#thinking about the time her coach messaged me and told me that isa sees all the posts i make of her on twitter and they make her so happy 😭

[cut-catches]

WHERE ARE MY ISABELLA AJALLA LOVERS AT‼️‼️‼️

[hmhteen]

HMH Teen Teaser: THE LOVE LETTERS OF ABELARD AND LILY!

We’re so excited about this one, people! This is the love story of Abelard, who has autism, and Lily, who has ADHD. They’ve known one another since they were kids, but one fateful day in detention, Lily kisses Abelard. Their relationship deepens and changes in ways difficult to describe in words. Especially because Abelard’s autism makes it difficult for him to communicate verbally...so they write one another text messages, often quoting an old book they both love, and just when they think they’re finally connecting, a decision Lily makes about her own mental health changes everything. 

You can read the first four chapters of this romantic YA below! 

CHAPTER ONE

The day Abelard and I broke the wall, we had a four- hour English test. Seriously.  Every tenth grade  student  in the State of Texas had to take a four-hour English  test, which is too long to sit still even if you are a normal person. And I’m not a normal person.

After the test, I told my feet to take me to geography. If I didn’t tell myself where to go, if I let my mind drift, I’d find myself in the quiet calm of the art wing, where the fluorescent lights flickered an appealingly low cycle of semipermanent gloom. Or I’d stand in the empty girls’ room just to be alone. Sometimes I think I’m not attention deficient but attention abundant. Too much everything.

When I got to geography, Coach Neuwirth handed out a boring article about the importance of corn as a primary crop in the early Americas. Then he left the room. He did this a lot. Ever since basketball season had ended, Coach Neuwirth seemed like someone who was counting the min- utes until the school year was over. To be fair, he wasn’t the only one running out the clock. 

Thirty seconds after Coach Neuwirth left, the low murmur of voices turned into a conversational deluge. I sat in the back of the room because that’s where the two left- handed desks were — in the row reserved for stoner boys who do not like to make eye contact with teachers. Two seats in front sat Rogelio, turned sideways in his chair, talk- ing fast and casting glances in my direction.

“Cosababa, pelicular camisa,” Rogelio said, and the boys around him all laughed.

Okay, this is probably not what Rogelio said. I’m not a great listener. Also, my Spanish is terrible.

“Camisa,” he repeated.

At the word camisa, Emma K. turned to look at me, and whispered something to the blond girl next to her. I instantly wondered if I’d been talking to myself, which is a thing I do. It attracts attention.

Then it sank in. Camisa. Spanish for “shirt.”

Maybe there was something wrong with my shirt. Maybe the snap-button cowboy shirt I got at a thrift store was not charming and ironic as I’d imagined, but seri- ously ugly. Emma K. had whispered about my shirt. Even Rogelio and his friends, who often wore snap-button cow- boy shirts, had laughed at my shirt. Or maybe not, because my Spanish isn’t good, and anyway, Rogelio could have been talking about someone else. Not Emma K., though. She looked straight at me.

What if I’d popped open a button at bra level and I’d been walking around all day with my bra exposed, and was I even wearing a nice bra, a sexy black bra? Or was it just one of those tragic old bras with a ribbon or a rose that might have been cute once but, over repeated washings, had turned slightly gray and balled up like a dirty piece of dryer lint stuck to the center of my chest?

I clutched the front of my shirt, and Emma K. and the blond girl giggled. My shirt was properly buttoned, but I couldn’t sit in my chair for another minute. School was a molasses eternity, a nightmare ravel of bubble sheets and unkind whispers unfurled in slow motion. I had to leave, even though I’d promised my mother that I would under no circumstances skip school again.

I stood. My feet made a decision in favor of the door, but a squeaking metallic noise stopped me.

I turned.

Directly behind me was an accordion-folded, putty- colored vinyl wall, along with a gunmetal gray box with a handle sticking out of one end. The squeaking noise came from the metal box. The handle moved.

When our school  was built in  the sixties, someone decided that walls impede the free flow of educational ideas, because some of the third-floor rooms are all double-long, cut in half by retractable vinyl walls. Apparently, the archi- tect of this plan had never been to a high school cafeteria to experience the noise associated with the unimpeded flow of ideas. The wall doesn’t get opened much. 

 Last time anyone opened the wall was during Geography Fair. One of the custodians came with a strange circular key he inserted into a lock on the side of the box. He’d pushed the handle down and the wall had wheezed open, stuttering and complaining.

Now the handle jiggled up and down as if a bored ghost was trying to menace our class, but no one else was paying attention. I wondered if the custodian was trying to open the wall from the other side. It didn’t make sense.

I left my desk and walked to the box. I leaned over and grabbed it, surprised by the cool feel of solid metal. And suddenly, I felt much better. The world of noise and chaos faded away from me. The touch of real things can do this.

The movement stopped. I shook the bar up and down. It didn’t range very far before hitting the edge of what felt like teeth in a gear.

I pushed down hard on the handle. After a momen- tary lull, it sprang up in my hands, knocking with sur- prising force against my palms. I put both hands on the bar, planted the soles of my Converse sneakers, and pulled against it with all my might.

There was a loud pop, followed by the whipping sound of a wire cable unraveling. The bar went slack in my hands. The opposite end of the vinyl wall slid back three feet.

Everyone stopped talking. Students near the door craned their heads to see into the other classroom. Dakota Marquardt (male) said, “Shiiit!” and half the class giggled.

A rush of talking ensued, some of it in English, some in Spanish.

I dropped the handle and slid back into my chair, too late. Everyone had seen me.

Coach Neuwirth ran back into the room and tried to pull the accordion curtain closed. When he let go of the edge, it slid away, leaving a two-foot gap.

He turned and faced the room. “What the hell hap- pened here?”

It’s never good when a teacher like Coach Neuwirth swears.

I waited for someone to tell on me. Pretty much inevi- table.

Dakota Smith (female) stood and straightened her skirt. She pulled her long brown hair over her shoulder and leaned forward as though reaching across a podium for an invisible microphone.

“After you left, the handle on the wall began to move,” she began. “Lily put her hands on the handle and pushed down and the cable broke and — ”

“Thank you, Dakota.” Coach Neuwirth strode to his desk. “Lily Michaels-Ryan, please accompany me to my desk.”

I followed him to the front of the class, keenly aware that every set of eyes in the room was fixed on me. Coach Neuwirth filled out a form for me to take to the office, not the usual pink half-page referral form, but an ominous shade of yellow with pages of carbons. As I stared at the razor stubble on top of his pale head, I realized I’d messed up pretty badly. So badly, I probably wouldn’t be allowed to see my father in the summer.

“It wasn’t just me,” I said. “There was someone on the other side pushing down. I didn’t mean to break the door, it’s just . . .”

Coach Neuwirth ignored me.

“You’ll note, Miss Michaels-Ryan, that I have filled out a Skrellnetch form for you. Your mother will have to sign the kerblig and return it to the main office before you can be burn to clabs . . .”

This would be a good time to mention that I’d stopped taking my ADHD meds about a month earlier because they made me puke randomly and caused my head to ring like an empty bell at night. Side effects.

“. . . Your parents will have to sign the kerblig before you can be burn to clabs. Do you understand me?”

He waited, holding the Skrellnetch form that I needed to take to the office. Clearly, he had no plans to hand me the all-important Skrellnetch form until I answered him. I contemplated my choices. If I said yes, he would hold me responsible for remembering every clause in his statement, and I would be made to suffer later because I had no idea what he had just said. My heart pounded with a weird mix- ture of fear and exhilaration.

However, if I said no, Coach Neuwirth would consider it a sign of insubordination and general smart-assery. It didn’t look good for me.

“So . . . what copy does my mom sign again?”

Peals of laughter erupted from behind me. Someone muttered, “Ass-hat,” and the laughter increased.

“Get the hell out of my classroom,” Coach Neuwirth said. He threw the Skrellnetch paper across his desk at me.

I began my trek to the office, hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone while I held the stupid Skrellnetch form. After the noise and glare of the classroom, the quiet calm of the hall, with every other row of fluorescent lights off to save on electricity, was a relief. Six steps of cool dark, six steps of bright white burn. Down the stairs. The first floor had a band of colored tiles at shoulder height: white, mustard yel- low, white, blue. I held my right hand out and touched only the blue tiles as I passed through the hall, feeling my jittery state of anxiety mute into a dull, sad place in the center of my chest.

Down at the office, kindly Mrs. Treviño eyed my yel- low Skrellnetch form with visible regret.

“Lily, what happened?” she said, as though I’d twisted an ankle in gym, or had some other not-my-fault kind of accident.

“I broke the sliding wall between Coach Neuwirth’s and Ms. Cardeña’s rooms.”

Mrs. Treviño sighed deeply. I looked away as my lips started to quiver. A gray cloud of shame descended on me with remorseless speed. I’d like to be the good, thoughtful person Mrs. Treviño had mis- taken me for. A person who doesn’t break stuff.

“Well, you’re not the only one,” she said. “Come on back.”

She escorted me to the inner chamber. There, by the vice principal’s office, were two ugly orange chairs. On one chair sat Abelard Mitchell. I took one look at him and knew he’d been on the other side of the wall pulling up on the handle while I pushed down.

Mrs. Treviño gestured to the empty chair and left us alone in the waiting area.

I’d known Abelard since kindergarten. Since my last name was Michaels-Ryan and his was Mitchell, we stood next to each other at every elementary school function. Abelard was tall and slim but broad-shouldered, with a mop of sable brown hair and dark blue eyes. He was gorgeous, but he had some sort of processing delay, mild autism or Asperger’s syndrome or something. He didn’t interact like everyone else.

But sure. Neither did I. When I was seven, I acciden- tally smacked Abelard with my metal lunchbox because I couldn’t stop swinging my arms. I cut his cheek, but he didn’t cry, and no one noticed until later, so now he had this little scar, which was weirdly sexy. Abelard never said anything. He had to have noticed that I was standing there in front of him swinging my Hello Kitty lunchbox with happy, maniacal abandon.

I liked to believe that he could have cashed me in to the teacher and he didn’t.

I dropped into the chair next to him, feeling suddenly nervous to be sitting on a chair that was actually bolted to his chair — as though even the furniture was there to be punished.

“Hey,” I said, a little too loudly. “So you were on the other side of the wall? Who knew it would break like that? You’d think a handle roughly the same age as the Titanic would be sturdier. Although I guess that’s a bad compari- son.”

He said nothing. He was probably thinking about com- puter games, or quantum physics, or the novels of Hermann Hesse. From all available information, which I’ll admit was limited, Abelard was pretty brilliant.

“You were on the other side of the wall.” Abelard glanced at me and looked away.

“Yes.” I felt a strange thrill of complicity. “Usually, I’m here by myself. Why did you . . .”

I stopped before I asked him the stupidest of questions: Why did you break that? My least favorite question in the history of questions.

“The mechanism was squeaking. One of the gears is rusted. They need to oil it.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what to say, or if there was anything to say. I thought of Abelard, under the same anx- ious impulse to touch everything in the world of the here and now that we could feel with our hands. But unlike me, he was thinking about the hidden gears in the box, years of neglect and humidity, gears rusting away unused. He wanted to fix things, not destroy them. A more evolved monster, Abelard.

He leaned over and peered at me from under his shaggy fringe of hair. I caught a hint of his warm scent. Nice.

“Lily Michaels-Ryan,” he said. “You were in my English class last year. You hit me with a lunchbox in first grade.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “I hope it didn’t hurt too much. On the plus side, I really do like the scar. It makes you look like a pirate, a little disreputable, you know?”

Abelard brought his hand to his cheek and traced the edges of the scar as though checking to see if it was still there. Suddenly, I wanted to run my hand along his cheek- bone to feel for that slightly raised skin, proof of my earlier bad act.

The sight of his hand on his cheek made me conscious of where my hand was on the arm of the chair, touching the sleeve of his shirt. A phone rang in the office around the corner. Mrs. Treviño’s voice came from the outer office, but it felt like she was on the other side of the world. We were alone.

“Abelard, why didn’t you tell anyone that I hit you with my lunchbox?” I said. “I never got in trouble for that.”

Abelard frowned in slow motion. He seemed slightly offended, like I’d accused his seven-year-old self of being a tattletale and a snitch. I’d been right. He had protected me, one freak to another. I felt a swell of something more than gratitude, more than surprise.

Abelard’s lips parted slightly, like he had something to say that he didn’t want anyone else to hear. I wanted to know what he was thinking. Suddenly, what Abelard had to say seemed like the most important thing in the world.

I turned my head and put my arm down on the chair to lean in so he could whisper in my ear. My arm slipped on the ancient vinyl, and I accidentally moved too close to Abelard, which is a thing that I do. I’m not good with per- sonal space.

Abelard didn’t say anything. I felt his warm breath on the side of my face, a thousand little hairs on my cheek moving in the soft breeze, and I thought of his cheek and how I’d wanted to run my finger along the edge of his scar. And still it seemed like Abelard had something to say, but it wasn’t coming, and maybe he was too anxious to speak. I didn’t know what to say either. My brain was not forming thoughts in English.

I lifted my face and he looked away. But his lips were there, centimeters from mine.

I kissed him. The kiss was over before I really knew what I was doing, just a momentary soft press of my lips against his. A stray impulse that didn’t make sense, my wires crossed by the randomness of the day.

What was I thinking?

“Well, it was nice of you not to tell on me, even though you were only seven.” I went on talking as though I hadn’t just kissed him. I do this a lot. When you live at the mercy of your impulses like I do, you pretty much have to.

“Maybe you should have told someone? You probably needed stitches. Not that I don’t like the scar — it’s a great scar.”

Abelard brought his index finger to his lips and frowned. He had one of those serious, symmetrical faces that a slight frown only improves.

“Lily,” he said slowly, “I — ”

I braced myself for a quick, awkward rejection, but before Abelard could finish his sentence, Vice Principal Krenwelge rounded the corner. I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved.

CHAPTER TWO

My mother came to get me at school. She arrived look- ing 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 activ- ity, 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 milk- ing goats and picking organic beets. Heaven. I’d miss Mom and Iris, but clearly I belonged in a “less-structured learn- ing 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 big- gest 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 spe- cialist 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 devot- edly 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 recog- nized 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 should 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 wav- ing 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 THREE 

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 stir- ring.

“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 slump- ing 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 medi- cation 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 expe- rience 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 kinder- garten. She’s tiny and plays small children in local theatri- cal 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, mac- robiotic, 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 avoid- ing 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 nui- sance, 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 FOUR

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.”

“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 break- ing 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 conversa- tion 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 teach- ers 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 mainte- nance. Was there anything he didn’t know?

***

Detention was pretty boring. Half an hour later, I’d fin- ished 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, draw- ing. 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 insuf- ficient 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 move- ments. 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 clas- sic 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 even- tually 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 pic- ture 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 care- fully.

“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 mate- rial, 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 boy- friend. 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 tra- vails 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 moth- er’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 curricu- lum at LAME.

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 glam- our 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.

******

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