Tornado Brain

by Cat Patrick

  Often there would be a theme, like princess or circus or like when we turned eight and my mom let us have Halloween in August. That was Tess’s favorite because she loves anything scary and she and Charles made a kid-friendly haunted house in the inn’s function room. I hated it. There was this part of the party where Charles, dressed like a zombie, hid behind a door and jumped out when kids came in. It’d made Tess practically pee her pants with laughter, but I’d burst into tears.

  Anyway, the parties came with a lot of squealing and stampeding—even from quiet Tess—and usually made me feel like I was watching a noisy kaleidoscope from the corner of a room, depending on which medication they were giving me then.

  Medication for someone like me isn’t easy. My “challenges,” as Gabe calls them, are invisible—just like tornadoes you can’t see until they wipe out people’s houses in the middle of the night. My mom says my brain is special, but the psychiatrist will tell you that I have several neurological conditions: attention deficit disorder, Asperger’s syndrome, and sensory processing disorder. And they aren’t as simple as having strep throat and getting antibiotics to treat it. That’s why, after the labels, the psychiatrist experimented on me with a bunch of stuff. But nothing ever felt right, and even on medication, I still felt like screaming and crying and generally melting down a lot of the time. Definitely at my birthday parties.

  So I stopped having parties. That’s why my eleventh birthday was the best one ever.

  “If you’re not going to have a party, what would you like to do to celebrate your birthday?” my mom asked. “You’re turning eleven! And you’ve had such a great year. There’s a lot to celebrate.”

  It was a Saturday morning and we were all hanging out in the living room of the cottage. Tess was curled up sideways in the big chair, a horror book in front of her face, not really paying attention. Charles wrestled Pirate on the floor, getting dog hair all over his T-shirt for some old rock band I’d never heard of, and Mom and I were on opposite ends of the couch kind of watching whatever movie was playing on whatever channel the TV was on. Everyone was wearing pajama bottoms.

  I tossed a pillow in the air and caught it, over and over. I was literally throwing a throw pillow.

  “Maybe we could go to the arcade,” I said.

  Toss. Catch. Toss. Catch. Toss. Catch.

  “Okay,” Mom said enthusiastically. “We could—”

  “Never mind,” I interrupted, not wanting her to turn it into a big thing. Toss. Catch. “I don’t want to go there.” I thought a little more, liking the control of planning my very own non-party. “Can I sleep in a tent on the beach?”

  Toss. Catch. Toss. Catch.

  “Since the beach is technically a road, you can’t do that, unfortunately,” Charles answered, looking up at me from the floor with his smiling eyes and humongous wild eyebrows. “Sleeping on a road isn’t a great idea.”

  “Ha,” I said—not laughing, just saying it—tossing the pillow again. “Can I at least have a fire?”

  “Sure,” Mom said. I glanced at her and she was watching me toss the pillow with an expression like that emoji with the perfectly straight mouth, like she wanted to tell me to stop, but knew it would be better not to. Instead, she said, “We can make dinner and s’mores. It’ll be great! I could make skewers. You like skewers!” She smiled then; she looked better when she smiled.

  “Okay, but I was thinking it’d be a smaller number of people,” I said, focusing on the pillow because I knew my mom was going to make a sad-emoji face, and I knew I wouldn’t like it. “I just wanted to invite Colette.”

  “You’re not inviting your sister?” Mom asked.

  “Are you coming to my party?” Tess asked in a low voice. I guess she had been paying attention after all. I don’t know; maybe she always is and just pretends not to be.

  “No,” I said quickly. Mom was planning to drive Tess and eight friends all the way to Aberdeen to go roller skating, which sounded horrible for at least seven reasons.

  “Sorry, Mom, but Frankie’s right. It’s only fair that I don’t go to hers if she’s not going to mine,” Tess said matter-of-factly.

  “But that’s . . . ,” Mom said, her voice fading away. “You’ve always . . .” Her voice faded again. She cleared her throat. “The two of you and Colette play together all the time. Are you sure this won’t be . . . weird?”

  “We don’t play together,” Tess said, her cheeks pink. “We hang out. And it’s fine, Mom, really.” I think she understood that I placed a lot of value in fairness—and if I wasn’t going to her party, then she wasn’t going to mine. Fair is fair.

  “Well, I’ll do something with Tess, then,” Mom said. “But you can’t light a fire on your own, Frankie. Charles will have to go with you. Or I could, and Tess and Charles could do something?”

  “Um . . . ,” I said, not hiding a smile. My mom is the worst at starting fires.

  “I get it,” she said, laughing. “Charles is in charge of the fire.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, meaning it. Charles may have been a lawyer before he moved to Long Beach, but he didn’t act like it—he acted like a mature kid—so I knew he’d be okay to have around.

  On the evening of my non-party, which was the first Saturday after my actual eleventh birthday, Colette, Charles, and I loaded up one of the inn’s wagons with firewood, kindling, a lighter, beach blankets, beach chairs, hot dogs, sodas, and stuff to make s’mores. Charles pulled the wagon ahead of us with Pirate circling him like a maniac, seeming as excited to be going to the beach as I was.

  We meandered to the right side of the sand path and walked in a line so we could touch the tall beach grass as we went. This car entrance to the beach was closed to protect the razor clam beds from getting crushed. It was illegal to drive onto the beach this way during clam season or to ride a horse over this section of the beach this time of year. Charles was extreme: he wouldn’t even let us ride bikes through the entrance. Since cars had to drive onto the beach from the north or south entrances, the usual deep tire tracks were filled in by thick, tiny mountains of dry sand.

  “What did you do today?” Colette asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “Nothing.”

  “Oh,” Colette said. “My mom made me go to the grocery store with her and then she took me to the library and I got the next graphic novel in that series I like and then we got smoothies.” She paused for a breath. “If you could only have mango or strawberry smoothies for the rest of your life, what would you pick?”

  “Mango.”

  “You didn’t think about that very long.”

  “I hate strawberries.”

  “If you had to eat strawberries or broccoli for dinner, which one would you choose?” she asked.

  “I’d skip dinner,” I said, brushing the hair out of my mouth. Colette had her hair pulled up in knots like Mickey Mouse ears, and I maybe should have pulled mine back, too, to keep it out of my mouth, but I hate the feeling of having my ears exposed. And I can’t put a hoodie over a ponytail or knot. And hair bands give me headaches.

  We’d made it to the medium-dry sand then. I loved looking at the different tracks made by toes and shoe treads and webbed feet and paws, leading around in circles or swirls, a giant game of connect-the-dots between pieces of washed-up seaweed, logs, and shells. I kicked an empty crab claw.

  “I brought you a present,” Colette said, pausing to take off her flip-flops. “I also brought some music so we can sing if we want to, and two new quiz books.”

  “I love quizzes,” I said. I don’t love singing, but I didn’t say that.

  “I know. This is going to be so fun! My mom said your mom said we could stay out here until ten!”

  “I know!” I said, looking toward the water. “It’s the best!”

  The beach made me feel calm. The tide was low, and the sand near the water
was rippled from the waves rolling in and out when the tide had been higher. My eyes got stuck until Colette spoke again.

  “What’s Tess doing tonight?”

  “She went to a movie with our mom,” I said flatly. I didn’t want her to ask about Tess. Maybe she got that, because she started to run toward where Charles had stopped the wagon and was unloading supplies.

  “Let’s go!” Colette shouted over her shoulder. Sinking deep into the sand, she looked like she was running in slow motion. Her cheeks were extra pink and her blue eyes were really bright. “It’s time to build the fire!”

  Just before the sun disappeared that night, Charles used my first phone to take a picture of Colette and me at the water’s edge. In the picture, the sky is light blue and periwinkle at the top. The clouds are gray at the bottom, but coral and gold tipped because of the way the sun’s rays are hitting them. Colette and I are silhouettes: one with blowing hair and the other with Mickey Mouse ears. The glassy wet sand reflects the sky and our shadows; we’re laughing, the legs of our pants wet from not running fast enough when the waves came in.

  That picture of me and Colette at sunset is my favorite picture ever.

  I don’t have it anymore.

  * * *

  —

  THE LONG BEACH Police Station is a squat little box covered entirely in wood shingles, not just on the roof. The worn pieces of wood are nailed in rows on top of rows and faded from the sun—and they look like they’d give you splinters if you ran your hand along them.

  The clock on the post cemented to the sidewalk in front of the station said one forty-five, except that it was only one fifteen. I should have been starting my weekend after my early-release morning, but I was here, at the police station.

  The clock had been stuck on one forty-five since last summer. It drove me crazy that they didn’t fix it. That’s an example of how I notice things too much—I couldn’t not notice, and be bugged by, the stupid clock. It was like a mental hangnail. I think I might get those more than other people, like Tess. She wasn’t bugged by the clock.

  “Why won’t they fix that thing already?” I asked no one in particular.

  “Sorry, but how can you be talking about the clock right now when Colette is missing?” Tess asked softly, pulling her sweater tighter around her.

  “I’m just saying they should fix it.”

  Mom held open the door to the police station and I was glad because I didn’t want to touch it. I walked through, still stuck on the clock. “It makes no sense that they don’t. People need to know what time it is. The police need to know what time it is!”

  Tess had stopped listening to me.

  There were five kids sitting in the chairs lining the wall by the front desk, all of them with one or both parents, except the parents were all sitting in chairs on the opposite wall.

  Mia ran over and hugged Tess; she’d saved her a seat. Colette’s weird neighbor, Naomi, smiled and waved like she was at some great social event, not about to be questioned by the police. Bryce and Colin were there, of course, since a couple months ago, Colette and Bryce had declared themselves boyfriend-girlfriend and Colin is Bryce’s best friend.

  People had started calling Colette and Bryce Brolette, which is so weird. And it’d been especially weird since Colette and Bryce had barely ever talked to each other before they’d decided to become a name mash-up.

  Sitting next to Colin at the station, on the edge of his chair with his skateboard between his knees, was . . . Kai?

  “What are you doing here?” I asked before I could get control of the wild horses that sometimes race out of my mouth.

  “I . . . uh . . . ,” Kai answered, glancing down at the NO HATE JUST SKATE sticker on the top of his board. He looked back at me with his super-dark brown eyes and shrugged.

  I resisted a compulsive need to try to touch the tips of his blown-forward black hair or soft-looking skin. I really don’t like when people touch me, but when I want to touch things, it’s almost painful if I can’t.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” my mom whispered harshly as she nudged me toward two open seats on the parent side. I pulled away from her breath in my ear.

  “Stop it,” I said loudly.

  Mom looked embarrassed, but I didn’t care much because I was preoccupied by wishing she didn’t feel like she had to remind me every time I made a mistake—I almost always already knew—and being mad that she’d whispered in my ear because she should know by now that whispers feel absolutely terrible to me.

  I had my finger in my ear, trying to make it feel better, when two policemen came out and talked to us. I knew one of them: it was Maggie Saunders’s dad. He’d spoken at Career Day in fourth grade. He had a round face with an extra chin or two, and I liked him because one time, when he’d caught me cry-laughing while hugging a headstone in the cemetery, he said he wouldn’t tell my parents if I promised not to do it again.

  I’d never seen the one who wasn’t Mr. Saunders before, and he was exactly the opposite of Mr. Saunders. He had humongous muscles and had one of those beard things that wraps all the way around your mouth. I could tell that he was definitely in charge. His name tag said ROLLINS.

  “Mia Gilmore?” Officer Rollins asked, and Mia jumped a little. She gave my sister another hug, because they can’t do anything without hugging first, which makes me cringe, and then Mia and her mom followed the officers away from our group.

  Colin started telling Tess about getting his braces tightened, and Kai answered a question from Naomi about homework, messing with the corner of a sticker on his board deck that was coming up while he talked. When I looked at Bryce, he was staring into space with his light blue eyes. Bryce had never seemed that interesting to me and, as I stared at him staring at nothing, I couldn’t understand why Colette would want to pick him to be her first boyfriend. I wondered if they’d kissed. The thought of kissing a boy completely freaked me out because, I can’t be positive, but I’m pretty sure that means someone would touch you.

  I don’t know why I looked at Kai again right then, but I did. Now he was hunched over, typing on his phone, his mouth open a little in concentration. That’s how he sometimes looks when he takes tests, too. Before he caught me watching him, I pulled out my own phone and started reading the latest post on my favorite blog, written by a famous tornado chaser.

  Kids and their parents went in, stayed awhile, and left. The police didn’t take more than fifteen minutes with each kid, but it felt like forever. Mom went in with Tess and when they came out, Tess’s eyes were red and puffy. Tess begged Mom to let her leave without us so she could go to Mia’s house and Mom agreed. Finally when I was the last kid in the waiting room, Officer Rollins called my name. My mom and I followed him toward an interview room, but she asked me to wait outside for a few seconds.

  “May I speak with you privately first?” Mom asked the officer.

  “Of course,” he said, and they left me leaning against the wall, listening through a crack in the door.

  “I wanted to let you know that Frankie’s not neurotypical,” my mom began quietly. “She may not answer questions logically or may interrupt when you’re speaking. She’s very impulsive and she doesn’t react well to change, so it’s more challenging for her to be here than the other kids. Also, she has SPD, which means that she’s very sensitive to touch and may have a big reaction if—”

  I tuned out, my cheeks red with embarrassment.

  I don’t know why I’m the only one whose mom has to warn people in advance.

  chapter 5

  Fact: The part of the United States that gets the most destructive tornadoes is called Tornado Alley.

  “HAVE A SEAT, Frances,” Officer Rollins said when it was finally my turn in the interview room. My mom sat in the chair closest to the wall. She pulled her frumpy sweatshirt tight around her like she was freezing, but it was hot in the room.


  “I wanted to sit there,” I said to her, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “Be flexible, please,” she said.

  “I am,” I said. “I’m trying.” Flexibility is a big deal to her. And to therapists. And, I guess, to people in general. “But can I sit there?”

  My mom sighed and moved to the other chair. I bumped her knee and stepped on her toe trying to get around her to sit down in the chair by the wall. “It’s too warm,” I grumbled, but I stayed put.

  “Shall we get started, Frances?” Officer Rollins asked from across the wooden table.

  “My name’s Frankie,” I said, shifting in the hard-back chair with the warm seat. I wished I was at the beach. That’s what probably made me ask, “Are you from Long Beach?”

  He shook his head. “Tacoma.”

  “I like Wild Waves,” I said.

  “Wild Waves is in Federal Way,” Officer Rollins said.

  “Isn’t that close to Tacoma?” I asked. “Like right next to it? Like basically part of it?” He shrugged so I tried again. “I also like the Tacoma zoo.”

  “Most people do.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Well, I’m a grown-up.” I thought he was going to give more explanation, so I waited, but he didn’t.

  “Grown-ups can like zoos.”

  “Frankie, will you let the man speak?” Mom interrupted. She’d scooted her chair back a little so she was halfway behind me.

  I turned around to look at her. “You’re creeping me out. Move your chair back up the way it was.”

  “Don’t be bossy,” Mom said. “And please remember that Officer Rollins is in charge of this conversation, not you.”

  “I know he is,” I said to my mom. I hoped that she wasn’t making a mental list of all the ways I was not doing great today—all the reasons to make me start taking medication again. Or at least force me to go talk to Gabe.