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he was either in a perpetual state of PTSD or Teflon-coated against it.
“Okay,” his mother said, playing along. She’d already learned that seventy percent of her job was going to be just that: playing along. The other thirty percent? Playing by ear.
Some weird kids are born that way, and others are made by their circumstances. Lucy Abernathy fell into the latter category by not conforming to certain biological ratios considered attractive—and she resented the hell out of it.
Lucy couldn’t help it; she’d been trained to associate ice cream with domestic stability.
Take the amygdala, for example—the fight/flight/freeze part of the brain. In Aspies, it was ten to fifteen percent larger than in neurotypicals. That meant that a stressor of one for everyone else was a ten for someone like Dev, leading to what clinicians referred to as “depression attacks,” in which the experiencer goes from feeling fine to suicidal in a matter of seconds. It also contributed to a tendency known as “catastrophizing,” in which every conceivable scenario suddenly morphs into the worst possible outcome—a
She just wanted to die, instead of feeling like she was dying all the time.
But the closest thing he had to an interest in politics was vacuum cleaners. The thing they had in common? According to his stepfather, they both sucked.
To say she was bitter fell a wee bit short, like calling sulfuric acid tangy.
“I thought love was supposed to be like fireworks,” the boy said. “Nope,” his dream dad said. “It’s like a lump in your throat. But in your heart.”
Being ten. In a lot of ways, Lucy thought it was the perfect age. You were smart enough to understand most things when explained the right way, but still young enough not to care about things like your appearance, the opposite or same sex, life plans that preempted things like being an astronaut or princess or princess astronaut—back when magic wasn’t just possible, but how you made it through the day, from the miracle of meals to the casual assumption that your safety was somebody else’s responsibility. The only thing better than being ten was being ten during the summer, when even school
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His presence while it lasted had been precious, and precious things are precious because they’re rare.
None of the pamphlets said anything about the weeds, about how pretty some of them could be, once you disconnected them from the word weed and just marveled at how confidently they’d taken over every unpaved space.
