really know anymore. About anything.”

  “Okay,” he texted.

  I leafed through my copy of Abelard and Heloise. Heloise was a font of eloquent statements about loss and human suffering. I had so many quotes to work with.

  “I am too much accustomed to misfortune to expect any happy turn,” I texted.

  “Why?”

  Short and to the point. I might as well tell him.

  “Someone at school put me on suicide watch.”

  Another pause, even longer this time.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I have a broken brain,” I texted. “It’s not the same thing as a broken spirit.”

  A pause of epic proportions ensued. My heart fell. I thought Abelard understood me, I really did. But perhaps Mom was right: you can’t rely on another person for happiness. I was bound to scare Abelard off eventually. In a listicle gallery of the fourteen most unfortunate girlfriend archetypes, the “Suicide? Surprise!” girlfriend is rated number seven, just behind the “She-Hulk.” To be fair, I probably also qualify as a She-Hulk because—Hulk smash! If only smashing helped. You can’t smash your way through an uncomfortable and extended silence. You can’t smash your way off suicide watch. You can’t smash your way through love.

  “Have to go,” I texted. “Talk to you later.”

  I turned my phone off before he could answer.

   Chapter 18

  Abelard didn’t text me all weekend. I guessed we were over.

  I limped through school Monday. I felt like I had the words suicide risk tattooed on my forehead. Accordingly, I minimized my human contact as much as possible.

  Rosalind was already waiting under the live oaks when I hit the courtyard for lunch, but Abelard was not at his spot under the crepe myrtles.

  Abelard. The thought of him brought a tightness to my chest.

  I opened my lunch. Peanut butter and iceberg lettuce on whole wheat. Iris’s favorite. Tastes better than it sounds.

  Rosalind was glowing. She’d done her hair in an elaborate French twist kind of a thing, and there was something different about her.

  “Are you wearing false eyelashes?” I asked.

  “Have you looked at Richard’s eyelashes? I can’t compete with that. So yesterday, we met in Butler Park and . . .”

  “Butler Park?” I interrupted. “Where’s that?”

  “It’s the newer park down by the river.”

  “The one with the Dr. Seuss hill?”

  “Yes, but let me finish. He took the bus and met me on the Barton Creek side. He wouldn’t let me pick him up from his house. Maybe he doesn’t want me to see his house, which I guess I could understand. Oh, Lily, he’s so perfect. Anyway . . .”

  I hadn’t seen Rosalind fall this hard since eighth grade when she lost her mind over the admittedly dreamy theater graduate student who directed the summer youth version of The Frogs by Aristophanes. And since the dreamy theater graduate student had been twenty-five when Rosalind was thirteen, that relationship was going nowhere.

  I was happy for her, but I couldn’t focus. I lost track of what Rosalind was saying.

  “Someone put me on suicide watch,” I blurted out.

  Rosalind looked away and frowned.

  My phone buzzed. It was Abelard.

  “I need to talk to you. Come to the robotics lab.”

  I stood, feeling a strange mixture of dread and anticipation.

  “Where are you going?” Rosalind asked.

  “Abelard wants to see me right now. I’m going to the robotics lab.”

  Rosalind pulled out her phone.

  “Seven minutes, Lily. You’ll never get there and back in time for geography.”

  Time, my mortal enemy. Oh, how it taunted me—ugly, unyielding time! Abelard, waiting for me.

  I sat down to text Abelard.

  “Not enough time before next period.”

  “Come to robotics after school,” he texted back.

  After school, I hid in the second-floor bathroom for a while and brushed my hair and waited for the halls to empty as shouts and laughter faded from the hall. Abelard was in the robotics room. I tried to practice my calm breaths. Good things, bad things, endless possibilities of hope and despair. I had no emotional reference point, no way to scale my feelings. At some point, Abelard had become everything to me. What did my mother say? You can’t rely on another person for happiness. Well, too late, Mom, on that particular bit of wisdom!

&n
bsp; The robotics lab was at the far end of the school, underneath the art wing. Rumor had it that the lights flickered in the art wing because of the power drain from the robotics lab and the shop next door. It could have been the lighting or the maker vibe of that whole side of the building, but it was my favorite part of the school aside from the theater. I passed through the art wing, the glamorous smell of wet paint and solvent, past students’ work under glass and a pencil study of a transcendent pair of feet. Richard’s work. Only Richard could imbue toes with that level of mystery.

  Down the stairs. Blue tiles for luck. I stood outside the open door of the robotics lab, a hive of preregionals activity. Abelard was holding a soldering iron in one hand and a spool of solder in the other. He bent over what looked like a disemboweled vacuum cleaner. Like everyone in the room, he wore clear protective eyeglasses, the strap pushing his already shaggy head of sable hair into a wild tumble of mad scientist curls. He was completely focused on the project, his hands moving deftly from one solder point to the next, his face serenely beautiful, opaque. If I stood in the doorway of the lab and watched him all day, I’d never be able to guess at a tenth of the thoughts that passed through his mind. You could fall for a guy because he could toss a football from one end of the field to the other in a moment of perfect poetry of motion, or because of the way his green eyes sparkled in the sunlight, but soon the moment would be over.

  But when this moment ended, there would be another just like it. The gears would continue turning, out of my view, beyond my understanding. Abelard had answers to questions I hadn’t thought to ask until I met him.

  People began to notice me. Mr. Martini wandered over, protective goggles over chunky black glasses, a white lab coat.

  “Issome . . . need?” he said in an impatient tone. A busy-with-regionals-don’t-bother-us tone.

  “I’m here for Abelard,” I replied. My voice quivered unexpectedly, and Mr. Martini looked me over as if I might be a contract killer or crazed stalker.