“Wait here at the door,” he said finally. “Don’t come in—you haven’t inspreefed ayftey procols.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. I waited.
Mr. Martini walked over to Abelard’s disemboweled vacuum cleaner and watched his soldering technique for a maddeningly long time. I could see Mr. Martini talking, but at that moment, someone ran a drill, covering the sound of his voice. Abelard showed no sign of hearing either, but after a minute, he set his soldering iron down and turned and walked my way.
I moved out of the doorway, arms folded across my chest.
“Lily,” he said.
“Abelard,” I replied. “You wanted to see me?”
He pushed his glasses up on his head and stared at a spot on the wall to the left of me. “I have something that I want to say to you, but if you talk, I won’t be able to organize my thoughts.”
“Okay, I won’t talk.” I waited. The fluorescent light pulsed oddly in time with a twitch that spread along my skin. I studied his face, three-quarter profile, hair pushed back off his high forehead.
“I’ve been thinking about what you told me Friday night about having a broken brain, not a broken spirit. And I’ve been thinking about what it means to be broken, and how we call things broken that aren’t—fractured. It made me think about fractals. Do you know what a Mandelbrot set is?”
I shrugged.
“There’s a picture of a Mandelbrot set on the wall.”
I craned my head to look around the corner of the door at a poster of something that looked like a regularly shaped psychedelic inkblot. I had questions, but I was not to talk.
“So a Mandelbrot set is one kind of fractal,” he continued. “All fractals are self-similar, which means they have a pattern that repeats at different levels of magnification. Fractals are infinitely recursive and orderly, but they appear to be chaotic.”
“Why are you even in high school?” I blurted out. I couldn’t help it. I was following Abelard’s train of thought—but just barely. Why wasn’t he already at college or something, turning vacuum cleaners into perpetual motion machines, solving some of the world’s major technological issues with robots and math?
“If you talk, I won’t be able to finish what I have to say.” Abelard ran his hand over the top of his thigh, as though slightly agitated. It was probably hard for him to talk this much.
“Sorry.”
“Mathematicians use fractals to model things that appear to be chaotic but are really accumulations of complex patterns. Fractured things, not broken, because broken implies that there is a normal, when mathematically there isn’t. Normal would simply mean easily predictable—like a salt crystal. Fractured things like snowflakes and mountain ranges are more geometrically interesting and require more complex modeling.”
“Abelard,” I said, forgetting that I was not supposed to interrupt, “are you calling me a ‘special little snowflake’?”
Abelard closed his eyes. He’d thought about this, arranged what he’d planned to say in great detail, and all I could do was throw him off his game. And yet, I couldn’t help it. I wanted to ask him a hundred questions. I wanted to pull the goggles off his head and run my hands through his hair. This was more than I’d heard him talk the entire time I’d known him. He was wearing a heather green ringer T-shirt that looked insanely soft, bunny-marshmallow-cloud soft, and I wanted to run my hand over his chest and find out. Hard to be still and quiet at the same time. I leaned closer.
“Yes,” Abelard said finally. “You are a fractured snowflake, a pattern repeated in infinite detail in a world full of salt crystals. You’re not broken—you’re perfect.”
Perfect. Some tight, hard shell around my heart cracked open. I hadn’t even known I’d walled my heart away from this terrible world.
This had to be a miraculous mistake, a miscalculation on Abelard’s part. He’d done the math wrong. I was so far from perfect that I was afraid he would make a spot reevaluation and realize his mistake.
Big, stupid tears welled up in my eyes. I looked away. Several people in the robotics lab watched us through safety goggles like a colony of super-intelligent insect people, confused by off-task behavior. I don’t think anyone had ever cried in robotics lab before.
“You think I’m perfect? I don’t think the world at large shares your opinion.”
“The world doesn’t understand complexity,” Abelard said. “Not like I do.”
I lunged at Abelard, more violently than I had planned to, and pushed him slightly off balance. His arms flew up and went around me as he staggered back against the wall.
“Sorry,” I said.
In response he laughed. It was the smallest laugh, a tiny, delighted sound. I’d never heard Abelard laugh before. His arm slid around my waist, pulling me close.
His shirt was as soft as I’d imagined it would be.
“I love you, Abelard,” I murmured, before my brain could stop my rash and completely unwise mouth. Like Heloise, my heart surrendered too willingly to the conqueror. And then—miracle.
“I love you too, Lily.” He said it back.
I’d spent my entire life as a teacup with a jagged crack running down the side, an imperfect vessel threatening to spill my contents onto the table at any random moment. Tolerated but not adored. It didn’t seem like it would be even possible to love me. Probabilistically unlikely at best. But for Abelard, the jagged crack was the interesting thing about me.
I closed my eyes, and something went slack inside my brain, as some questioning whirring engine of doubt and impatience shut down. Still. There was only Abelard, the warmth of his neck, the feel of his chest against mine, his arm wrapped around my waist.
This moment alone.
Chapter 19
Mom was surprisingly willing to drop me at Abelard’s house on Sunday. She didn’t even ask if I had outstanding homework assignments. I guess she’d seen me pounding away at my Macbeth paper all weekend and assumed I was working just as hard at everything else.
Really, finishing my Macbeth paper was as much a matter of boredom as anything else. Rosalind was busy with Richard and the play, Abelard with robotics. The All-City Robotics competition was held Saturday, and Abelard’s team advanced to regionals. I wanted to go to the competition, but I was worried that I would be a distraction. So I stayed home and worked on my paper.
Sunday at one o’clock, we all jumped into the car together. Mom and Iris were headed to City Hall after they dropped me off so that Iris could write a report. Her school has given her a taste for urban planning and multiuse facilities. She’s always looking for storm-secured bunkers and fair-trade coffee shops. Nice to know she will survive the coming apocalypse and complete cultural collapse while the rest of us wander around looking for Cheetos and Wi-Fi.
“Maybe someday you’ll actually teach me to drive,” I said. “Then I could take the car.”
“Maybe,” Mom replied in a far-too-cheerful voice, the kind of voice you use on an eleven-year-old who still believes in Santa. A grow-up-and-get-over-yourself voice.
“Everyone drives, Mom. Texas is the drivingest state in the drivingest country in the world. Unless you want me to move to Amsterdam or New York, I really need—”
“Let’s see how things shake out this summer,” she said. “We’ll both have more time then.”
This summer. When I would be in Portland. Research had provided me with ample reason to believe that mass transit in Portland did not suck as badly as it did in Austin.
“Fine,” I said. “Don’t teach me.”
We turned off Enfield, and Mom pulled up in the Mitchells’ driveway.
“This is where Abelard lives?” Iris said. “It’s so big! Are they rich? What’s it like on the inside?”
“Like a Victorian gentlemen’s club and a library got married and gave birth to a house,” I replied.
Mom snorted with laughter. At that moment, I realized she’d probably been in the house before when Dad was a student. The pa
st and the present colliding—again.
“Is that what it’s like, Mom?” Iris said. We weren’t used to hearing Mom laugh like that.
“Pretty much,” Mom replied. “Lily, Iris and I are going to City Hall and maybe out shopping. Three hours, okay?”
Mrs. Mitchell had on another one of those giant silver and turquoise squash-blossom necklaces that always look like they might weigh upward of fifteen pounds. Hard on your neck.
“Lily,” she said. “So nice to see you again.”
“Thanks,” I replied, hands at my side.
Abelard stood in the middle of the room, barefoot. He was wearing different sunglasses than the pair he wore to Dan’s. He probably had sunglasses for indoors and sunglasses for outdoors. The sight of the glasses gave me an odd thrill.
“Abelard,” I said rolling his name over my tongue, because now it felt like it belonged to me. The Lewis chessboard was set up on the coffee table.
“Are you planning on trouncing me soundly at chess?” I asked.
“Yes,” Abelard replied. Simple statement of fact.
“Abelard, you shouldn’t say things like that,” Mrs. Mitchell said. “Lily will get the wrong idea.”
“Pretty accurate, though,” I said. “I can’t imagine beating Abelard at chess anytime soon.”
“Maybe you two would like to do something other than play chess?” Mrs. Mitchell asked. “We have plenty of board games.”
I did have something I wanted to do besides play chess. I wanted to go to Abelard’s perfect room and sit on the bed next to him and find out whether he still smelled of warmth and sandalwood. I wanted to feel his arms around me again.
“Board games take three people,” Abelard said.
“I could play a game with you,” Mrs. Mitchell said unconvincingly. “Or your father could . . .”
“Video games,” Abelard said.
Yes! Alone with Abelard in his room.
“Sounds great,” I said quickly.
I followed Abelard up the stairs to his room.
“Keep the door open,” Mrs. Mitchell called behind us.
I settled on the end of the bed platform. Abelard handed me a controller.
“Monsters or soldiers?” Abelard said.
“Monsters are metaphorically appealing,” I replied.
Soon Abelard and I were side by side on the end of his bed, crawling through an abandoned state hospital while mutated half-zombies with strange surgical appliances attempted to kill our avatars. Abelard had a sniper rifle, and I had a machete, which turned out to be perfectly suited to my random-movement berserker style of video fighting. I had to learn not to slash Abelard with an accidental backhand. I think I killed him three times, but he was good-natured about my slower-than-average learning curve. He just kept explaining to me how not to kill him.
Mrs. Mitchell stood outside the open door and pretended to be interested in our progress through the funerary tunnels from the morgue.
“How can you stand so much blood and gore?” she said to me.
“You get used to it,” I said. Probably a horrifying answer.
She turned and left, her light tread heading down the stairs. I gave my full attention to the floating disembodied head of a child.
“I don’t like to fly,” Abelard said.
“I don’t blame you,” I said. “Who wants to run into a floating toddler head? Toddlers—so creepy!”
“I don’t like to fly on airplanes.”
“I’ve only been on an airplane a couple of times,” I replied.
“I don’t like people I don’t know touching me. I don’t like going through security. I don’t like the noise.”
Abelard in an airport. I might feel overwhelmed in airports and shopping malls, places filled with noise and distraction, but I could still function. He couldn’t.
“How do you deal at school? Doesn’t passing period drive you crazy?”
“I leave class five minutes early. It’s part of my accommodations.”
“Oh, yeah.” I remembered last year when Abelard left English class early. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it triggered another memory. Abelard in seventh grade, standing in the middle of the hallway, shrieking. Teachers came running, helplessly fluttering about Abelard like anxious moths to a brightly lit flame. They couldn’t get him to move or stop shrieking. I just stood there and watched until Mr. Acosta yelled at me to get to class. That Abelard seemed like a different person from the calm, collected Abelard beside me.
We outran the floating toddler head by ducking down a side corridor. We ended up in an office strewn with paperwork and old files. For some reason, the abandoned office was way creepier than the electroshock therapy room.
“Are you going to fly to Portland?” he asked.
It was beginning to sink in that my father lived in Portland, and Abelard lived in Austin, and I couldn’t be in two places at once. I didn’t want to leave Abelard, but I didn’t have a future here, and I wanted to see my father again. It was all too much.
“I don’t know. My father lives on a cooperative farm, and they have a homeschool collective. I could probably graduate if I homeschooled, which is so not going to happen if I stay here. I’m not sure I want to go, but then again, I don’t know how things are going to work out here. I’ll end up working at the fry station at McDonald’s while my sister skips her senior year to go to some fabulous college. But then of course, there’s you and Rosalind . . .”
I stopped. I was rambling. But Abelard didn’t appear to be listening anyway. He was completely focused on the game, searching the journal of a long-dead medical examiner for clues to what exactly had gone wrong in the asylum. Since we were not under attack, I let him do the reading while I studied his beautiful profile. I missed seeing his eyes, but the dark glasses were weirdly sexy.
“Maybe you could come visit,” I said. “I mean, I know you don’t like to fly, but there’s always the bus.”
Virtual Abelard put down the book after ripping out the applicable pages, a very un-Abelard-like thing to do, IMHO. Just because you’re being hunted by the cursed undead is no reason to despoil a book.
Virtual Abelard turned, and I followed him back down the funerary tunnel to the hydrotherapy room, where muscular attendants tried to force our characters into blood-spattered bathtubs.
“I like the train,” Abelard said. “You can have your own room on the train.”
The only thing I knew about train travel came from a movie Rosalind’s parents had us watch—Cary Grant and an elegant blond woman making out in a sleek pale green room the size of a walk-in closet. I imagined Abelard in place of Cary Grant, nuzzling my cheek, talking in a low voice about stars and fractals while the world rushed by. Yes. Magical trains.
Mrs. Mitchell appeared in the doorway, completely disrupting my magical-train-ride-to-Portland fantasy scenario.
“I made cookies.” She bustled into the room and deposited the plate on Abelard’s desk. “Maybe you want to come downstairs for a bit?”
“Game,” Abelard said.
Mrs. Mitchell watched as we made our way back out through the tunnel. Glowing eyes swam out of the darkness, either rats or monsters. Abelard took careful aim with his sniper rifle and fired. Something at the end of the corridor exploded in a flash of dark red.
She shrugged and left the room.
Abelard put the game on pause. We had maybe ten minutes before she came back, and it made me bold. I moved closer.
I draped my hand across his wrist, fingering that strange but attractive med-alert bracelet. His wrist was surprisingly thick. I ran my fingertips along the inside of his wrist, at the place where his arm joined his hand. At any moment he might shake off my hand and turn away. I’d try not be crushed. I’d read that people with Asperger’s don’t always like to be touched.
Abelard studied our hands with a slight frown. I slid my hand along his wrist into his palm. He hesitated for a moment and then wrapped his fingers around mine and held my hand.
Only for a moment.
Then he slid his hand over my wrist in exactly the same way I’d wrapped my hand around his wrist, as though we were inventing a language of gesture from scratch, slowly, through repetition and imitation. Iteration—his word. His fingers went all the way around my wrist, overlapped. It gave me an odd thrill, this difference. His hands were so much bigger than mine. Should have been obvious, but it was new information. It was all new. And nice.
“I want to kiss you,” he said.
I looked up, startled. Just as quickly, I remembered that he couldn’t tolerate eye contact. “Now? Are you sure?”
I felt myself flush. Nervous. What if he didn’t like it?
“I mean, you can kiss me,” I said. “But don’t feel like you have to if it’s something you—”
Abelard kissed me. Midsentence. A soft press of his lips against mine. The warm feel of his shoulder as he leaned into me. I closed my eyes. He lingered for a moment before pulling away. Not the F4-tornado-leveling-the-school embrace of untrammeled passion I’d expected. Gentle. Better.
“How was that?” he asked.
“Good.” My voice sounded strange, a little breathless. “Very good. And for you?”
“Different,” he said softly.
“Is that bad?”
“No, it’s good. Different from my last kiss.”
“Last kiss? You mean, when I kissed you in the office?”
Abelard frowned.
“Before that. A different girl.”
A different girl. Abelard had kissed another girl before me. Of course he had. It was stupid to be jealous of some girl from his past . . .
While my head was running this hamster wheel, Abelard leaned over and kissed me again. And the hamster wheel stopped turning.
“Lily?”
Seven. Our appointed hour. It had only been a few hours since I’d seen him, but it felt like forever. Iris hovered in our room, pretending to work, busy trying to eavesdrop. Hard to listen in to a text conversation.
“Abelard,” I replied, just for the thrill of writing his name. The memory of his kiss lingered almost unendurably. Writing was a pleasure, but I wanted more. I reached under my bed, looking for The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. I’d dropped it there earlier.
The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily Page 11