Lakelore, page 12
“Did you bring your workbook?” Amanda the Learning Specialist asks.
“I left it on the kitchen counter,” I say.
I answered that way too fast for this to be a believable lie.
I try to save it.
“I even told myself to grab it on the way out,” I say, “and then I just forgot.”
Amanda the Learning Specialist doesn’t look like she believes it. I’m hoping she forgets entirely that she asked me to handwrite in the spiral-bound workbook. I know what my handwriting looks like. It’s messy, inconsistent, chaotic. It tilts in all different directions. I don’t think it’ll encourage Amanda the Learning Specialist to give a glowing report.
“Sorry about that,” I say.
Amanda the Learning Specialist sounds neither annoyed nor dissuaded when she says, “Bring them next time.”
My hands find the glitter jar in my bag. When Amanda the Learning Specialist asks me about it, I tell her. I take the opening to slip in how I’ve already made friends in my new town. I give her what she needs to write down that I’m pleasant, that I make friends easily, that I am an absolute delight.
I tell her about Bastián, about their ADHD. I tell her how I probably wouldn’t have guessed if they hadn’t told me, and I don’t realize why I’m saying that until a minute later. I’m hoping Amanda the Learning Specialist will tell me no one would ever guess that I’m dyslexic.
She doesn’t.
“You know those are also called calming jars, right?” she says. “They help with emotional regulation.”
I turn it so the sparkles tumble over themselves.
“Did you know ADHD and dyslexia have something in common?” Amanda the Learning Specialist asks.
I shake my head.
I shake the glitter jar.
“They both affect executive functioning,” she says. “Working memory. Emotional regulation. Problem solving.”
I am about to ask, What are you saying, Amanda—that if I’d had a glitter jar I wouldn’t have become the kid who beat the shit out of someone? That all this could have been avoided with some sparkles?
For a minute, I’m back in elementary school, with adults telling me to say the alphabet backward to calm myself down. I can still feel the rage building like pressure in my shoulders. If you ever want to make someone dyslexic who’s angry even angrier, tell them to say the alphabet backward.
I watch only the gold glitter, then only the green, like the flashes on the horizon right before the sun goes down.
“Does your friend know?” Amanda the Learning Specialist asks.
“About what?” I ask.
“That you’re dyslexic,” Amanda the Learning Specialist says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Of course.” As though I told Bastián the first time we met, as though I just dropped it into conversation right after my name and pronouns.
“Do they know what happened?” she asks.
I shake my head.
I shake the glitter jar.
“You don’t have to tell them,” Amanda the Learning Specialist says. “You don’t have to tell anyone.”
“I know,” I say.
“But if you ever decide to,” she says, “you can. It’s not something you have to hide.”
I mean to nod, but because I’m still shaking the glitter jar, I shake my head too.
I believe that Amanda the Learning Specialist believes what she’s saying.
Amanda the Learning Specialist is also white. And Bastián’s friends, the ones who are white and the ones who aren’t, all qualify as who adults would call Nice Kids. Abril in her floral skirts and the posture that’s both open and upright, like a ballet teacher for little kids. Maddie with her wide, curious eyes and welcoming smile and unbitten nails. Bastián with their ironed work khakis and deferential nod to anyone older. They are all the definition of Nice Kids. Not Troubled. Not Aggressive. Not all the things someone, and then everyone, will call me if they know what happened, which is Amanda-the-Learning-Specialist code for what I did.
When I leave the session with Amanda the Learning Specialist, my shoulder blades flinch with the sense that someone is following me. Every set of strangers’ footsteps behind me sounds like ones I know. They’re not. I know that. But even though I know that, the memory is so sharp that I can hear those guys trying to get me to look back, how they’ll roar with satisfaction if I do.
I don’t look back. I don’t fall into the memory of being so scared that I have to check over my shoulder.
I wait for the bus. I get on. I don’t look at anyone. But in the rattling of the bus engine, I hear them imitating me in fourth grade, mocking the stuttering, uncertain noises I made when I tried to read, when the teacher told me to sound it out, just sound it out. I hear them imitating me for years after, and me learning to ignore it.
I feel the sting of their glares when they stop getting the reaction they want.
The sound twists and spins. It pitches higher. The frequency through my chest, the high laugh I’ve been hearing at home. It’s back, and now it’s following me. It won’t let me go. It’s even louder now, noise flaring inside my brain.
When the bus stops, I’m almost running to get off. But the second I’m off, I’m facing darkness. A minute ago the sky was pale through the bus windows, washed out by clouds. Now it’s the blue of deep water, tinted green and purple at the edges.
Everywhere there’s usually brush is seagrass. Everywhere there’s usually rocks there are different colors of stones. No. Sea glass, polished pieces of cobalt and beer-bottle green, frosted clear glass, the gray green and pale amber of old wine bottles.
I look down the road, but the bus is already gone. All I can hear is the last far-off whir of the engine, and then the rising echo of that laugh.
“What do you want?” I shout into the noise. The laugh wrings out my brain, so I scream back at it. “What do you want from me?”
But the sky folds away my voice, and it vanishes. A sound somewhere between air crashing into air and water crashing into water makes me turn my head.
Over where the lake would be—I can’t see from here if the lake is water or seagrass right now—color shifts and tumbles. It looks like clouds, or how waves look from underwater when they break, the crashing and billowing foam.
The clouds shift colors, the storm coming in fast.
BASTIÁN
Sometimes, ADHD feels like trying to get a fitted sheet on a bed when the sheet’s a little too small. I get one corner on, another flies off. I figure things out at school, but tap out my brain so much I don’t want to talk to anyone when I get home. I show up everywhere forty-five minutes early (because it’s either that or twenty minutes late), then forget to screw the top back on my water bottle before I shove it into my backpack.
Today, it means deciding, in the middle of folding my laundry, that it’s absolutely time to organize my desk drawer.
What happens when I get lost in doing something—whether it’s this, or painting alebrijes—they call it hyperfocus.
Hyperfocus. It’s why, when I look up, I have no idea how long I’ve been in this version of my room.
Hyperfocus. It’s what makes me startle when I notice the walls are the color of wet cilantro. The glitter jars are luminescent as deep-sea jellyfish.
People who don’t have brains like mine might not panic as fast as I do, or as often. But getting startled out of hyperfocus feels like being shaken out of sleepwalking. Which is why I run into the hall, looking for Mom and Mamá, before remembering that they’re never in this version of our house, or this version of the world.
Every time I move, the echo of a memory finds me. When I look back at my desk, I remember crawling under it when I read take-home test directions for the third time and couldn’t parse them. I pass the closet I hid in because Mom and Mamá were having Nochebuena at our house, and it was too many voices, too many people talking at me, too many people I knew and didn’t know trying to touch my hair or my face.
I pick up a phone, but instead of a dial tone, it’s the sound of rushing water, a whole lake of it. I pick up the one in the kitchen, and the noise is a storm.
I throw open doors, still looking for Mom or Mamá. At the back of my mind, I know they’re not here. I know throwing open doors isn’t going to help me.
I open a hall closet, and paint spools through the air. I check the bathroom, and pieces of sea glass swirl around the bathtub drain in marigold-orange water. I check the kitchen.
A line of cookbooks sit glowing on a shelf, spines illuminated. One wings through the air and opens. Glaringly white pages tear out of it, a few at a time. My stomach kicks when I recognize it, the cookbook I ripped into pieces when I couldn’t follow a recipe, when I tried it and it turned out so spectacularly wrong I couldn’t see the point of trying.
Cups I haven’t seen in years show up on the counters, ones I broke because I was clumsy, or because I was so desperate to be helpful that I carried too many at a time, or because I was so distracted I forgot I had a cup in one hand.
Light illuminates their rims, like they’re holding neon. But when I come closer, they tilt off the edges. One by one, they shatter on the floor, sending me stumbling back.
From the closet where paint is swirling through the air comes a faint echo. I hear the far-off sound of myself screaming when I was so overwhelmed all I could do was sit in the dark. I hadn’t yet learned to tell anyone what I needed, or even learned to know what I needed. So I just screamed into the hems of coats, the heavy fabric muffling the sound as I tried to make my brain quiet.
It’s all coming to the surface, everything I sent down with the alebrijes. Outside the window, I see them swimming up near the watery moon. Yellow and red branches sway against the night.
The weather in my brain goes past heat or searing light. It’s parched and wind-thrown. It’s wildfire weather, the kind that can take a single spark and spread it through my brain. Everything gets leveled. Every time I try to find a place solid enough to get my footing, it turns to ash and crumbles underneath me. All the water in the world under the lake gathers and buckles into the shape of flames.
A door hinge whines.
The front door opens. Not like anyone’s opening it. More like it’s shrugging open.
“Bastián.” Lore runs into the house.
I back up. “You can’t be here.”
Lore stops just inside.
I keep backing up. “You can’t be here.”
My shoulder hits a door frame. A column of pain goes through me.
Lore says my name again.
As the pain of hitting my shoulder blade dulls, I think of a word we learned in physics. Impulse. Not impulse as in impulsive. Impulse as in the mathematical, physical concept.
Force divided by time. Hitting a wall hurts more than leaning against it because of how fast it happens. Slamming into a sidewalk damages you so much more than jumping into a pile of leaves because the first one will stop you cold in a split second, while the leaves absorb your momentum gradually, slowing you down.
Impulse: The same force has more of an impact on you the faster it happens.
And Lore is about to know everything about me all at once. Too fast, so the impulse will hit hard enough to break whatever exists between me and them.
If Lore sees these pieces of myself I’ve left behind—in the broken cups, the torn pages, my hands gripping the closet shut, my low, raw screams caught in the cracks between tiles—they’ll see the worst of what living in my brain looks like. And all of that will take up more space than anything Lore or anyone else likes about me.
Maybe, eventually, if Lore knew me enough to know enough good things about me, they could take the impact of all this. But they don’t know that much good, nowhere near.
“Are you okay to be touched right now?” Lore asks.
The inside of me feels like a knot most of the time. So when it loosens, like it does now, that’s the strange thing, like I’m coming apart. And in that unknotting, something else comes together.
Lore listened, not just to what I told them but what I didn’t. I asked if hugs were okay with them because I wished people had asked me.
Lore isn’t touching me unless I say okay.
“Yes,” I say.
“Is there anywhere you don’t want me to touch you right now?” Lore asks, slow, careful.
“No,” I say, fast as darting the needle into the orange.
Lore brushes pieces of hair out of my face, their fingers cool against my skin.
“I’m not gonna pretend I’ve never wished my brain was different,” Lore says. “I’ve wished it more times than I could ever tell you. But if it was, I might not understand the way my mom thinks as much as I do. I might not have learned to read by hearing my dad read to me, so we wouldn’t have read together as much.”
Lore rests their forehead against mine in a way that makes me shut my eyes.
“Sometimes you can’t separate the hard things from the good things,” Lore whispers.
The door hinge whines again.
Lore and I both open our eyes.
A current of air eases the front door open wider, and new sound comes in.
LORE
The noise starts in the trees. Then it echoes off the sky that looks like clouds or water breaking into water.
But this isn’t a storm, or a laugh. It’s the static of something too far away to understand.
Slowly, like tuning the dial of an old radio, the noise pulls into words. Each word I recognize gives the charge of something familiar in an unfamiliar context. A crow that’s gotten inside the post office. An old picture of my mother, age five, climbing the tree in my abuela’s backyard.
Sound it out. Just sound it out. The same words echo in a dozen voices, some frustrated, some laughing, some taunting.
My heart catches, and goes still.
Everything I tried not to bring with me when my family had to move, everything I never wanted anyone else to know, it’s humming out of the sidewalks and the blades of underwater grass coating the street.
I don’t just remember it. I’m inside it.
I’m small, and a teacher who didn’t like me even before she found out how I read is telling me, in increasingly frustrated repetitions, to sound it out, just sound it out. And I cannot force what she’s asking of me because my brain will not do it. My brain will not give my mouth the tentative but promising sounds other kids are making. The b before blue. The almost-hum of y before yellow. The long pause on the o of orange and thickening emphasis on the last sound.
I cannot say the words on the page, not the way she wants. I know them. I can sight-read them. But I cannot sound them out. I cannot bridge the words I know by heart and the sounds they break down into.
Instead, my brain, my mouth, form only one refrain—I’m stupid, I’m stupid, I’m stupid. It gets hot on my tongue, and to keep myself from screaming it, I grit my teeth so hard I think I might crack a molar.
I walk out the front door, not because I want to meet everything outside, but because I have to stand between all of it and Bastián. I have to stop it from coming inside.
“Lore,” Bastián says, apprehension tinting their voice.
“Stay here,” I say, the words as hard and steady as I can make them.
I can’t do anything about what Bastián remembers from their own life and wishes they didn’t. But I can stop this, because it’s not here for Bastián. It’s here for me.
If I stand at the sidewalk, maybe that’ll be as far as it gets. If I can stop it, none of it will find its way into Bastián’s house.
When I get outside, years of voices in hallways find me, all of them saying Why don’t you sound it out? They say it every time they pass me. They imitate my stuttering breaths when I try not to cry during reading time.
I throw back at them things I hear my parents say. Why don’t you come up with some new material? Or, Oh yeah, that’s original. I learn to shrug it off, same as the comments about my lunch, how I bring food they don’t know in repurposed plastic containers, instead of the juice boxes and individually wrapped cookies that are currency in grade school.
I pretend none of it touches me. I continually hold my jaw in that clench. Later, this will help me be a boy, the practice sharpening the angles in my face.
When I tell adults about them making fun of me in the halls, the adults tell me that if I ignore them, they’ll ignore me. When that doesn’t work, I tell them again. They tell me that I should learn to laugh with them, that if I learn to laugh at myself, to not take myself so seriously, I might find myself making some new friends.
So I do. When they laugh at me, I force a laugh, even with my jaw still tight. And at first it works. They look at me like someone’s little brother they have greater affection for because of how easy I am to mess with. They laugh at me. I laugh at me. And out of our agreement over how easy I am to make fun of, a truce emerges.
But then there’s the spelling bee, my blank horror at the word veterinarian. There’s the library book in my backpack, one they think I’m too old for. There’s the fact of us getting older, our bodies changing enough that everything turns, that old jokes now have the new, thrilling edge of being spoken in deeper voices or from greater heights.
They start taunting me with sound it out again, because I still cannot sound it out. This is evident in the face of archaic words that show up in English class and the unfamiliar terms in our science textbooks.
This time, I do not laugh. I cannot laugh. My jaw has grown so tight I can’t do it.
I stop laughing. With each cue they give me to laugh, each time I don’t laugh, they grow increasingly offended at this silent suggestion that their jokes are not funny.
So the next time they tell me to sound it out, they grab at my sleeves, the edges of my jacket, to make sure I can’t just keep walking. And something in my brain begins to splinter.
