Lakelore, page 8
Abril sits at the top of the other slide, legs crossed in. “She’s right. You hear actors all the time talking about how when they put on the clothes, they become the character.”
As the debate continues, I glance between each of them and Lore. “That’s Sloan. That’s Maddie. You already know Vivienne and Abril.”
“Back me up on this,” Sloan says, not hearing us.
I missed what Sloan was just saying, but whatever it is, I go with, “I’m not taking sides here.”
“That’s right,” Abril says. “Bastián’s too much of a Libra to pick a favorite.” She looks at me. “No offense.”
I hold my hands up, in a gesture that probably looks like no offense taken but that I hope conveys please leave me out of this. Avoiding conflict is the best strategy for me. When I get pulled into arguments, even about ranking a movie franchise, I stop planning out what I’ll say. When I say things without thinking, I say the wrong things.
“You.” Sloan looks at Lore.
“They do have a name,” Vivienne says.
“This is Lore,” I say.
Sloan ignores me and keeps looking right at Lore. “Favorite of the original trilogy.”
I’m about to say You don’t have to answer that, but Lore answers, fast, “First one.”
“And why is that?” Sloan says. With him up on the playhouse, I feel like we’re both standing before some kind of judge and reasoning with a child to come down from the rope ladder.
“Most R2-D2 screen time,” Lore says. “After the first time my parents showed it to me, I went around beeping like that for months. But they figured they’d brought it upon themselves so they didn’t stop me. Especially when they realized I was so annoying I could get people they didn’t like to leave.”
Everyone laughs except Vivienne, who catches my eye and mouths, I like them.
I don’t know why it takes this to make it clear to me, but it’s now clear to me: Lore is weird. A kind of weird possibly in the same universe as the kind of weird I am.
“I deem your reasoning worthy,” Sloan says.
Lore gives the most sarcastic bow I’ve ever seen, eyes wide and eyebrows raised.
The whole time Lore talks with my friends, I’m only partly hearing them.
Mostly, I’m thinking about what Lore saw in my room. The reminder notes I put everywhere. Along with timers and alarms that help me do what I need to do but might forget. They remind me what I need for the next day. They cue me to hydrate. They help me not interrupt myself in the middle of completing tasks, like half finishing the dishes and then starting dinner and then forgetting about both and taking a shower.
They give me shorthand versions of classes and therapy sessions, so I remember to put the brakes on my own brain. Slow versus fast. Hot versus cold. Next step first.
Lore’s not asking about them. But I bristle at the thought that anyone but Mom and Mamá and Antonio and my closest friends have seen them, the kind of adjustments I have to make to compensate for everything my brain either can’t do or resists doing.
I have to shift out of thinking about this. That’s not why we’re here. Shoving my brain off this train of thought feels like putting all my weight behind moving a piece of furniture. It doesn’t budge, and then all of a sudden, it slides, and I’m blurting out, “Abril, can Lore and I talk to you for a minute?”
Everyone looks at me, and I know I just interrupted.
Abril comes down the slide. “You requested an audience?”
I wait for the conversation above to get loud enough that no one will hear us.
I look at Lore.
“Bastián says you know about something about where I live,” Lore says.
“What do you mean?” Abril asks. Then it clicks, and she beams at me. “Bastián Silvano, are you admitting I’m right?”
I glance at Lore. “I told you she’d be like this.”
Lore ignores me. “Yes, they’re admitting you’re right. Now what do I do?”
“You did tell them I don’t know how to un-haunt things, right?” Abril asks me.
“So it is haunted?” Lore asks. Alarm sharpens their voice. “It’s definitely haunted?”
I glare at Abril. “Thanks. Thanks for that.”
“What do I do?” Lore says. “It’s like the walls don’t like that I’m there.”
Abril frowns.
Lore looks nervous. Lore doesn’t know that this is Abril’s thinking frown. Hope isn’t lost yet.
“I need to do a little research,” Abril says.
“Research?” I ask.
“Asking my grandmother a few questions,” Abril says. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“Thank you,” Lore says.
“No, thank you.” Abril grins at me. “I didn’t think I’d win this debate.”
“Hey, Lore,” Sloan calls down. “We have follow-up questions.”
Lore takes a few steps to get a clear line of conversation with Sloan, Maddie, and Vivienne.
Lore plays with their hands as they talk, twisting their fingers together in front of them. I can’t stop watching. Their hands. Their face. Their braids brushing their shoulders.
“What are you standing here for?” Abril says, low enough that no one can hear. “Go over there.”
“They saw the index cards,” I say, fast. Not fast because I didn’t mean to say it. Fast because I want it over with.
Abril looks at me with a wince of sympathy. She’s one of the few people outside my family who know what this means.
Abril knows that tangible reminders like the index cards are part of the external scaffolding of my life. They help me remember things in the moment I need to do them. They’re also never the same between one time Abril comes over and the next.
Sometimes things staying the same are good—when I take my meds, putting my keys in the same place, cleaning the papers out of my bag at the end of the week. But sometimes things staying the same means they stop working. If I left the index cards the same, I’d go right by them without even seeing them. So I rearrange them the same way I rearrange the clocks and alarms. I write the words and phrases in different colors. I cut the cards into different shapes. I switch them around. I make patterns and then take them apart. If they look different, then I notice them. I drink a glass of water, and I pause long enough to calm down. I open the notebook I carry around and look back at what I wrote down.
That doesn’t mean I want Lore to know any of this.
“How do I explain that?” I ask.
“You either don’t,” Abril says, “because you don’t have to. You don’t owe anyone an explanation. Or you tell them the truth, that you’ve worked incredibly hard to work with your brain.”
I feel myself frowning, not because I don’t appreciate what Abril just said—I do—but because sometimes compliments make me uncomfortable. Even ones I want to be true.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Abril says, “I put the chances of them reacting badly at about 0.3 percent.”
“Just as a rough estimate?” I ask.
“Precisely calculated with science,” she says. “I’m even better at math than you, you know that. And anyway”—Abril’s whisper goes even lower—“if that 0.3 percent is the case, they’re not worth it. They’re not worth you.”
Abril kicks at the heel of my shoe, and it startles me into stumbling. She knows me well enough to know I’ll try to make it look deliberate by walking forward. Which gets me close to Lore. The only not-awkward way I can explain coming toward them is to take the swing next to them.
Abril climbs back up the wooden ladder. When her entrance shifts the center of the conversation back up to the playhouse, Lore reaches for their bag.
“I brought something to show you.” Lore opens a book and hands it to me. “See?” They tap the glossy page. The spread shows glow-in-the-dark green cats in an olive-green kitchen. “Radioactive Cats.”
I trace my fingers over the page, outlining the cats.
“Did you know a group of jellyfish is called a bloom?” I ask.
I realize, only after I’ve said it, that this was too fast of a conversation change. Just because the connection was clear in my head—cats, colorful cats, colorful animals, jellyfish—doesn’t mean it would be clear to anyone else.
“Yeah,” Lore says. “I did know that one.”
“And it’s called a thunder of hippopotamuses,” I say.
“Didn’t know that one,” Lore says.
“And a dazzle of zebras,” I say.
“Oh, I like that one,” Lore says.
I stop. One more and it’ll be clear I looked all these up to impress Lore.
I turn the pages, from the green cats I’ve been staring at, to a scene of a bright turquoise bedroom swarmed by orange goldfish. A pack of red foxes invades a dining room that’s gray right down to the chandelier. Then comes a house as pink as a doll’s dress, with a bluish-lavender interior, and dozens of midnight-blue squirrels and a few ink-black crows.
There are people in the frames, but my eyes don’t go to them. They look bored, incidental, like they’re background noise to what’s happening, and everything that’s happening is background noise to them.
“I love that one,” Lore says, pointing to the page I’ve just paused on, a flurry of ultramarine-blue leaves whirling through an autumn-brown room.
“I forget things sometimes,” I blurt out. “Really basic things.”
What is wrong with me today? Two socially inappropriate subject changes in a row. Nicely done, Bastián. Care to try for a third?
Lore pauses for a second, and I think they’ll say something like, That came out of nowhere. But they say, “Everyone does.”
“I appreciate you saying that, and I know you’re trying to be nice,” I say. “But when I say I forget things, I mean, a lot. I forget to eat, and then I’m somehow surprised when I’m really hungry. I forget that I’m holding something, so I’ll drop it or spill it or break it. My long-term memory, it’s pretty good. Like I remember what color shirt you were wearing when we met. It was orange.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Lore says.
“No, not when we met the other day,” I say. “The actual first time we met.”
Lore’s eyes open a little more. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But that’s my long-term memory. My working memory, it’s shit. I can’t hold much in my head at once.”
Lore looks down at our feet and the hems of our jeans. “You’re talking about the cards.”
I look down too. “Yeah.”
Most of the time, I don’t like quiet very much. It scares me. It gives my thoughts too much space to ricochet around. But the quiet Lore lets stand between us, I need that. I don’t realize I need it until it’s there, open, not filled with compassion or commentary. I said something I needed to say, and now Lore knows, and that’s all it needs to be.
Lore twists in the swing, left and right. Their shirt pulls tighter against them. Lore’s chest is flatter than it sometimes is, enough that they must be wearing a binder. It’s the kind of thing I don’t want to notice but do, especially since I wear binders.
“What are your words?” I ask, and then immediately wonder if that was enough time for a subject change.
“What do you mean my words?” Lore asks.
“Like how I’m nonbinary, and I’m also a boy, a guy,” I say. “Do you have words that feel right?”
“Boy is usually a pretty good bet,” Lore says. “On select days, so is girl.”
“I’m never a girl,” I say.
“Yeah, I guessed that,” Lore says. “But I don’t love guessing, and I don’t really love when people guess with me, so thanks for telling me.”
The air shifts, and I can smell Lore’s soap, the artificial fruit of raspberry or apple shower gel.
“When did you come out?” I ask.
“A few years ago?” Lore says. “Before I told my parents, I was going to school looking like a girl every day, and if I wasn’t feeling girly that day, I’d change when I got to school and then change back before I went home.”
“Wow,” I say. “That is closet-committed.”
“You have no idea.” Lore kicks at the rocks. “Once I was in full boy mode, hair under the hat, binder and everything, and my mom got home early.”
“Oh no,” I say.
“Oh yes,” Lore says. “I didn’t know it was possible to let down my hair that fast, put a bra on under my shirt but over my binder…”
“No,” I interrupt even though I don’t mean to.
“Yes,” Lore says. “Easiest way to put my chiches back on after I’d made them disappear.” Lore gives a magician’s hand flourish. “Then I put on lipstick. All in about a minute. I think I broke the sound barrier.”
“You’re like the nonbinary Clark Kent.” I trace the edges of the book’s pages. “Right into the gender phone booth.”
“It was a lot like that,” Lore says. “Sometimes I kind of wish I could give the people around me a daily report on my gender. Just so they’d know what to expect. So no one would give me that confused look whether I was wearing a binder or makeup or whatever.”
When I don’t say anything, Lore looks up. “I’m not making any sense, am I?”
“No,” I say. “You’re making a lot of sense. The world could use daily gender forecasts.”
The minute I hear myself say it, I know how stupid it sounds.
But Lore’s face lights up. “Yes,” they say. “Sunny, forty-two percent expected femininity.”
“Tonight,” I say, “cloudy with likely masculinity.”
“Exactly,” Lore says.
Our shoes accidentally touch, my right, Lore’s left. I pull back.
When my friends are laughing loudly enough that I’m sure they won’t hear, I say what’s been stuck in my throat this whole time.
“I’m sorry about everything,” I say. “I really thought I could fix it.”
Lore looks at me. “You think this is your fault?”
“Well, yeah,” I say. “Who else’s?”
Lore makes a circle with the toe of their shoe, moving the small rocks out in buckling waves.
“Bastián, I have to tell you something,” they say.
“Something other than we have to find a way to calm down the building you’re living in?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Lore says.
I wait. I don’t talk. I want to jump in and ask, What? What are you talking about? But sometimes, if the weather in my brain is right, I can give people enough quiet for them to choose the moment they talk. I learned how from watching my brother. Antonio lets silences stand. He lets conversations breathe.
“What happened,” Lore says, “with all the furniture and the flooding, that was my fault.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”
So much for letting silences stand.
Lore breathes out. “I tried to do what you do, sending things into the world under the lake.”
“What?” I turn the swing I’m on toward Lore. “How?”
The book starts sliding off my lap. I forgot I had it. I scramble to keep it from falling, grabbing it by the edge.
“I did what you said you do,” Lore says.
“With what?” I ask.
“Paint,” Lore says. “I have these paint samples in my room, and when I tried it, I felt it. What you were talking about with letting everything just end up in something small enough that you can hold it. I felt that.”
The color in my room.
It was a shadow of the paint Lore gave to the world under the lake.
“But how did you…” I don’t have the end of the sentence, so it’s a relief when Lore interrupts.
“I saw it.” Lore pulls closer, pinning themself and their swing still with the toes of their shoes against the ground. “I went to the inlet, and it happened, just like when you showed it to me.”
I let my temple fall against one of the swing chains.
“I didn’t go down there,” Lore says. “I wouldn’t do that.”
That makes my panic a little smaller. That means there’s only so much Lore could have found out.
But the world under the lake still opened for Lore, which means I’m right. Lore’s connected to it.
“I’m sorry,” Lore says. “I thought it would help, and it didn’t.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s not your fault.”
“You’re not mad?”
“No,” I say. “Why would I be?”
“Because the world under the lake is yours?”
“It’s not mine,” I say. “It doesn’t belong to me. I’m just the only one I know who’s been there. Besides you.” I lift my head as another question comes to me. “But what were you trying to send down there?”
Lore opens their mouth, then hesitates.
I know that pause. I’ve given that pause. That’s the I don’t want to talk about it pause.
“Forget it,” I say. “It’s none of my business.”
I hand Lore back the book.
“You can borrow it if you want,” Lore says.
“It’s okay.” I’ve gotten better at not losing things. Most of the time I know where my keys, ID, library books are. But the thought of even possibly losing this book, with the pictures Lore stared at growing up, makes me leave it in their hands.
“What if it doesn’t work?” Lore asks.
“What?” I ask.
“Sending things down there to get away from them.” Lore puts the book in their bag. “What if it doesn’t work?”
I feel the shift of weather in my brain, the air drying out. “Can we not talk about this? You tried it. It didn’t work. I’m not mad. What have we not covered?”
“But what if it didn’t work because it just doesn’t work?” Lore asks.
“Lore,” I say, slowly, so I can actually think about what I’m saying. “It’s the only way it’s ever worked for me.”
“The only way what’s ever worked?” they ask.
“Everything,” I say.
Maddie leans over the edge of the slide, tilting her head at Lore. “You know you don’t have to listen, right?”
“To what?” Lore asks.
“Bastián’s art lectures,” Sloan says.
