Lakelore, page 11
Right now, this is the math: I want Lore to understand. And if I want that, I have to explain. I want Lore to understand more than I want to get out of explaining this.
“It was a little hard to catch because before I came out,” I say, “I was kind of socialized like a girl, and because of how girls are socialized, in class I mostly seemed out there and daydreamy. That just doesn’t flag people for ADHD as fast.”
Lore cringes. “The gender binary strikes again.”
“Yeah,” I say, sighing. “The restlessness, the fidgeting, the distraction, the impulse control stuff, the stuff you’d expect with ADHD, it’s all here. I’ve just learned to keep it on the inside.”
Lore holds the needle up to the light. “That sounds hard.”
I want to tell them that sometimes it’s okay, and sometimes it’s exhausting. Sometimes it means trying to change the weather in my own brain and finding it as impossible as moving the clouds in a storm. The weather in my brain may or may not match up with what’s going on, but an atmosphere of something being wrong can permeate everything even if I can’t figure out what it is.
Sometimes it means not saying anything when someone misgenders me because I don’t want to be flagged as a problem any more than I already am. So when it happens, I absorb it, take the impact, give the right reassuring looks to my friends so they’ll know to stand down, I don’t want them starting a fight for me.
Sometimes the way my brain can’t filter out what’s important from what’s not—what looks in the hall are directed toward me and which have nothing to do with me, which noises I need to alert to and which I should ignore—feels so big I can’t hold it steady. It’s a buoy I’m constantly trying to push underwater. It takes all my effort, all my weight, and even then I’m usually only doing a half-assed job. But a half-assed job is also better than I’d be doing without therapy and class and the medication that gives my brain just enough of a filter to remember what I’m supposed to be doing.
Sometimes it’s meant collapsing in on myself to hide the noise in my own brain. Sometimes it’s left me wound so tight I feel like I’m grinding down my own gears.
Sometimes it’s meant burning my own heart to the ground to make sure the way my brain disrupts me doesn’t disrupt anyone else.
What I say instead: “You get used to it.”
“Getting used to something doesn’t make it easy,” Lore says.
Lore saying that feels like a latch clicking open, something unlocking. Like there’s space for me to tell the truth.
“When I first got diagnosed,” I say, “my parents didn’t want to tell me.”
“Why?” Lore asks.
“Because they thought knowing would make me feel different in a bad way,” I say. “Like me knowing would make it worse.”
“What, like those old cartoons?” Lore asks. “When they accidentally run off the cliff but don’t fall until they look down?”
I actually laugh. “I don’t know. Maybe. People think ADHD means I get distracted every time a butterfly goes by, and sure, that happens, but that’s not even the half of it. I will actively worry about that butterfly. I will wonder if that butterfly is gonna be okay on the thousands of miles of that species’ migration path. Did you know that some butterflies can travel up to a hundred miles in a day? Monarch butterflies can rack up three thousand miles by the time they get where they’re going.”
Lore smiles.
“Sorry,” I say, but I can still feel the laugh in my own voice. “My brain rambles. So I ramble. I know random stuff comes into everyone’s heads. I just seem to say it out loud more often.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Lore says. “I like random stuff. In case you haven’t noticed.”
Lore checks the measurement marks on the syringe, showing me the line we’re going for. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah,” I say, checking the same way Lore does, noting the same line.
“How did you know?” Lore asks. “That you were ready to do this.” They double-check for air bubbles.
I try to gauge what kind of answer to give, wondering if Lore’s just curious, if it’s because they’ve considered it themself, if they just want to know more about me.
But I don’t know why they’re asking. So I just tell the truth.
“When you know what you need,” I say, “what your body needs, you feel this urgency with it. That’s how I knew. Once you know the right thing, every minute you don’t do it feels wrong.”
“Do you feel different?” Lore asks.
“Yes and no,” I say. “I feel a little more like me, if that makes any sense. But that could be because I feel it, or just because I know I’m going in the right direction. It’s like when you’re lost and then you figure out where you are. Just knowing you’re facing the right way changes everything.”
I almost ask if Lore knows what I mean. But Lore’s smile—slight but open—tells me they do.
Lore shows me how to prime the needle. “We’re looking for a bubble.” We each gently push on the syringe until a tiny balloon appears at the tip of the needle.
“I see your maelstrom of salamanders,” Lore says, waiting for the bubble to slip out of the way for the saline, “and raise you a glory of unicorns.”
“Unicorns have a collective noun?” I ask.
“Glory, blessing, or marvel,” Lore says. “Maybe there’s more. I don’t know who decides these things.”
“Yeah, who does decide?” I ask. “Has anyone ever seen a group of unicorns?”
“I guess you can decide on a collective noun for just about anything,” Lore says. “My mother calls a group of dyslexic people a teeming.”
I laugh. “I guess of group of us with ADHD would probably be called a distraction.”
“Or a glitter,” Lore says.
“I like that better,” I say.
Lore holds up their orange. “You ready?”
I nod. “I am the orange.”
“According to that”—Lore looks at the instructions— “we want to go in fast, then slow down, check everything, inject slowly, then go back to fast when we pull it out.”
Fast. Slow down. Fast again. I don’t know if Lore even knows they’re making patterns for me, but they are, and they stick with me better.
We dart the needles in at the instructed angle, do all the checks, plunger down slow, pull the needle out after.
Seeing someone else have to break down the steps as gradually as I have to makes me feel like maybe I can learn to do this myself. It helps knock down the wall between me and the overwhelming task held in a syringe and a vial.
Lore hands me a prepped Band-Aid.
“Really?” I ask.
“You’re still the orange.” Lore tapes a Band-Aid over the spot on their orange. I do the same on mine.
Lore looks up and I look toward Lore at the exact same moment. For a second, we’re close enough that I can smell the grain of sandpaper. The smell of varnish. The warmth of sawdust.
Lore pulls back like we’ve static-shocked each other.
I’m staring at them, and I probably look pretty stupid while I’m doing it, and I’m ready for Lore to make some kind of joke about it.
“Nice work, Silvano,” Lore says as we put the needles into the sharps container. “You were, in fact, the orange.”
“Thank you,” I say. “For this.”
Lore looks down, smoothing the edges of the Band-Aid. “Anytime.”
LORE
When I dream, the walls around me turn to water. The siding turns translucent, and then transparent. Anyone walking by can see in. Anyone can see everything I tried to leave behind. It all came here with me. It’s hiding in unpacked boxes like my shirt.
I wake up blinking into bright light, like the sun’s coming through the blinds. But when I open my eyes, I find the room dark. Everything is soaked in the deep violet of dusk, like blue hour.
The glitter jar Bastián gave me throws off comets of light, the water now bright blue, shimmering gold. The glitter swirls like I’ve just shaken it up. It glistens like sun off new pennies, or tiny points of flame.
As soon as I sit up in bed, I know where I am. The glitter jar casts fireflies of light, showing me the room. A lamp I know I didn’t leave on is now glowing the dark pink of raspberry tea. The walls have turned brilliant green.
If the shift in colors wasn’t enough, the stillness in the air is. I can’t hear my parents’ snoring on the other side of the wall (they like to pretend they don’t snore, but they do, practically in unison).
Something taps the outside of the building. It sounds like the echo of a sound I just heard, and realize that’s what woke me up, not the light.
I stumble over to the window and slide the pane open.
The tapping is a series of small stones hitting the siding. No, not stones. I catch the tint of each one—amber, green, deep blue. They look like pieces of water-smoothed glass.
Bastián stands on the street outside. They wear jeans that have the wrinkled look of being either slept in or picked up off the floor, with what I’m pretty sure is their favorite hooded sweatshirt. Their hair is sleep-messy. All signs of how fast they left the house.
I lean against the windowsill. I shrug away the nightmare feeling, like it’s a dusting of brittle leaves on my shoulders. I don’t want Bastián to see any trace of it.
“You’ve got to get down here,” Bastián says.
They seem so awake and alert there’s a frequency coming off them. Bastián’s so level sometimes and so animated other times, and that may be confusing to someone else, but not to me. I take some things easily and get worked up about others, without a lot of discernable logic. I didn’t wince on the drive away from my old street, but when the packing tape gun malfunctioned, I almost threw it against a wall.
An iridescent shimmer makes me look to my left. That’s when I see it, the first set of bubbles. They float through the air as slowly as through water, a sheen of color on the surface of each one.
I pull on jeans, zip up a sweatshirt, get my shoes on so fast I’m still pulling them over my heels when I get to the stairs.
I run outside, and stop as soon as I see the dark around me.
The bubbles are everywhere. Not just that one string of them. They drift through the air as gently as stray balloons, each one as big as a fishbowl. And the sheens of color aren’t just the iridescence on their surfaces. Each one holds a whirl of color like Bastián’s glitter jars.
The world under the lake feels calmer, a universe away from the night the water rushed in.
I step into the middle of the street, reaching my hand out for one of the bubbles.
My fingers barely touch the surface when it breaks open. The currents in the air pull the amber glitter into threads and carry it away.
Then there’s nothing between Bastián and me. We stand in the middle of the street, the asphalt covered in seagrass.
Bastián’s face holds so much wonder that I can imagine what they looked like the first time they made a glitter jar. That wonder brightens as we watch the bubbles float up into the purple of the sky. High above us, they break like they’re reaching the surface, the glitter spreading out and sticking there in constellations of cotton-candy pink and deep green, pale blue and copper.
Bastián reaches out for one of the bubbles. The surface vanishes, and a twirl of glitter turns to a ribbon in the air, the black of a lace mantilla. I touch another one, and the glitter that spills out is fuchsia that streams through the dark and then vanishes, fast as a minnow. Bastián’s fingers meet one that lets out green and blue like a spill of ink.
Above us, more bubbles float upward, making a sky of stars in fire colors and the purple of lavender buds.
With the touch of our fingers, each bubble dissolves, sudden as a hiccup.
I don’t realize how close I am to Bastián until a bubble breaks open a second before I touch it. Our fingers brush inside a whirl of silver, the glitter bright as the moon on spider silk.
We don’t move our hands.
Bastián touches my arm, cautious and slow. I shiver in a way that makes me feel awake, like when the light turns from blue gray to gold in the morning.
I turn, my cheek so close to Bastián’s I can feel their heat.
Everything about Bastián right now stills me. The color of their hair, the night turning it from black brown to true black like it’s wet. The dark brown of their widened eyes. The deep acne scar on their left cheek that I thought was a dimple and that I like even more now that I know a little of its story.
Bastián and I are so close their breath touches my lips. Their fingers brush my cheek, cool against the nervous heat on my skin.
It happens so slowly, each of us narrowing the space at the same shivering, hesitating rate, that I can’t tell who kisses who. All I know is that they’re coming closer, and so am I, and the world around us is such a luminous version of itself that I don’t second-guess what I’m doing.
BASTIÁN
Part of me wants this to be terrible. Part of me wants it to be awkward and stilted, for us to pull away from each other and laugh about how bad it was. Because I’ve gotten used to liking Lore, but not liking Lore.
Liking Lore means there’s something to break between us. It’s not that a friendship between Lore and me couldn’t break apart; it could. But this, something like this is so much more fragile. And with everything Lore learns about me, it could get a little more brittle.
Lore knows the side of my ADHD that’s unobtrusive enough to fit on index cards and in glitter jars.
Lore doesn’t know that when I was a kid, one of my parents or Antonio had to sit with me as I shook that glitter jar to calm down.
Lore doesn’t know that I’m so easily distracted that I had to learn what’s common sense to everyone else. I had to build the skill of not absentmindedly walking in front of cars when there isn’t a crosswalk.
Lore doesn’t know that I forget things even when I care. I will remember the color of nail polish Lore is wearing right now, but it will take three conversations about siblings before I remember whether Lore has any. I will have to explain that this is not because it doesn’t matter to me, but because it takes me multiple tries to pin important information in my brain so it sticks.
All that means I kind of want this kiss to be comic-relief-level awful.
But when Lore kisses me, it’s everything I’ve ever noticed about them all at once, each catching the light like the surface of a bubble.
How they pop soda can tabs with one hand in a way that makes me unable to stop looking at their fingers. That chipped green nail polish. The roughness on the backs of their knuckles from the paints and finishes they work with.
The hairpins they slide into the middle of their bra when they wear a bra, the shrug, the you never know when you might need one.
How they mostly wear green, orange, yellow, black, gray, brown, the apathy toward typically gendered colors, no blue except jeans. Their fearlessness about all the forms they take, boy, girl, and as many points in between as there are pieces of sea glass on the floor of the lake.
Their soap that smells like green-apple hard candy.
I’m still wondering if I’m making a mistake, kissing this person I’ve already pulled too far into this world. But the soft, humming feeling inside me, I’m tuning into it like a frequency. That frequency holds one single bright point, the possibility that maybe Lore was right.
Maybe fighting the world under the lake is what’s pulling more of it toward the surface. Now that I know something about Lore’s brain that they didn’t want to tell me, and they know something about mine I didn’t want to tell them, the world under the lake isn’t rushing above the surface like a storm. It’s floating, drifting up, soft as air bubbles. We stop fighting, and the storm settles.
Lore’s hand is on my back, brushing the nape of my neck. Lore’s mouth takes hold of mine so hard that my next breath feels like coming up for air. And for once, I want to be here, where the world under the lake and world above the surface blur. For right now, instead of this being the space that holds everything I’m afraid of, it’s the space that holds everything I want.
We are still, and we are living currents. We are pulsars that appear as single points of blinking light but that hold the bright matter of whole constellations.
This is how the first gleaming wings find us. This is how the butterflies made of lake water swarm around us.
We don’t find our way back.
We let our way back find us.
LORE
“Do you want to tell me about what happened at your last school?” Amanda the Learning Specialist asks.
The question checks me in the sternum. We were just talking about study strategies, audiobooks, learning accommodations. How did we get here? What turn did I miss?
“I made a mistake,” I say. “I want to move past it. The rest of it doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Amanda the Learning Specialist looks at me for a long time, like she wants to make sure I’m done talking. “Does that feel true?”
“What do you mean does it feel true?” I ask.
“Does that feel like the story you want to tell?” Amanda the Learning Specialist asks.
I want to tell her that it’s the only story anyone will ever want. I’m brown, and trans, and I have a learning disability. My sheer existence is as much nuance as I get to have. Who I am uses up all the space the world is willing to give me, and even that, I have to fight to keep open. I am already a living confrontation. My story doesn’t get to be complicated.
“It’s all there is,” I say. “That’s it.”
Amanda the Learning Specialist nods.
After a minute she asks, “Did you bring your favorite book?”
“No.” I probably overact the expression meant to say I forgot and am just now remembering. I can tell I’ve overdone it so much I might as well have snapped my fingers and added a darn it all. “Sorry.”
