Page 40 of Tilly in Technicolor
“Are you alright?” Ollie asks after a moment.
His gaze is like a caress I can feel across my face, and I nod, pressing my cheek against my shoulder, angling my eyes away from him. “Yeah. Sorry. That was just… so much.” I nibble on my lip. “Really sorry,” I repeat.
“There’s no need to be sorry.” Ollie clears his throat. “I, um… I understand. I understand how you’re feeling.”
I snort. “Okay. Sure.”
There’s a long pause, and I can still feel Oliver looking at me. “I think you’re being sarcastic, but I don’t understand why,” he finally says.
With a sigh, I press the back of my head against the wall behind me, blinking up at the patch of blue sky hovering over our hideout. I try to pluck at the jumble of words in my head, but it’s hard to find ones that will work. Why does admitting this to people always feel like I’m stripping myself naked?
“I have ADHD,” I say, continuing to look up. “And while I know that no one particularlylikescrowds like that, what we experienced pretty much makes me short-circuit.”
Oliver is quiet in the tiny pause I leave, and I decide to push forward. Open the vein. Lay it all out there.
“The world has this misconception that ADHD is as simple as not focusing or some quirky personality trait, but it’s so much more than that. It’s like—God, how do you even explain it?—it’s like every single thing around me is screaming for my attention, clawing at my brain and ripping it in one hundred different directions, all with equal force. And my body can’t figure out how to process any of it. Crowds like that”—I wave vaguely at the direction we came from—“make my nervous system feel like it’s being ripped apart. Like my brain will never stop humming, never catch up to everything begging for its attention. Life is just—I don’t know—so fucking much. It’s hard to do anything. Figure out the order to do anything. Remember to eat or take care of myself. And… yeah. It all kind of makes for gloriously embarrassing meltdowns.”
I trace the stones beneath me, trying to swallow past the raw vulnerability building in my throat. Poking at my eyes. Even before I had a name for it, I’ve been judged for the atypical way my brain works, even by people like Mom or Dad who are supposed to love me the most.
It took a global pandemic, torturous online schooling, and me breaking down in furious sobs on a daily basis when I couldn’t get my wandering brain to cooperate for my mom to take me to a child psychiatrist.
Dr. Alverez had explained to us that I wasn’t scatterbrained or lazy or undisciplined (like I’d heard far too often throughout my life), but my executive functioning was virtually nonexistent. It wasn’t that I lacked attention, I just couldn’t regulate it.
But even with my diagnosis, they didn’tgetit. It would be ridiculous to think a random almost-stranger like Oliver somehow would.
“I’m sure you have some sort of inevitable follow-up question like ‘Isn’t ADHD just for boys or little kids?’ so go ahead and shoot,” I say, continuing to let my fingers wander over the ground.
I still can’t bring myself to look at Oliver, but I hear him take a step toward me. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him crouch down, using his palm to dust off a spot on the ground before sitting beside me.
For some reason, his silence, the warmth of his arm next to mine, is so much worse than if he’d said something shitty like I’m expecting.
“Can I tell you something?” he asks after a moment.
“If you must,” I say, trying to be flippant while I oh-so-subtly wipe my eyes and nose on my sleeve.
“I believe we’re much more alike than you think.”
Chapter 20Neurodivine and Feelin’ Fine
OLIVER
“How so?” Tilly asks, her thunderstorm eyes staring up at me with wide vulnerability.
“I’m… well…” I cough a few times, searching for the right words.
It’s hard to trust people to know what to do when they find out I’m autistic. They act like it’s some bigthinginstead of a simple fact about my brain.
It’s “well-meaning” aunts saying softly to my mums that I don’tlookautistic, or telling my peers at school and having them stare at me in horror like it’s catching. It’s primary school jokes where I’m called Spock or teachers staring at me with the expectation I’m some sort of savant, when, in actuality, I’m nothing more than myself.
It’s not a shame thing that makes me hesitant to tell people—feeling shame over the wiring of my brain would be an utterly pointless waste of energy—more that my autism is a piece of me, and sharing any of my pieces with others is a wholly uncomfortable experience. It’s handing another person something they can either treat kindly, or twist and reshape to hurt you.
I swallow, tapping my fingers together at my side. “I’m autistic,” I say, staring at Tilly’s shoulder. “And I understand your sensory processing issues. I have them, too, but with complex noises and strong smells. Totally scrambles my brain and makes me stim.”
Tilly is quiet for so long—for her, that is, in reality, it’s like, two seconds of silence—that I risk a glance higher than her shoulder.
She’s still staring at me with those wide, gray eyes, but she has a smile on her mouth.
“Oh,” she says at last, and something about that single syllable reverberates gently down my spine like the calming effect of a plucked harp string. “So youdoget it… Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
