Lakelore, page 6
“It’s called cohesion,” they say. “The phenomenon of how particles of the same substance stick together.”
“Like how queer and trans people seem to find each other,” I say.
“Kind of, yeah, same general idea,” Bastián says. “Except that’s a good thing. What’s happening here, I don’t think it’s a good thing. I’m worried that something is pulling the world under the lake back up here.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“That’s what I don’t know.” Bastián hesitates. “Maybe there’s something I should have sent into the world under the lake that I didn’t.”
I stand up from the grass. “You think there are things you want to forget that are pulling back things you already forgot?”
“I didn’t forget anything,” Bastián says. “It’s not like the alebrijes take my memories with them. I still remember everything. Like that one”—Bastián gestures at the last flash of cotton-candy blue—“I made her during a time when I was pretty sure that someone looking at me a certain way meant they hated me. I remember that. It’s not like that ever went away. But sending all of that into the world under the lake meant I wasn’t so close it.”
As we look for the seiche, Bastián’s words knock around in me, like something turning over in the dryer.
If the problem started when I moved here, the problem has to have something to do with me. And if Bastián thinks the problem is about letting go of things, then what I did might be pulling the world under the lake above the surface.
By the time we find the seiche, layers of water receding down a street, I know.
The problem doesn’t just have something to do with me. The problem is me. And maybe if I can do something like what Bastián does with the alebrijes, I can fix this.
BASTIÁN
“This can’t happen,” I say.
Shapes float against the dark.
“I mean it,” I say. “You can’t follow me back here.”
The alebrijes twirl forward. I tense, thinking they’re going to rush out from the world under the lake and toward the surface.
“If you do,” I say, “everything will fall apart for me. Do you get that?”
The quetzals and mule deer pull back. They stay close to the sea glass.
I try to level out my breathing. “Thank you.”
LORE
“Your teachers’ notes mention you’re good at spelling,” Amanda the Learning Specialist says.
I’m shocked there’s anything good left to pull from my file. After what happened, I’d imagined the school striking out every positive thing any teacher ever said about me, a correction written underneath each one. Never mind. We take it all back. We knew there was something off about Lore Garcia the whole time.
Everyone wants to think they see the best in everyone else, but when the bad comes out, they want to pretend that’s all they ever saw.
“You were in the school spelling bee,” Amanda the Learning Specialist says.
“Not really,” I say. “I didn’t get past the first round.”
“What happened?” she asks.
“They had us all take written tests to qualify,” I say, “And because I knew how to draw words like gingham and chartreuse, I qualified.”
I hope she’s writing down adapts well. Engages thoughtfully with schoolwork.
“Gingham and chartreuse, that was just luck.” Yeah, bad luck, but I don’t say that out loud. “My parents are furniture restorers, so I know fabric words.” I shift the bag on my lap, tiny quarter-pint cans bumping against one another. Noble Petal (blush pink) knocks into Dinosaur Kale (deep forest green). “But then the actual spelling bee was oral, not written.”
I flinch at the memory of staring blankly into the school auditorium in a way that Merritt Harnish would mimic for years.
I feel the weight of the paint cans on my lap. Every word from Merritt and his friends, every time they looked at me like I was supposed to confirm how hilarious they were, I imagine all of it streaming out of my hands and into these paint colors. I picture all of it leaving my brain and my body and becoming so contained I can release it into the world under the lake.
“So that’s what happened,” I say. “I’m only good at spelling if it’s written down.”
Amanda the Learning Specialist looks at me like she expects me to keep talking. So I do.
“I can’t really spell out loud because the letters I see in my head almost never end up being the ones I say out loud,” I tell her. “But if I can write them down, that’s when the words can be pictures.”
“How are they pictures?” Amanda the Learning Specialist asks.
I think for a second. “I guess when I’m writing them down, letters aren’t really letters as much as they’re curves and lines. That’s what makes it more like drawing than spelling. Sometimes I don’t write the letters in order either. I start in the middle sometimes, and I keep adding letters until the word looks right. Until it looks like the word I memorized.”
Amanda the Learning Specialist nods.
She doesn’t write anything down.
Should I not have admitted that?
“I don’t do it with every word,” I say. “Like with short words, or words I write a lot, my hands get used to them. It’s the longer ones or the ones that don’t come up a lot where I end up writing the letters out of order. My mom does it too.”
My hands go clammy. I’m talking too much. Usually, that helps me win people over. It loosens them up. With people who aren’t talkers, it takes the pressure off. With people who are, it gets them started. But in this room, rambling means eventually I’ll say something I shouldn’t. So I need to just answer her questions, not open myself like a soda can so she can see what fizzes out.
I shift, and the paint cans rattle.
“I’m sorry, I have to ask,” Amanda the Learning Specialist says. “What are you holding?”
“Paint samples.” I pull one out of the bag and hold it up.
“And you just carry them around like that?” she asks.
“I like them,” I say. “They make me happy.”
“Why do they make you happy?” Amanda the Learning Specialist asks.
Her expression is so genuinely interested that it makes me nervous.
If I want to put all the parts of my life I don’t want into these paint cans, this is the place to do it. This is the room where Amanda the Learning Specialist asks about my trouble with syllable segmentation, phonemic awareness, open and closed syllables. This is where I have to talk about my particular hatred of Dr. Seuss and the nonsense words he puts in his books, because when you’re dyslexic, knowing how to read the word cat does not necessarily mean you know how to read the word bat or mat or whatever made-up word rhymes with them.
Everything I have to talk about here can go into these paint cans.
Everything I don’t want to talk about can go into these paint cans.
“I guess I love the names,” I say. “Amberglass Blush. Candy Button.” I check the labels on the cans I have with me. “Princess Cake. Boudoir Sky. Which is, surprise”—I hold it up so she can see the paint dot—“not blue but purple.”
“So I’m guessing you like those paint-chip-card displays in home-improvement stores?” Amanda the Learning Specialist asks.
“Oh yeah,” I say. “That’s where my parents could always find me when I got away from them. Most of the words I know how to read I learned from my parents and teachers and librarians reading with me. But the rest I probably learned from paint fan decks. When trips to get supplies took a while, my parents used to bribe me with the promise to buy me one of these.” I hold up a quarter-pint can, this one with a dot of apricot orange on the top. “I always picked based on the name.”
“How are things going with your family now?” Amanda asks.
Except for how I tore down our life in the city they’d lived in for twenty years, they’re flawless.
“Good,” I say.
“What about friends?” she asks. “You keeping up with anyone from your old school?”
What I don’t say, what I want to say: All my friends liked me. And most of them even stuck with me when I came out (and those who didn’t, I chose to forget their names). I was the one they asked what shirts to wear on first dates, what were the best grocery stores to buy flowers to bring their mothers after they stayed out too late. But I don’t hear from most of them.
Some of them tried. When I didn’t answer, they gave up. There has to be a hard dividing line between what happened and my life now.
“Yeah,” I say, tensing so the hitch in my stomach won’t show up in my voice. “A few of them.”
Amanda the Learning Specialist checks the clock and sees—like I’ve pretended not to have seen for the past ten minutes—that our session’s almost over. “Your homework”—she hands me a workbook—“is to start on that. And bring me your favorite book.”
“Like for school?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “Your favorite book in general. Doesn’t have to be for school.”
When I pick up my bag, I swear the paint cans are heavier than when we started.
When I get off the bus home, I go to the inlet.
I know I’d told Bastián I’d stay away from the lake. But if there’s any chance this might work, I have to try.
In the dusk, the middle of the lake goes midnight blue. At first, I think the shifting color along the rocks is just splashes of water breaking. But as I stand there, shapes come into focus. A leaf of blue lifts off the surface.
Another follows it. Then a few more, then hundreds, each of them like a butterfly made of water.
I remember this, from that day years ago, jewels of water rushing toward us and painting over the sky.
Then I can see the dark landscape of the world under the lake. Stars swim through it like handfuls of glitter in molten glass.
I’m not going in, even if I want to. The world under the lake is somewhere Bastián brought me once. That doesn’t make it mine.
I take out the paint cans I brought with me. I open the pale pink, the storm blue, the green as bright as food coloring.
With each one I open, the world under the lake pulls on the paint, strong as the moon’s on the ocean. The color drifts toward the dark, spooling out like auroras in a winter sky.
I can almost hear a faint noise going with it, a twinkling sound like water skipping over metal.
A flare of recognition goes through me. It’s that laugh coming off the walls at home. But now it’s streaming away, trailing after a ribbon of tangerine paint.
Maybe it’s not just me who needed to give things up to the world under the lake. Maybe I was supposed to bring that laugh here, to find a path underwater. Maybe I’m making things right with whatever noise and restlessness is haunting where we live.
The sound lilts and skips into the dark.
I stay in exactly that spot until the cans are empty, so clean of paint there’s no trace of color.
BASTIÁN
“We covered the extra blood pressure checks, right?” Dr. Robins asks. “You can do those at Dr. Russell’s office. You don’t have to come all the way to me.”
While I’m on the phone with Dr. Robins, I make an alebrije, a shark with eyes that glint like live ash. The vial of testosterone sits on the corner of my desk, right next to my meds. Easy reach for reference.
“Meds still feeling okay?” Dr. Robins asks.
“Yeah,” I tell him, and we talk about my dosage and the timing. ADHD medication helps give me more of a buffer against changes in my brain weather. I used to get startled by a noise and be thrown off for hours. Someone would give me a look that could have meant nothing, and the ground of my thoughts would dry out and crack. That still happens, but it happens less often, and it happens slower.
This morning I missed the time I usually take my meds. I woke up groggy, tired from dreams of the lake flooding onto the shore, the water pulling into the shape of flames and licking across the hills. So I’m back to setting alarms.
“Any side effects I should know about?” Dr. Robins asks.
A note I put on my desk reminds me. I can never remember this stuff in the moment. “There’s this occasional twitch in my thigh muscle,” I say. “But it doesn’t really bother me.”
“Let’s keep an eye on that,” Dr. Robins says. “You feel ready for your next injection?”
What I tell him: “The nurse gave me some practice syringes and told me to rehearse with saline and fruit.”
What I don’t tell him: I’m still trying to make sense of the directions.
When I get off the phone, I pick up the vial. I shut my eyes, the glass cool against my palm.
If I tell Mom and Mamá that I didn’t catch any of the nurse’s instructions, they’ll remind me that I need to speak up when I don’t understand things. And they’ll mean well, but it’ll be a speech I’ve heard before and a bunch of I know, I know that they’ve heard from me. Mom and Mamá forget sometimes that it’s not that I don’t know what to do. It’s how much my brain resists remembering what I need to do in the moment, and then actually doing it. And explaining that is almost as frustrating as reading directions.
A noise like rushing water comes from outside. Not the hollow echo of someone running a sink or taking a shower, but the force of water hitting the ground. It sounds like hard rain, or the crackling of embers.
When I open my eyes, I almost drop the vial. The fluid inside is now the same deep, illuminated blue it turned in the clinic.
Spills of color drift through my room. Cobalt-glass blue and the red of chili powder and the green of wet grass spread across the air. They thin out and go translucent, like drops of food coloring in water.
I set the vial down and go to the window.
Water skims over the street. But it’s not going out like a tide. The water’s rising. It’s rushing in hard enough for the surface to foam. Strands of lake kelp tumble underneath.
My breath buckles and halts, like those bright green ribbons snapping in the current.
I call Mom’s and Mamá’s names, just in case I’m wrong, just in case I’m not alone in this world-under-the-lake version of our house.
No one answers.
Sometimes how fast I think makes me slow to make decisions. It means I take in so much information I can’t put it in any kind of workable order. So in those rare moments when I know exactly what to do—not because I’m letting my fear or my first impulse decide, but because I can feel in to my cells—I’m sure.
I check the address Lore wrote down, and I run.
LORE
I scrub my hands at the sink, my clothes smelling of varnish and sawdust. As the water spins down the drain, it throws off little arcs of color, like sun through prisms. Or the swirl on the surface of a bubble.
I look up.
Everything is brighter. The bathroom counter is the color of lemon meringue pie. The towels on the rack, usually faded orange, glow as bright as bell peppers.
“Mom?” I call out.
When I step into the hall, the carpet under my feet is the color and texture of pincushion moss.
I take a few more steps. “Dad?”
When a sound comes back, my heart jumps, thinking my parents are here.
But in the next split second, the sound gets clear enough for me to know it’s not a voice.
It’s the tumbling, foaming noise of rushing water.
It floods into the hallway, rising, throwing cords of green and blue and rust-colored kelp at my legs. As I go for the stairs, the ribbons grab at my calves, and I have to fight as hard as if I’m running through mud.
The current pours down the stairs into the shop, turning the wood steps into a waterfall. I cling to the railing so the force doesn’t knock me over.
The water on the ground floor is high enough that the furniture-in-progress is floating. A cabinet that’s usually a dark, rich wood is now a bright red, and it knocks into a desk that’s usually a blond finish but is now a glaring blue. A yellow end table collides with a coffee table that’s suddenly the purple of violet petals. They all clatter against one another. Inside the noise of them knocking together, another sound emerges, one that’s bristled against the back of my neck for half my life.
It comes with the words sound it out, said in a repeating chorus. These are boys who like seeing the anger surge in me, the way my knuckles go tense as I hold it back. They know that I know I have to cram all that rage back inside me, because I am brown, and queer, and nonbinary, and I cannot get away with fighting.
That chorus changes shape. It coils in and billows out and twists into that laugh coming off the walls. It’s back, and it’s louder, singeing the edges of my thoughts so nothing else gets in. It’s a flame sealing off the ends of a rope, leaving it glassy, impenetrable.
I hear my name in an unfamiliar boy’s voice, and I pull back.
I can’t see them, any of the boys whose voices are finding me again. But they’re echoing off the walls.
Kelp and branches weave up from the floor. The kelp grabs at my legs. I stumble against the branches, and they’re as hard as the boughs of a full-grown tree.
“Lore.” The unfamiliar boy’s voice calls my name again.
I turn. A forest-green table rides the current and catches me in the side. It hits hard enough to take the wind out of me, and I fall back on it. The kelp grows thicker in the water, and the water twirls around it in eddies and tiny whirlpools. The branches climb up toward the ceiling.
But I don’t move. I don’t have enough air back in my lungs to move.
A boy’s shadow falls over me. This boy will draw back his fist, and I will deserve it, because I hit first. Everyone saw me hit first. Years of imitating how I try to read, years of grabbing at the edges of my clothes, but because everyone saw my fist go into him first, everything after is on me.
I forgot, at the worst possible moment, that someone like me doesn’t get to fight back.
