“Sure,” I replied. Screeb pretty. That was me.
“Sclur your blashes,” she said, holding out an eyelash curler.
“Oh.” Curl my eyelashes. My brain took the visual cue and made sense of the words. “No thanks. I’m on my way to detention. Coach Neuwirth.”
I stared at my reflection in the mirror—a slight bump on the bridge of my nose, skeptical green eyes. My wavy brown hair already starting to look like my time with the brush had been an exercise in futility. I couldn’t see how curly eyelashes would be much of an improvement.
“Really?” she said. “Me too.”
And then she went back to curling her eyelashes.
Abelard was already in detention when I arrived. The only other people in the room were Richard Hernandez from my algebra class and Rogelio. An emo boy I didn’t know wandered in after me.
I dropped my backpack on the floor and sat at the desk in front of Abelard, my heart pounding. Coach Neuwirth could show up at any moment. I turned around and faced Abelard before my heart rate settled.
“Okay,” I said. Extraneous hand movement. I do this when I’m nervous. “Why did you take the blame for breaking the wall when it wasn’t just your fault? Because my mom said that your mom told the vice principal that you said you were to blame.”
I stopped because I’d run out of breath. Also—tortured sentence.
Abelard looked up. His eyes were a clearer, deeper shade of blue than I had remembered. He looked away.
“And when I hit you with the lunchbox in first grade, you never told anyone, but you probably should have. It wasn’t like we were really friends or anything—”
“You came to my house,” Abelard said in a surprisingly loud voice.
Tectonic shift of the earth’s crust, a realignment of everything. Abelard and I had a prior history, a reason I’d felt a natural connection between us. I wished I remembered.
“You came to my house,” Abelard repeated. “I was five. We watched Pokémon together. You insisted Charizard was a dragon, not a lizard.”
I’ve had an obsession with dragons ever since Dad read me The Poetic Edda. There’s a dragon in Norse mythology who chews on the roots of the tree of life. A bad thing, right? But my father contended that without the dragon, the tree of life would become overgrown and eventually choke itself out of existence. My personal spirit animal—the destructive dragon.
“Because—fire-breathing,” I said. “I mean, hello, dragon?”
Abelard blinked.
“Char—lizard, Charizard,” he said slowly. “Etymology.”
Beside us Richard and Rogelio switched their conversation seamlessly from English to Spanish. Should have been a hint, but I was too excited to pay attention. A rustling noise at the front of the room and throat clearing.
“Turn around.”
“Oh, you did not just play the Pokémon etymology card,” I said, experiencing a rush of word-borne feels. More fun words than I’d had in a long time. “Dragons are everything! It’s a dragon who nibbles on the roots of the tree of life, because otherwise—”
“Miss Michaels-Ryan! Turn around!” a voice boomed. “Stop pestering Mr. Mitchell.”
Pestering. I was pestering. A word invented by teachers to mean “bothering” but sounding infinitely worse, like something you’d get arrested for doing in a movie theater.
I swiveled, and Coach Neuwirth locked eyes on me. I felt my stomach flop, but at that moment Rogelio muttered something hilarious in Spanish. Rogelio is a natural-born confrontation clown, one of those guys who always have to get the last word in. It didn’t help Coach Neuwirth’s mood that the last word was in Spanish.
“We’re going to break up your little party,” Coach Neuwirth said. “Mr. Mondragon, please move next to Mr. Kreuz, Miss Michaels-Ryan, next to Mr. Hernandez.”
I moved back a row next to Richard Hernandez. Abelard turned sideways in his chair and stared out the window. The room went quiet, unearthly quiet. Montana Jordan/Jordan Montana slid soundlessly into the room and took a seat across from the emo boy. Coach Neuwirth glared at her from his desk.
“Nidhogg,” Abelard said in a voice that cut through the thick stillness. “Yggdrasil.”
Nidhogg—the dragon. Yggdrasil—the tree of life. I didn’t remember the names from Norse mythology, but Abelard did. Abelard, my secret cartoon-watching friend from a childhood I didn’t quite remember. Abelard, who knew Norse mythology and the finer points of gear maintenance. Was there anything he didn’t know?
Detention was pretty boring. Half an hour later, I’d finished my homework. I hadn’t eaten my lunch, and I was hungry and tired, too burnt to read. There was nothing to do.
Richard Hernandez sat at the desk next to me, drawing. I leaned over, expecting to see badly drawn girls with gravity-defying breasts, motorcycles, guns—the standard Grand Theft Auto love letter to chaos and faceless sex. The stuff boys draw.
Instead, Richard was drawing Abelard. Abelard with a three-quarter profile, his right cheekbone illuminated by sunlight streaming in from the window. Richard had drawn the barest line of a mouth and was filling in the details of Abelard’s chin, muscles in his jaw shaded diagonally from top left to bottom right.
The only part of the picture Richard had finished was Abelard’s eyes. He’d perfectly captured the way Abelard’s dark blue eyes held the light, the open, almost mystical quality of his gaze.
I glanced at Abelard and felt a strange thrill in the pit of my stomach. There was something otherworldly about him. It wasn’t my imagination—Richard saw it too.
Richard finished Abelard’s chin and moved to his hair.
“Wow,” I murmured.
Richard wrapped his right arm around his picture to shield it from my view and looked up. He had close-set, intelligent eyes and dark hair in a Caesar cut.
“That’s really good,” I whispered. Good was an insufficient word for his drawing, like telling a rock star his music was nice. I felt a little stupid about that, but what could I do? Drugs kill thought—even the happy, helpful drugs.
“Shhh . . .” Coach Neuwirth hissed.
“Thanks,” Richard mouthed silently.
Richard returned to drawing, and I continued to watch. Minutes passed while he sketched in rapid, assured movements. It was calming, watching Richard, as soothing as a lullaby. I almost forgot that I was hungry and that the skin over my skull was beginning to crawl and itch.
One of the basketball players came by to talk to Coach Neuwirth. They stepped out into the hall, and I leaned over toward Richard.
“You’re left-handed—like me. Also Leonardo da Vinci,” I whispered. “You shade in the same direction—top left to bottom right. Do you know they think da Vinci was dyslexic?”
I held my hands out to visualize this, making the classic L for loser with my left hand. Kindergarten tricks. They never get old.
“You’re making that up,” Richard said. “How could anybody know?”
“I’m not making it up. I saw it on Nova. Da Vinci wrote letters backwards and misspelled words. Classic dyslexic tendencies. I should know. I’m dyslexic, too.”
“No you’re not.” Richard looked up, his close-set eyes in a savage frown. “You can read.”
Richard said the word read with the naked bitterness I usually reserve for the terms late slip or instruction sheet. Dyslexia. You can pass for normal for a while, but eventually the anger gives you away. The monster will out. I decided I liked Richard.
“Yes, I’m totally normal,” I replied. “That’s why I’ve been in the same algebra class with you for two years running.”
“But I see you reading all the time. You always have a book—”
“I hear talking,” Coach Neuwirth boomed.
Richard startled at the sound of Coach Neuwirth’s voice. His pencil slipped, and the picture of Abelard floated off the desk, slid across the floor, and landed face-up in front of Rogelio Mondragon.
Richard froze, a stricken look on his face.
Coach Neuwirth was in the hall talking, his back half turned but still in the line of sight. I eased out of my seat in a crouch and moved slowly toward the picture, hoping to snatch it before Rogelio noticed.
I was too slow. Rogelio spotted the picture and grabbed it. He glanced at Abelard and back to the picture as his expression changed from perplexed to positively gleeful. It was as though he’d found a secret love letter, ready-made for a million stupid jokes. Someone was going to be made to suffer in both English and Spanish. Rogelio scanned the room, searching for his victim.
At the exact moment Rogelio’s eyes settled on me, Coach Neuwirth strode down the aisle and ripped the picture out of Rogelio’s hands.
“Whose picture is this?” Coach Neuwirth demanded.
Richard looked a little sick.
“It’s mine.” The words were out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying. Lies are like that sometimes.
Coach Neuwirth held the picture and examined it carefully.
“So, this is your boyfriend?” Coach Neuwirth chuckled. “Pretty good likeness of our friend Abelard here.”
Hard to determine who he was trying to humiliate at this juncture, Abelard for being unlikely boyfriend material, or me for being, well, me. Sometimes I think Coach Neuwirth lets the cruelty fly randomly just to see who might get hit.
Abelard turned to look at me briefly. I couldn’t tell whether he was horrified, embarrassed, or intrigued that Coach Neuwirth just told the whole world he was my boyfriend. I looked away.
Coach Neuwirth handed the picture to me.
“Put it away, Ms. Michaels-Ryan,” Coach Neuwirth said.
I folded the drawing of Abelard and slipped it into my book.
In the afternoon when I returned home, the picture fell out of my book. Abelard, beautiful and distant. Richard Hernandez’s own version of the Mona Lisa, a mystery for the ages. Abelard, no doubt named for Peter Abelard from the twelfth-century text The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Strange.
I drew a thought bubble over his head and wrote the words I am Abelard, medieval French philosopher and time traveler. I have come to the future on a quest for love and beauty, but find only the barren wasteland that is high school. My travails are for not!
I stuck the picture on the bulletin board and collapsed on my bed, empty. I opened my book, a novel about a girl on the run with her brilliant, eccentric father. After three pages, I quit reading, because I didn’t care what happened with the father’s new girlfriend or the daughter’s desire to go to a normal school for more than three months at a time. My head had begun that drug-fueled end-of-the-day descent, circling the empty runway of a town called Apathy.
I put my book away.
My sister came into our bedroom.
Iris is in seventh grade. Tall like me, brown eyes to my green. Same wavy brown hair, same bump on the bridge of her nose. Iris doesn’t seem to have inherited my mother’s large breasts like I have. She wishes that she had my breasts, but she is wrong about this.
Iris attends the Liberal Arts, Math, and Engineering Academy—LAMEA, or LAME as everyone calls it. She is the perfect student, equally adept at the long-form essay and robotics, and building musical instruments out of found objects. Found objects are a big part of the curriculum at LAMEA.
For someone with such a full curricular life, Iris has an overdeveloped interest in my activities. Like being me has a 1950s-motorcycle-and-leather-bomber-jacket sort of glamour for her, because she has never tasted the fruits of failure. I could tell her that living outside the lines is not all that, but she probably wouldn’t listen anyway.
“What are you doing?” Iris said.
“Nothing.”
“Who is that?” She leaned over the picture of Abelard, studying it with the dreamy intensity she usually reserves for K-pop stars with ice-blond dyed hair and too much mascara.
“No one,” I replied. “A kid at my school. His name is Abelard.”
“He’s adorable,” she said.
“No.” I stared at the picture. “Well, yes, he is.”
I thought about my impulsive kiss, and my heart flopped in protest. Continued exposure to the sight of Abelard’s faraway eyes was unfair.
“It’s dinnertime,” Iris said. “Mom told me to tell you.”
“Not hungry,” I replied.
“Mom made a really good salad. We’ve got Supernatural cued up.”
Supernatural. Salad. These are the things we do together, eat salads and watch Supernatural because all three of us, Mom, me, and Iris, think those guys are hot. Iris likes the taller baby-faced one, but Mom and I prefer the deep-voiced snarky brother. It’s like a miracle, Mom says, to find such transgenerational hotness on TV.
This was our familial idea of a good time. It meant nothing to me at that moment—good TV, hot guys in a seventies ride, salad.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll just lie here and listen to the inside of my skull buzz.”
Iris wandered off. I played Candy Crush on my phone until I saw little orange and blue striped candies exploding on the insides of my eyelids when I closed them, and still it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough pleasure, not enough light or color to fill the emptiness of my brain. It didn’t feel good or fun, but it was motion of a kind. If I stopped playing, I would realize that there were no thoughts left in my head and I was truly alone. This was what happened when my ADHD medicine wore off. This was why I hated drugs.
I left the picture of Abelard in my room, thinking I would show it to Rosalind over lunch. But when I packed my stuff up for school in the morning, the picture was gone. This didn’t surprise me in the least. Most pieces of paper I come into contact with disappear suddenly and without reason. It’s just the way it is.
Chapter 5
Nothing disappears forever. The universe is a swirling mass of lost jewelry, paperwork, and people, a vortex of missing cell phones and spare keys. When I pulled my bed away from the wall looking for my lost math homework, I found a take-home history test from eighth grade and a copper ring I’d never seen before. My math homework was in Kansas or stuck behind the dryer; either way, searching for it was pointless. I wasn’t going to find it before it was due that day. My math homework still existed; my favorite eye shadow wasn’t lost—it was buried under a pile of towels at the bottom of the laundry hamper. My dad wasn’t missing; he was on a goat farm in Portland, Oregon.
When you lose things constantly, as I do, it helps to remember that matter can never be created or destroyed. You will always find what you are looking for later, probably when it’s no longer important to you.
So I expected to find Richard’s portrait of Abelard—one day.
Math was my last class of the day. I’d mostly done my homework, but I didn’t really understand it, so I’d left a few problems blank. It was about logarithms and natural log and inverted logarithms, which are something else. I didn’t understand the way X turns from one thing into another, and it made me angry and anxious just thinking about X as an exponent, like X doesn’t have enough to do just being a line position variable.
Still, I could have gotten partial credit if I hadn’t lost the assignment. I had to pass algebra to see my dad, and I was just barely scraping by. I needed the grade.
I tore through my backpack, looking for the assignment. I sorted frantically through the pile of loose and crumpled paper at the bottom of my locker, getting angrier by the minute. The bell rang, and then I was in the hallway with a few other stragglers and no math assignment in sight. My giant math book was on the floor, blocking the door of the locker. I slammed the book in the locker five times in a row and then kicked the locker five times. It hurt my foot, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I shoved the book and my backpack into my locker and closed the door. The locker was slightly bent at the bottom, and I had to push it hard to get it to close.
Next thing I knew, I was walking down Lamar Boulevard in the bright sunshine. It happens this way. I’m upset, I start walking to cool down,
and before you know it, I’ve skipped school. It’s never a conscious choice.
After a while, I dug in the pocket of my jeans and found a five-dollar bill. Enough for a Coke at the 7-Eleven and a bus home. I lingered over my Coke on the curb in front of the 7-Eleven and tried not to cry. I didn’t have my house key, and I couldn’t get in until Iris got home. If I failed math, I’d never get to Portland. Plus, I’d skipped school—again.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a guy sitting in his car, staring at me. He was a bald old man in a sedan. I got up and walked to my bus stop and sat on the bench. It occurred to me that not only had I skipped math class, but I’d skipped detention as well. Coach Neuwirth would make me suffer.
Worse yet, I wouldn’t get to see Abelard. I’d been thinking about him all day.
“Needer scride?”
I turned. The bald man craned his head out the window of his car. He’d followed me from the 7-Eleven.
“Crab sand walk,” he said. “Nedderly be home in sure hours.”
I blinked. I couldn’t understand him.
“What? What did you say?”
I realized that I’d made a big mistake. I should have just ignored him. He got out of the car and walked toward me, smiling, his eyelids strangely droopy. It freaked me out. I’d left my phone in my locker. There was no one at the bus stop.
“Screw look upset. Canner hell?”
Just then, one of those whippet-thin guys in spandex who ride up and down Lamar on racing bicycles stopped and told the guy to fuck off. Literally he said, “Fuck off, old man. Go be a predator elsewhere”—and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t catch. The old man drove away quickly. Then the bicycle hero got back on his bike just as my bus arrived.
For every horrible person in the universe, there is a truly amazingly good person waiting to undo the evil. It’s all a matter of timing. A bicycle hero is only good if he arrives at the right moment. If only I had a bike hero to help me find my homework. Then maybe I could stay in school.
“Lily,” Mom said, “I got an automated notice from school that you weren’t in class in the afternoon. Did you leave school?”
The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily Page 3