Peter Abelard and Heloise had nothing to do but read, drink wine, and argue philosophy all day. Of course, they fell madly, stupidly in love. Stupid, because Heloise became pregnant. Abelard wanted to get married, but Heloise refused on the grounds that married life would mean returning to sewing stuff and needlepoint. Reasonable, if you ask me.
Then her uncle Fulbert found out. Fulbert may not have even been her real uncle; he may have been her pretend “uncle.” Ick. And the story only gets more disturbing from there. Fulbert hired thugs to cut off Abelard’s genitals. Abelard fell into a deep depression, and I mean, who wouldn’t? Heloise entered a monastery and quickly became the mother superior because she was smarter than everyone else there. Abelard and Heloise continued to write each other, and eventually they lived together.
No one knows what happened to the baby.
Monday morning, I took my dad’s copy of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise to school. I told myself I’d keep the book in my backpack until detention, but I couldn’t help it. During English class, I slid the book under my desk to reread Heloise’s first letter. The sweet letter, before everything went wrong between them.
I circled a passage from the letter to use in my exchanges with Abelard. Stuff about Peter Abelard’s cleverness and worldly beauty.
That would work. Abelard Mitchell, my Abelard, had worldly beauty to burn. When I thought of the way his hair—
“Lily?”
I looked up. Mrs. Rogers-Peña was peering at me over the top of her reading glasses, one eyebrow crooked at an angle.
“I’m sure whatever you’re reading has deep literary merit, but the rest of us are discussing Macbeth. Would you care to join us?”
I shoved The Letters of Abelard and Heloise in my backpack and picked up Macbeth.
After my last class, I ran up the stairs past students fleeing the school, pushing my way through the third-floor mosh pit to Coach Neuwirth’s room. I hoped to catch Richard before Coach Neuwirth showed up.
I flew into the room and almost ran into Richard. No one else was there. It occurred to me that Abelard wasn’t the only one I owed an apology for the picture. After all, I’d stolen it from Richard. Maybe he didn’t want his beautiful artwork displayed before the whole stupid world.
“Oh, hey,” I said breathlessly. “Have you seen the thread with your picture of Abelard?”
“Thread?” Richard lowered his backpack into the nearest chair and turned to face me. We were almost the same height, eyes at a level. “My picture?”
“Okay, see, what happened is, I took the picture you drew of Abelard home, and I meant to return it to you, but then my sister found it, and she posted it online for a homework assignment, which shouldn’t have even been a thing. But then, for some reason, all the trolls came out from under their bridges to . . .”
Richard frowned, and I remembered that he couldn’t read. The whole vicious rugby scrum of the internet was unavailable to him. Sad, but at the same time I had to think how nice it was to meet a guy who’d never dipped his toe into the cesspool of 4chan. All actual human qualities still intact. Perfect for Rosalind.
“Look, let me just show you,” I said.
I grabbed my phone and pulled up the picture. When I leaned close to hold the phone between us, Richard stiffened slightly.
“I took your picture home and left it in my room. My sister found it and posted it online. I had no idea she would do that. I’m sorry.”
“There’s something written on the picture. What does it say?”
“Oh, that was me.” I felt myself blushing. It hadn’t occurred to me until this moment that I had defaced his work. “It’s about Abelard, and well, it’s hard to explain, but Abelard was named after a famous philosopher and lover from the Middle Ages—”
“You know a lot about the Middle Ages—da Vinci and all—don’t you?”
Richard studied me, his gaze roaming from my eyes to my lips and back again as though trying to decide whether my face was aesthetically pleasing or not. Artists.
“Da Vinci was Italian Renaissance, but yeah, I guess I do. My father is sort of a medieval scholar, or he was until he left us . . .”
Until he left us . . . I’d never actually said those words to another person before. My father left us.
“When did your father leave?” Richard asked.
It was a casual question, and yet there was something about Richard that made me want to confess how I felt like I was the cause of my parents’ divorce. Maybe it was knowing that Richard was dyslexic. Maybe he’d screwed up his family too.
“I guess it’s been four, five years. But I don’t think he left as much as . . .” I stopped, remembering that I was on a mission on Rosalind’s behalf. I had limited time before Coach Neuwirth showed up. “So, hey—how much longer do you have detention?” I asked.
“Three more days.”
“Me too! What are you doing after that?”
Richard opened his mouth, but I was too nervous to let him form a sentence. Clock. Ticking.
“You should come and work crew at the theater Thursday,” I said. “Mr. Turner is always looking for artists to work on the set. You’d probably be great at set design, plus they often have people paint the set so—”
“I don’t know. After school I go home to—”
“Oh, come on, say yes!” I grabbed Richard by the arm. I do this sometimes, forget the rules of personal space.
Rogelio arrived, followed by Coach Neuwirth.
“Ms. Michaels-Ryan,” Coach Neuwirth boomed, “please stop pestering Mr. Hernandez.”
Pestering. There was that word again. I guess pestering means randomly invading someone’s personal space. Guilty as charged.
I didn’t know if Richard would show up to the theater on Thursday, but I’d done my best. Now it was up to Rosalind.
Chapter 10
Thursday afternoon, and Abelard hadn’t texted since the weekend. My dad’s copy of the book was already beginning to look dog-eared from my near-constant attention. If Abelard didn’t text back soon, the book would burst at the seams, dropping pages like tears.
Iris was in the kitchen making a salad.
“Lily?” Mom’s voice echoed from the dining room. I’d done something wrong. Again.
I walked to the dining room table where Mom had her laptop and work spread out, a semipermanent collection of papers and bills. Iris trailed in our wake, a few steps back as though a five-foot distance was enough to provide her ninjalike cover. I knew what Iris was doing—getting up in my business.
“Here’s what I wanted to show you.” Mom turned the laptop to face me. “I just got an automated message from GradeSpeed. You’re failing geography.”
The sight of Coach Neuwirth’s name alone was enough to make me bristle. I scanned the column of grades: 72, 95, 67, 93, 0, 0, 94, 0. My high numbers were test scores, the low numbers and zeros: homework. Because my brain stores random unimportant bits of information like the stellar news that the capital of Sri Lanka is Colombo, but it doesn’t seem to have room for the knowledge of what homework assignment is due. The brain wants what it wants.
Still, my grade should have averaged out to a 70-something because tests had more weight. Instead, my average grade for the six weeks was 47.
A 47. There was no extra credit, no talking my way into a slightly better grade with a number like that. Not with Coach Neuwirth.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “My test scores are good.”
“You’re not looking at the right thing, Lily. You have a zero for your six-week project. It’s forty percent of your grade.” Mom leaned over the laptop and pointed to a line, her face lit in the white glow of the laptop.
I tried to focus on the numbers, but the screen blurred into a halo of white, a fuzzy snowball of doom. It didn’t matter if the numbers made sense or not. They never do. All that mattered was that my hope for a golden summer with Dad on the farm was gone. You can’t argue with GradeSpeed.
“I did my
Populations in Peril project,” I said. “I made a diorama and wrote a paper. I turned it in, I swear.”
“Lily made a kick-ass diorama, Mom,” Iris said. “I watched her.”
“Language, Iris,” Mom said.
“What?” Iris flopped into one of the dining room chairs and folded her arms across her chest. “Kick-ass has entered the standard lexicon. Ms. Arbeth says it all the time.”
“Your teacher may feel comfortable with the phrase, but I don’t particularly care whether it’s common usage or not . . .”
I stopped listening to Mom and Iris argue semantics. I stopped thinking about school and cell phones and dioramas. I wanted to text Dad, but he never liked to text because “conversation is all about context and nuance, and texting destroys that.” Besides, his number had changed. We used to message each other on Facebook, but about a year ago, he went off Facebook suddenly. I couldn’t reach him.
I thought about Dad’s favorite word: quotidian. Meaning “daily, routine,” and therefore unimportant. As in “don’t get mired in quotidian details.” Something he used to say. But nothing saved me from the quotidian and the ugly, from the Coach Neuwirths of the world.
“Lily, you’re crying,” Mom said softly.
“Am I?” I swabbed my eyes with the back of my hand—wet. Sometimes my medication makes me feel so numb, I’m not aware of my emotions as they happen. Other people have to tell me. Iris looked away.
“Maybe it’s a mistake,” Mom said. “You did ask Coach Neuwirth for your 504 accommodations before the project, right?”
“Coach Neuwirth,” I said bitterly.
Like I was going to talk about my 504 accommodations with Coach Neuwirth. Who wants to go to the least sympathetic person on Earth and say, “Excuse me, I’m broken. Can you help me?” Honestly, I’d rather fail. At least my dignity would still be intact.
“Talk to him tomorrow, okay?” Mom said.
I nodded. Anything to get out of the room.
I picked at dinner. Later I went to my room and tried to read, but everything was gray and covered with a film of self-loathing. I’d had no idea how I’d screwed up my stupid diorama, but clearly I had.
“Lily?”
A text from Abelard. He was there. My name whispered soft and low over a great distance. All misery evaporated.
“Abelard. You’re here again. It’s been a week.”
I waited, eyes closed, my head propped against the pillows on my bed. Wondering if that sounded like a complaint.
“I’m glad you’re back,” I added.
My phone buzzed with the arrival of his next message.
“I was worried. I wondered if you, who had raised this passion, had kindly received the declaration, or if it was an offense.” A quote from the letters.
“Kindly received, I assure you.”
“I thought you would text me. I didn’t want to bother you,” he texted.
How many times had I wanted to text Abelard? Middle of school, middle of the night. How many times had I imagined that he didn’t really like me that much or he’d gotten cold feet?
“Bother me, please. Better that I don’t text you. I have impulse control issues.”
“If you weren’t impulsive, we wouldn’t be talking,” he wrote. “If you weren’t impulsive, you wouldn’t have kissed me. I like your impulses.”
The mention of kissing sent a shiver through me.
“Not everyone agrees. I’m in trouble at school again.”
“Trouble?” he wrote back after a short pause. “What kind of trouble?”
“I’m failing geography. Coach Neuwirth gave me a zero on a project.”
I waited for a minute, then two and three. I was learning to enjoy the pauses in our dialogues, to use the time to look for quotes, to read back through our texts, to roll the lines around my mouth and taste them melting on my tongue.
I evolved an elaborate fantasy of a passionate kiss with Abelard that would happen so organically that neither of us would have to make the decision to move on the other. During a blackout or tornado warning at school, or some other disaster that would subvert the normal logic and rules of behavior so that in an extraordinary moment, we would drift together in perfect harmony of thought and desire. He’d lean forward in the dark, and his lips would magically find mine. I’d run my fingers through his hair as he pulled me closer . . .
I was about to wipe out the top floor of the school with an F4 tornado when my phone pinged with Abelard’s incoming text.
“Coach Neuwirth! His discourse is a fire, which instead of enlightening, obscures everything with its smoke.”
I recognized the quote from early in the first letter when Abelard describes his divinity teacher, Anselm. I flipped through the book to find the section and the right quote.
“I was too knowing in the subjects he discoursed upon,” I wrote back. Peter Abelard’s words. I’d broken my own rule, to speak only Heloise’s words, but I didn’t think my Abelard would mind.
“He is a tree beautified with variety of leaves and branches, but barren of fruit,” Abelard texted back.
I laughed at the thought of Coach Neuwirth as a beautiful, stupid tree.
“I’ve missed you.”
Fifteen seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds. I worried that I’d gone off script and said something stupid and too personal and maybe needy. Because, yes, me—needy.
“And I you.”
“Pleasures tasted sparingly, and with difficulty, have always a higher relish.” A quote I had been saving. I was pleased with myself.
“I am unmoved by your argument. I would prefer to taste pleasures daily and, if possible, in person.”
I held the phone to my face and studied the screen. A flush of anticipation and something approaching fear spread through me.
“In person?” My heart beat painfully.
“Absolument,” Abelard replied. Absolutely in French. I love random French! I failed two years of French in middle school before switching to failing Spanish in high school. French—the language of love and delightful idioms, a certain je ne sais quoi. And of course, impossible spelling. Je regrette that I can’t spell.
I giggled. I couldn’t help it. I felt stupidly happy.
Iris turned on the bed to face me. “What did he say?”
“Nothing,” I replied. “Okay, he wants to meet.”
“Are you sure?” I texted. “I talk a lot. I can’t always help it.”
“I don’t talk enough. It should average out.”
“Just so you know,” I texted.
“Just so I know,” he replied.
“Are you going to go?” Iris reached for the phone, and I pulled it away. “What does he want to do? What will Mom say?”
“We don’t have to talk at all,” Abelard texted. “We could play a game.”
“A game? What kind of game?”
“Do you play chess?”
Chess. I’d played it with my dad, but it had been years. I wondered if I even remembered the rules.
“Chess. Sure,” I texted back.
“Come to my house Saturday at 2:00. We’ll play chess.”
He sent me the directions.
“I’ll be there,” I replied. Tornados and failing grades could not have kept me away.
Chapter 11
Friday I met Rosalind in the courtyard for lunch.
I opened my lunch bag. Tuna fish sandwich and a green apple, small, no doubt sour, and hard. My mother buys bags of Granny Smith apples because they are cheap and never seem to go bad—real apocalypse food.
Rosalind set her lunch aside. She was blushing—actually blushing.
“Oh my god, I just remembered! You’re not going to believe what happened. Richard showed up at the theater yesterday. He wants to work on the set. Richard! Can you imagine?”
“Wow!” I said, trying to sound surprised. I am a terrible actress, but Rosalind was too freaked out to notice. “What did you think of him?”
“You’re right,
he has amazing eyelashes. And he has the most artistic hands. I mean, have you ever looked at his hands?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“He asked Mr. Turner if you were coming.” Rosalind frowned as though I’d consciously flirted with her crush of five minutes. Never. “Did you tell Richard you would be there?”
“I did mention I work crew sometimes. So what did Richard say?”
“I didn’t talk to him.” She raised an eyebrow in horror. “As if I would just walk up to him and start a conversation?”
It baffles me that someone like Rosalind can get up in front of the whole school and remember the script for an entire play, but she can’t talk to a guy.
“You’re going to have to talk to him,” I said. “Richard is quiet and a little self-contained.”
“Quiet and self-contained? You might as well be talking about me,” Rosalind said. “It’s not like I have a million friends outside of theater. I would never have talked to you, except that you demanded to try on my shoes.”
“What? I did no such thing.” She’s told me this story before, but I don’t remember it happening. Rosalind’s shoes are very small and clever and above all, leather free. Her shoes would never have fit me. “Did I really demand to try on your shoes? I thought we met when I spilled red paint on you.”
“That was later. Before that, you came up during recess and said, ‘Your shoes have pink flowers and purple flowers, and the purple flowers have pink inside, and the pink flowers have purple inside, and I find them fascinating’—and then you asked to try them on.”
Rosalind did a perfect impression of six-year-old me, complete with hand-waving, ninety-mile-an-hour speech pattern, and a good deal of bobbing head motion. I’d like to say that I’ve changed a lot since kindergarten, but sadly, this isn’t true. I still wave my arms and talk way too fast. I would have been offended, except that it was spot-on—and it was Rosalind.
The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily Page 6