“Other way around.” Lore pulls out the book. “This is mine.”

  Maddie nods. “Carry on.”

  Lore waits a few seconds for the talking and laughing above us to start back up.

  “What if you didn’t?” Lore whispers. “What if you don’t need to be hiding from whatever you’re hiding from?”

  “I’m not hiding from anything,” I say. “It’s how I let things go. That’s what people do, right? They let things go. Only it’s harder for me to do that, so this is one of the only ways I know how to.”

  My restlessness, my impulsive moments, the times when I’m overstimulated or overloaded or afraid, putting all those into the alebrijes gives me literal distance from all those things. I don’t hate them any more than I hate the alebrijes who carry them in their wings.

  They’re just not part of me anymore. They can’t be.

  “I’m not asking what you send down there,” Lore says. “But just so you know, I like everything about you.”

  My hands grip the swing chains, the grain of the rust against my palms.

  The version of me that I’ve worked for years to be—calmer, more careful, a Bastián who thinks about what they’ll say before they say it—would take a minute. That Bastián would stay quiet for a few seconds, recognize the compliment, and then respond with thank you.

  But the version of me I gave over to the world under the lake in pieces, the one that’s fast and impulsive and reactive, that Bastián gets to my mouth first.

  “You only like everything about me because I don’t keep the parts no one would like.”

  I land on the words hard. It’s loud enough that, right after, I know I snapped them at Lore. Just short of yelling.

  Lore pulls back, the swing drifting with their shift in weight.

  My friends look over the side of the playhouse. They heard me raise my voice, but they look curious, not concerned.

  “Disagreement about expressionist painters?” Sloan asks.

  Lore produces a laugh that may or may not sound as forced to everyone else as it does to me.

  “I’ve got to get home.” Lore stands up from the swing and pulls their bag onto their shoulder. “May the force be with you.”

  “And also with you,” Maddie and Vivienne say in unison.

  I watch Lore leave. I watch their swing slow to a stop.

  Then I climb up the ladder to meet my friends. I laugh when they laugh. I pretend that I didn’t just scare Lore off. I pretend the Bastián I used to be didn’t just reach above the surface, and find me, and screw everything up.

  I stay up there, sitting on the edge as everyone else goes home. First Maddie and Sloan. Then Vivienne. Then Abril.

  “You sure you’re okay here on your own?” Abril says.

  “I like looking at the water.” I tilt my head toward the lake. It’s taking on the orange of the sky.

  “You just seem a little”—Abril pauses—“brooding.”

  “I’m fine.” My slight laugh seems to satisfy her.

  “Okay.” But she pauses right before the edge and glances back.

  “Go down the damn slide,” I say.

  Abril gives a quirked smile and whirs down to the ground.

  I stay as the sun falls and the sky gets dark. I lean back and lie on the wood platform. I breathe in the smell of stones and dirt, of rotting plants and new growth. I stay long enough that the chill makes me zip my jacket closed. I turn the band of my watch around my wrist, one way, then the other, as I watch the sky.

  Whoever said the only things you regret in life are the things you never do probably didn’t have ADHD.

  When it comes to things I regret, the column of things I’ve done usually runs longer than the things I haven’t. And right now, I regret how I couldn’t put the brakes on my own brain and just shut up.

  But how do you explain that to someone else? How do you tell someone that you had to work to learn not to follow every impulse your brain has? How do you tell someone that you couldn’t just learn it like everyone else does, until it becomes your own common sense? That you came into the world with so much quicksand you needed professional help to learn to steer around it?

  My brain won’t stop tumbling over what I said to Lore, like water turning a broken piece of a bottle into sea glass. My brain tries to smooth down the edges.

  But it keeps stopping in the same place.

  When I say things without thinking, I say the wrong things.

  Even when the wrong thing is the truth.

  You only like everything about me because I don’t keep the parts no one would like.

  It’s something I never wanted to say out loud.

  But if everything I let go into the world under the lake washes back up, Lore will find out anyway.

  LORE

  It happens while I’m walking home. A thread at the center of me lights up and blazes even brighter than how annoyed I am with Bastián.

  What the hell was I thinking telling them to do anything when I can’t even tell them how my own brain works?

  I will never tell Bastián what happened at my last school. I will never tell anyone here. No one here can know any of that if I really want a chance here.

  But maybe that doesn’t have to apply to everything. Maybe I don’t have to tangle all that up with the truth of my brain. Just because Bastián can never know what happened doesn’t mean they can never know me.

  When I get to the second rung from the top, Bastián hears me, and turns. The moon is still low, and a little gold, trailing a yellow ribbon across the lake. But it gives off enough light to show me Bastián’s expression, open, unguarded, but a little shocked to see me.

  “If you were trying to scare me off”—I climb onto the wooden platform—“you’re gonna have to be a lot more creative than that.”

  Bastián shifts over. I sit on the edge alongside them. I breathe in the raw, silvery smell of the lake.

  “Should I take you not speaking as a bad sign?” I ask.

  “Sometimes I shouldn’t talk,” Bastián says.

  “I like when you talk,” I say.

  “I don’t want to talk right now,” Bastián says.

  “Does that mean you want me to leave?” I ask.

  “No.” Bastián laughs. “I don’t want to talk right now because sometimes I’m an asshole when I talk, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “No, you’re not,” I say. “If you were, I wouldn’t tell you what I’m about to tell you.”

  Bastián doesn’t look at me. But the way they brace their hands behind them, palms on the wooden planks, lets me know they’re listening.

  We watch the moon get higher and paler, the ribbon on the water turning to milk. And I try to tell Bastián how my brain works, hoping I’ll figure it out as I go.

  LORE

  I can’t really tell anyone what it’s like to be dyslexic. The same as how I can’t really tell anyone what it’s like to be nonbinary, or Mexican American. I can only tell them what it’s like for me to be dyslexic.

  So this is how I try to explain it to Bastián:

  We all have warehouses where our brains store words. People who read without dyslexia—and what puto decided a reading learning disability should have that spelling?—they have one really big warehouse, and everything about words gets stored in there. How words are spelled. How they sound. How to read them in your head and out loud.

  But for me, it’s like I have two totally separate warehouses. One for how words sound, how I hear them and say them. Then another one for how words look on the page, how they’re spelled, how I read them. And for every word I know, those two warehouses each have a different item number for it. Take the word platinum. I hear that word, and the first warehouse, the hearing/speaking warehouse, goes and gets that word and all the information it knows about it. I know how to say that word out loud. I know how it sounds. I know what it means. When I hear it, it calls up the cold sheen of an expensive ring, or Marilyn Monroe’s hair.

  But when I come across the word platinum on the page, we’re not in that first warehouse anymore, the hearing/speaking warehouse that has all that information about blondes and metal. We’re in the second warehouse, the reading/writing/spelling warehouse, and all the information I have about that word on the page has to come from that second warehouse, because my brain has attached those two different item numbers to that word, one for how it sounds, and the other for the letters on a page. And because of my dyslexia, it doesn’t realize those two item numbers are for the same word. It can’t match the letters I’m seeing to a word I’ve heard a hundred times.

  The words I know, I know through memorization. So I match the two item numbers by memory. They’re still two different items, but a lot of times I’ll remember that they both go to the same word. That’s how I learned to read, by memorizing how words looked, by linking them up in my brain even though those two warehouses will never agree on the same inventory system.

  If I don’t know for sure, I start guessing. I take part of the word and try to match it. Sometimes I guess right, and the reading/writing warehouse finds the right item, platinum. But sometimes it pulls the part of the word it recognizes, and I end up thinking or saying plated or platypus, or other words that may or may not be in the right galaxy as the word on the page. I think our assigned book is Lord of the Files instead of Lord of the Flies. Or I read out loud in the middle of science class that an octopus has eight testicles, and it takes me a second too long to realize why everyone is laughing. I realize that platypus blond is not a thing. A great band name, maybe, but not a thing.

  In grade school, some teachers didn’t like it when I read by straight memorization. They said “sight reading” like it was dipping a classmate’s ponytail into finger paint—the act of a troublemaker. It’s okay to do that with certain words, apparently. They call them “sight words.” Little. Yellow. Blue. Mira. Juego. Conmigo.

  But if you try to memorize other words, words you’re supposed to sound out, then it’s called cheating. You’re not reading right. And I didn’t know how to explain that I couldn’t sound it out any more than I could have gotten up in front of the class and done thirty-two pirouettes in a row, or broken my desk apart with my bare hands. A teacher telling me to just sound it out—that word just, like I was refusing to do something simple—didn’t make it any more possible. My brain simply wasn’t built for it.

  My dyslexia has made me good at memorizing words, at turning every word into a sight word, but abysmal at guessing how a word might sound if I don’t know it. An adult could tell me to just sound it out all they want, but I’m still going to be dyslexic, and those two warehouses are never going to talk enough to match up their item numbers, to share what they each know about a word. My dyslexia is the scratchy phone lines, glitchy inventory systems, and lost log sheets that make that impossible.

  When I stop talking, Bastián doesn’t say anything. They don’t look at me. But as I’ve been talking, the tension has been leaving their back and shoulders. Their limbs seem looser now. They’re not holding themself quite so rigidly. Their body now knows how to relax while this close to me, enough that when our arms brush, Bastián doesn’t pull back.

  Tonight, when the world under the lake comes above the surface, it’s as quiet as a distant planet. It’s bright and dark at the same time, the sky deep violet, the edges of the swings lit up like they’re outlined in phosphorescent green. Trails of bubbles float over the lake, each of them as big as pomegranates. They hold ribbons of color that shift between looking like paint and looking like pieces of seaweed.

  Instead of a field of silver water, the lake is a seagrass bed that stretches all the way to where we are. The glowing green of the blades drifts in the air, like we’re underwater, on the floor of the lake.

  When we climb down to the ground, we don’t leave right away. We don’t go looking for the seiche just yet. We lie in the seagrass meadow. Our fingers find each other in the soft growth, the moon overhead wavering like we’re watching it refracted through water.

  BASTIÁN

  Most of the time, everything around me is either too quiet or too loud. When there’s silence, I’m restless and twitchy. My brain roots around in the stillness, looking for something to pay attention to or wondering what I might be missing. If it’s too loud, everything rushes in at once, and I can’t filter what’s important from what’s not.

  Some people think ADHD means I can’t pay attention, but so often I’m trying to find the point between paying too little attention and paying so much that I get overwhelmed. Finding that point can be as hard as finding a specific star in a whole galaxy. It’s trying to pick out the right thread of lightning in an electrical storm. It’s cosmic particles colliding. Our brains hold as many cells as the Milky Way contains stars, and sometimes ADHD is like feeling all of them at once, all those cells, all those stars, a whole galaxy of fire and chaos and light.

  But right now, every time Lore pauses, every time Lore takes a few seconds or a minute between things they’re explaining, my brain doesn’t flinch with wanting to fill that quiet. The soft sound of distant lake grass fills it for me. I don’t have to remind myself to listen. I’m not going to talk, so I don’t have to worry about what I’ll say.

  It’s not like any place—even the world under the lake—or any person—even someone who gets it the way Lore does—will suddenly make my brain different. The sea of underwater grass in front of us, or how the green turns silver as it catches the light, will not make me not have ADHD. Being close to Lore or anyone else cannot and will not change the anatomy or chemistry of my brain.

  But for once, I don’t have to explain to someone else how my brain works.

  For once, someone is explaining theirs to me.

  Lore and I look out into what the world under the lake has made of tonight. There’s no sound except the drifting of the swings and the whisper of underwater grass and the soft sound of a current around us, like the inside of a shell.

  A pair of silver wings flutters down and lands on my sleeve. Another wafts onto Lore’s hair. A few more stream over the grass. Lore laughs as an arc of them hover near their shoulder. They surround us the way they did at the edge of the inlet the first time I met Lore.

  My brain wants to pick apart what this means. Are we onto something talking to Abril? Are we doing something right, and if so, what is it?

  But for just this minute, I set all of that down. I watch the threads of light buckling across our bodies.

  We stay still, and they bring us back.

  LORE

  When you have a gender presentation range as wide as I do, you get used to confused looks. I’ve been walking around here mostly in my work jeans—faded by the wash, flecked with paint—with my hair under hats. But right now I’m wearing one of my more femme-y tops—flowy, embroidered. Red-tinted lip gloss. About as girly as I ever get.

  This means every block or so I get a look like someone almost recognizes me. Is that … That looks like Lore … That looks like the Garcias’ kid … Sometimes they place me by the time I pass them, and they’re confident enough to say my name. Sometimes they’re not sure, and give the polite, generic smile that works whether they know me or not. It happens three times on the walk to the copy-and-print shop.

  I’m considering different rolls of shipping tape—I should have asked my parents to be more specific—when I realize Bastián is a rack of office supplies away from me.

  Heat blooms alongside my collarbone, following the embroidery on my shirt. I was almost positive Bastián wasn’t on today. Sloan said as much when I ran into him.

  I was not planning on Bastián seeing girly Lore.

  A name tag glints gold on Bastián’s shirt. It doesn’t look like their name—I can’t read it from this distance but I can tell by the length of the word. But then they get close enough for me to see it’s their full first name, Sebastián.

  “Are you finding every”—Bastián starts, then I look up, it clicks for them, and Bastián changes course midsentence—“sorry, didn’t recognize you.”

  How level their expression is makes something in me fall and lift at the same time. They’re not staring like they think I’m hotter this way than when I dress in my boy clothes, which I appreciate. But maybe they’re not staring that way because they don’t think of me that way period.

  “I thought you weren’t working today,” I say.

  “I’m filling in,” Bastián says. “It was last minute.” Bastián writes something on a clipboard. “Hey, can you stay around for a second?”

  I wave a hand at the rolls of tape. “I’m in the middle of a lengthy deliberation.”

  “Do you want help?” Bastián says. “Because I can bore you with details about acrylic and hot melt.”

  “I think I’m up to the challenge,” I say. “But thanks.”

  Bastián disappears, but the sense of them being next to me stays, like the wake after a boat. The slight surprise coming off them is a kind I’m not used to. It was neutral, observant, instead of the thrilled shock of guys seeing me wear makeup for the first time, asking why don’t I look this way every day. Once they placed me, Bastián looked at me like I’m just me, like it’s not going to be some kind of disappointment if tomorrow I’m wearing my favorite T-shirt and old jeans again.

  When Bastián comes back, they hand me a glass jar filled with indigo water.

  “It seemed like you liked the ones in my room,” Bastián says.

  With the motion of being passed from Bastián’s hands to mine, green and gold and sherbet-orange glitter swirl through.

  “Where do you get these things?” I ask.

  “I make them,” Bastián says.

  I look from the shimmering water to Bastián. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Bastián says, like it’s nothing. “Why?”

  I tilt it back and forth, and it’s all my favorite colors at once. The glitter flickers through, and the water shifts purple when I turn it one way, blue when I turn it another. I think of Bastián dyeing the water, choosing each kind of glitter, sealing the jar.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18