Lakelore, page 10
“So I was thinking about what we were talking about,” Bastián says.
“What?” I ask.
“Daily gender forecasts,” Bastián says. “What if we do it?”
I turn the glitter jar over. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, whenever we want,” Bastián says, “we can just say what our daily forecast is, and then at least someone will know.”
“What if I don’t know what percentage masculinity’s in the forecast?” I ask.
“Then pick anything,” Bastián says. “Whatever feels like it says your gender right now. Like, yesterday, I could say my gender was”—Bastián thinks for a minute—“probably a perfectly folded T-shirt.”
“Of course it was.” I bet all Bastián’s T-shirts are perfectly folded. It’s one of the things I noticed about their room, the mix of order and chaos. Art supplies cluttered their desk, and flocks of index cards covered their corkboard at all angles, but there weren’t clothes left on the floor or scattered around except a stray jacket. Everything I learn about this boy—this boy who maybe folds and puts away their laundry right after washing it but who also doesn’t realize when there’s paint on their hands—makes me want to learn more about them. And it makes me wonder, even more, if there are similarities between their brain and mine.
“Or maybe my abuelo’s dictionary,” Bastián says. “Yeah. That’s what I’m going with.”
As I spin the glitter jar in my hands, I picture what their grandfather’s dictionary might look like, the weathered cover, the onionskin. Did Bastián’s grandfather make alebrijes like their great-grandfather? Is there paint on the binding and the edges of the pages?
“Your turn.” Bastián looks at me. “Gender forecast.”
“For right now?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Right now?” I shake the glitter jar. “I think it might be this.”
“Okay.” Bastián’s smile is shy, and they don’t quite look at me, like I’ve given them some kind of compliment they want but don’t know what to do with. “What about yesterday?”
“I guess”—I think about it, how I felt, how to put it in terms other than masculine and feminine, boy or girl, neither or both or somewhere in the space between—“really strong coffee. Or maybe that popping sound soda makes.”
“A gender fizz.” Bastián nods. “Sounds like the next big drink.”
For a minute, I’m quiet.
When it comes to being trans, so many things can take the air out of me. The misgendering. The questions about why I can’t just be a girl all the time if I can be a girl any of the time. The questions about what got me so confused that I became someone who lives in the space between genders, as though it was that space between that confused me, and not the world’s insistence that I live elsewhere.
But this, what Bastián’s saying, that look, that puts some of the air back into me.
“None of this would make sense to anyone else,” I say.
“So what?” Bastián says. “It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else.”
Bastián puts the cap on a permanent marker someone left open near the paper cutter. “The tourists never recap the pens. My sociology observation of the day.”
“You get a lot of tourists in here?” I ask.
“A print-and-ship place?” Bastián says. “Oh yeah. Especially this time of year. People staying down the shore with their families come here to do their work stuff.”
I turn the glitter jar in my hands again. The sun through the store windows winks off the glitter and throws points of light onto both of us.
“So what about you?” I ask. “What’s your current gender forecast?”
“Right now?” Bastián breathes out so slowly the sound gets folded into the rustling of paper. “I think it’s a vial of testosterone I don’t know what to do with.”
“Literally or figuratively?” I ask.
“Literally,” Bastián says. “I have it at home, and I just keep staring at it.”
“It’s a big decision,” I say.
“It’s not that.” Bastián neatens a stack of envelopes near a photo printer. “I made the decision. I already had my first shot.”
“Oh,” I say. “Then, felicidades?”
“Thanks?” Bastián says, laughing as they imitate the question sound of how I said it.
“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean it that way. I mean, it sounds like you know this is right for you, so I’m confused. Why the staring at the vial?”
Bastián breathes out again, harder this time. It’s officially a sigh. “A nurse gave me my first injection, so that was good. But the clinic is an hour away, so I’ve got to learn to do them at home. And I’m not great with directions, giving them or following them.”
“And yet you work here.” I look around at the copiers, printers, scanners. “Each one of these must have an instruction manual a thousand pages long.”
“It’s adorable that you think I read them,” Bastián says.
“You don’t?” I ask.
“Not even a little.” Bastián pulls out an original someone left in a copier and then cleans the glass plate. “I work on instinct.”
“I’m even more impressed now,” I say.
“Yeah, except it works until it doesn’t,” Bastián says. “The directions for my shot, I know I’ll get used to them eventually.” Bastián sweeps tinsel-sized filaments of paper off the paper cutter. “But they seem so complicated that the complication takes over my brain and I just freeze up.”
“They didn’t explain it to you during your appointment?” I ask.
“Oh, they did,” Bastián says through a worn-out laugh. “I just didn’t get it. And I didn’t ask the nurse to explain it again, and I should have. She would have gone over it again. I just didn’t ask. I never seem to realize how much I should have asked until it’s too late.”
I can feel Bastián’s wince so clearly it presses into my chest plate. I know that feeling of not asking because you don’t want to admit that you didn’t understand something, that after several more repetitions you still might not understand it, the worry that the other person’s patience will thin and fray before you can.
“What about your parents?” I ask.
Bastián hesitates. “They’ve been really great about everything, but if they’re part of this—you know, more than they already have been by just being my parents—then they’re gonna ask all the questions. ‘Do you feel different now,’ ‘how do you feel,’ ‘do you feel okay,’ ‘are you sure this is safe.’ And I don’t think they want that any more than I do. I think they’re more nervous about it than I am.”
“That sounds like a lot,” I say.
“It’s been less than a week and they look at me like they’re listening for my voice to crack, and it’s making me really tense.” Bastián drops a few of the stray paper clips they’re collecting.
I pick them up, our fingers brushing as I slip them into Bastián’s hand. We both look up at the same time. I look away, fast, before I know if Bastián does the same thing.
“I just don’t want it to be a big deal.” Bastián gathers up a few more errant paper clips, some rubber bands. “And I don’t want this to be the thousandth thing they have to help me with.”
“Then let me,” I say.
The words are out of my mouth on impulse, and seeing the shocked look on Bastián’s face, I wish I could pull them back.
“Are you serious?” Bastián asks, but they sound more hopeful than shocked.
“If you want,” I say. “I’m pretty good with directions.”
Not exactly a lie. I’m great with directions as long as I’m hearing them and not reading them. Pictures help. I’m really hoping there are pictures.
“I don’t mean the shot,” I say. “I mean the figuring-it-out part. I can help you with the shot if you want, but you’d have to be okay with me seeing”—I check to make sure no one’s close enough to listen, or waiting for Bastián to help with a copier—“whatever part of you we’re working with.”
Bastián looks at me a little oddly. “My leg?”
“You can do it in your leg?” I ask.
“That’s where the nurse gave me my first one, yeah.”
This all just got simultaneously more and less awkward.
“Why do you look so relieved?” Bastián says.
“No reason,” I say.
“Wait.” Bastián starts laughing. “Were you willing to put a syringe in my ass?”
“Shut up,” I say. “That’s where I thought they went. That’s where they told me back when I was thinking about it. No, really, shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Bastián says, but they’re clearly making an effort not to laugh.
“Okay, but your face right now,” I say.
“My face?” Bastián says. “You should see yours. It’s priceless.” Bastián looks at me, right at me, and we’re close enough that I can see a slight red tint to their eyes that only shows in direct sunlight, a warmth in the brown.
Why do I feel this off-kilter right now, when we’ve been in a world that doesn’t exist to anyone else? Why do I have trouble looking at this boy now when our hands have found each other in seagrass?
Bastián watches the refracted light from the glitter. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Just tell me when.”
My hands turn the jar, and it looks like it holds stardust or a sunset. The glitter sends fireflies of green and yellow light over our faces and chests.
“Sebastián,” says a woman holding her hand over the microphone half of a desk phone. “Machine three’s out of legal-size.”
Bastián cuffs up their sleeves and says in a voice filled with theatrical gravitas, “This is my chance to shine.”
I give an equally serious nod. “Godspeed.”
LORE
Abril’s deliberations over a new conditioner make my tape selection look rushed.
“I asked my grandmother,” she says, “and here’s what I found out.”
She tells me the building has a long history of lakelore. One fall, orange sunburst lichen grew on the side of the building, perfectly predicting the storms that season. Another year, it was angry about beautiful stones being taken from the shore, and the curb in front tripped every tourist who had coyamito agate in their pockets. Ten years after that, people insisted that when the weather and the moon and the seiches were right, pools opened up in the sidewalk, like rings cut in ice, revealing opaleye and mooneye fish swirling underneath.
“My abuela doesn’t really believe that last one,” Abril says. “The point is, it’s always been a house with a lot of feelings.”
So this was long enough ago that it was one enormous house, before they divided the building into units.
“So what do I do?” I ask.
Abril smells a bottle with the attention of a perfumer. “My grandmother says to fluff the pillows.”
I don’t even try not to stare. “What?”
“Not literally.” Abril puts the bottle back. “Well, yes, literally. But not just the pillows. She says open the curtains. Smooth down the corners of the wallpaper. Show you care. She says sometimes ghosts and unsettled spaces just need to be shown a little consideration.”
“And that works?” I ask.
“My abuela knows this stuff,” Abril says. “Once her sister moved into the house and kept losing things. They would just disappear from right where she left them. Then my grandmother found out that the original owner had painted the house coral because it was her favorite color and she wanted to live inside her favorite color. But then when she died, the next owners had painted it a different color, and the place got really angry. When my grandmother convinced her sister to paint it back, everything was fine.”
“I’ll try it,” I say, not adding I’ll try anything.
Abril picks up a bottle that’s raspberry-scented, the conditioner tinted pink. “I meant to ask you. Did you tell me how you and Bastián met?”
“It was a long time ago,” I say.
Abril keeps looking at me. Her expressions says I’ll wait.
“I was here on a field trip,” I say, “and I was kind of hiding from someone. That’s when I met Bastián. At the lake.”
A light comes on in Abril’s eyes. “That was you?”
“What?” I ask.
Bastián told her about me? Us meeting was significant enough for them to tell a friend, and for that friend to remember?
Abril looks startled, like she just realized her mistake.
In an attempt to dispel the awkwardness of this moment, I grab a bottle of the conditioner my mom and I have both used for three years. “Try this.”
Abril smells it. “I like it.” I have no idea if she means it or is just trying to help with the awkwardness, but either way, I’ll take it.
I go home. And every time I take breaks from sanding and painting, I circle the rooms, dusting windowsills and smoothing the curling edges of old wallpaper. I scrub marks off door frames and dust the top of the fridge. I take the glass cover off each ceiling light and wash it in the bathroom sink. I show all the consideration I can, hoping it might settle these rooms and that chilling laugh.
BASTIÁN
When Lore comes over, I’m in the kitchen, sitting on top of the fridge.
Lore looks up at me. “Should I ask?”
“You’re the one who just talked to Abril,” I say. “Should I ask?”
“We’re trying something,” Lore says.
I hand Lore the directions I’m studying and climb down. “Did you know a group of salamanders is called a maelstrom?”
Lore stands back while I jump down from the counter.
“I can’t read these,” Lore says.
“Oh,” I say. “Right. Sorry.”
“I mean, I can read them.” Lore washes their hands at the sink, the soap fluffing on their hands. “But I won’t get much of them unless you want to stand around while I read them about ten more times. Maybe not actually ten, but if you’re standing there watching me, that’s gonna make me nervous and reading already makes me nervous, so now that I think of it, yes, maybe ten. So can you read them out loud?”
I read them all the way through, out loud.
Lore has their eyes closed off and on, occasionally handling the syringe, the needles, the prep pads I’ve set out.
“One more time, okay?” Lore asks when I get to the end.
I read them through again, same speed.
“I think I’ve got it,” Lore says when I finish.
“What do you mean, you’ve got it?” I ask.
“I have a weirdly good memory,” Lore says. “Once I understand something, I remember it. But if this is practice, what are we injecting into?”
I hold up a bag of damaged oranges that fell off a neighbor’s tree, and that she was more than happy to have me gather off her lawn. “Sorry it’s not my ass. I really hate to disappoint you.”
“I’m sure your ass is magnificent.” Lore opens an alcohol prep pad. “But I’ll be okay.” Lore grabs an orange and swipes the pad over it.
“You’re sanitizing the fruit?” I ask.
“Hey.” Lore holds it up, a patch of the rind shining from the alcohol. “For our purposes, this is you. You do this exactly like you’re supposed to do on you. Be the orange.”
“I admire your dedication,” I say.
“Say it.” Lore holds the fruit closer to my face. “I am the orange.”
“I am the orange,” I repeat. I run an alcohol pad over another orange.
“Good,” Lore says. “Then you’ll be ready when the orange is you.”
We unwrap the practice syringes and put on the blunt fill needles for drawing.
“Are you really not gonna tell me why you were on top of the fridge?” Lore asks.
“I just like climbing things,” I say. “Counters, trees, tops of fridges. Sitting still’s not really my thing. Going up there”—I glance toward the top of the fridge—“used to help me see things differently when I was a kid. It calmed me down.”
“You did that as a kid?” Lore asks.
“Oh yeah.” I pat the counter. “This kitchen’s got a good setup for it.”
Lore takes me through the next steps slowly enough—with enough patience for each time I ask Wait, can you say that part again? and Can you back up a little?—that they start to flow together.
“If you were actually doing this with the vial”—Lore checks one of the pictures—“this would be when you turned it upside down to draw down the dose.”
Lore talks me through drawing into the syringes, what’s the same, what’ll be different when I’m drawing with the vial. I watch Lore’s hands, their fingers confident, unhesitating. I copy what they do.
“But what made you think of it in the first place?” Lore asks. “Climbing the fridge.”
I watch the saline fill the barrel.
We switch out the needles, the thicker-drawing ones for the thinner kind I’ll inject with. The needle I will eventually pull into my leg is about an inch and a half long. But that thought is far less intimidating than saying the words I say next.
“I have ADHD.”
“Oh.” Lore sounds not repelled, not shocked, more like they’re putting something together.
“Yeah,” I say.
This was a terrible idea. The more complicated things are, the less I want to explain them. It’s not just that my brain has trouble organizing things, though that’s certainly part of it. It’s that I get frustrated with how long it takes it explain them, how much you have to stop and backtrack and clarify. A particular cord of muscle in my back tenses up thinking of telling my parents I wanted to start testosterone. Not because they tried to talk me out of it—they didn’t; they just wanted to understand. And it’s not that I didn’t want them to understand—I did.
But the process of explaining things wears out my brain. I want to take everything I’m thinking and just throw it all out there at once, like upending the contents of a box. But conversations don’t work that way. And it’s not lost on me how ironic it is that I don’t want to explain things even as I need things repeatedly explained to me. That’s where resisting my first impulse comes in. My first impulse is screw it, not worth it. But I set that aside, and instead, I do the math.
