“Um—yes.”
No point in lying. You can’t argue with a robocall.
Mom had come home late from work with one of those time-stamped, grocery-store baked chickens and a premade salad. Chocolate-covered ice cream bars in a sad attempt to retain nice-mom status while simultaneously crawling up my ass about attendance. Might have worked if I was still ten. She put the ice cream bars in the freezer and turned toward me.
“Did something happen to make you want to leave school?” she said in a soft voice.
“No.”
She pursed her mouth in a tight line and shook her head. In the range of maternal responses to failure, I’d have taken anger over defeat any day. I couldn’t stand that I made my mother look old and tired. I was the most exhausting person in the world, apparently.
“You can’t keep leaving school, Lily,” Mom replied, not looking at me. “Do you want another visit from CPS?”
Child Protective Services. In middle school I skipped so many classes that CPS sent a small, earnest guy in a shirt and tie to question Mom. He talked to me alone for what seemed like hours. I thought he was nice, but Mom remembers the CPS visit differently than I do. Mom remembers the CPS visit as the “Worst. Day. Ever.”
“What can CPS do?” I said, beginning to get angry. “I mean, school is hell. How can CPS punish me worse than I’m already being punished? Has CPS discovered a deeper level of hell for people who skip school?”
Okay—Dante’s Inferno in AP English last semester. Metaphorically useful. But then I remembered that my trip to Portland was contingent on staying in school. I had hopes of crawling out of the stygian marsh to dry land.
“Coach Neuwirth called me,” she said, ignoring my CPS question. “He said to tell you that you just earned yourself three extra days of detention.”
“Fine.”
I didn’t mind detention as long as Abelard was there.
Abelard didn’t show up for detention the next day. I thought he might be late, but ten minutes into it, I realized he wasn’t coming.
“Where is Abelard?” I blurted out.
“Well, Ms. Michaels-Ryan, your ‘boyfriend’ isn’t in detention anymore,” Coach Neuwirth replied. “Apparently Abelard’s mother felt that two days of detention was punishment enough for the wanton destruction of thousands of dollars’ worth of school property. I respectfully disagree.”
No Abelard!
I took the late bus home. Rosalind had texted me a half-dozen times since school ended, expressing frustration that I had not yet turned on my phone. Sometimes I forget.
When I finally got back to her, she sent me a link. I opened it and found Richard’s picture of Abelard on Tumblr with my stupid thought bubble clearly in view. I followed the comment trail. It started with Iris and her best friend, Exene Ybarra, conversing about an English assignment on intertextuality and the internet and cute boys and The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, which Exene had never heard of. Somewhere in the day, a multitude of their friends jumped on the thread, and then someone wrote, OMG! That’s Abelard Mitchell. I felt sick.
And then people from our school appeared on the thread, and it got worse.
Iris. I was going to kill her. Why would she post this online? It was a public declaration that I was crushed out on Abelard for the whole internet to see. I checked the thread to see if anyone had figured out I was the person who wrote this. So far, no one. My heart slowed just a little. Dozens of comments, some of them funny, but a few were mean to Abelard. Heart-twistingly, middle-school-depths-of-hell, I-am-sad-to-be-a-human-being mean. Yes, I was going to kill Iris.
“You asked about Abelard,” Rosalind texted. “Did you do this?”
Rosalind. She knows me too well.
“Yes and no.” I texted back. “My words. Iris took it and posted it.”
“WTF? Iris?”
“I will kill!” I sent back.
“Who drew the picture?”
“Richard Hernandez,” I said. I was pretty sure Rosalind didn’t know Richard. They didn’t travel in the same circles.
“He’s an amazing artist.”
I wondered if Abelard had decided not to come to detention because of the picture and all the craptacular things people had posted about him. My heart sank to a new low.
Detention made me late, and Iris was already home when I arrived. I found her in the kitchen, chopping carrots for dinner. I stood in the kitchen doorway and stared at her long enough to make her really uncomfortable.
“What?”
I let her twist for a moment before I spoke. She deserved to suffer.
“I believe you have something that belongs to me,” I said slowly.
Iris blushed and hurried over to her backpack on the dining room table. She opened the top and carefully pulled out a manila folder with my picture of Abelard inside. The picture looked like she’d ironed it. Really, it looked better than when I’d brought it home. So there was that.
“Sorry,” she croaked, her voice failing her.
“Sorry? You posted this online! Did you even read the comments?”
“It was for an English assignment on intertextuality,” she said. “I was supposed to find a feed that referenced a literary work.”
“Doesn’t your school have a closed network?” I asked.
“Yes, but this was supposed to be something we found outside of school.”
LAMEA. It’s an all-pastiche, postapocalyptic playground until someone gets hurt. I blame LAMEA for unleashing mutant geniuses on the world with limited supervision.
“So, instead of searching, you stole one. Lazy.” Calling her lazy was the sickest burn I could ever offer Iris. And it worked. She looked like she was about to cry.
“Please don’t tell Mom,” she begged.
For some reason, this touched my heart just a little. What could Iris possibly be worried about? She’d always been Mom’s favorite. Plus, there was no way Mom could ever punish her. What could Mom do? Ban her from extracurricular activities? Send her to norm school?
Not that Iris knew that.
“You know, that’s a good idea,” I replied. “I should tell Mom.”
I didn’t tell Mom. It was enough to watch Iris squirm. I put Abelard’s picture back up on the bulletin board. And I hoped that, like so many things on the internet, the site with Abelard’s picture would disappear in a day. But of course, that didn’t happen.
Chapter 6
My English teacher, Mrs. Rogers-Peña, loves books and reading more than anyone I’ve ever met, except perhaps my father. She lets me slide on the deadlines and details as long as I get my work in. She has chin-length dark hair and thick glasses, and tends to wear skirts that look like they were made out of 1950s kitchen curtains. She knows everything that goes on in school. Which can be a problem.
I headed to her desk after class to talk about the novel at hand, The Stranger. Mrs. Rogers-Peña is always trying to get people to discuss whatever novel we happen to be reading. I wanted to talk to her, but not in front of other students.
“This is depressing. I mean, I get that the point is pointlessness . . .”
“You’re right, Lily,” Mrs. Rogers-Peña said. “All books should be happy and pleasant.”
This was why she was my favorite teacher. She never stinted on the irony.
“I’m glad you’re here, because I have a question for you,” she said. “Is high school really a barren wasteland?”
She turned her laptop to show Richard’s picture and my 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!
Busted. My heart sped.
“What makes you think I wrote that?” I asked.
“Lily, please.” Mrs. Rogers-Peña peered over the edge of her glasses. “You referenced The Letters of Abelard and Heloise in a paper last semester. Also, you misspelled naught. You might as well hav
e signed this.”
Dyslexia. No matter how much you try to hide it, the spelling always gives you away.
“It wasn’t me,” I said. “I mean it was me, but it wasn’t me. I wrote this, but—”
“It doesn’t matter who did what. I know you didn’t intend for this to happen, but people have posted some pretty mean things about Abelard. You need to apologize to him.”
My stomach did a flip-flop. I did not want to apologize to Abelard. No, I did not.
“But if I apologize, Abelard will know that I wrote this about him.”
Endless possibilities for mortification presented themselves, like I’d scrolled his name in curlicues on my notebook. Abelard, looking for “love and beauty.” So middle school! What had I done? What had Iris done?
“Yes,” Mrs. Rogers-Peña said. “And that’s the point. Bullying thrives on anonymity. You have to put a face on this thing. Are we clear?”
I nodded. When she said it that way, it seemed like I owed Abelard an explanation. But still.
At lunchtime I met Rosalind in the courtyard. I didn’t even bother to unpack my lunch. Eating was an impossibility. My fourth day back on the medication, and my appetite was pretty much gone. Supposedly it takes a couple of weeks for the antidepressant to build up in your system, but I could already feel the drug working its dismal magic.
Abelard was in his usual spot under the crepe myrtle, looking at his phone. I wondered if he was studying his picture. I hoped not. I hoped that he’d managed to miss the whole fiasco.
Rosalind was on her phone, staring at the picture of Abelard, eating a salad wrap.
“Mrs. Rogers-Peña thinks I should apologize to Abelard because of all the stuff people said on this thread.”
Rosalind scrolled down and made a face.
“Definitely apologize,” she said. “It’s not your fault that people are horrible, but you did start this.”
“What if Abelard didn’t see it?” I asked hopefully.
“Oh, he saw it,” Rosalind replied. “If he didn’t find it himself, somebody pointed it out to him. You know how school is.” I nodded. Whatever Mrs. Rogers-Peña believed about the nature of high school, I stood by my “barren wasteland” assessment.
I lunged in Abelard’s direction, stumbled, and caught myself. Behind me, Rosalind sighed at my lack of personal elegance. I walked the open space of the courtyard, arms at my sides, feeling like the entire school was watching me: the stoners returning from the parking lot, shiny blond seniors sipping low-fat caramel extra-whip lattes for lunch, the Hispanic girls eating school lunch on trays in the blazing sun. If I hadn’t been on drugs, I probably wouldn’t have cared, because I wouldn’t have noticed all the other people. But suddenly, talking to Abelard seemed like a really bad idea. A people-will-be-joking-about-this-for-months bad, because two freaks in the same vicinity was an order of magnitude more hilarious. I stopped, but it was too late. Abelard looked up and made eye contact.
“Lily,” he said.
Almost like he’d expected me.
His dark blue eyes skittered away like some incredibly rare and beautiful animal you catch a glimpse of through the forest canopy.
“Abelard,” I replied.
I took a deep breath and sat down next to him. “Have you seen your picture online?”
I tried to wait for Abelard to respond. I made it maybe a second and a half before I started talking at my usual breakneck pace. Ninety miles an hour with gusts up to a hundred and fifty.
“Well, okay,” I began. “So I had that picture after detention, and I took it home and wrote something about Peter Abelard, the twelfth-century French monk on it, just as a private joke. I didn’t plan on showing anyone the picture, but then I lost it, and it . . . ended up online.”
I paused and waited for a response from Abelard. A sign that he was mad, or indifferent to the ramblings of internet trolls because he’d evolved into a superior mind-based being. Nothing. Abelard sat perfectly still, staring into the middle ground. The grape Kool-Aid scent of mountain laurel drifted in from the vines by the teachers’ parking lot.
“You’ve read The Letters of Abelard and Heloise,” he said finally.
“My father read it to me when I was little.”
I thought about how weird that sounded. It’s not a happy bedtime story. It’s not a novel, either. It’s a slim volume of letters sent back and forth between two medieval geniuses who had the misfortune of falling madly in love. Real people.
“My father read it to me in Latin,” Abelard said.
“Latin?” I said. “You know Latin?”
Abelard nodded.
I wondered why he wasn’t over at LAMEA magnet school with all the other geniuses. Abelard felt the gears of the world turning; he spoke Latin. What other talents was he hiding?
“Okay, well, I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” I stood up slowly.
“So when you kissed me,” he said. “Was that a joke, too?”
My mouth went dry. This wasn’t how I pictured this conversation going. Not at all.
“No, it wasn’t a joke. So . . . what happened there was . . . Well, I went off my medication, and I guess I’ve been having a little problem with impulse control.”
“Impulse,” he said. “You had an impulse.”
He said the word impulse slowly, as though trying to understand the full meaning of the word. As in, “impulse: a sudden strong and unreflective urge or desire to act.” Emphasis on desire. I desired to kiss him. And now he knew.
My face went hot as an awkward pause fell over us. “I’m back on my medication now, so you don’t have to worry. I’m not going to do anything weird. Again. Okay, so . . . Bye.”
I turned and bounded toward the doors and away, narrowly missing a full-body collision with Dakota Smith from geography.
“Lily!” Rosalind called. “You forgot your lunchbox.”
Rosalind had grabbed my lunch and followed me. She’s done this hundreds of times since kindergarten. The only reason I still have a purse and a backpack is because Rosalind is my best friend.
“How did it go?” she asked.
“Great! We had a nice talk about my impulse control issues and my struggles with prescription drugs. Also, he speaks Latin.” I paused, strangely out of breath.
“Latin—okay,” she said slowly. “So why are you hyperventilating?”
“I’ll tell you inside.” It felt like the whole entire world was listening in to our conversation. I pushed through the double doors and moved quickly past the cafeteria. I found an empty place in the hall and stopped.
“I didn’t tell you this because it was just so awkward,” I whispered. “I kissed Abelard in the vice principal’s office. He wanted to know why I kissed him.”
“You kissed Abelard? What made you do that?”
“I don’t know. It was just one of those—”
“Lily moments,” she said.
I grimaced. I don’t like it when Rosalind refers to what she calls my “Lily moments,” but in this case, it was pretty accurate.
“So you really do like Abelard?”
“No,” I said quickly. “I mean, maybe. Okay—yes.”
And there it was. I’d admitted to Rosalind that I liked Abelard—which was enough to make me admit it to myself.
Chapter 7
“Let’s stop pretending that sixteen people is a viable breeding population,” Iris yelled at her laptop. “Two hundred years down the line, everyone will be so inbred they’ll have three thumbs on each hand and speak only in grunts.”
“Could you possibly text, like a normal human being?” I asked.
“Can’t.” Iris gestured to the piece of posterboard on her bed. “Craft project. Need my hands free.”
Iris sat cross-legged on her bed, talking to Exene Ybarra on speakerphone while one of her beloved K-pop videos played on her laptop: spastically cheerful Korean girls leaping around in a crayon selection of miniskirts and matching thigh-high stockings. I was still trying to rea
d my novel about the girl on the run with her brilliant father. Trying and failing.
Iris and Exene were working on a project where you had to design a fallout shelter and underground survival community for sixteen people, only in this homework scenario of the damned, thirty people arrive at the shelter and fourteen people have to be left outside. Iris and Exene had the names, the ages, the IQs, the job descriptions, and the breeding potential of everyone who showed up to the shelter. Iris and Exene also had an inexplicable faith that the decision of who lived and who died could be solved with a rational, community-based process. In real life, their bomb shelter would quickly have filled with the kind of gym-muscled douchebags who were not in the least bit concerned with the continued survival of the human race and had devoted their lives to maintaining physical superiority and minimal body hair. This was what you learned in norm school.
“Well, if they can’t breed, what’s the point of survival?” Exene asked. “They might as well all leave the shelter right—”
“Human dignity?” Iris replied. “The chance to leave a message for an alien race—”
“Pointless. If the human race doesn’t survive, it doesn’t matter,” Exene said.
“What do you think, Lily?” Iris said, in a naked attempt to open a line of communication between us. I’d returned Abelard’s picture to the bulletin board, but I was still mad at her for posting it online.
“Kill everyone who isn’t a farmer,” I replied, without looking over at Iris.
Exene laughed.
“‘Holiday in Cambodia,’” Exene said. “Dead Kennedys.”
Exene Ybarra’s parents are semifamous musicians with a late-seventies California punk fetish. I think her mom once played bass in a band with my dad. They named her after Exene Cervenka of X.
My phone on the bedside table buzzed. I ignored it.
It buzzed again.
“Are you going to get that?” Iris said.
“No.” I turned the page of my book, though I couldn’t remember what I’d read. My eyes skimmed over the words without gathering any meaning. Pointedly demonstrating my displeasure with Iris took more energy than I had at this hour of the day.
The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily Page 4