Chapter 2
My mother came to get me at school. She arrived looking frazzled, a small coffee stain over the left breast pocket of her shirt, lipstick reapplied but the rest of her makeup faded, leaving her skin blotchy, nose reddened by the sun. I expected her to be mad, but this was far worse. She looked defeated. Friday, the end of a long week, and now this.
Mom had a brief conference with Vice Principal Krenwelge, and then we drove home in silence. I was tired, beyond tired, needing the comfort of a darkened room.
“Are you mad at me?” I finally said.
We were stopped on Lamar at the light in front of Waterloo Records, where Dad’s band had a CD release when I was five. I remembered Mom in a tight camisole and brightly colored skirt, holding a sleepy baby Iris on her shoulder. Her hair dyed magenta red. Happy clothes. Sexy, even. Afterward, we walked to Amy’s for ice cream. Life in the before time.
“No, Lily, I’m not mad. You’re just lucky Abelard’s mom volunteered to pay the damages.”
This made me sit up.
“Why? Abelard and I broke the wall together. It was as much my fault as his.”
“Not according to your vice principal. Mrs. Mitchell seemed to think that it was Abelard’s idea to break the wall, and you were just following along.”
Mom rolled her eyes to let me know what she thought of this explanation. Me in close proximity to a broken thing: cause and effect. Mom knew who was at fault.
Why would Mrs. Mitchell think that Abelard was at fault? There could be only one reason. Abelard must have taken the blame for me. It didn’t feel right. Abelard wasn’t the breaky type. If I hadn’t pushed down on the stupid handle, Abelard might have found a janitor to oil the gears.
“Abelard said the wall was already broken. Abelard said the gears hadn’t been oiled in an eternity.”
“Well, the next time Abelard decides to ‘fix’ something, don’t volunteer to help, okay?”
“Volunteer to help,” I mumbled.
I liked the idea that I’d jumped up because I’d intuited that the situation needed my special breaking expertise. But what if breaking and fixing were really the same activity, reversed?
Did Abelard really “fix” things, or did he just break things, like me? I wanted to ask him about his experience fixing things and breaking things. I thought about the time I’d pulled up too hard on the back seat handle of the car door while pushing against the door with my hip, and the handle broke. And then for some reason, I flipped the child lock switch thinking it might fix the door, only it didn’t. It locked the door, permanently. I’d tried to fix it, I really had.
“. . . and Mrs. Screngle says tuber work.” Mom glanced over at me. “Lily, are you listening?”
“No,” I admitted. No point in lying.
“Did you eat today?”
I had to think about it. The day seemed like an eternity, as though the time before I broke the wall and the time after served as a clear demarcation of events, like the birth of Jesus or the arrival of the dinosaur-ending meteor off the coast of the Yucatan. And now my mind was filled with thoughts of Abelard. Why had he covered for me?
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Is your lunch still in your backpack?” Mom asked.
I dug through the backpack at my feet. Sure enough, my lunch was untouched in the outer pocket.
“I would have eaten, but they told us to eat during the test, and I was still working, and I just sort of forgot about it, and then we had to go straight to sixth period, so I didn’t have time.”
“Are you hungry now?”
I nodded.
We drove through P. Terry’s for veggie burgers, and we split a chocolate shake on the way home, like I was being rewarded for screwing up. I was happy enough, but I couldn’t let things go. I kept thinking about my dad in Portland.
At the start of the school year, Mom had promised that I could visit Dad if I kept my grades up and didn’t skip class. I’d been trying, but things hadn’t been going too well. My grades are all over the place, and I try not to skip, but sometimes I can’t help it.
“So, Mom, about the summer . . . I mean, could I still see Dad?”
Secretly, I planned to go visit Dad and just stay on. Dad taught English at a homeschool cooperative connected to the farm where he worked, kids getting life credit for milking goats and picking organic beets. Heaven. I’d miss Mom and Iris, but clearly I belonged in a “less-structured learning environment.”
“I know you want to see your dad.” Mom paused. It wasn’t quite a pregnant pause, just an awkward millisecond or two. “But it’s not that simple. We’d have to talk to him, and he may not be in a position to have houseguests . . . and of course, your grades . . . and no more skipping . . .”
I stopped listening. A qualified yes is almost a full yes. I’d have to improve my grades and attend all my classes, blah, blah, blah. I could do that.
“You know, Lily, seeing your dad again isn’t going to solve all your problems.”
I nodded to let her know I’d heard her and stared out the window. She was wrong. My father had solved my biggest problem. There was no reason to think he couldn’t solve my smaller ones.
My father taught me how to read.
When I was in second grade, the school reading specialist decided I was dyslexic. She told my mom to read to me every single night, but Mom worked nights. So Dad read to me.
In the beginning, he read me books about cat warriors while he drank craft beer. When Dad got tired of reading books about cats, he picked up Nancy Drew and the Three Investigators from a used book store. These books amused him with their gee-whiz ’thirties and ’forties references: chaste country club dances, German housekeepers devotedly making strudel, and clubhouses with secret tunnels made out of packing crates and junk. Nancy Drew ushered in cheaper beer: Tecate in cans. I laughed at Dad’s earnest voice for Ned Nickerson, Nancy’s straight-arrow boyfriend, and I fell asleep worrying how Nancy was going to get out of that cave by the ocean before high tide.
“Choral reading,” my mother said, echoing the reading specialist’s advice. “Dad reads a passage, Lily reads a passage.”
My father sat by my bed with the book held between us as I painfully sounded out each little word. I learned to read the same way Hercules learned to hold a full-grown bull in his arms, by having to brute-force sound my way through every syllable until the words got longer and heavier. At first, I read individual words, then sentences, and eventually paragraphs.
Together we read all of Harry Potter; The Lightning Thief ; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Inkheart; and Diane Duane. When the words began to swim on the page, Dad read to me from his own personal library of medieval classics. By this time, I was sharing a bedroom with my sister, Iris, and she listened with rapt attention.
Dad read Le Morte d’Arthur and Physica by Hildegard von Bingen, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Letters of Abelard and Heloise.
At about the time we started on Tolkien, with a nightly supplement of The Prose Edda and the Nibelungenlied, my father had discovered vodka. Cheap, easy to hide, and packed more of a punch than beer.
I never questioned the hours I spent sequestered away in my bedroom with Dad, reading while he drank. It was fun, and it was too good to last.
The end came when I was in fifth grade. My mom caught me alone in my room with her copy of Jane Eyre.
“Are you reading?” she asked, hands on her hips. Her dark green eyes glittered with some internal fire I recognized as hopefulness. She had a sort of feral alertness that alarmed me.
“What? . . . No,” I replied, thrown off my guard. I quickly regained my composure. “This book is weird. I can’t understand this language. What’s it about?”
“It’s a love story about a girl with a strong moral compass. It’s an older book, so the language can seem a little stilted, but it’s really good.” She smoothed the hair away from my forehead and attempted a wan smile. She looked sad. “You shou
ld have your father read it to you.”
“I will.”
I felt bad about lying to her, but mostly I felt relieved. Crisis averted! My father read me Jane Eyre, or he reread me Jane Eyre, because I’d already finished it by then. I didn’t care. Mom was happy; Dad was pleasantly drunk. Life was golden.
At the end of fifth grade, the school tested me again. I’d never seen my mother so thrilled. She came home waving her copy of my test results over her head.
“Your phonemic scores are still relatively low,” she said. “But your comprehension is off the charts. You’ve made amazing progress, Lily.”
I didn’t immediately get the magnitude of what I’d done, but I think my father did. He greeted the news that I was in the 98th+ percentile in reading comprehension with a queasy smile. I’ll never forget the look he gave me. It was as though his usefulness on the planet had suddenly ended. Maybe he knew divorce was not far off.
“I’ve heard about this book Wuthering Heights,” I said, hoping I wasn’t overplaying the wide-eyed thing. “I don’t think I can read it by myself, though. It’s for older people, right? But we could read it together.”
“Sure thing, Lil,” Dad said, his eyes distant.
We all smiled at one another. The happiest part of my life ended there in the fifth grade.
Chapter 3
Monday morning my mother woke me while it was still dark. She stood by my bed with a cup of tea and a piece of toast.
“Eat the toast,” Mom said. She hovered over me, already dressed for work in a white linen shirt and a fifties beaded cardigan that may have once been an ironic statement for her but that she now considers an heirloom.
“It’s the middle of the night.” I rolled over to face Iris’s twin bed next to mine. “Look. Iris is still asleep.”
My sister was an inanimate lump of covers. Iris usually springs out of bed like Snow White, ready to polish silver and sing with birds, but it was so early she wasn’t even stirring.
“I have to go to work early today,” Mom said. “You need to take your medication.”
“I can’t take it on empty stomach.”
“Hence the toast.” Mom thrust the plate at me.
Reluctantly, I bit into the toast. At this hour of the morning, food seemed like a human rights violation. I chewed twice and swallowed with difficulty before slumping back on the bed.
“Now your medication.”
I took the pill and swallowed without hesitation. She handed me the lukewarm and very weak tea with milk to wash it down.
“You don’t trust me anymore,” I said.
“It just doesn’t seem like you’ve been taking your medication lately, Lily. Maybe you’ve forgotten. I thought I would help you remember.”
Every morning for the past month, Mom had left a cup of tea, a piece of toast, and a pill on a plate for me by my bedside. And every morning I’d taken that pill and stashed it in an old pickle jar under my bed. I didn’t like the drug. It sucked the creamy goodness out of life.
Antidepressants tend to do that. I should know. This wasn’t the first one I’d been on.
Bells and whistles went off in my head. On Saturday, the day after Abelard and I broke the wall, Mom offered to take me and Iris to a movie. She didn’t go with us, and at the time, it seemed kind of weird. She must have gone home and searched the room for missing pills.
I probably should have flushed the medicine in the toilet so downstream fish and migratory waterfowl could experience an unexpected rush of jittery calm and the sudden ability to meet deadlines and organize paperwork. Yes, I could have shared my drug bounty with the ecosystem, but a strange frugality had stopped me. The stuff was expensive.
Once Mom left, I looked under the bed. Sure enough, the pickle jar was gone.
I’m sure Mom was relieved to find my hidden stash, because I’d saved her a couple hundred bucks. One thing was for certain: She would never mention the pickle jar, and neither would I.
School. I met Rosalind at our usual spot under the live oaks in the courtyard for lunch.
Rosalind is my oldest friend all the way back to kindergarten. She’s tiny and plays small children in local theatrical productions. With her long dark hair in braids and her giant brown eyes, she can pass for twelve. Maybe ten on a really big stage.
Rosalind was eating out of a bento box filled with brown rice, raw carrots, and seaweed salad. Rosalind’s parents are restricted-calorie-intake people who have formulated a plan to live for all of eternity. Like the children of vegan, macrobiotic, gluten-shunning parents everywhere, Rosalind’s favorite food is pizza—though she likes classy pizza: feta cheese, black olives. Her dream is to move to New York and eat nothing but pizza. Also—acting.
“Lily, how was your trip to the vice principal’s office?” Rosalind asked.
“Gripping and poignant. I laughed, I cried—”
“Was your mom mad?”
“Weirdly, no. I have a week in detention, but that’s it. She even said I can still see my dad this summer.”
“Really?” Rosalind raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Your mom said you could go to Portland?”
“If I keep my grades up and don’t skip class.”
Truth be told, Rosalind didn’t entirely approve of my plan to visit my dad and then refuse to return. She didn’t think I was cut out to be an organic beet farmer. Also, she would miss me.
I glanced across the courtyard. Abelard sat at his usual spot on the low wall under the crepe myrtle. Alone. The sight of him through the milling crowd sent a jolt of electricity up my spine. I realized I’d been scanning the halls all day, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.
I settled on the bench next to Rosalind, carefully avoiding a patch of grackle poo, and opened the lunch that Iris had packed for me. A tomato sandwich, apple, Oreos. I nibbled on an Oreo and set the rest aside.
“You’re not eating?” Rosalind said. “Why, if I had a sandwich on actual bread—bread made from real demon wheat, mind you—”
“Here, have it. It’s yours. Taste the evil.”
I handed Rosalind my sandwich, but she just shrugged. I suspect she actually likes brown rice.
“So you aren’t eating. What’s up?”
“I’m back on my drug-based diet. My stomach will refuse all food until five thirty, at which point I will eat my entire day’s calories in two hours, mostly in potato chips. Straight out of the bag. If we even have potato chips. Might be stale crackers.”
“Healthy,” Rosalind said. “I thought you weren’t going to take the drugs anymore.”
“After my little trip to the vice principal’s office, my mother decided she would watch me take my meds, like some hospital matron in one of those old movies your parents love.”
“The Snake Pit, Olivia de Havilland,” Rosalind said.
“Whatever.”
Rosalind frowned.
“The drugs aren’t good for you, Lily. They change you.”
“It’s not like I have a choice.”
“Um, you know how my mother is always talking about . . . balance between . . . gluten and sugar can . . . talk to your mother . . . only if you . . . off the medication . . . take you to a dark place.”
I shrugged, uninterested in the topic of my medication and diet. Abelard was eating cookies or crackers, reading something on his phone, dark hair falling over his eyes. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. He was an attractive nuisance, a shiny object.
“What do you think of Abelard?” I asked.
Rosalind followed my gaze. “I don’t know. He’s kind of in his own little bubble. Why do you ask?”
“He was on the other side of the wall when I—when we broke it.” Breaking the wall was beginning to feel like a shared secret, a source of pride. Abelard and I destroyed something—together.
“Okay,” Rosalind said slowly. Dubious. I know that look.
“He took the blame. For both of us. He didn’t have to do that.”
“And you think that was about you?”
“Maybe it was about me,” I said.
I continued to stare. It was easy to stare at Abelard. He never lifted his head, never glanced in my direction. Plus—kind of beautiful. Rosalind had a point, though. Abelard was self-contained. Maybe he hadn’t thought about me once since I’d kissed him in the office. And here I was thinking obsessively about him, imagining we had some sort of secret kinship just because ten years ago I hit him in the face with my lunchbox.
“I’m just saying, don’t construct an elaborate fantasy about him before you find out what’s really going on in his head,” Rosalind said. “Abelard is not like everyone else.”
“Neither am I.”
Rosalind sighed.
“You know what I mean, Lily. Unlike Abelard, you can carry on a conversation—”
“Almost like a normal person,” I interrupted.
“You are a normal person,” she said.
I kind of loved that Rosalind thought there was nothing wrong with me that couldn’t be cured by regular helpings of wheatgrass shots and a little extra understanding. This was why she was my best friend—but it bothered me to hear her say Abelard was not like everyone else. Broken.
Whether she admitted it or not, I was also not like everyone else. Why be polite—why not just say “broken”?
I am a proud Broken American. There. I’ve said it.
Chapter 4
Normally I leave school each afternoon like I’m running the bulls at Pamplona. Not that afternoon. I went to the bathroom and fought for space at the mirror with the girls who did their makeup. I brushed my hair in the corner, but then one of the mirror regulars, a raccoon-eyed blonde named Montana Jordan or Jordan Montana, took pity on me.
“Here.” She waved me to a free spot in the mirror.
I touched up my base and put on some lip gloss.
“You should really sclur your blash,” Montana Jordan/Jordan Montana said. Her voice echoed noisily against the bathroom tile. “Screeb pretty.”
The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily Page 2