Lakelore, page 4
So I don’t expect Bastián to place me.
But they do. And now I have a name to go with them.
“Hi,” I say, the syllable laced with a nervous laugh. I instantly wonder why I thought that the right response. Hi, like we’re just running into each other.
A blur of blue rushes at us. Bastián pulls me out of the way. I feel the motion of their body, them sweeping me into the arc of their path.
A second later, I’m against them, my shirt against their sweatshirt.
“You okay?” Bastián asks.
We’re close enough that our breathing brushes against each other’s hair. So it takes me a second to say, “Yeah. I’m good.”
Bastián lets go and pulls back. “Sorry.”
I look up, and track that rush of blue.
First I take in what it is as it crosses the sky, a spotted fish with a feathered tail that looks blade sharp. Then I take in that the sky is no longer daylight-gray, but purple, dark as the rind of an eggplant.
Ocean plants twist up toward that sky. A starfish with blue swallowtail wings rustles the stalks. The sky ripples with threads of light like sun bowing on the bottom of a pool.
“Are we…” I don’t finish the thought. It trails off, following the fish swimming into the distance.
I look for what I saw the last time, the flickering of blue, the path between the place underneath the water and the surface, the one Bastián led me down and that I followed back toward the inlet.
But I don’t see it.
“How do we get back?” I ask.
Bastián stares into the sky, dread tinting their expression.
The water grass reaches out toward us, stirred like a current’s going through it.
“Bastián?” I say. “How do we get back?”
Bastián shakes their head. “We’re not under the lake.”
As soon as they say it, I see it. I recognize the features around us. Everything is still here, but altered. The rocks have turned deep green and blue, the nearby brush to thickets of pondweed. The hills now look like the contours of a lake bed.
We’re not where Bastián led me that day.
We’re in a different version of where we were a minute ago.
BASTIÁN
Lore came back.
The one other person I know of who’s seen the world under the lake came back.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. And again it sounds harsh, like I often sound when I’m rushing to ask a question I really want the answer to. And if I can tell I sound harsh, it’s really bad, because half the time, I don’t know how I come across. Mom will tell me I seem sarcastic when I’m not. Vivienne will worry that I’m upset or agitated when I’m just excited about something.
I’m still trying to gauge how I come across to Lore right now. Part of me thinks if I say the wrong thing, or say it in the wrong way, Lore will just vanish.
“I just moved…” Lore breathes the beginning of a word I’m guessing is here, then stops.
Lore looks around at the water thyme rippling where the brush used to be. “Who are you?”
I have no idea how to answer that. Who I am now is not who I was when I brought Lore into the world under the lake. I don’t even go into the world under the lake anymore.
“Did you know there’s a collective noun for a group of polar bears?” Lore asks.
I shudder out of what I was thinking. “What?”
“A group of polar bears,” Lore says. “It’s called an aurora.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“Sorry,” Lore says. “You seem tense. I thought you could use a piece of trivia.”
I let out a laugh that surprises me more than it seems to surprise Lore. You seem tense. I am past tense. We are in a corner of the shoreline that looks like it’s been filtered through the lake. And as far as I can tell, we’re alone. There are no tiny figures down the shoreline. The boats out on the lake bob on the ink blue of the water, unattended.
Lore’s focus stays at the dark ground where the dirt path just was. They watch filmy layers of deep-blue water cross back and forth.
“What?” I ask.
“It’s going out,” Lore says.
“What is?” I ask.
“The tide,” Lore says. “Look.”
“There are no tides,” I say. “This is a lake. The closest we have are called seiches, and they’re different from tides.”
Lore turns that stare on me.
“Sorry,” I say. “You seemed tense. I thought you could use some trivia.”
Lore laughs. “Ten points.” They tilt their head at the water skimming over the ground. “Really, though. Look.”
I watch, until I see what Lore’s seeing.
Those layers of water are gradually receding toward the hills. It’s so slight I wouldn’t be able to stay still long enough to notice if Lore hadn’t pointed it out.
“If the tide—sorry, seiche—is going out,” Lore says, “where’s it going?”
I shake my head. “No idea.”
A second later, Lore is trailing the water toward the ghostly versions of the olive trees.
“Lore.” I go after them. “Wait.”
Their next step takes them into water deep enough that it’s up to their waist.
“Lore,” I call out again, louder this time, as I run forward.
The sky flashes to pale gray. Then it settles into the dulled silver it was before. The rocks and hills fade back to their soft grays and browns. The dark silhouettes of trees fill out with olive leaves.
Lore’s now at the edge of the brush, jeans soaked, but standing on dry ground. They’re breathing hard, pupils pinned small from the sudden light.
How still they’re staying lets me notice the faint wisps of color vanishing off Lore. They’re thin and delicate as cobwebs, the bright green of algae, as though the world under the lake has left barely visible threads on Lore.
But I can’t tell if it just happened, or if it happened seven years ago.
Lore’s glance catches on my wrist. They give my watch a weird look. No one our age wears watches, and I know that. But I’ve also noticed that wearing a man’s watch signals something to people looking at me that they don’t even register. It makes it more likely that they’ll call me him instead of her, and while him might not be quite right, it’s a whole sky closer to right than her. That’s worth my friends telling me that an analog watch makes me look about a thousand years old.
“Please tell me that’s not really the time,” Lore says.
“Usually about ten to fifteen minutes ahead,” I say. “But yeah.”
Lore swears under their breath. “I’m late.”
I may not always know what to do, especially when I’m knocked off-balance. But I’m not making the same mistake again.
“How do I find you?” I ask, at the same time Lore asks the same thing.
We trade awkward laughs.
There’s a bristling energy around Lore, and I know they’re ready to run. They’re not sticking around for an address or phone number.
“There’s a copy place here,” I say. “It’s the only one. I’m there starting”—I check my watch again, because there’s enough in my head right now that I’ve already forgotten the time—“roughly now until closing.”
“Okay,” Lore says. “Thanks.”
Then they’re gone.
LORE
Even running, I miss my bus, and I have to wait for the next one.
Waiting for the next one makes me mythologically late for one of the most important appointments of my life.
I clatter into the waiting room, and a minute later a door opens.
“Lore Garcia?” she asks.
The title learning specialist made me expect a woman in a crisply ironed skirt-suit. Not someone in a plaid button-up open over a band tank top.
“Sorry,” I say. The sweat on my face makes locks of my hair stick. But I don’t take off my hat. On days when I’m a boy or mostly a boy, I never take off my hat unless I have to. “I know I’m late.”
“You’re more than late,” she says. “We’ll reschedule.”
No. I cannot reschedule. If I reschedule, my parents will hear about it. Best case scenario, they’ll think I’m too much of a mess to make anything of my new life here. Worse case, they’ll think I don’t give a shit.
“Okay.” I sink down into one of the waiting room chairs, the woven upholstery gone fuzzy at the edges. “I’ll wait.”
“I didn’t mean today,” she says.
“I’ll just stay,” I say. “In case anyone doesn’t show.” I try to give her a pleasant, unbothered look that tells her I’m not a pain in the ass, I’m simply persistent.
“It’s your day, not mine,” she says.
I open my bag and casually take out my summer reading book to show her that I plan, I think ahead, I take homework seriously. All the things I need her to decide about me.
Whether anyone’s willing to say it or not, I know she’ll give a full report to my new school. And I need that report to be that I’m a promising new student, not a bad bet. I’m already a brown nonbinary kid who just moved to a mostly white town. If the learning specialist gives me anything less than a sparkling review, the teachers will be even more on alert than they already are. A couple of days being late to class, a badly timed laugh, and they’ll decide I’m a lost cause, or worse.
Especially if they all know what happened at my last school.
My fingers find where a hardware store receipt is holding my place.
But when I flip the book open, there are no lines of text.
There’s a window of the same deep blue darkness I found in the washing machine.
My fingers scramble to turn the pages, but I can’t find the edges.
I slam the book shut.
I try again, a random page.
The book still holds that square of blue. It’s lit up with bright points, little bits of fluorescent pink and purple and red, like the dots on the i’s in neon signs. They swirl around like they’re circling a drain.
I press the book shut again, look up, and smile like nothing’s wrong, just in case the learning specialist is looking. But she’s in her office, one wall of which has a flag that’s all sunset colors. I’m pretty sure it’s the lesbian flag. It hovers right over a potted fern.
Out of habit, I made a point to hide the pink and blue of the trans flag and the bright bands of the rainbow flag hanging off the canvas strap of my bag. Shoving them into the bag, out of view, is a reflex, something my hands do around new people or in new places.
But now, I fluff the flags out. I’ll take anything that might convince her to fit me in today, up to and including queer family nepotism.
For the next four hours, I take up this corner of the waiting room. I look through old magazines. I use the one all-gender bathroom I find in the basement of this building.
Kids and parents file in and out, and a few students who look college aged or even in grad school. I stay.
I keep checking the time. My fingers wear the upholstery under me even fuzzier as I realize I’m probably going to miss Bastián. But I stay.
I don’t know if it’s the flags or if I wear her down. But just as the sun is going behind the buildings across the street, her door opens again.
“It’s your lucky day,” she says.
I stand up, fast, before she can change her mind.
“Don’t get too excited,” she says. “We can’t cover the whole hour and a half right now. But we can at least get started, so come on in.”
BASTIÁN
“You’re the only one who can reason with that thing,” Trish says as I’m leaving.
“Nathaniel and I have an understanding,” I say.
“You named the laminating machine?” Trish asks.
“I did no naming,” I say. “We just made introductions.” I check the parking lot one more time, looking for Lore.
“You okay?” Trish asks.
Besides worrying that I’ll never see Lore again, I’m great.
“I’m fine,” I say. “You sure you don’t need me to stay?”
“Get out of here,” Trish says.
On the walk home, I work on putting some kind of order to my thoughts. I try to figure out what could have pulled the world under the lake above the surface. It can’t just be Lore and me meeting again, not with what happened at the clinic.
The weather in my brain is getting hotter and brighter. The cloud-cover thins out. Tourists may like cloudless skies but I don’t, especially in my brain. When the weather in my brain feels cloudless, the heat and glare leaves my mood dried out and brittle.
The minute I get home, Mamá calls from the kitchen, “Your brother says if you don’t visit him by the end of the month he’s coming to get you.”
“I know,” I call back.
“He wants to make alebrijes with you,” Mamá says. “I like that you two do that together. I like that you do things as brothers.”
I go to my room, brain spinning back on its previous axis.
I do what I always do. I take this feeling rattling around inside me and I turn it into paint and papier-mâché. I’ve done it with days when I was so overloaded I wanted to sit in a closet with a glitter jar and not hear anyone’s voice. I’ve done it with times I’ve said something stupid because I didn’t take two seconds to think first. And now I do it with how worried I’m getting about the world under the lake.
I fall into the calming motion of the brushstrokes, the cold milk of the papier-mâché, the whispering of the bristles in paint. It all eases up my fear that maybe I did something stupid without even knowing it, and that’s why today happened.
A flash of motion pulls my attention to the window.
Lore is on the sidewalk outside.
I run for the door before Mamá can. When I open the door, Lore is lifting a hand to knock. Their hair sticks out in all directions from under their hat. There’s a bloom of color in their face, like they ran here.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Lore says. “I was late getting the bus, so I was late getting back, and I missed you.”
I blink at them. “What are you doing here?”
“I ran into your friends,” Lore says. “The one with the month name and the one with the Arthurian name.”
“Abril and Vivienne?” I ask. I don’t often meet people who seem to live at an even higher frequency than I do, but Lore might qualify, at least right now. If I talked as fast as Lore is right now, Mom would pat the air in front of her and say slow down.
“Yeah, them,” Lore says. “Sorry, sometimes I make mental notes to help me remember names but then I just remember the mental notes and not the names. Anyway, I told them I was looking for you.”
“And they gave you my address?” I ask.
“Sorry.” Lore takes a step back. “I didn’t mean to creep you out.”
“You didn’t,” I say. “My friends and I just need to have a talk about boundaries. Do you want to come in?” As in, into the kitchen or living room, and not my room. Strangers do not see my room.
Lore follows me inside.
“In their defense,” Lore says, “I told them we’d met before, and I said I really needed to find you. I think they might have thought I was about to go for the grand declaration of love.”
That actually makes me laugh. “Yeah, that sounds like them. They’re romantics.”
“Got it,” Lore says. “Equal parts adorable and sickening.”
“Exactly,” I say. “You want anything? You look…”
“Terrible?” Lore asks. “It’s okay. You can say it.”
“I was gonna say flushed. Do you want water or something?”
“Who’s your friend?” Mamá asks when we come into the kitchen.
Before I can say anything, Lore says, “I’m Lore. They/them.” Lore shrugs at the trans and rainbow scarves on their bag. “Walking pride flag.”
The quirk of Mamá’s smile as she leaves the kitchen means I can predict what she’ll say later. Your new friend’s a character.
Lore watches Mamá go into the living room, then, with a lowered voice, says, “Have we covered the necessary small talk?”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“What happened today?” Lore whispers. “How did you do that?”
“You think I did that?” I ask.
“You did it last time,” Lore says.
“No,” I say. “I brought you into the world under the lake last time. This time, it came to us. I didn’t do that. I wouldn’t know how to do that.”
Lore looks at my hands and then pulls back.
I didn’t even realize I rushed out of my room still holding an alebrije, a gold snake with wings.
“Is that”—Lore glances into the living room too, like they’re checking that Mamá is absorbed in watching TV, and then back at the winged snake—“that looks like…”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s an alebrije. But it’s not alive yet.”
“Yet?” Lore’s whisper thins out.
I slow down and remind myself that Lore doesn’t know the world under the lake, or how it works.
“What’s an alebrije?” Lore asks.
I thud an open palm against my chest. “You wound me.”
“Sorry?” Lore says.
“Fastest possible history lesson.” I put down the alebrije and take a glass from the cabinet. “Alebrijes go back to the 1930s, to the Linares family, specifically Pedro Linares. He dreamed alebrijes, and then made them. They’re mythical creatures usually made of combinations of features of different animals. Like a frog with bird’s feathers, or a snake with dragonfly wings.”
“Or a starfish-butterfly,” Lore says.
I fill the glass and then hand it to Lore. “My great-grandfather studied how to make them in Mexico City. He made the papier-mâché kind, so that’s what we know in our family. Usually they’re made of papier-mâché or wood, and then painted.”
