When I tried to put them away, I felt their agitated buzzing from inside my drawers or under my bed, loud enough that I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t throw them away, not when they were the craft my brother had taught me, this art that went back to our great-grandfather. I couldn’t give them away; that would be giving someone else things I wanted to forget.

  I couldn’t ask Antonio what to do either. I imagined him whistling in wonder. Wow, all of those? That’s how often something happens that you need to let go of?

  But I had to do something with them. Their sheer numbers were proof of how often I struggled with the ordinary work of existing in the world.

  I did figure it out eventually.

  It just cost me the world under the lake.

  LORE

  “What happened?” my parents ask as soon as they see me.

  My head feels lined with concrete or brick. My tongue feels dry as masa flour. My mouth wouldn’t form the words to explain even if I had them.

  “What happened?” They both keep asking, in more urgent pitches, like they’re trying to break some part of me open, to make it give up the whole story.

  Then I realize what they’re staring at.

  What they’re talking at, what they’re trying to make give up the secrets they want, isn’t me. They’re not looking at my face.

  They’re looking at the blood on my shirt.

  I blurt out, “It’s not mine.”

  As though that makes any of this better.

  BASTIÁN

  The path into the world under the lake shivers open, like a whirl of iridescent leaves.

  The alebrije I’m holding looks a little like a primeval dolphin, the kind that people sometimes swear they’ve spotted in the lake. The colors I painted onto the dolphin’s back, the greens and blues of the lake itself, are still wet. They gleam in the sun pouring over the inlet.

  I set the dolphin down on the lapping water. The teal body stretches and grows until the alebrije looks like some ancient sea dinosaur. Then the alebrije swims down into the world under the lake.

  I breathe out, feeling the alebrije carrying off a day I lost worrying about how to talk to my relatives about being on testosterone. It drained away hours and all the energy from my brain. And then I beat myself up for fixating on it (because why just be anxious when you can be anxious about being anxious?).

  So I made this alebrije. And as I painted the dolphin’s fins, my brain started to unknot. The tension passed from my fingers and into the bristles and paint.

  It doesn’t mean I’ll never feel that anxiety again. I know myself too well to think that. But making the alebrije lets me stop beating myself up about it.

  I set down another alebrije, a mint-green fox trailing an emerald-green peacock’s tail. This one’s for yesterday afternoon, when it got busier in the copy-and-print shop than I’ve ever seen it. I was holding four different tasks in my head, and three different customers’ questions, and when another customer touched my arm, everything flew out of my brain, because that’s what happens when someone touches me and I’m not expecting it or don’t want it or both. Everything spills out of my brain. My working memory chucks it all into long-term storage, and good luck to me if I want to find any of it anytime soon.

  The dolphin and the peacock-tailed fox weave down into the world under the lake, crossing each other’s paths as they go. I stand at the edge of the water, watching them vanish.

  I might never have figured out what to do with the alebrijes if it wasn’t for my ADHD. I’m naturally clumsy, but I particularly excel at dropping things because I forget they’re in my hands. One day I was fidgeting with an alebrije at the inlet, and I accidentally dropped it. The raccoon grew, sprouting purple fur. The webbed hands looked real and slick as a salamander’s. The alebrije bounded into the dark.

  So I brought all my alebrijes to the world under the lake, and the world under the lake brought them to life. They made the world under the lake theirs, taking the shadow boxes inside my brain with them.

  At first I thought I could have both, the world under the lake and this way to let the alebrijes go. But the first time an alebrije tried to follow me above the surface, trailing after me like a puppy, I knew it was the last time I would ever go down there.

  So I never go farther than where I’m standing now. If I don’t want to risk those shadow boxes finding their way back to me, I can’t.

  LORE

  My parents call it.

  “No,” I tell them. “We don’t have to leave.”

  I took the suspension. I issued the required apology, teeth gritted. It was received and declared accepted, teeth clenched.

  “Why do we have to leave?” I ask.

  But they know it’s over.

  After what I did, and how it happened, it was never not over.

  They find a good rate on a rental that’s been vacant for months, far enough away to be in a different school district.

  When we pack everything up, they act like there is nothing out of the ordinary about this move. Nothing is making us leave. They act as though we all just need a change of scenery.

  So I act that way too.

  BASTIÁN

  Abril and Vivienne have been nauseatingly cute ever since they admitted they’ve liked each other since third grade. They hold hands as they go down the sidewalk. The light through the trees casts leaf shadows on their arms.

  “Today’s the big day, right?” Abril asks me.

  “You know I’m not coming back from the first appointment with a deeper voice and facial hair, right?” I ask.

  Abril rolls her eyes. “Thanks for clearing that up.”

  “Hey, you know you have a friend here, right?” Vivienne asks.

  I try to parse what she’s saying, if this is a you’re not alone talk. I appreciate the sentiment, but the meaningful way Vivienne’s looking at me is making me nervous. Did she mix me up with my brother? The thought of an injection or a blood draw makes Antonio tense in a way that’s obvious even if he never says anything about it. Needles have never bothered me. When I was growing up, my parents used to send me along to Antonio’s doctors’ appointments to distract him with my strings of non sequiturs about oceanic trenches and solar flares.

  “She means a fellow nonbinary friend,” Abril says. “They’re our age. Vivi just met them.”

  “They seem nice,” Vivienne says, which means absolutely nothing because Vivienne thinks everyone’s nice unless they prove otherwise. “Their family just rented the apartment above that empty storefront.”

  “That place that’s been vacant forever?” I ask.

  “Because it’s haunted,” Abril says.

  “We are not having this conversation again,” I say.

  “That building is angry,” Abril says. “You can just tell.”

  “That building had termites and dry rot,” I say. “It was vacant because they had to fix it.”

  “That was a while ago,” Abril says. “What about since then?”

  I look at Vivienne. “Please don’t tell me she’s convinced you.”

  “I really don’t care,” Vivienne says. “Just go say hi to them, okay? You should know each other.”

  “Because we all rove around in packs?” I ask.

  “I mean, don’t we?” Abril asks.

  She’s not wrong. I’m the only one of our friends who’s trans, but we’re all queer. Abril, Vivienne, Sloan, Maddie, and I were friends before any of us came out. Most of us found one another with a look across the classroom or playground, half curiosity, half recognition, that look you get when you meet someone and realize you have something in common, whether or not you can name it. Maddie calls it the Queer Bear Stare.

  “Because”—Vivienne eyes both of us, her big-sister look—“nothing makes you want to be invisible more than thinking there’s no one else around like you. So just go introduce yourself.”

  I laugh. “Yeah, I’m not doing that.”

  “Why not?” Vivienne asks.

  “Do you introduce yourself to every lesbian who moves here?” I ask.

  “Every one I know about, yeah,” Vivienne says.

  Abril smile-winces. “How do you think we ended up in that book club?”

  “I thought you liked Virginia Woolf,” Vivienne says.

  “That doesn’t mean I want to discuss the Clarissa-Sally kiss with little old ladies who know my abuela,” Abril says.

  Vivienne looks back at me. “Please?” she says. “If you’d just moved here, wouldn’t you want to know there’s someone else like you around?”

  “Wouldn’t you want all the friends you could get if you’d just moved into the angry house?” Abril says under her breath.

  “Abril,” Vivienne says.

  “Okay, fine,” I say. “I’ll do it. Trans unicorns unite.” I bow, and then pull out the little notebook I keep in my back pocket.

  The weather in my brain today is good. It’s blue and misty, like after a soaking rain. I have the reserves to humor my friends.

  “It’s going in the notebook,” Vivienne stage-whispers. “That means they’ll actually do it.”

  That’s usually true. In this case, though, I’m lying. But to convince Abril and Vivienne, I need to write it down. Mental notes don’t stick in my brain, and they both know it, so this is the fastest way to close this topic.

  Vivienne and Abril forget that I don’t come off particularly approachable to people I’ve just met. I have to make an effort not to fill conversational silences that are seconds long but feel three years long to me. And in trying not to do that, I sometimes end up overcompensating, so I come across as withdrawn, uninterested.

  I present the open page to Vivienne. Most of my friends at school know I carry little notebooks everywhere—even if they don’t know it’s to pick up the slack of my working memory—but Vivienne, Abril, Maddie, and Sloan are the only ones I’d ever show them to.

  Vivienne grins at the page. I’ve written Go be friendly in my messy but (after a lot of practice) legible handwriting. Even in my own notebooks, I try to keep it legible. If I don’t, and I forget about what I wrote down, I’ll come back to it in two days and have no idea what it says. The thought that it was something important and now lost can preoccupy my brain for an entire day.

  “Happy?” I ask.

  Vivienne grins. “Very.”

  LORE

  “Aren’t you beautiful?” I whisper to the wood I’m sanding. “You’re going to be so pretty.”

  The door to the back workroom creaks open, throwing raw sun over the coating of sawdust on the floor and my jeans.

  “I’m officially worried,” my dad says.

  “Oh, don’t even pretend you never talk to the furniture,” my mother calls on her way up to the apartment. In this new space, we all have to get used to how sound does and does not carry between the shop on the ground floor and the apartment upstairs.

  I go at another patch. “Who decided to throw paint over this anyway?” I brush away the dust. “The wood’s beautiful.”

  My dad dabs at an imaginary tear and sniffs. “I’ve never been prouder.” A phone rings, and he turns toward the front room.

  Summer’s always busy. Everyone gets around to things they pushed aside the rest of the year, including getting old furniture fixed up. My parents’ reputation for being good and being fast keeps them in business. And ever since they taught me some of the basics—the right way to sand, how to repair a haze or blush on a finish—I’ve helped them with the fast part. (Case in point, the 150 midcentury chairs we’re restoring in time for a wedding next month, a job that will help pay for the move.)

  The next time I look up, my mother’s in the doorway. “How long have you been working?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “A couple hours?”

  “Liar,” my mom says.

  I work on a corner with a patch of paint that won’t budge. I’m the reason we had to pack up not just our house, but my parents’ whole business. I’m the reason we left the city they lived in since before I was born. And I want my parents to say this, but they won’t. So all I can do is sand and paint and oil, and hope it all eventually outweighs what got us here.

  My mom twirls her recently-highlighted-at-home hair into a bun.

  “Don’t panic when you see the calendar, okay?” she asks.

  “Starting like that is a great way to get me to panic,” I say.

  “But there are kittens,” she says. It’s her usual refrain when there’s something on the family calendar I’m not going to like. Just like in our old kitchen, a shared wall calendar alerts the three of us to important appointments and helps coordinate use of the car. My mother always chooses an adorable one so that a weekend set aside for accounting or cleaning out cabinets can be offset with But there are hedgehogs, or But there are puppies.

  “Your first session with the learning specialist,” my mother says. “Hour and a half. They won’t all be that long. Just the first one.”

  A sarcastic I can’t wait drifts into my throat. I bite it back. My mom doesn’t deserve that. Not when I’m the reason we’re in this town and I’m at a new school that strongly recommends I meet with a learning specialist.

  “Okay,” I say. “When is it?”

  “Today,” she says.

  “Today?” I stop sanding. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  She shrugs. “I didn’t want you to be nervous.”

  “What if I couldn’t go?” I ask.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “You have big exciting plans?”

  “I could,” I say. “I already made two friends.”

  “Dolly Purrton and Catsy Cline don’t count.”

  “Not our neighbors’ cats,” I say. “I just met two of my future classmates.”

  “Your appointment’s at four.” She hands me a piece of paper.

  I take it. It has three lines of my mother’s handwriting. Bus numbers. Directions. Times. My mother and I are both dyslexic, so how is her handwriting always neater than mine?

  “Do you remember this place?” my mother asks, as casually as if musing about making aguas frescas.

  “What place?” I ask. I didn’t come with them to look for a place to rent, so I didn’t see this one until we moved in.

  “You’ve been to the lake here before,” she says.

  I look toward the front window as though I can see the water from here. “When?”

  She shrugs. “It was a while ago.”

  A noise, a voice, shivers from a wall. It sounds like a laugh. And a creepy one, high and fake. It’s a horror movie laugh, the kind you’d hear from a ghost girl.

  My mom pins her bun in place with a few old detailing brushes. “What’s that face?”

  “Didn’t you hear that?” I ask.

  My mom stares at me. “Hear what?”

  BASTIÁN

  Mom flips open a magazine. “Oh good, Christmas cookie recipes.”

  I give her the laugh she’s trying to get out of me. One of the small joys Mom finds in waiting rooms is how out of season the magazines are.

  But my laugh comes out broken and nervous, and she hears it. She must, because she asks, “You doing okay?”

  I nod. She probably thinks I’m nervous about my first shot, but I’m not. A nurse who’s done this a thousand times will do the injection. And when I think about what’s going to go into my body, I feel every cell in me shifting into place. It’s like the glitter in the glitter jars I make, wafting through the water and settling at the bottom.

  What I’m nervous for is my second shot, the first one I’ll do at home. It’ll require me to follow directions that, like a lot of directions, are probably simple to almost everyone else but complicated to me.

  I run my hand over the sleeve of my jacket. The grain of the wale under my fingers calms me down. The right textures help me hold on to good weather in my brain. It gives me space to remind myself that the nurse will teach me how to do this. She won’t send me home expecting me to just know.

  I wait for them to call my name. Last, not first. I’ve always appreciated that, since a lot of us don’t have legal names that match us. I’m lucky enough to be done with that part, now legally Sebastián Mario Silvano (I picked the first name with my brother’s help; Mom and Mamá picked the middle).

  Mom turns the magazine pages. “Your brother wants to know when you’re gonna go see him.”

  “I will.” I pick up a science magazine. “I just need to get off work.”

  “Because the copy-and-print is going to crumble without you?” Mom asks.

  “I do have a way with the laminating machine,” I say.

  Mom gets absorbed enough in instructions for making an ornament wreath that I get out of telling her why I’ve been so slow in giving Antonio dates. I don’t want to tell her the truth, that I’m stalling on telling him about the testosterone.

  I want to tell him. Antonio taught me to form wings on the back of an axolotl, or fins on a jaguar, and then paint them in the same brilliant colors our great-grandfather used. He showed me how to turns things my brain gets stuck on into alebrijes.

  But he’s also the Antonio with a wife and two dogs and a house they just moved into. I am barely more than half his age, sixteen to his thirty-one, and I am about to deep dive into a world he’s half a lifetime away from. New facial hair and sometimes-painful growth spurts and probably worsening acne and awkward voice cracks.

  A shine on the floor pulls my attention down. It takes me a second to register what the gloss over the carpet is. It’s a thin layer of water, like the lake lapping at the pebbled shoreline.

  Another skims in over it. Veils of water overlap like translucent fabric. Where the light through the waiting room window hits, it catches the glitter of silt.

  I look at my mom, but she’s still flipping through the magazine.

  “Mom?” I say.