Beastly: Lindy's Diary (5 page)

Once, when I accidentally brushed up against Adrian’s arm, I was imagining he was Kyle, and I felt a

shock of electricity all through my body. If only he was Kyle.

But no. Kyle isn’t what I want, isn’t what I should want. If I’m honest with myself—and I try to be—the

main thing Kyle had going for him was looks. Maybe Adrian will have everything else. Maybe we can be

friends.

I could use a friend, actually, and by the looks of it, so could he.

So I admired each rose, which wasn’t hard. They were as beautiful as their owner was strange. And it

was flattering to have someone try so hard to impress me. No one had ever cared before.

Adrian offered to cut some of the roses for me, but I said,

“Maybe I’ll come back to see them,” and then, I made myself take a long look at his face and was struck,

once again, by his beautiful, catlike eyes. Hadn’t Kyle’s been the same blue? Maybe. But that was where

the resemblance ended.

Then, Will showed up. Adrian told him I was there, and he acted all happy and announced we’d be

reading Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 54.”

!!!!!

“No way! I was just reading that this morning,” I said.

Will asked Adrian to read it aloud, and it was beautiful.

He read beautifully, and when we discussed the sonnet, Adrian seemed to understand it better than most of the kids in my class. Okay, his understanding was a little surface-y, like someone who’d looked the poem

up on Wikipedia or something. But that was way more than I was used to. I mean, he actually cared
.

I said, “I love these old sonnets.”

“Why?” he asked. “I mean, not that I don’t. I was just wondering why you love them?”

I laughed. “It’s okay if you don’t love them. At my school, people kind of thought I was a mutant because I loved every moldy old poem we read.”

God, why did I keep saying stuff like “mutant”? But I kept going. “I love Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks like The Iliad and The Odyssey, Chaucer, even Thomas Malory.

But the people in my class, they wanted to analyze song lyrics or something.”

He didn’t reply, but I talk when I get nervous, so I kept going. On and on and on and on, saying pretentious stuff like, “I think that it’s not really possible to understand the new things without seeing their origins. I mean, there would have been no Once and Future King if Malory hadn’t written Le Morte d’Arthur, and

there would be no song lyrics if we hadn’t first read Shakespeare’s sonnets.

You know?”

Clearly, he didn’t know. He was staring at me, that weird, fixed stare I often got from classmates, like I might possibly have gone off the deep end, babbling about my favorite subject. Literally, no one got me

unless they were a 70-year-old English teacher.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know I get carried away.” I vowed not to tell him about how Shakespeare was like

a personal friend of mine.

He shook his head. “No. No, not at all. Man, that is just so . . . I never thought of it that way. Wow. I mean, wow!

Hearing you talk about it like that, it makes me want to read all that stuff. What was that last one you said, Le Morte d’Arthur? Is that like King Arthur? I’m really into heroes.”

“Me too!” I found I could look at him now, without even thinking about it. “I have Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in my room. They’re poems about Arthur. Epic poems.” I tried not to sigh a little when I said “epic.”

I glanced at Will. “Maybe we could read them sometime, Will?” Will said, “Don’t look at me. I’m just

furniture.” Adrian laughed and said, “Please, Will. It would be . . .

epic.”

And he wasn’t joking.

We moved on to math then, in which Adrian was really smart, and then history. He had some decent

thoughts on the French and Indian War, a war teachers usually brush over. Apparently, he and Will had

actually discussed it in over. Apparently, he and Will had actually discussed it in depth.

By the time we went upstairs to have lunch, I was thinking this might not actually suck as bad as I thought it would.

July 26

Yesterday’s entry was interrupted by Adrian, who knocked on my door, first off, to ask me if I was having dinner with them (I was) and secondly to make, he said, a confession.

“A confession?” I asked, thinking, Okay, this is the part where he tells me he actually does intend to sell me on the black market after all.

But he said, “I don’t know squat about poetry.” I laughed and said, “Sure you do. You had a lot to say

about sonnet fifty-four.”

He said, “I cheated. I looked it up. Will told me ahead of time what we were going to do, and I studied. I didn’t want to look stupid in front of you.” Wikipedia. Just as I thought. Playing with a girl’s feelings about poetry.

He said, “Stupid and ugly is a deadly combination.” Aaaaannnnd . . . I forgave him. I said, “You’re not

stupid.

You’re great at math—can’t fake that. And you had a lot to say about the French and Indian War.” I

cringed, realizing I hadn’t contradicted his assertion that he was ugly. I couldn’t. He would know I was

lying.

He said, “Ah, well . . . Will and I read The Last of the Mohicans.”

I smiled. “See, I haven’t read that.”

“The important thing is,” he said, “I lied about Shakespeare. Yes, I lied because you have to try harder

when you look like a supervil ain, but I don’t want to lie to you. I want to be friends, which requires total and complete honesty. Usually, I’m one of those people you talked about, the people who don’t understand

why we read the moldy old stuff.”

So did he come to insult my taste? But then he added,

“Until now. Hearing you talking about Shakespeare and all those other writers really made me want to

read them.” I still didn’t know if he was making fun of me or what, but then he said, “Will you teach me

about poetry?” That was all I needed, all I needed to start babbling on about every poem I’d ever read in my entire life. If you think I didn’t recite parts of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” you don’t know me very well. And then, I started on “Dover Beach,” and he listened like he was actually, you know,

listening.

I got to the last stanza, the part that goes, Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept

with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night. He got really excited.

“Hey, I know that poem,” he said. “Wasn’t that in Fahrenheit 451?” I remembered that yes, it had been.

The part where the fireman, Guy Montag, reads poetry to his wife and her friends, to show them why

books shouldn’t be burned.

“That book was awesome,” he said. “It was the first book I ever really loved, and it started me reading

all this other science fiction, like Asimov and Toffler.” Now, science fiction is the one genre that totally makes my eyes glaze over, but it was cool that he read, and I actually liked Fahrenheit 451. I told him so.

Which led to another fifteen minutes of talking about that.

And, at the end of it, I realized I’d been standing there with him for almost an hour and I hadn’t once

thought about how weird looking he was, hadn’t once thought about how I was a prisoner here. Hadn’t

thought about my father or school.

And then, Magda called us for dinner and Adrian said he would read Shakespeare and he would read

Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and anything else I wanted him to read, if I would just forgive him for his lie, and loan him the books, which he was pretty sure I had.

I gave him Idylls of the King, and by this morning, he’d already read “The Coming of Arthur,” “Gareth

and Lynette,” and all the way to “Merlin and Vivien.” He confessed he’d stayed up most of the night to

read them.

Before Will came, we sat and read “Lancelot and Elaine” together, and I swear I thought I saw him wipe

a tear from his eye when Elaine’s body was borne down the Thames past Camelot, but I pretended not to

notice.

But Will, who showed up just then, did notice. He was all,

“Was that sniffling I just heard? Are you crying, Adrian?” Adrian laughed at that and said Will ’s

supersonic blind-person hearing was obviously failing him and that he was not crying. I assured Will that it had been me and told him what we’d been reading.

So then, Will calls Adrian a heartless beast for not crying over one of the most touching passages in

English lit.

I sort of froze at the word beast, but Adrian laughed and said, “Poetry’s for sissies!”

Adrian was an unusual guy in more ways than just his appearance.

I want to ask him more about himself, about what it’s like to be like he is, but I guess it would be too

embarrassing.

There are plenty of things I don’t want him to ask me about either. So it was fine just to talk about poetry.

September 1

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written, mostly because I’ve been so busy reading to keep up with

Adrian. Also, watching baseball, because it turns out he’s a major Yankees fan and so am I.

Between watching the games and discussing the Yanks’

chances at the pennant, we have sort of a running game of Can You Top This? where our childhoods are

concerned.

It went like this:

Me: Did you ever play baseball?

Him: Nah, my dad wasn’t much for throwing a ball. He offered to have the maid practice with me, but it

didn’t seem like real baseball that way.

Me: Understood.

Him: We did watch a game on TV . . . once. But we never went to a game because, you know, the

shrieking mobs with pitchforks would have made things uncomfortable.

Me: (nervous laugh, but tucking away the information that he’d always looked like this) Aren’t you going

to ask me if my dad took me to any ball games?

Him: Sorry. I thought it might be a sensitive subject. He didn’t exactly seem like the type of guy who’d put buying peanuts and Cracker Jacks high on his priority list.

Me: It’s true. Most of our Cracker Jack budget has been going for actual crack lately. But when I was

little, we used to go.

And then, I stopped joking and told him about how it was, back when my mom was alive. We were a

normal family, my two sisters and I. Mom was a paralegal. Dad was an English teacher at Tuttle, which is

how I got so interested in poetry and stuff like that. But then, when my mom died, he sort of freaked out, started doing drugs. Prescription stuff first, to help him sleep, but then, it was easier to get the other stuff.

He got fired from Tuttle. My sister Sarah, who’d been going there, had to drop out and go to public

school. She never forgave him. But when I got old enough to go to middle school myself, she told me we

should call them, give them a guilt trip about firing my dad (even though, really, we knew they’d had no

choice), get them to give me a scholarship. After all, I had the grades for it.

That’s how I started going to Tuttle.

“Did you like it?” Adrian asked, and that set off a whole other train of thought because, no, I hadn’t liked it. I’d hated it. I mean, yes, I’d been physically safe at Tuttle, unlike at my old school or even at home, but I hated going someplace where everyone was rich and beautiful and treated me like I was vaguely—if I’m

honest here, not even vaguely—dirty compared to them just because I was poor. The fact is, here, in this

apartment, where I’m being held prisoner, I’m actually happier than I’ve been in a long time, and these

people—this freakish boy, blind man, and their maid—are the closest I’ve had to a real family since my

mother died. We have dinner together.

And yesterday, Magda taught Adrian and me to make flan for dessert. Will and I do yoga every morning,

and we have a baseball pool going. For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m part of something. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome, but if so, I’m moving to Stockholm.

Finally, I said, “No, I didn’t really like it. I mean, it was a good education, but the people there were snobs.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What are you sorry about? They’d have been just as snobby to you.”

More snobby, I was thinking. He looked thoughtful, and for a second, I was worried I’d hurt his feelings.

But then he said, “Well, that’s obvious. Good thing neither of us have to go there, right?”

And I agreed that it was a good thing, then changed the subject back to baseball. Fortunately, we had a lot to talk about.

October 23

Last year, when Kyle Kingsbury gave me that rose at the dance, I thought that whenever I smelled roses, I would think of him.

I was wrong.

It’s fall now. It has been three months since I came to live with Adrian, three months, studying every day in his rose garden. Now, the scent of roses has become hopelessly, irrevocably associated with Adrian.

Sometimes I think I’ve become used to it, and I ask him if we can study someplace else for a day, so the

next day, I can experience it anew.

It’s hard for me to believe I missed the beginning of school. I wonder if people have even noticed I’m

gone. If they have, they probably just think I went back to my old school. I don’t miss Tuttle, where I was so invisible.

Other Things I Don’t Miss

—Guys lurking on our doorstep

—Weird noises outside at night

—My dad not coming home for days or nights on end

—Being alone and frightened

Sometimes I do worry about my father. I don’t know if he actually went to rehab. Chances are, he didn’t.

But I push that fear back. After all, he ditched me here. I’ve at least earned the right not to obsess over him.