Lakelore, page 3
She makes a hmm noise under her breath to tell me she heard me, to ask what I want.
I look at the few other people in the waiting room, but no one else notices. One man crosses and uncrosses his legs, which sends ripples through the water out from his shoes.
A door opens.
“Silvano,” a nurse in pastel scrubs says.
I stand up, the automatic reflex of hearing my name called in here. I brace for my shoes to squish against the soaked carpet, but nothing.
I look down. The carpet, dulled by sun and age, has the fuzzy look of being dry again. Dust motes wink in the light through the window.
Mom watches me hesitate. “You want me to come in with you?”
“No,” I say. “I’m okay.”
She tips her head toward the door “Adelante.”
I walk toward the door where the nurse is waiting, and the world feels hazy around the edges, like it does when you’re waking up.
The nurse goes through the standard checks, and I keep looking for the shine of water on the floor.
By the time we’re in the exam room, and she’s talking me through how to do an injection, I’ve convinced myself that it was a trick of the light. Or that nerves made me carry a piece of the world under the lake here with me. Maybe it’s my brain’s version of the turtle stuffed animal I took everywhere as a little kid.
Watch what she’s doing, I tell myself. Listen to the words she’s saying. You need to know this.
But that’s the thing about my brain. I can watch. I can listen. That doesn’t mean I get it. I can pay all the attention I have and still not understand.
As the nurse gets to the part about drawing from the vial, spines of color appear behind her. Spindly plants like branching coral sprout from the supply drawers. The thick fluid in the vial she’s holding turns a deep blue, the color a child might use to fill in an ocean.
As she keeps talking, my mouth stays half-open, and I can’t figure out how to either close it or ask do you see that?
The nurse keeps going with the brisk, precise instructions of someone who’s done an uncountable number of injections. And because I didn’t absorb the first part of the directions, I’m already behind, so I can’t follow what she’s saying now.
The deep blue pulls into the barrel of the syringe, and it looks like the bright cobalt of the sky just before it gets dark.
The nurse keeps talking, and the spindly branches reach out like the purple fingers of Mexican sage. They grow toward the fluorescent lights like they’re looking for the sun.
The world under the lake followed me here. Did I bring part of it with me by mistake? Did some of it stick to me the last time I brought an alebrije to the inlet?
“You still with me?” the nurse asks.
I shake my head, an involuntary snapping back to attention. “What?”
My eyes go past her, but the green and red of the coral has vanished. The fluid in the syringe fades to almost clear again.
The nurse studies my face. “It’s really not as hard as it seems,” she says. “You’ll get it in two seconds. Is there any part you want me to go over again?”
Roughly all of it. I just missed everything she said. So my brain wants me to ask, Can you say all of that again? But I’m used to saying I understand things when I don’t. I’ve gotten better about asking questions, saying I need something explained again. But when I panic, it’s an impulse my tongue still has muscle memory for. I push away help as hard as I need it. The shame of how little I comprehend something makes me blurt out the opposite. So before I can think about the actual consequences of this lie, I hear myself saying, “No. I got it.”
I’m still looking for those branches of color when I realize the nurse just said something else.
“Sorry, what?” I ask.
“You ready?” she asks, and by the way she’s holding the syringe I know she’s talking about the injection.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m ready.”
The needle goes in. The testosterone goes in. I breathe out. It’s the same kind of deep, involuntary breath that still happens when people call me a boy and use the right pronouns. It’s the calm of something being right.
The slight chill of the testosterone going into my thigh muscle flashes that deep blue through my brain.
“You’re a steady one, aren’t you?” the nurse says, the hint of some kind of Midwestern accent on the you.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“You seemed all kinds of jumpy when you walked in here,” she says. “But I put the needle in and you didn’t even flinch.” She puts the syringe in the sharps container. “You’ll be just fine doing these at home.”
She hands me a lot of paper, including a set of instruction sheets with grayscale copies of photos, written paragraphs alongside them. Which would be great except that I know what happens with my brain and complicated directions. As soon as I understand one step, I lose the rest, or how they all go in sequence. The frustration of this will take up all available space in my brain, and the directions will look even more incomprehensible than they did when I started.
These might as well be instructions on building a Mars rover.
She leads me back toward the waiting room. I’m caught between how calm my body feels from the injection itself, from the testosterone finding its way into my cells, and the flinch of wondering if I’m about to see veils of water crossing the waiting room floor. But it’s the same patterned carpet.
Maybe this was something I needed to do so badly that the world under the lake followed my anxious heart here. Now that it’s done, the world under the lake has pulled back beneath the water.
Mom looks up from a different magazine. “Everything go okay?”
I turn the watchband on my wrist, but then stop myself. Mom knows I do that when I’m nervous.
I want to tell her the truth. Yeah, it went great. But I don’t know how to do the next one.
Except if I tell her that, she’ll say something to someone, ask for them to talk me through it again. And that’s going against the current of how I’ve lived with ADHD, trying to make it small enough that it doesn’t inconvenience anyone.
Over years of adapting to living with my own brain, I’ve perfected a nod meant to convey everything from yes, I absolutely understood all that to of course, I’m fine, definitely not overstimulated/overwhelmed/wishing I could hide under a piece of furniture.
And it’s so convincing that even when I use it on Mom, she believes it.
LORE
I have no place calling anyone’s laugh creepy when my mom, my dad, and I all have the kind of obnoxious laughs that sound a little like farm animals.
But something about that laugh got to me, like I was hearing it through water.
In my room, I line up tiny quarter pints with their name labels. Apricot Sherbet. Hillside Clover. Strawberry Milk.
I try to remember if we came here for vacation. But my parents aren’t ones for normal vacations. I grew up on road trips to see things like a Stonehenge replica made of cars (my mom’s pick), a giant sculpture of a roadrunner (my dad’s), banded rock formations that look painted like rainbows (me). I’m pretty sure my mom was talking about someone’s wedding. I’ve been in three of them, a flower girl in two, a ring bearer in another.
I’m still trying to picture which wedding—which one smelled like the soft green dust of the live oaks here?—as I sort laundry.
I grab an armful of towels and open the washer.
A blue glow makes me jump back.
Streaks of light turn against a blue-black darkness as deep as an ocean.
I blink into the washer.
Those trails of light look like constellations in a slow spin cycle, or cars’ lights in a long-exposure photo.
What makes me stare isn’t the strangeness of it.
It’s the familiarity. The particular way the brightness lies against the dark pulls up a memory, like something hauled up from underwater.
“I thought I heard you in here.”
At the sound of my mother’s voice, I slam the washer shut.
My mother comes into the hall, carrying a handful of dish towels. When she reaches for the washer door, I brace for her to jump back, to see what I’ve just seen. A tangle of stars against dark water.
But when she opens it, there’s nothing inside but the metal drum of the washer.
She adds the dish towels, and then goes toward the stairs.
I listen to the whirring of the washer, blinking away the points of light I can still see.
That searing brightness against the smooth, perfect dark stirs something, like silt kicking up, catching the light.
“Mom?” I say.
She stops and looks back down the hall.
“Did I”—I start out slowly—“did I come here on a field trip?”
She nods. “You were nine, I think?”
She probably assumes that nothing worth remembering happened on that field trip.
Because I never told her any of it.
BASTIÁN
The second we’re back at home, I tell Mom I have to stop by work, saying I feel fine, really.
But instead, I go down to the craggy inlet no one ever sees unless they’re hiking by it.
I pass by the old sign that used to say LAKELORE, the wood so weathered that the letters are barely visible now. All on its own, the one word looks lost, so you can’t even tell what it’s doing there. But there used to be a lot more to it than that. Below that one plank, there was a whole placard, a map lettered with little pieces of old lake folklore. The rumored sightings of ancient dolphins. Giant bubbles floating up from the lake floor, holding curled ribbons of seaweed. There was supposedly even a reference to the world under the lake.
But this was a long time ago. By the time I was born, storms had broken the brittle wood into pieces. By the time I was five, wind and sheets of rain had carried the splinters away, and all that was left was LAKELORE, that one plank thick and heavy enough to stay.
There’s a spare beauty in the thin tree cover and low scrub that can withstand the wind out here, the alternating cold and hot. The rough grass looks like water rippling. Little bits of quartz sparkle in the rocks. But right now, I’m not looking at any of that. Right now, I’m standing at the edge of the water, thin sheets of it lapping over the pebbled floor.
I wait for the edges of the lake to turn into leaves of water, spooling away to show the dark underneath. I wait for those silver and blue-green leaves to lift off and swarm around me, painting over the sky. I wait for the world under the lake to open, so I can look for any sign that something’s off, for any reason those threads of lake magic followed me above the surface.
I’m staring so hard at the lake that I don’t notice the water around where I’m standing. I don’t realize it’s flooding into the inlet until it soaks my shoes and the hems of my pants.
LORE
As I walk, the landscape comes forward a little at a time. First the fog, settling low. Then the edges of the rocks, gray as a moon.
The stretch of the lake with pale silt beaches, the ones that draw tourists, that seems like a different planet from where I am now. This is part of the shoreline where the houses get far apart and the land gets hilly.
This is the rocky stretch I remember. There’s not a lot filling out the land here, no thick green, nothing blooming except sprays of wildflowers. The trees grow low, wind-bent from how exposed this side of the lake is. The brush and sage paint the hills soft brown and faded olive.
When I find the sign, I know where I am for sure. It’s not much more than a splintered board on a post. But I can make out the shadow of blue lettering. LAKELORE.
My fingers graze the worn wood, and it sends a shiver of recognition through me. It charges the ends of my hair and the crescent moons of my fingernails.
This sign gave me my name. After I left that strange world underneath the water, and the boy who led me into it, I saw these letters. I’d been looking for my name for months. The name I’d been given when I was born had a kind of weight I couldn’t carry. It was so distinctly feminine I didn’t know how to hold it up.
I brush off the last half of the word on the sign, the echo of the letters almost clear. Lore. The first time I saw it, I couldn’t parse the whole word, because I’d never seen the whole word before. But when I saw this second half of the word, I knew it was mine. Those four letters emerged from the middle of the name I’d been given at birth, like a constellation out of a cluster of stars. When I told my parents, they smiled like it was obvious, like they couldn’t believe we’d missed it.
Of course, my mother said.
That’s it, my father said.
Under the cloud cover, the rocks along the lake look pale gray. The spray laps at them and deepens them to slate. It’s not raining here, not yet, but a storm over the lake is throwing sheets of it against the rocks.
I’m wondering how stable a particular ledge is, how close I can get, and if I’ll find pieces of water lifting off the lake. Or if I’ll find the world underneath that gave me somewhere to hide.
Instead, I see someone down there, trying to scramble up the side of the inlet as the water comes in, and the rocks and wet silt give out.
BASTIÁN
There’s a reason I don’t come to the inlet during storms. The ground goes soft. The rocks get harder to climb.
But the storm over the lake is nowhere close. It’s still far on the horizon. The lightning looks as small as filaments of copper wire.
The water rushing in right now, that’s something else. I know it as soon as I feel it. I know it even before I notice the deep blue and orange of branching plants, the kind I’ve only ever seen in the world under the lake until today. They sprout between the rocks and up through the rough ground. They mirror the shape of the lightning across the lake.
This isn’t the seiches either. The lake’s version of tides are gradual, gentle, not rushing and fast like this.
When I try to get up the side of the inlet, I can’t get a good grip. Even if I could, the rocks are sliding.
A voice calls from above me.
“Hey, do you need help?”
I look up.
I can’t see their features, just dark hair getting in their face, the sweatshirt, the hand they’re reaching down as they say, “Grab my forearm.”
“What?” I call over the rush of water.
“If you don’t want to pull me down with you,” they say, “then don’t grab my hand, grab on to my forearm.”
I hesitate. I don’t know this person, and I have no faith that they’re steady enough, no matter what part of their arm I grab. Vivienne and Abril have repeatedly demonstrated the physics of this trying to help each other out of a pool, laughing as they both tumble back in. No one ever realizes just how much you have to anchor yourself to pull anyone else out of anything.
Another sheet of water comes in. This one gets up to my waist. Distant lightning cuts the sky into pieces.
A hand reaches down and grabs my arm just below my elbow. I grab their arm back. They’re stronger than I expect, pulling me up enough that I can get myself up over the shifting rocks.
“You okay?” they ask, both of us kneeling on the ground above the inlet.
I press the heels of my wet hands into the dirt. I wait for my breathing to slow and my heart rate to come down. All the things I’ve been taught to do since I was a kid.
I get my first good look at this person. My brain starts on the kind of fast inventory I’ve learned to do in a world that often doesn’t like that I’m brown and trans. It’s a quick, involuntary gauging of whether the person across from me may or may not like that I’m brown and trans.
The features let me breathe a little slower. Dark brown eyes. Black hair. Hands and face a brown that’s somewhere between mine and my brother’s.
Then I start to wonder if this person is like me in more ways than that. Their voice is low in a way that sounds like they’re putting effort in. The jeans and sweatshirt are loose. The smudged eyeliner is the same green as the leaves out here. The hair’s stuffed under a beanie, some of it fluffed out in front to look like a boy’s haircut. I used to do that before I cut my hair the same way Antonio does.
But my sense of recognition goes past that, like this is someone I’ve met before. It’s not just about them being brown or maybe trans.
The panic of not remembering someone’s name when I really should rears up in me. Church? A friend’s cousin? Someone at the school where my sister-in-law works? How many times have I met this person, and how upset will they be that I can’t place them? What was I distracted by when I met them? What file did my working memory throw their name and the context into when it had to make room for something else?
“Do I know you?” I ask as we both get to our feet and brush the dirt off our knees.
They look a little panicked, and I realize that how raw my voice is right now made that sound like an accusation. It happens sometimes, even with all the practice I’ve put in. I talk louder than I mean to. My tone is off, and jarring to other people.
Before I can correct and soften with something like I mean, do you go to school here? they say, “Yeah. I’m Lore.” Then Lore adds, “They/them.”
The name shivers through me, and I almost get all the way there. I almost know as I say back, like I’ve said so many times, “Bastián, they/them.”
Because my brain tends to take in too much at once, it takes me a few seconds to understand what’s happening. The shifts in light and color rush in so fast I can’t process them.
But in the space between registering Lore’s name and me getting all the way to knowing who they are, I realize that the world around us is going dark.
LORE
I know I look different than I did then. I turned out wide hipped and a height that’s neither tall nor short. Back then I was both skinny and a head below most of my classmates. My face looked too small for my not-small features, my mouth too cramped for my teeth. I look different enough now—settled into yourself, my mother calls it—that relatives I haven’t seen for years and then meet again at weddings or funerals don’t place me right away.
