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you're so gorgeous, people say to her all the time, with this half-sad look on their face made up of what remains unsaid, i don't know how you aren't in love right now. because everyone else is. even charlie brown got together with heather wold.
but if she's honest, she doesn't really want to be.
/
lucy van pelt was in love once. with a blond boy whose eyes reminded her of the grass and who played the piano like heartstrings, so beautifully, so heartrendingly. she'd visit him three times a week, sometimes more. so close to him that through proximity or osmosis or airborne contagion she can somehow find absolution for her feelings.
but that was then.
/
there's a certain impossibility, abnormality in them; lucy had thought it benign, but now it is malignant. schroeder had touched her like lightning and smiled like sunshine; he let free the disasters which lurked within her mind. (aren't therapists just hosts for the demons of so many?)
/
why don't you just ask him, lucy? violet asks her over calculus. the worst schroeder can say is no, isn't it?
exactly, violet.
/
a couple years ago, when he would be over with frieda, lucy would imagine switching places with her. she'd imagine being the one to hold his hand, to kiss, to go home with, to love him. she'd daydream about what could be and spent hours in her room writing about him and the (un?)requited love.
now, all she does is push him out of her mind.
/
the truth: when lucy was in love with schroeder, she didn't feel like herself. she felt vulnerable. she cared about what he thought of her and she hated it. she hated caring about another's opinion on her. she hated going over every little thing they did or didn't say to each other, over-analyzing it and thinking about what she could've said that would've made the conversation better.
but most of all, she hated feeling weak.
/
so what happened with you and that boy? he asks her one night after she was in love with him. you two seemed quite good together. she bites on her lip to keep from screaming that the only one she'd be good with is right in front of her.
instead, she shrugs. he didn't want it - us - anymore. she wonders, briefly, when he'd turned into the analyst; wasn't she the one who was going to be a psychiatrist?
did you?
a pause. lucy looks schroeder in the eye.
i don't think i ever did.
/
lucy van pelt does not have many experiences with love. there's only one boy for her; there's only one love that makes her feel complete and infinite at the same time.
but she hid it in a box and kept it underneath her bed.
/
she thinks of schroeder as a virus, sometimes. an incurable disease that's attacking every cell in her petite body, infecting her blood with a mysterious feeling that strips her of her power and renders her fragile, weak.
(but this disease, it is her salvation, not her damnation.)
/
once upon a time, lucy van pelt was in love.
as she looks at the blond boy whose love for beethoven was stronger than his love for himself, who she still visits three times a week, sometimes more, except this time he does not have any girl on his arm, she finally realizes that, maybe, she had never been out of it.
(absolution was overrated anyway.)