Robin Talley - Pulp - the must read inspiring LGBT novel from the award winning author Robin Talley

“Okay.” Abby struggled to think of something to say about school. Mom always tried to act as if she was interested in her life, which meant she never gave up until Abby told her at least one story about her day. “We went to Starbucks during free period and Ben got into this big involved debate with the barista about Game of Thrones . Then Vanessa told them both to quit it unless they were ready to talk about the inherent sexism in the writing, and we all started fighting about Daenerys, and Linh and I were almost late for stats.”

Mom laughed and settled down into the desk chair, opposite Abby on the bed. “How’s it going with you and Linh being friends now that you’ve been back in school for a few weeks? I know it can be difficult after a big change.”

“It’s fine.” Abby wished she hadn’t told her parents about her and Linh breaking up. She doubted they would’ve noticed if she hadn’t spelled it out for them. Back in June, when it first happened, they hadn’t seemed to realize she was crying in her room every night. Of course, the whole thing had been their fault in the first place, but they never seemed to grasp that, either.

But Abby had gone over and over it in her head, and it was the only explanation. The weirdness between her and Linh had started that day in May, when Linh and Abby had sat motionless on the stairs watching Mom and Dad’s mutual meltdown.

Right after that whole thing happened Abby had been pretty messed up, so they’d gone to Linh’s house. There was nowhere else to go. It was a long walk, all uphill, and they’d left Abby’s house so fast to get away from the parent drama that they’d wound up leaving Linh’s backpack on the floor of Abby’s room. The backpack had probably had stuff in it Linh needed for school the next day, but they didn’t talk about that. They didn’t talk about anything, in fact.

Instead, when they got inside Linh’s house and saw that it was cool and dark and empty—deserted except for the two of them, the tasteful linen furniture and the cat purring in front of the restored brick fireplace—they’d started kissing. Then they went up to Linh’s room.

If Abby had known that was going to be the last time they had sex, she probably would’ve paid more attention to the details. She’d be able to remember exactly how it started, exactly what they were wearing, exactly who said what and when. Though she wasn’t sure either of them had said much of anything, come to think of it.

There was another fanfiction term— hurt/comfort . It used to be one of Abby’s favorite fic genres, back before she knew what actual hurting felt like.

In hurt/comfort stories, something bad happened to one character, and then another character comforted them. Usually with lots of soft words and making out. Or more than making out, depending on the story’s rating.

That evening, as she gazed into the sunset during the slow walk back from Linh’s house, Abby had reflected, This is my very own real-life hurt/comfort story .

She’d thought putting a label on it might help. She was wrong.

Abby and Linh had never spoken about anything that happened that afternoon. But a few days afterward, Linh started talking about breaking up.

She was casual about it at first. So casual Abby got away with pretending not to understand, for a while. The problem was, Linh kept bringing it up. They were going to be apart for the summer anyway, she’d pointed out, with Linh off in Hanoi and Abby in Massachusetts—and everyone knew long-distance relationships were basically impossible. Maybe, she’d finally said one afternoon, casting a sideways glance at Abby, they were only delaying the inevitable.

Abby didn’t let on how much that hurt. She hadn’t stopped caring about Linh just because her family was slowly imploding.

But she didn’t want to fight about it, because the very idea of fighting made her think about her parents. When Abby’s mom and dad were fighting, they didn’t even seem to care if they were hurting each other. Sometimes, they almost seemed to want to hurt each other.

So the night before Linh’s flight, when she oh-so-casually mentioned breaking up again, Abby closed her eyes and nodded. She was tired, and so she agreed, because agreeing was easy.

She’d told herself it was temporary. That by the time the summer ended, Linh would realize how wrong she’d been, and they could pick up where they’d left off. For now, though, they’d agreed to be “just friends.” Abby figured that was better than nothing at all.

They emailed every day that summer. At first, they kept it light. Linh told Abby about all the mistakes she was making as she struggled to learn Vietnamese, and about how every time she tried to cross the street she was positive she was going to get hit by a speeding motorcycle. She told funny stories, too, about how it was so oppressively humid that standing on the riverbanks watching the dragon boat races felt like standing in the middle of a thick wet cloud, and how she’d feared for her life the first time she climbed onto the back of her cousin’s motorized scooter, but once they started moving the adrenaline rush was so addictive she was thinking about borrowing the scooter and venturing out on her own.

As the summer went on, though, Linh’s emails changed. She started writing Abby long messages late at night about how complicated her feelings were becoming the longer she stayed in Hanoi. She wrote about how frustrating it was when strangers greeted her in Vietnamese, then started politely treating her like an out-of-touch foreigner when they realized she didn’t understand. The language barrier put a constant strain on things at home, too, since Linh was spending all her time with her cousins. She was having a great time getting to know them, but communicating was still a big challenge. And as the end of the summer got closer, it was upsetting her more and more to think that this could be one of the last chances she’d have to spend time with all the relatives she’d grown close to.

Abby read all of Linh’s emails closely. She spent hours looking up college cultural exchange programs and internships in Vietnam that Linh might be able to apply to next year, and she sent her long, detailed replies full of links and bullet points.

She tried to read between the lines of what Linh was saying, too. Sometimes, sprinkled throughout the stories about her trip, there would be occasional less-specific comments. Comments like, It’s just so hard to know if you’re making the right decisions until it’s already too late . And, Lately I’ve been changing my mind so often I can barely think in a straight line .

Those comments gave Abby hope. Maybe too much hope.

But she knew better than to ask about that over email. That conversation should wait until they were in the same country, at least. So instead she told Linh funny stories of her own, like the one about the poetry reading her creative writing camp had gone to, and how all the boys had giggled and made inappropriate gestures during the poems about sex, and how it made her feel bad for all the straight and otherwise non-gay girls who had to put up with that kind of thing on the regular.

Abby didn’t usually say much about her real life in those emails. There never seemed to be anything worth saying. She mentioned once or twice that her parents seemed to carefully coordinate their phone calls so that she never wound up talking to them both on the same day, and that she and Ethan only texted each other in emojis now. But she always tried to make those stories funny, too, using plenty of emojis of her own.

Either way, all that emailing had brought her and Linh closer—or so Abby thought. She was sure that when the school year started up again, Linh would realize she’d been wrong to freak out about what happened, and things could go back to the way they’d been. Or at least some approximation.