Lakelore, page 13
I tell other adults how if they’re in a hallway, I can’t get past them. When I get caught cutting behind the school to avoid them, I say why.
The adults ask why I would ever tell such awful lies about the sons of such nice families.
I don’t think there’s always one moment you realize racism is a thing that lives and breathes instead of something in history books, because really, you know it your whole life. You know it in the color of dolls on shelves, the color of villains on TV.
But you make excuses for the world. Another channel must have the brown-skinned heroes. The brown dolls must be somewhere else.
This is the moment I know for sure, though, that it isn’t all some big misunderstanding, that it isn’t a coincidence that the bad guys in movies have darker skin and eyes and hair than the good guys. That’s when I know it’s that way because someone—or really, a lot of someones—not only made it that way but have been keeping it that way ever since.
I can’t tell you why I do what I do in the particular moment I do it.
Maybe the brittle part of my brain that’s been cracking apart finally breaks into splinters. Maybe it’s that after years of something you grit your teeth trying to take, there’s a moment you just can’t anymore. Your teeth slip. You bite the inside of your cheek. Or your jaw gets tired of clenching down that hard.
Maybe it’s that Merritt Harnish grabs my shirt so hard that he gets not just my shirt but the edge of my binder. His grip on both layers is so tight I can feel the right side of my chest moving in the front. When he lets it go, it snaps back, and I can feel the pain going through my rib cage.
So I turn around.
I hit him hard enough to give him an instant nosebleed. He’ll feel the pain of the impact later, but right now, the adrenaline comes fast enough that all he feels is the shock of it.
That’s the part everyone will talk about first.
Merritt grabs me by the collar.
I’ll never know if I’m right, but in this moment, I think he’s remembering Jilly Uhlenbruck watching on that field trip, laughing at him like he’s laughed at me for years. Right now, that moment and this moment are the same. They take up one point in space.
I hit him again.
He slams me into a wall hard enough that my temple will be some shade of purple or blue or sickly yellow for the next two weeks. Pain spins through my head, knocking off more splinters.
He reaches to grab my shirt again.
I bring my knee up into his crotch.
The sound I rip out of him draws a crowd.
He’s still stumbling through the pain when a new round of rage puffs him back up. I don’t expect him to come back from it that fast. So when he rushes at me, he gets me down on the concrete.
He draws back a fist, getting the momentum to send it into my cheek or my temple.
The muscles in my jaw want to brace, to wince. My eyes want to shut so I can go somewhere else until he’s done bloodying up my face.
But I keep my eyes open.
I don’t turn away.
I make him look at me.
I stare up at him so that he can see all of the irises, dark and blazing enough to bore into him. I make him see all of the brown. I make him see so much of a color he hates.
He drops his fist.
Everyone watching thinks it’s because, right then, the teachers are rushing in to break it up.
But a split second before the teachers’ voices find us, I see something in Merritt Harnish’s face. A shift. Like he’s remembering himself.
It’s fast, but in that split second, I see the truth of him.
He doesn’t hate me because I fought back.
He doesn’t even hate me because I’m too stupid to sound it out.
He hates me because, for a second, I made him see me as a boy. I got him to fight me like a boy, and to him, that humiliation is unforgivable.
I only see it for a second, his horror at what I have made him do. It’s the only time I will see it. In another half second, it will turn to rage. Then that rage will get stretched into a roiling disgust that he has to share a hallway, a school, a city, with me.
The weeks after are a cycle of ice packs, meetings with school administrators, debates about the length of my suspension.
Merritt’s friends follow me home, saying they hope I enjoy watching my ass because I’ll get to do a lot of it. They offer what they call friendly advice, telling me if they were me they wouldn’t sleep until graduation.
They don’t do anything to me. That’s not the point. The point is that they like me not knowing if or when they might.
Then comes my parents’ late-night conversations, ones they think I can’t hear. They talk about moving, their fears that if we stay, I’ll come home beaten up or broken. Something that happened in the middle of the school year isn’t going away, it’s getting worse.
“Lore.” Bastián’s voice slices through the noise of what I remember.
I startle and turn around. I stumble deeper into the marine grass.
No. Bastián can’t be out here. They can’t be in this current of noise rushing over me like water. They can’t have heard everything, from every imitated syllable to Merritt Harnish’s friends telling me why I should consider myself lucky, speaking the words that still cling to the back of my shirt. The only reason his family isn’t going after your ass is because you’re a girl.
I know Bastián’s heard it, everything that the world under the lake is throwing back at me. I can tell by how they stare, mouth slack with something that would look like empathy if I didn’t know what they’re probably thinking.
They may not know everything. They may not know how and why it happened. But they heard enough.
Bastián doesn’t make mistakes like I do. Bastián is the kind of person who folds their pajamas into a neat square and sets them under their pillow. I am the kind of person who drops my clothes on the floor so fast my mother makes jokes about me being raptured.
Bastián would never do what I did. They may be in constant fights with their own brain, but they’d never lose one that disastrously.
Before me, the world under the lake was strange and disconcerting but beautiful. What I brought in is sharp and violent. It’s not a refracted moon or a lapping tide. It’s rushing water and crashing furniture. I have not only dragged the worst of myself into what was supposed to be my new life here, I have brought the worst of myself into the secret landscape Bastián shared with me.
The clouds let out a noise between thunder and crashing waves.
When I leave, Bastián calls my name.
But I don’t turn around.
I look for anything that could be one of the lake’s seiches, layers of water slipping out farther into the dark.
I want the purple night to turn deep blue. I want the underwater grass filling the street to go back to asphalt. I want the bright colors to fade from the trees.
But I get all the way home, and none of it’s turned back.
I stand on the sidewalk.
The building doesn’t look right. The walls are thinning out, the wood becoming so threadbare I can see through it in places. But instead of the wood looking brittle and splintered, it looks wet and slick.
The walls of the building are turning to water. They’re turning translucent in places, showing flashes of what’s inside. Patches go transparent and then solid again. Colors swim over the surface like a bubble before it pops.
The shiver of a laugh slides toward me. It streams out through the walls, rippling the water. It crawls over my skin. It settles onto my own tongue. It vibrates in my throat and lungs.
The horror of understanding blooms in my chest.
Of course I didn’t recognize this laugh.
It’s not my real laugh. It’s not the familiar one I inherited from my mother. It’s not even my fake laugh, the one I give when my youngest primos try to tell jokes and mess up the punch lines.
This is my scared laugh. It’s the one I forced when adults told me to laugh along with Merritt and his friends. It’s the halting, nervous laugh I willed out of myself even when my throat didn’t want to give it up.
The laugh that’s haunted me isn’t some unknown voice, or even Merritt’s or his friends’. It’s the noise I had to make to survive, but that never really belonged to me. That sound is a ghost outside me.
Abril’s words come back to me.
It’s always been a house with a lot of feelings.
It took mine into its very walls.
I try to slow down my breathing. I try to shove everything that’s gotten loose back into the small, brittle space inside my chest.
But it won’t stay. Even when the seiche skims over the sidewalk and takes me back to the world I know, I can’t shove it all back down. The frequency of my own forgotten laugh rings through my brain. It’s the trembling reminder that I made so many mistakes before I threw my fist at Merritt Harnish.
BASTIÁN
I want to tell Lore that it doesn’t matter. Well, not that it doesn’t matter. Of course it does. It will never not matter. Whatever happened is a jagged wound in Lore. I could see it in their face and the way their stance changed. I could feel their fear vibrating through the air.
I couldn’t make enough sense of all that noise to know exactly what happened. But I do know that anyone who told Lore to sound it out never deserved them.
The next morning, as I’m restocking printer paper, I hold on to one possibility: If I don’t know everything about what happened to Lore, maybe Lore doesn’t know everything about me either.
I mail a postcard to my brother, a painting of that kind of spiral shell my brain feels like right now, all those curves and chambers that sound bounces around in. And as though he can feel it dropping into the mailbox, as soon as I get home, he calls.
“The dogs miss you,” Antonio says. “And Michelle’s convinced you don’t like her.”
“I do so like her,” I say.
“They say they do so like you,” Antonio yells in a way that sounds like it’s across the room.
“Of course they do,” I hear Michelle yell back. “I’m delightful. If they don’t like anyone, it’s definitely you.”
“Come on.” Antonio’s talking to me again. “We’ll take over the whole kitchen. Papier-mâché everywhere. We’ll have a house full of alebrijes by the time we’re done.”
“I started T,” I blurt out.
I don’t even realize I’m thinking of saying it until I already have.
“And?” Antonio asks.
“And what?” I ask.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“I’ve only had one dose,” I say. “I don’t feel much yet. I guess I feel a little more like me. But that could be in my head.”
“Feeling more like you is in your head,” Antonio says. “You got to feel it there before you feel it everywhere else, right?”
I have no idea. Sometimes it starts in the core of my body, the feeling of my binder holding me in. Sometimes it’s my hands, doing something that keeps my brain still.
Right now, it’s the knot loosening in my chest.
“So this is why you’ve been avoiding me?” Antonio asks.
Even before I realized I was trans, I always studied my brother, the way he moves his body and his hands, the way he laughs, the way he puts on a jacket or sits in a chair. I started wearing a watch because Antonio wore one. But now that I’m looking toward what the testosterone will make of my body, I’m thinking even more about what I might make of myself. While it’s doing its work of slightly rearranging my cells, I’m thinking about the kind of boy I want to be, and that looks a lot like my brother.
So is he going to think I’m trying to imitate him (especially since sometimes I am)? Is he going to shudder if my face looks like his, or if my voice ends up sounding too much like his?
“Kind of,” I say.
“Then don’t,” Antonio says. “I’m proud of you for doing what’s gonna make you feel like you.”
The knot of my heart unclenches a little more. Antonio has always been somewhere between older brother and uncle. So when he sees me, it’s like getting seen twice. The impact, the spectacular impulse of it, is as strong as when Mom and Mamá started using my pronouns like it was nothing, like it was easy because it was right.
“What’s the rest of it?” Antonio asks.
“The rest of what?” I ask.
“You said starting T is kind of why you’ve been avoiding me,” Antonio says. “What’s the rest?”
I look at the line of alebrijes crowding my desk.
I want to tell Lore that what I heard, what the world under the lake threw back at Lore, doesn’t change anything to me. I want to tell them I don’t care. Anything that happened may be part of Lore, but it’s not them.
Except that, when it comes to myself, I don’t really believe that. And if I don’t believe there’s nothing to be ashamed of, how can Lore?
BASTIÁN
This time, I don’t wait for the world under the lake to come above the surface. I go down to the water, passing the LAKELORE sign that’s so weathered and faded the letters barely show.
I climb down to the inlet. I wait for the water to break into a swarm of blue-green and silver wings, showing me the path underneath.
The alebrijes drift through the dark, a few coming slightly forward again, trying to get me to follow them.
This time, I do. If this is what they want, if there’s any chance that they’re coming above the surface trying to find me, this is the only move I have left.
I follow the pieces of lit-up sea glass. The rounds of yellow and green and blue get thicker on the ground as they lead me in.
The farther I go, the more the ground squishes under my feet. I remember this, the wet, soft moss, like I’m walking on the bottom of a pond.
My heart pulls back into a knot. Harder than a knot. It’s a dense thing with a quasar’s gravity. It pulls me back toward being the boy I was years ago, who didn’t know how to live with my own brain.
As I go farther down, the ground breaks apart and rises up. Fallen trees crowd patches of the lake bed, like a waterlogged forest. Pieces of what look like wrecked boats catch under the trunks, the lacquered wood scratched. The hull of a coble boat is so rusted over I can barely see the paint.
I dodge around the broken wood, the glow of amber sea glass guiding me forward.
From the dark, the hot glow of live ash winks at me. The flashes come in pairs, the stares of alebrijes with eyes like meteors. To anyone else, those points of smoldering light might seem threatening, a warning. But to me, they’re as familiar as the walls of my room, alebrijes whose eyes I made out of tiny plastic jewels or sequins that turned to embers when they came to life.
I know what’s waiting for me here. Echoes of me hiding in closets, lying on the floor with my hands over my eyes, screaming if someone tried to move me or touch me.
An alebrije owl flies past, feathers wearing a sprinkling of leaf-green scales. An octopus with flames for tentacles crosses a far corner of the dark. An ocelot with the wings of a monarch butterfly looks at me, eyes hot and glittering.
Water thyme sways alongside the green ribbons of wild water celery. Yellow and pale purple flowers dot the star grass. And among the boats and underwater trees are things I didn’t know were here.
The couple of refrigerators could have just ended up down here—a lot of things end up on the bottom of a lake. Except one is deep green and another is red violet, and they look like dyed-bright versions of the fridges I’ve climbed on at home, at Antonio’s old apartment, at Antonio and Michelle’s house.
Pinned under pieces of sea glass are leaves of paper with my handwriting on them. Index cards, in every color.
Glitter jars rest in beds of seagrass, gathering light and throwing it back in tiny rainbows.
The world under the lake isn’t just holding the parts of myself and my history that I don’t want to think about.
It’s holding the ways I adapted, and lived.
Sometimes you can’t separate the hard things from the good things.
I hear the words the way Lore said them. I hear them as I remember their hair in two braids, a gray sweatshirt, the pull of their heart as strong and whirling as the spin of a planet.
This place holds not only reminders of when I gripped the windowsill so hard it left splinters in my palms, or when I couldn’t filter out the noise in the halls at school. It holds the way I took what my brain threw at me, and how I turned it over, wearing down the broken edges until they were sea glass.
I feel in my hands, in the tension in my knuckles, how hard I’ve tried. I shove all of this down, and then, like a balloon, it bobs up above the surface. It’s as unbothered by my effort as I am drained by it. I didn’t realize how tired all this was making me. Not just the effort it takes me to function, but the effort it takes to make it look like it’s not effort. Trying to act like it doesn’t cost me anything is costing me more than I have.
I am so tired of trying to keep the buoy of how my brain works under the water, of how, every time, I’m breaking my own heart hoping it stays there.
LORE
If I could will myself to laugh when I didn’t want to, why can’t I do this?
What Amanda the Learning Specialist tells my new school will depend in part on this stupid workbook. I keep thinking the same words over and over. Just fill it out. Just write it in. But that twists, fast, into Sound it out.
Shards of color spill across my room.
I check the glitter jar Bastián made me, but the sun’s not hitting it.
I follow where the pieces of light are coming from, toward the window.
The sun is hitting a glitter jar down on the sidewalk, lighting up the deep lilac of the water and bouncing off the pieces of glitter. It’s so bright that it takes me a second to see Bastián holding it.
I set my back against the wall.
The center of my heart spins and glows, while the bristling in my shoulder blades wants me to stay up here until Bastián leaves. Maybe even until Bastián graduates.
The adults ask why I would ever tell such awful lies about the sons of such nice families.
I don’t think there’s always one moment you realize racism is a thing that lives and breathes instead of something in history books, because really, you know it your whole life. You know it in the color of dolls on shelves, the color of villains on TV.
But you make excuses for the world. Another channel must have the brown-skinned heroes. The brown dolls must be somewhere else.
This is the moment I know for sure, though, that it isn’t all some big misunderstanding, that it isn’t a coincidence that the bad guys in movies have darker skin and eyes and hair than the good guys. That’s when I know it’s that way because someone—or really, a lot of someones—not only made it that way but have been keeping it that way ever since.
I can’t tell you why I do what I do in the particular moment I do it.
Maybe the brittle part of my brain that’s been cracking apart finally breaks into splinters. Maybe it’s that after years of something you grit your teeth trying to take, there’s a moment you just can’t anymore. Your teeth slip. You bite the inside of your cheek. Or your jaw gets tired of clenching down that hard.
Maybe it’s that Merritt Harnish grabs my shirt so hard that he gets not just my shirt but the edge of my binder. His grip on both layers is so tight I can feel the right side of my chest moving in the front. When he lets it go, it snaps back, and I can feel the pain going through my rib cage.
So I turn around.
I hit him hard enough to give him an instant nosebleed. He’ll feel the pain of the impact later, but right now, the adrenaline comes fast enough that all he feels is the shock of it.
That’s the part everyone will talk about first.
Merritt grabs me by the collar.
I’ll never know if I’m right, but in this moment, I think he’s remembering Jilly Uhlenbruck watching on that field trip, laughing at him like he’s laughed at me for years. Right now, that moment and this moment are the same. They take up one point in space.
I hit him again.
He slams me into a wall hard enough that my temple will be some shade of purple or blue or sickly yellow for the next two weeks. Pain spins through my head, knocking off more splinters.
He reaches to grab my shirt again.
I bring my knee up into his crotch.
The sound I rip out of him draws a crowd.
He’s still stumbling through the pain when a new round of rage puffs him back up. I don’t expect him to come back from it that fast. So when he rushes at me, he gets me down on the concrete.
He draws back a fist, getting the momentum to send it into my cheek or my temple.
The muscles in my jaw want to brace, to wince. My eyes want to shut so I can go somewhere else until he’s done bloodying up my face.
But I keep my eyes open.
I don’t turn away.
I make him look at me.
I stare up at him so that he can see all of the irises, dark and blazing enough to bore into him. I make him see all of the brown. I make him see so much of a color he hates.
He drops his fist.
Everyone watching thinks it’s because, right then, the teachers are rushing in to break it up.
But a split second before the teachers’ voices find us, I see something in Merritt Harnish’s face. A shift. Like he’s remembering himself.
It’s fast, but in that split second, I see the truth of him.
He doesn’t hate me because I fought back.
He doesn’t even hate me because I’m too stupid to sound it out.
He hates me because, for a second, I made him see me as a boy. I got him to fight me like a boy, and to him, that humiliation is unforgivable.
I only see it for a second, his horror at what I have made him do. It’s the only time I will see it. In another half second, it will turn to rage. Then that rage will get stretched into a roiling disgust that he has to share a hallway, a school, a city, with me.
The weeks after are a cycle of ice packs, meetings with school administrators, debates about the length of my suspension.
Merritt’s friends follow me home, saying they hope I enjoy watching my ass because I’ll get to do a lot of it. They offer what they call friendly advice, telling me if they were me they wouldn’t sleep until graduation.
They don’t do anything to me. That’s not the point. The point is that they like me not knowing if or when they might.
Then comes my parents’ late-night conversations, ones they think I can’t hear. They talk about moving, their fears that if we stay, I’ll come home beaten up or broken. Something that happened in the middle of the school year isn’t going away, it’s getting worse.
“Lore.” Bastián’s voice slices through the noise of what I remember.
I startle and turn around. I stumble deeper into the marine grass.
No. Bastián can’t be out here. They can’t be in this current of noise rushing over me like water. They can’t have heard everything, from every imitated syllable to Merritt Harnish’s friends telling me why I should consider myself lucky, speaking the words that still cling to the back of my shirt. The only reason his family isn’t going after your ass is because you’re a girl.
I know Bastián’s heard it, everything that the world under the lake is throwing back at me. I can tell by how they stare, mouth slack with something that would look like empathy if I didn’t know what they’re probably thinking.
They may not know everything. They may not know how and why it happened. But they heard enough.
Bastián doesn’t make mistakes like I do. Bastián is the kind of person who folds their pajamas into a neat square and sets them under their pillow. I am the kind of person who drops my clothes on the floor so fast my mother makes jokes about me being raptured.
Bastián would never do what I did. They may be in constant fights with their own brain, but they’d never lose one that disastrously.
Before me, the world under the lake was strange and disconcerting but beautiful. What I brought in is sharp and violent. It’s not a refracted moon or a lapping tide. It’s rushing water and crashing furniture. I have not only dragged the worst of myself into what was supposed to be my new life here, I have brought the worst of myself into the secret landscape Bastián shared with me.
The clouds let out a noise between thunder and crashing waves.
When I leave, Bastián calls my name.
But I don’t turn around.
I look for anything that could be one of the lake’s seiches, layers of water slipping out farther into the dark.
I want the purple night to turn deep blue. I want the underwater grass filling the street to go back to asphalt. I want the bright colors to fade from the trees.
But I get all the way home, and none of it’s turned back.
I stand on the sidewalk.
The building doesn’t look right. The walls are thinning out, the wood becoming so threadbare I can see through it in places. But instead of the wood looking brittle and splintered, it looks wet and slick.
The walls of the building are turning to water. They’re turning translucent in places, showing flashes of what’s inside. Patches go transparent and then solid again. Colors swim over the surface like a bubble before it pops.
The shiver of a laugh slides toward me. It streams out through the walls, rippling the water. It crawls over my skin. It settles onto my own tongue. It vibrates in my throat and lungs.
The horror of understanding blooms in my chest.
Of course I didn’t recognize this laugh.
It’s not my real laugh. It’s not the familiar one I inherited from my mother. It’s not even my fake laugh, the one I give when my youngest primos try to tell jokes and mess up the punch lines.
This is my scared laugh. It’s the one I forced when adults told me to laugh along with Merritt and his friends. It’s the halting, nervous laugh I willed out of myself even when my throat didn’t want to give it up.
The laugh that’s haunted me isn’t some unknown voice, or even Merritt’s or his friends’. It’s the noise I had to make to survive, but that never really belonged to me. That sound is a ghost outside me.
Abril’s words come back to me.
It’s always been a house with a lot of feelings.
It took mine into its very walls.
I try to slow down my breathing. I try to shove everything that’s gotten loose back into the small, brittle space inside my chest.
But it won’t stay. Even when the seiche skims over the sidewalk and takes me back to the world I know, I can’t shove it all back down. The frequency of my own forgotten laugh rings through my brain. It’s the trembling reminder that I made so many mistakes before I threw my fist at Merritt Harnish.
BASTIÁN
I want to tell Lore that it doesn’t matter. Well, not that it doesn’t matter. Of course it does. It will never not matter. Whatever happened is a jagged wound in Lore. I could see it in their face and the way their stance changed. I could feel their fear vibrating through the air.
I couldn’t make enough sense of all that noise to know exactly what happened. But I do know that anyone who told Lore to sound it out never deserved them.
The next morning, as I’m restocking printer paper, I hold on to one possibility: If I don’t know everything about what happened to Lore, maybe Lore doesn’t know everything about me either.
I mail a postcard to my brother, a painting of that kind of spiral shell my brain feels like right now, all those curves and chambers that sound bounces around in. And as though he can feel it dropping into the mailbox, as soon as I get home, he calls.
“The dogs miss you,” Antonio says. “And Michelle’s convinced you don’t like her.”
“I do so like her,” I say.
“They say they do so like you,” Antonio yells in a way that sounds like it’s across the room.
“Of course they do,” I hear Michelle yell back. “I’m delightful. If they don’t like anyone, it’s definitely you.”
“Come on.” Antonio’s talking to me again. “We’ll take over the whole kitchen. Papier-mâché everywhere. We’ll have a house full of alebrijes by the time we’re done.”
“I started T,” I blurt out.
I don’t even realize I’m thinking of saying it until I already have.
“And?” Antonio asks.
“And what?” I ask.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“I’ve only had one dose,” I say. “I don’t feel much yet. I guess I feel a little more like me. But that could be in my head.”
“Feeling more like you is in your head,” Antonio says. “You got to feel it there before you feel it everywhere else, right?”
I have no idea. Sometimes it starts in the core of my body, the feeling of my binder holding me in. Sometimes it’s my hands, doing something that keeps my brain still.
Right now, it’s the knot loosening in my chest.
“So this is why you’ve been avoiding me?” Antonio asks.
Even before I realized I was trans, I always studied my brother, the way he moves his body and his hands, the way he laughs, the way he puts on a jacket or sits in a chair. I started wearing a watch because Antonio wore one. But now that I’m looking toward what the testosterone will make of my body, I’m thinking even more about what I might make of myself. While it’s doing its work of slightly rearranging my cells, I’m thinking about the kind of boy I want to be, and that looks a lot like my brother.
So is he going to think I’m trying to imitate him (especially since sometimes I am)? Is he going to shudder if my face looks like his, or if my voice ends up sounding too much like his?
“Kind of,” I say.
“Then don’t,” Antonio says. “I’m proud of you for doing what’s gonna make you feel like you.”
The knot of my heart unclenches a little more. Antonio has always been somewhere between older brother and uncle. So when he sees me, it’s like getting seen twice. The impact, the spectacular impulse of it, is as strong as when Mom and Mamá started using my pronouns like it was nothing, like it was easy because it was right.
“What’s the rest of it?” Antonio asks.
“The rest of what?” I ask.
“You said starting T is kind of why you’ve been avoiding me,” Antonio says. “What’s the rest?”
I look at the line of alebrijes crowding my desk.
I want to tell Lore that what I heard, what the world under the lake threw back at Lore, doesn’t change anything to me. I want to tell them I don’t care. Anything that happened may be part of Lore, but it’s not them.
Except that, when it comes to myself, I don’t really believe that. And if I don’t believe there’s nothing to be ashamed of, how can Lore?
BASTIÁN
This time, I don’t wait for the world under the lake to come above the surface. I go down to the water, passing the LAKELORE sign that’s so weathered and faded the letters barely show.
I climb down to the inlet. I wait for the water to break into a swarm of blue-green and silver wings, showing me the path underneath.
The alebrijes drift through the dark, a few coming slightly forward again, trying to get me to follow them.
This time, I do. If this is what they want, if there’s any chance that they’re coming above the surface trying to find me, this is the only move I have left.
I follow the pieces of lit-up sea glass. The rounds of yellow and green and blue get thicker on the ground as they lead me in.
The farther I go, the more the ground squishes under my feet. I remember this, the wet, soft moss, like I’m walking on the bottom of a pond.
My heart pulls back into a knot. Harder than a knot. It’s a dense thing with a quasar’s gravity. It pulls me back toward being the boy I was years ago, who didn’t know how to live with my own brain.
As I go farther down, the ground breaks apart and rises up. Fallen trees crowd patches of the lake bed, like a waterlogged forest. Pieces of what look like wrecked boats catch under the trunks, the lacquered wood scratched. The hull of a coble boat is so rusted over I can barely see the paint.
I dodge around the broken wood, the glow of amber sea glass guiding me forward.
From the dark, the hot glow of live ash winks at me. The flashes come in pairs, the stares of alebrijes with eyes like meteors. To anyone else, those points of smoldering light might seem threatening, a warning. But to me, they’re as familiar as the walls of my room, alebrijes whose eyes I made out of tiny plastic jewels or sequins that turned to embers when they came to life.
I know what’s waiting for me here. Echoes of me hiding in closets, lying on the floor with my hands over my eyes, screaming if someone tried to move me or touch me.
An alebrije owl flies past, feathers wearing a sprinkling of leaf-green scales. An octopus with flames for tentacles crosses a far corner of the dark. An ocelot with the wings of a monarch butterfly looks at me, eyes hot and glittering.
Water thyme sways alongside the green ribbons of wild water celery. Yellow and pale purple flowers dot the star grass. And among the boats and underwater trees are things I didn’t know were here.
The couple of refrigerators could have just ended up down here—a lot of things end up on the bottom of a lake. Except one is deep green and another is red violet, and they look like dyed-bright versions of the fridges I’ve climbed on at home, at Antonio’s old apartment, at Antonio and Michelle’s house.
Pinned under pieces of sea glass are leaves of paper with my handwriting on them. Index cards, in every color.
Glitter jars rest in beds of seagrass, gathering light and throwing it back in tiny rainbows.
The world under the lake isn’t just holding the parts of myself and my history that I don’t want to think about.
It’s holding the ways I adapted, and lived.
Sometimes you can’t separate the hard things from the good things.
I hear the words the way Lore said them. I hear them as I remember their hair in two braids, a gray sweatshirt, the pull of their heart as strong and whirling as the spin of a planet.
This place holds not only reminders of when I gripped the windowsill so hard it left splinters in my palms, or when I couldn’t filter out the noise in the halls at school. It holds the way I took what my brain threw at me, and how I turned it over, wearing down the broken edges until they were sea glass.
I feel in my hands, in the tension in my knuckles, how hard I’ve tried. I shove all of this down, and then, like a balloon, it bobs up above the surface. It’s as unbothered by my effort as I am drained by it. I didn’t realize how tired all this was making me. Not just the effort it takes me to function, but the effort it takes to make it look like it’s not effort. Trying to act like it doesn’t cost me anything is costing me more than I have.
I am so tired of trying to keep the buoy of how my brain works under the water, of how, every time, I’m breaking my own heart hoping it stays there.
LORE
If I could will myself to laugh when I didn’t want to, why can’t I do this?
What Amanda the Learning Specialist tells my new school will depend in part on this stupid workbook. I keep thinking the same words over and over. Just fill it out. Just write it in. But that twists, fast, into Sound it out.
Shards of color spill across my room.
I check the glitter jar Bastián made me, but the sun’s not hitting it.
I follow where the pieces of light are coming from, toward the window.
The sun is hitting a glitter jar down on the sidewalk, lighting up the deep lilac of the water and bouncing off the pieces of glitter. It’s so bright that it takes me a second to see Bastián holding it.
I set my back against the wall.
The center of my heart spins and glows, while the bristling in my shoulder blades wants me to stay up here until Bastián leaves. Maybe even until Bastián graduates.
