Lakelore, page 16
In this kitchen, I’m like my brother. I’m like my great-grandfather. I’m one of the Silvano men, dreaming with paint on our hands.
LORE
I throw my bag on the low table in Amanda the Learning Specialist’s office. “Here.” I hand her the workbook. “Warning, I don’t have cute handwriting. I don’t dot my i’s with hearts or little circles. My dad says I have the handwriting of a doctor scribbling on a chart with their nondominant hand, and I’m pretty sure he’s being nice.”
Amanda the Learning Specialist takes the workbook. “You know it’s really common for people with dyslexia to have messy handwriting, right?”
“Not like that,” I say.
“Yes, like that.” She turns through the workbook. “Sometimes exactly like that.”
I pull out a picture book with worn purple edges.
I hand it to her.
“You wanted me to bring my favorite book, and this is my favorite book,” I say, and it feels like confessing to something. “I was nine when I first read it.”
I could read it all the way through. No stops. No catching. Phonics had dismantled the way I had learned to read, cracking it into so many pieces I thought I was too stupid for books. But I could still read this book.
“And a lot of those are sight words.” I don’t mean to sound as defensive as I do, but I can’t help it. “So no one could tell me I was reading them wrong.”
It’s not just the dyslexia that makes reading harder. It’s how the world responds to it. I learned how to read, but then got told I was reading wrong, that I had to read another way no matter how hard my brain fought it. So even now, when I read, I bring with me not just my dyslexia, but also my fear that I am reading wrong. I bring with me the flinch of hiding picture books in my backpack, knowing what other kids my age would say.
Amanda the Learning Specialist reviews the pages about a rabbit diving into different tubs of paint, turning herself sea blue and then flower purple. Turning herself leaf green. But the color she likes best, the one that happens when she mixes all the paints, is brown. To her, it’s warm, and perfect. Not dirty. Not wrong. To her, the color brown is beautiful.
I almost miss it, the unclenching in the center of my heart. That easing up doesn’t come from Amanda the Learning Specialist saying that this being my favorite book is okay. And she does. She tells me how anyone who made fun of me reading picture books didn’t know what they were talking about, how she wishes everyone read them.
But what Amanda the Learning Specialist says, that’s not the point. The point is me showing this book to her in the first place. It’s the strange physics of all this, how something in me releases not because of her reaction, but my action.
On the bus home, the rain against the windows is a drizzle so light it could be the spray thrown by passing cars. When we stop, and the bus door whooshes open, I smell pine needles. As a few people get on—two old ladies, a guy who looks like he’s in his twenties—I can see the deep green needles coated in tiny points of rain.
The old ladies’ mix of perfumes—the same kind of flowery as my mom’s favorite detergent—goes by. The guy in his twenties takes a seat behind me.
As the bus gets up to speed, the guy makes a noise toward me, one meant to tell me he likes what he sees.
There’s not really any way I ever look that lets me move through the world without resistance. Sometimes I look like a boy who’s even younger than I actually am, a boy with soft edges and floppy hair and a shrug in my posture that makes people think they can shove me aside.
Or I look like a girl who men think they have a right to stare at.
I know which one I look like today. Black sweater over a tank top with scalloped lace around the edges. My favorite sheer red lip gloss. Tighter jeans than I wear when I’m feeling more like a guy. Hair down, and that I’m already regretting I didn’t pull into a ponytail before I left Amanda the Learning Specialist’s office, but then again, that would leave the heat of his gaze on my bare neck.
“Not feeling friendly?” the guys asks.
The humming from the floor of the bus rises into my body.
“Come on,” he says. “Just give me a smile.”
When I shut my eyes, the hum of the bus turns to a breaking sound, like wood splintering apart.
The sound of Merritt and his friends laughing radiates out from the seats and windows.
If it had just been them laughing, I could have withstood it. I knew how to take the laughing, absorb it. I’d been taking it since third grade.
It was the threat held in all that noise, the promise that if they ever got bored with laughing at me, with following me, they’d do worse.
“Just turn around,” the guy behind me says.
I squeeze my eyes shut tighter.
The first time I threw my fist into Merritt Harnish, he and the guys who followed him around forgave it, or forgave it enough. We were kids, all gawky limbs and entropy, so they eventually let it go, content with how they could make my shoulders round with a few words.
But the second time, that they couldn’t forgive. That was serious. That was real. We were too old for them to pretend it wasn’t. And instead of being in front of a girl Merritt liked, it was in front of half the school.
Now this guy behind me, trying to get me to turn around, is all of them. He wants what I didn’t give them last year, and if I give it to him, I’ll give it to all of them.
“Turn around and look at me, beautiful,” he says, his voice holding all of theirs.
He wants me to look back.
He wants to see the fear in me.
My brain feels carved out of salt-soaked wood, brittle and splintering into even smaller pieces.
Then one of those pieces breaks against another, and I remember.
When I stared at Merritt, he froze. I made him see me—as a boy, as someone whose stare held a hundred shades of brown—and he froze.
This whole time, I’ve thought that I hated myself for fighting back. But I think I’ve hated myself more for what that fighting back meant. It was the end of a story other people wrote, and I gave it to them, that perfect ending.
When Merritt and his friends started with me, I asked for help. And I got told to laugh off the taunts, to learn to laugh at myself along with those guys. So I did. I laughed. Until I couldn’t anymore. And when I fought back, when everyone saw me hit Merritt first, I confirmed everything that so many people watching already thought. With that first hit, I became everything they expected of someone brown and trans and dyslexic. They wielded everything about me against me until I did something definitive enough to prove I was the problem all along.
In that moment, I participated in the process of making myself that problem, the same way I participated when I laughed with Merritt and his friends. I became part of a story that placed me exactly where everyone else wanted me.
I grip the edge of the seat.
I look over my shoulder, at the guy who’s been talking to my hair and the back of my sweater.
He grins. “Was that so hard?”
I stare, eyes wide and boring into him.
“Now how about a smile?” he asks.
I don’t smile.
“What?” he asks.
My eyes augur into him. He’s a layer of ice in my way.
He gives a thin, nervous laugh. “Okay, you can turn back around now.”
Like I was waiting for permission.
I don’t laugh with him.
I give him nothing.
My own laugh has been haunting me, but there’s been so much under that laugh. That laugh has been the ghost reminding me how much I stopped being on my own side. I learned that I couldn’t trust myself with myself. I became one of those laughing voices, one of my own bullies.
I have been haunted by that version of myself. But I can’t exile them forever, no more than Bastián can exile themself from every time their ADHD was a current pulling them under. So many of us are haunted by versions of ourselves we wish we could exile. But the pieces of our beings don’t pull apart that easily. If we try to unweave ourselves, we unravel at the edges. So we all do the work of reconciling who we are now with the ghosts we once were.
One day, I can earn back my own trust.
I can start now.
I keep staring.
“What are you staring at me like that for?” the guy asks.
I make him nervous, but he can’t not look at me. I make him look at me. I stay turned around. I keep looking back.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asks.
He wanted to see me, so I make him see me.
“Stop doing that,” he says.
I keep staring at him, my fingers gripping the back of the seat.
This whole time, I thought if I looked back, Merritt and his friends would win.
But when I look back, really look, guys who think they’re fearless recoil.
I keep staring.
When this guy looks at me, he sees a brown girl. And I am a brown girl, just like I’m a brown boy, just like I’m both and neither, in different proportions depending on the day. I’m the gradients of blue and green and violet and silver that the lake turns.
But he doesn’t know that, because he doesn’t know me. He sees the hair, the lip gloss, the eyeliner, the lace on the edge of my tank top, and he sees a brown girl who he should get to look at. He sees a brown girl staring at him as shamelessly as he was just staring at me, except my stare has none of the admiration. This surprises and confuses and scares him so much that he will not realize how insulted he feels until hours later, when I am long gone and he has blurred me together so completely with other brown girls that he cannot tell us apart.
I keep staring. And he keeps moving his eyes around, looking ahead, or out the window, or the window on the opposite side, or trying to catch the eye of another passenger. He tries to get a sympathetic look from any of them, a shared, unspoken Can you believe this bitch?
But none of them are having it. Two friends, in the middle of figuring out when they’re getting coffee together, sneer at him like he’s interrupting. A parent, encouraging a child who works at a bead maze, pauses only to glare at him. An older passenger sticks to his newspaper, pointedly turning the page. I can’t be sure from this angle, but I think when the guy tries with the driver, the driver only casts a cold glance in the convex mirror. Even las viejas who got on at the same stop give him twin admonishing expressions.
They all saw him, and heard him.
I know what I’ve just done, so I settle into my seat. I know I can’t get off this bus until after he has. I can’t get off, even at my stop, and risk him following me. Even if I’m as reckless right now as my stare is unyielding, the instinct in my chest warns me that I have to stay with the people on this bus rather than risk him following me.
So I keep staring. I might as well keep staring.
But as the bus slows into the next stop, he scrambles to his feet. He lurches toward the door. He stumbles off like he’s running away.
I watch him watch the bus pull away, fear and confusion in his face.
I turn and sit straight. I look forward.
If I leave everything that happened behind me, if I draw hard lines between there and here, then and now, I leave behind that moment where I made Merritt look at me. I lose that moment when the force of me was so unfathomable he couldn’t do anything except stay still and watch. If I forget everything that happened before my family moved, I’ll lose that brazen thread inside me, bright as a wire filament.
At the next transfer point, the bus sits for a minute, the driver holding to keep the schedule.
I look out the window. The trees grow so far into the road they’re brushing the side of the bus. It’s stopped raining, but perfectly round drops glitter at the very ends of the pine needles, shining wet.
A flash of color darts in and out of the branches. When it settles long enough, I get a better look. A tiny butterfly, the outer wings silvery brown like the lake’s shoreline, the inner wings blue as the leaves of water that lifted off the surface. Each time the butterfly lands or takes off, the slight weight knocks loose a drop of rain.
A week ago, those points of rain would have looked like beads of clear glass.
But right now, those raindrops at the ends of the pine needles look so much like the little bubbles Bastián and I eased out of the syringes that I almost laugh.
I get off the bus, five stops early. I tell the driver “Thank you” on my way out, like this was my planned destination the whole time.
Once you know the right thing, every minute you don’t do it feels wrong.
I make two calls.
My first is to Vivienne.
“You know the thing you thought I was gonna do the first time I asked you and Abril where to find Bastián?” I ask when she picks up.
“The grand romantic gesture?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, kind of. I don’t know about the romantic part. I don’t know how Bastián feels anymore. And I don’t care. I mean, I do care, but even if they don’t feel that way, I want to be friends if they want to be friends. I made a mistake, and I want to fix it, and I’m afraid if I don’t do it now I’ll lose my nerve to ever do it. So just be blunt here, is this a good idea or bad idea?”
The silence makes me suspect that I said too much at once. A few seconds more, and I’m sure of it.
“Vivienne?” I ask.
Voices chatter in the background.
“Is someone else there with you?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Vivienne says. “We’re all over at my house. We would have invited you if you weren’t avoiding all of us.” I can hear the smug smile in her voice. “Can I tell them?” Just like that, the smug smile is gone from her voice.
It takes me a second to register what she means. “Tell them—what I just told you?”
“Yeah,” Vivienne says. “Up to you. I can either give you my opinion or we can get a group vote.”
I hesitate. But Bastián’s four closest friends might know better than one of them.
“Fine,” I say. “Go ahead.”
Voices murmur in the background. I can barely hear them over the traffic.
“The consensus says do it,” Vivienne says.
“Okay,” I say. “So what do I do?”
“Where are you?” Vivienne asks.
I give her the stop number, the rough location.
Vivienne repeats what I just said to everyone else.
“Maddie knows where you are,” Vivienne says. “And she says you’re gonna want to write this down.”
“Write what down?” I ask.
“How to get to Antonio and Michelle’s,” Vivienne says.
“You want me to show up unannounced at their brother’s house?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Vivienne says. “Show them you’re showing up. Literally, in this case.”
I don’t realize until she says it how much I was both hoping and dreading that she’d suggest this. It’s a simultaneous rise and fall, two vertical drafts blowing past each other inside a storm.
“No,” I say. “Forget it. Never mind.”
“Lore,” she says.
“We’ve crossed into bad idea,” I say. “I don’t know their brother. I’m not just gonna stop by without permission.”
“Good point,” Vivienne says.
I breathe out. “Thank you.”
I’m already calculating how long it’ll probably be until l can get the next bus home.
Except that Vivienne is still talking to everyone else, and hasn’t hung up.
“What are you all doing?” I ask.
“Hold on,” Vivienne says. “Sloan’s calling Bastián’s brother.”
“What?” I ask, loud enough that a woman on a nearby bench looks up from her book. I lower my voice again. “Why?”
“You don’t want to show up without permission,” Vivienne says. “I respect that. So we’re asking permission.”
“Seriously?” I ask.
“Yeah, Sloan and Maddie’s older brother know Antonio pretty well, so they kind of do too,” Vivienne says.
“Then they can show up unannounced,” I say.
More voices in the background.
“Vivienne?” At this point I’m whisper-yelling.
After a few more seconds, Vivienne says, “Yeah, five votes for this being a good idea.”
“Five?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Vivienne says. “Me, Abril, Maddie, and Sloan just called Antonio, and Antonio says come over.”
“Wait, why doesn’t Bastián get a vote?” I ask.
“Antonio didn’t ask them,” Vivienne says.
“Why not?” I ask.
“Oh, Lore,” Vivienne says with fond patience. “I haven’t known you very long, but I think I know that if Bastián knows you’re coming, you’re definitely gonna lose your nerve.” This time, a sympathetic sigh. “I think you know I’m right about this.”
I kick at the dirt near my feet. “What if Bastián doesn’t want me there?”
“Then you get on the next bus back,” she says, “and you come over here, because no matter what happens with you and Bastián we’re still their friends and we’re still yours, okay? All of that clear? Now get a pen.”
I grab a pen from my bag. The next thing my hand finds is the cardboard sleeve Vivienne wrote her address on. I let out a laugh.
“What?” Vivienne asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Go ahead.”
Vivienne puts Maddie on the phone, and Maddie gives me the bus number, the approximate next time, the stop to get off at.
My heart feels fragile as a soap bubble. “You’re sure about this?” I ask.
“We’re hanging up on you now,” Maddie says. “Go.”
My second call is to my parents.
“So, what if I wasn’t home until later?” I ask.
“How much later?” my mom asks.
I do a quick calculation of the bus transfer times. “A lot.”
“Why?” my mom asks.
“Because I’m thinking about doing something stupid,” I say.
