“You’re right.” My sister smiles sheepishly. “Please continue.”
“They saw me as me and they loved me for everything I was instead of everything I couldn’t be,” I say. “So when the world was hostile and unkind and loud and bright, when the whispering voice became so loud I couldn’t breathe, it didn’t matter, because I was always safe with you.”
Art wells up and I roll my eyes.
“Are you going to cry again, because I really feel like this is not the appropriate time for you to do that and you should control yourself, Artemis.”
She wipes her face. “I’m not going to cry.”
“You’re already crying.”
“I’m just a very watery person. Continue.”
“That day, I lost everything,” I say, and there it is: not a splash of truth, but gallons and gallons and gallons of it. “You weren’t safe anymore, Artemis. Metis was everywhere. You judged me too, so I had nowhere left to go.”
“Don’t say that.” Artemis is properly crying now, zero self-control at all. “I know you always say what you mean, Cass, but not everybody is like that. Sometimes people just say things. Because they’re bored. Or angry. Or hurt. Or sad. Or hammered and in need of attention. I didn’t mean what I said, but you took it so literally. I resented you for, like, minutes, every now and then. You know, like a regular pissy younger sibling who isn’t allowed a dog. The rest of the time you were just my sweet, smart, beautiful big sister who I loved more than anyone else in the world.”
“Yes.” I nod. “I’m starting to realize that.”
Because the whole truth is overwhelming, but sometimes you have to be brave enough to look it straight in the eye. Artemis has spent the last ten years apologizing, but I was the one who couldn’t forgive, who ran away, who cut her off without giving her a chance to make things better. Who tucked my pain and memories neatly away where they could never be accessed, never be processed, never be given the room to breathe or grow old. Who trapped the past in a time capsule, sealed it up and buried it deep inside me where nobody could reach it.
Artemis keeps saying sorry, but this has never been all her fault.
“I’m so sorry too,” I say quietly. “And, for the record, I never said you couldn’t have a dog. Or a birthday party, or a new restaurant. I’d have just gone upstairs and looked at my paint chips with my headphones on, or ordered a bowl of chips and picked out all the black bits.”
“Yeah,” Artemis sighs. “I’m realizing that, now I’m older. I think they were Mum’s rules, not yours.”
There’s a silence, or as much of a silence as can be had with people tripping down the stairs around us and lighting cigarettes directly in front of us. You’d think they’d realize we were having a moment, but apparently not.
“You’re safe with me, Cassandra,” Art says finally.
My throat abruptly closes in its entirety like a Venus flytrap, which is named after the Roman goddess of love, who was named after Aphrodite, so really it should be the Aphrodite flytrap and the Romans just stole it, as per usual.
Artemis holds out a finger; I touch it with my fingertip.
“Why did you suddenly come back?” I say abruptly, because this has been bugging me for ages. “I know you tried to contact me over the years, but you really amped it up this time. Following me about, sitting on my doorstep. You went full throttle with the stalking. You’d never done that before, had you?”
Maybe I’d missed it. Let’s be honest: it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve missed something painfully obvious.
“A bit,” Artemis admits. “But not as much, no. I...”
She hesitates, then bites her lip and reaches into her bag.
“I’ve been thinking of finally selling the house, so I was going through the attic and looking through some old boxes.” There’s a plastic folder in her hands. “I’d not been up there in all this time. I was shocked by how organized it was. Everything is labeled and tidied into perfectly arranged stacks. It’s absolute madness.”
I smile, remembering Dad’s constant grumbling over our mother’s anally retentive obsession with storage solutions: even the toilet roll had its own designated compartment.
“Anyway.” Artemis opens it. “I found this.”
She hands the folder over to me and I stare at it blankly, flicking through the pages, trying to work out what it is and what it means.
“I don’t understand,” I admit finally.
“It’s a clinical report,” Artemis explains, pointing at the front page. “Mum was diagnosed as autistic six months before the accident. I guess she was getting ready to tell us, because there are all these notes scribbled all over it. She corrected a lot of the psychologist’s grammar too, but that’s probably to be expected.”
I stare at the paper again, then at Artemis. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” My sister smiles, shrugs. “I mean, we should probably have worked it out for ourselves, what with the lifelong obsession with Greek mythology and the rules and regulations and the need for quiet, dark rooms and the same restaurant and food over and over again and the sensory issues and the repetitive movements and the massive meltdowns, but we all just thought she was your bog-standard academic.”
I blink. “Wow. That’s...”
“I know.” Artemis studies me. “Are you okay?”
“I mean.” My eyes well up properly now, and I realize I’m scratching at my legs again. I really need to start keeping my nails short. “Yeah. It’s a lot. I just wish she’d told us, so we could have supported her better. Poor Mum.”
Artemis is still watching me.
“What?”
Artemis continues to watch me.
“What is it?”
She’s still watching me.
“Have I got something on my face?” I rub it with the palm of my hand. “What are you staring at me like that for?”
“Look,” Art says gently, pointing at the file.
On the back page, scrawled in our mother’s beautiful handwriting, is written:
And Cassandra.
There’s no question mark. No doubt. This is not a debate.
“And Cassandra what?” I say automatically, then jolt backward. “I’m not autistic. Don’t be ridiculous. I’d know if I was. You don’t live thirty-one years without realizing something like that. Somebody would have said something.”
“From the sounds of it,” Art says quietly, “they did.”
My brain feels as if it’s folding into tiny pieces, like a note in school you can switch into different shapes to read different things, although I wouldn’t know for sure because nobody ever passed them to me. Is this why everyone keeps asking if I’m on the spectrum? I thought maybe they just meant I was inordinately colorful.
“I’m on the spectrum,” I say with a jolt. “Derek and Jack were right.”
“They were not.” Artemis scowls. “That’s a euphemism. They don’t want to say autistic because they think it’s rude. It is not rude.”
“It’s not?” I say distantly, observing my brain shift again.
“Nope. People think autism is some kind of error, and it’s not. You’re not broken or ‘disordered,’ or whatever they say on their little bits of paper. That just means ‘not exactly like me.’ Which—” Artemis points at the folder “—I think you’ll see is one of the many things Mum wrote in the margins, along with the words go to hell, highlighted in pink. Autism is just a different wiring. You’re built in alternative neurological software, from the ground up. Every single part of you. And it’s...”
“Colorful and loud?” I guess, and Artemis laughs.
“I was going to say brilliant,” she says. “But, yeah, I’d imagine that too. Although I don’t know why anyone is surprised at how the world treats you. This has never really been a planet that embraces difference.”
The new solidness inside me shifts and settles, consolidates a little further. I should be more surprised. I should be reeling. But isn’t this exactly how I’ve always felt? That I’m not quite made the same? That I’m some kind of alien, trying to learn how to be a human from scratch every day? That I constantly need to translate the world around me to myself, and then myself back to the world again, like speaking two completely different languages simultaneously?
Wow. No wonder I’m always so bloody exhausted.
“What I’m saying,” Art continues, and I can feel her eyes roaming my face gently like fingertips, “is that you’ve been taught to hate yourself, Cass. From the beginning you’ve been told you’re broken, over and over again, and forced to try and be like everyone else. Then I did it to you too. I’m your sister and I called you a monster. How could I blame you for shutting me out? I’d have got up and smashed my head into the pulpit, if I were you.”
“A good thing I’m not, then,” I observe lightly. “They don’t like that kind of behavior in churches.”
“They certainly do not.” Artemis laughs. “I don’t want you to be normal, Cass. I never have. Honestly, if the world was built for your wiring, it would be a much better place. There’d be a lot less overhead lighting, for starters.”
I stare at the floor as the world and everything in it tilts, then straightens.