When I forgot a binder or my boxer briefs in the washer and then ran downstairs before Mom or Mamá could find them, they pretended not to notice. They humored me during my desperate performances of sounding casual. Sorry, I forgot I had a load in.

  But they knew. By the time I came out, their reaction was relief, not shock.

  Once you get past the fear of being seen, you can get to the part where you know you’re not alone.

  LORE

  When the world under the lake doesn’t show up again, I know it’s a good thing.

  But it still leaves a hollow in me, not finding Bastián in the middle of a street thick with seagrass. Or at the abandoned playground that’s glowing at the edges. Or in the dark glittering with bubbles that float above us like lanterns.

  So the next time Amanda the Learning Specialist asks if I want to talk about what happened at my last school, I don’t have the clear space in me to craft a polite response. I forget to do the calibration, the screening of what I’m about to say. I answer before thinking about how a promising student worthy of a glowing report might respond.

  “I’m not gonna cry in here,” I say. “So if that’s what I’m supposed to do, I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Why do you think I want you to cry in here?” Amanda the Learning Specialist asks.

  “Why else would you ask me questions about it?” I say. “I’m sure you have a whole file on me. You already know what happened. And I’m not gonna try to defend it.”

  “What do you think you have to defend?” Amanda the Learning Specialist asks.

  That catches me as off guard as a joke. “Really?”

  Amanda the Learning Specialist looks sad in a way I want to pick apart, to root out any pity. But I can’t find any. She just looks sad.

  “The school should have protected you,” she says. “You know that, right? The stuff that guy was doing to you, the stuff he was saying to you, not to mention that shit with your binder, that was harassment based on—”

  “Stop.” I hold up both my hands and shut my eyes.

  If she keeps talking, I’ll get pulled back into what happened. There will be none of me left in this room. There isn’t even enough of me here now to appreciate Amanda the Learning Specialist saying the word shit.

  Amanda the Learning Specialist leaves the silence for a minute, like she’s waiting for me to talk.

  I don’t.

  So she does.

  “You know, there’s a quote from one of my favorite poets,” she says. “Whatever is unnamed, this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”

  “I did speak it,” I say. “I told who I was supposed to tell.” My shoulders round. I want to disappear into the shell of my own body. “They said it was just talk, that if I didn’t react, or reacted the right way, they’d lose interest. They said the same thing to my parents.”

  I study the faded pattern on the carpet. “You want to know how well that worked? After what happened? They started following me. And every time I looked over my shoulder…” The thread of their laughter is still so loud in my brain it makes me close my eyes. “They said the only reason they didn’t beat me up to get back at me for what I did to their friend was…” I shut my eyes again. I can’t say it. I try again. “They said I was lucky I was…”

  I still can’t say it.

  After a few seconds that feel like a full minute, Amanda the Learning Specialist says, “You fighting back doesn’t justify anyone trying to make you afraid.”

  I shake my head to clear the memory, the prickling through my shoulder blades when I could feel them behind me, knowing that me looking over my shoulder to check was exactly what they wanted.

  Maybe this will always be the space I live in, wanting to look back, knowing I never can.

  BASTIÁN

  “Act now.” Michelle comes into the living room with a stack of sheets. “If you put these down for a minute, the dogs will sit on them.”

  “And by the dogs you mean Clover,” I say.

  “Accurate.” Michelle hands me the sheets and goes back into the kitchen.

  Lucky, the sheepdog mix Antonio’s had for years, sleeps half the day and ambles around the house or yard the other. Clover’s the tiny one who still gets into things, including backpacks. Because of everything I brought for my shot, I’ll be triple-checking that I close mine.

  I’ve gotten the bottom sheet on the sofa when I notice Antonio watching me.

  My brother has an unnerving way of inventorying my features, seeing what they add up to.

  I tuck the end of the top sheet under the sofa cushions. “Yes?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “There’s just something different about you.”

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking of the list of supplies I triple-checked. Vial. Syringes. Needles. Alcohol prep pads. Band-Aids. And I probably still forgot something. “I told you.”

  “No,” Antonio says. “It’s not just that.”

  I pull on the pillowcases.

  “I think you’re ready,” Antonio says.

  “For what?” I ask.

  He gestures for me to follow him, which I do, into the room where he and Michelle keep their yet-to-be-unpacked boxes.

  Antonio starts looking through one, but I’m not watching him.

  I’m too busy taking in all the points of color in this room.

  An iguana with a tail that ends in the perfect bulb of a paper flame. A rabbit with a quetzal’s tail feathers. A porcupine with every quill a different shade. A cross between a rattlesnake and a butterfly. There must be a hundred alebrijes on the windowsills, on an old dresser, clustered on top of boxes.

  “You kept the alebrijes?” I ask.

  He laughs. “Not all of them,” he says. “If I kept them all I wouldn’t have room for anything else. I’ve given a lot of them to relatives. A few of our cousins really like them. Those are just the ones I made for me.” He closes a box and opens another one. “Mostly the ones I made on bad days.”

  “Yeah, but you kept them? Why?” I ask. I’m stumbling over the words because I don’t want to ask what I’m thinking.

  You kept your bad days?

  Antonio sifts through another box. “What else would I do with them?”

  “But you never had them out at your apartment,” I say.

  “There was no place to put anything at that apartment,” he says. “I would’ve kept knocking them over.”

  “But you told me you made them when you were mad about things, or frustrated, or just sad, right?” I ask. “Wasn’t the whole point to get rid of all that?”

  “Not to get rid of it.” He folds down the flaps on a box. “But to feel like it wasn’t taking up all the space in me, yeah.”

  “Then why did you keep them?” I ask.

  Antonio looks at me like I’ve asked something both obvious and not easily answerable. Why do we breathe air instead of water? Why can’t I get to Saturn on the same bus I took here? What elevation do unicorns typically live at?

  “Because they’re still part of me, Bastián,” he says. “My bad days, they’re part of me. And the things I make, those are part of me too. Especially the things I made during bad days, because they remind me that I still made something out of those bad days.”

  For a minute, my brain is quiet. There’s nothing but the colors of the alebrijes, and the sound of cardboard whisking against cardboard, and my brother’s words.

  I still made something out of those bad days.

  I spend so much of my life fighting my bad days. I thought they had to be as distinct from me as land from water.

  But I can’t keep separating out my hardest days like they’re a shadow version of me. Days where my brain finds its way forward, and days where it gets stuck in a feeling I can’t pull back from, these are part of the cycles that come with my ADHD. And even though right now I know this down to my cells, there will be days when I don’t know it. Today, I may accept how my brain works. Tomorrow, I may be fighting it again. There will be days when I feel proud and worthy, and days I feel frustrated and defeated and lost.

  The chaos in my brain doesn’t turn like a moon cycle. The determination and the discouragement don’t come in and out with the tidal rhythm of an ocean. They move with the seeming randomness of lake seiches.

  But I can love who I love. I can do what makes the inside of me glow like sea glass. I can keep talking to the people who care about me. I can do the work that helps me live with the seiches inside my own brain.

  These are the points of light I follow. They leave space for the possibility that all my days are worth keeping.

  “Found it.” From another open box, Antonio pulls a fold of dark denim.

  The jean jacket I remember him wearing for years. He’s wearing it in half the pictures of us when I was growing up. The stiff edges of the collar and cuffs have softened from how many times it’s gone through the wash.

  “Take it,” he says.

  “What?” I ask.

  “It’s yours now,” Antonio says.

  I didn’t think I could be struck even more silent than I was a minute ago.

  This jacket, the easy way Antonio shrugged into it and out of it, the way his cologne got woven into the threads, this jacket holds so much of what makes my brother my brother. How he was known for being a blur of speed on the football field, and for bringing bunches of our overgrown rosemary to neighbors just because he felt like it. That’s the kind of masculinity I wanted, my equivalent of my brother in that jacket.

  “Come on, take it.” Antonio laughs, shoving it into my hand. “I think it’s gonna look good on you.”

  The fabric is thick and heavy but soft in my hands.

  It’s one more thread between him and me, just like the alebrijes are a thread between our great-grandfather and us. Maybe our bisabuelo did the same thing we do, generations before we were born. Maybe he took what was spilling out of his heart and made it into fins and wings. And I think it might be this that I’ve seen in my brother for so long. It’s the glowing center of Antonio, the alchemy not just of giving shape and color to his hardest moments, but of being a man who leaves space for his own heart.

  I put on Antonio’s jacket, and I feel a little closer to being not just more like my brother, but more like the version of myself I’m meant to be.

  LORE

  “Lore.”

  I turn at the sound of my name outside the hardware store.

  Vivienne waves. She’s holding paper coffee cups like she’s waiting for someone, but still crosses the sidewalk toward me.

  “Where have you vanished to?” she asks.

  “Just helping my parents with some stuff.” I lift the bag I took out of the hardware store. “It’s been busy.”

  Vivienne glances down the sidewalk, then back at me. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  Vivienne steps close enough that I can see the texture of her sweater, the weave of the lavender cloth. “What happened?” she asks. “What did they do?”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Bastián,” Vivienne says. “What did they do that was worth just disappearing on them?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “Bastián didn’t do anything. I just don’t like them like that.”

  “I’m not talking about that,” Vivienne says. “If you’re not into the boy, you’re not. That’s fine. But why just drop all of us? We kind of like you, in case you didn’t notice.”

  I look down at our shoes, and I think they’re the exact same kind, except mine are my favorite shade of brown, and Vivienne’s are strawberry-milkshake pink.

  “It’s a long story,” I say.

  A long story that starts with Bastián being Abril and Vivienne and Sloan and Maddie’s friend first. If I can’t be around Bastián, I can’t be friends with them.

  I glance around, hoping that whoever Vivienne is waiting for is Abril. Or Sloan. Or Maddie.

  Vivienne must pick up on that. “If you’re worried about seeing them,” she says, “you don’t need to be. Bastián’s at their brother’s house.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

  “Look.” Vivienne sets down both coffee cups on an old newspaper box that holds the local weekly. “If you change your mind about being friends, I’m around.” She rips the cardboard sleeve off one cup and scrawls things on it, not just her number but her address, like we’re the kind of friends who might just stop by to see each other.

  I do not return the favor. I can see it now, my incomprehensible scrawl alongside Vivienne’s bubbly handwriting.

  When I get home, my workbook from Amanda the Learning Specialist is glowering from a corner of the kitchen. Another reminder of my terrible handwriting.

  I shove it in with the cookbooks.

  I wash the dishes in the sink. I dry my mom’s favorite cup, blue with painted orange flowers. These small things—the familiar rhythm of dishes, slicing limón into water, hanging the clock in our kitchen—these things keep me steady. They’re helping me narrow my world to what’s in front of me—pieces in the workroom, pages of summer reading, the grocery list.

  The cups click against one another as I put them away. I close the cabinet door, leaving nothing between me and my view of the fridge.

  I didn’t realize until now how easy it would be to get up there.

  I jump up on the counter.

  I climb on top of the fridge.

  When my dad comes into the kitchen, it takes him a second to register me.

  “Should I be concerned?” he asks.

  I settle into sitting, making sure my feet don’t knock the magnets off the front. “Someone told me it helps you see things differently.”

  “Is it working?” my dad asks.

  From here, the books that seem big enough to block out the sun are as small as stamps on an envelope. From here, everything we had to move could be toy furniture, instead of all the weight we had to haul from the last version of our lives to this one.

  The appointment marked on the wall calendar for tomorrow isn’t a square of pure dread.

  It’s just a place I have to show up.

  “I think so.” I look down. The squares of vinyl flooring look as small as my hands.

  And the workbook Amanda the Learning Specialist gave me looks small enough for me to hold.

  “Will you hand me that?” I ask, pointing to the thin spine sticking out from the cookbooks.

  My dad passes it to me.

  “Thanks.” I pull out the pen I tucked into the spiral binding. I cross my legs into me. I open to the first page.

  BASTIÁN

  I am the orange.

  When I think this, I’m back in my parents’ kitchen, practicing. Not sitting on the edge of the bathtub in my brother’s house.

  I run an alcohol pad over my leg, the chill instant on my skin. I swipe one over the top of the vial. I prep everything just like I did with Lore.

  I dart the needle in. I do the injection. It’s a breath going through my body, the deep, glowing blue of something being right.

  I walk around Antonio’s neighborhood, because that’s what I do when there’s too much of any feeling in me. Even good ones, like the relief that I just did that, can feel so big I have to move around to clear some of it.

  When I come back, Antonio’s ripping pages out of a phone book and covering the kitchen table. “You ready?”

  Something in me feels still, and settled.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I am.”

  We shape the wire frames, mold the papier-mâché, mix the paint. I’m wearing my brother’s jacket, sleeves cuffed so they don’t pick up a film of papier-mâché or streaks of paint while we do the work of our great-grandfather’s hands.

  Antonio holds up two figures that are shaped a lot like Clover and Lucky. “What do you think?”

  “Museumworthy,” I say. “Your dogs will go down in history as famous muses.”

  “Thought so,” Antonio says.

  My fingers are steady as I paint the first alebrije, an armadillo the color of lilac blossoms, with blue dragonfly wings and eyes like embers.

  For once, I’m not imagining setting this one down on the sea glass path, watching it carry away a piece of myself I think I don’t need. I let the alebrijes be wonders all on their own. A hummingbird with fins. An axolotl with a tongue like a flame.

  “Hey, Antonio?” I say.

  “Yeah?” Antonio says, not looking up.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  He looks up. “For what?”

  This is one of those times where I said something without thinking, which means I don’t quite know how to explain it. So I slow down, and I try to figure it out.

  Antonio knows these pauses, so he goes back to his alebrije. He knows I never figure out what I need to figure out while someone’s staring at me.

  Things in my brain are always colliding. It makes it harder to put information in any kind of order. But this, making alebrijes, is where I get to welcome those collisions instead of resisting them. My brain gets to imagine unexpected combinations, a fox with a peacock’s tail, or a doe with a narwhal’s horn.

  Antonio gave those collisions something to do.

  “For this,” I say. “I don’t know if I ever said thank you for all this.”

  I work at giving more detail on the wings, darker blue veining out within the lighter blue.

  I don’t realize I’ve gotten up until Antonio laughs.

  I stop, registering that I’m walking back and forth while painting. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Antonio shapes a fish’s fin. “I like that you don’t sit still.”

  “You do?” I ask.

  “Yeah.” He works on the edge of the fin. “It’s like you’re always ready for what’s next.”

  Usually, my binder feels like the thing holding me together, keeping me in when my brain throws me in so many directions I feel like I’m flying apart.

  But right now, in my brother’s jacket, this is a little like the first time I put a binder on. Not just the wonder of how, beneath a T-shirt, my body could have belonged to so many other guys. But remembering that I was a guy. I was who I knew I was.