It smelled funny. Acid climbed up my nose and into my skull. The sheet music swam in front of my eyes, blurring with the audience chairs.

This school gymnasium was so different. No one else noticed it except me.

I got up and told my parents, who were sitting in the front row, that we needed to leave. I was getting a headache. But then my classmates came. They were panicking because they didn't want me to leave. Who else would fill in for the solo?

But they were busy joking with my parents, laughing. I didn't get their jokes. I didn't understand why Tienne was crying and making me cry too until my dad shouted. Anger. At me? No, at my classmates. I corrected them that my family was Vietnamese, not Chinese. With my parents' glower, they mumbled apologies and slinked away. Somehow, I could hear their conversation across from the gym: that my parents were normal, so why wasn't I?

It was raining. I ran down the hallways to an empty foreign classroom. The ceiling was missing, but it was quiet, and that was all that mattered. Two adults were there. One noticed me and pushed up his glasses. After seeing that I wasn't going to follow him, he purposefully strode out. Minutes passed and it was like my nasals had been cleared: I wasn't breathing in fire. I curled up against the wall and pressed my palms on the floor overflowing with water.

But the ground didn't morph or shimmer. Worksheets and tables darkened with raindrops. I shielded my guitar with my body.

I asked the other adult sitting at a desk why Shield wasn't working. A part of me knew this had been my first time discovering the power, so I shouldn't have been able to ask this question. When she didn't answer, I asked if she was a teacher. She looked too old to be in high school.

She raised her eyebrows. I tried to elaborate but I gave up. She got up and held an umbrella over me. She had azure eyes.

—

MONTY: Yikes. Sounds rough. Have you given Nora a heads-up so she knows the family drama surrounding this?

TAI: Would it not make a bad impression on her?

MONTY: She'll figure it out either way but I'm sure she'll appreciate being informed. That really sucks.

After texting Nora, I sighed. This had to be the longest night ever. The bedsheets were pooled around me like frozen water, as if time had stopped at midnight after I woke up feeling sad.

Relying on Monty to walk me through the trains of thought going on in other people's minds didn't make me feel as supported as it did lost. Sometimes I wished everyone communicated in the way that made sense to me. Not that I hated being Autistic—it was the opposite. Being on the spectrum was an important part of who I was, and my family, flawed as they were, taught me that I shouldn't expect anything less than 100% love and acceptance just because of my differences. But this also meant tightrope-walking the gap between the neurotypical and neurodivergent world—if that bridge could be crossed at all.

MONTY: Your parents sound like mine. They grew up in an unfair environment where they got the every-person-for-themself mentality. Just prove them wrong. They'll accept your girlfriend eventually.

MONTY: Why?

TAI: Overprotective

MONTY: Don't get manipulated

TAI: What's with everyone thinking everyone's a manipulator?

MONTY: Just drawing upon my experiences. Been doing a deep dive into my family history so it's been on my mind

TAI: You never talk about your family.

MONTY: Jo and I've been talking about the difference between religion and culture, so I've been doing research into Hong Kong

MONTY: I can't care for my family but I don't want them to get in my way of understanding my background

TAI: Why don't you care?

MONTY: Lots of reasons. Academic pressure as the eldest, limited support when I began to lose my hearing, etc

MONTY: No one wants to have their life dictated

I bit my lip, flashing back to how I'd asked Nora the same question. Now I understood that it wasn't the question that bothered her; it was shaping my expectations into my perceived reality of her family.

TAI: I'm sorry I assumed.

MONTY: It's nothing

MONTY: If it makes you feel better, jobs aren't coming easy for me either. Interpretations and stuff aren't a big problem, but it's the working environment that sucks

TAI: That's made me appreciate being self-employed

TAI: That you can choose your own workplace

TAI: Don't give up. You're the best coder I know

MONTY: I'm the only coder you know dude. But I *am* the best too. Not giving up yet. IDK your obstacles but you shouldn't either

We talked about our Christmas gifts—Monty liked his, whew—before we said goodnight. I cleared all the Instagram notifications clogging up my feed, barely glancing at any of them. Texting had helped straighten out the bundle of emotions eating me on the inside. I needed help but I didn't know what would help. Not for the first time, I wished I knew how to maintain contact with other Autistic people I'd met in life.

I looked up to where fairy lights lined the ceiling bathing my bedroom in a warm orange. I withdrew my hand from the floor, deactivating Shield. The fairy lights disappeared. Everything faded back into a blue-tinted darkness. Through the window, puffy falling snow threw moving shadows on the floor, cold and impalpable as sleep.

—

The spider red numbers on my alarm clock read 3:03 AM when floorboards creaked. A pair of bare feet appeared under the door's gap, which could only be Tienne's.

"Tai?" she called. "Can I come in?"

Tiennese Translation: "I'm lonely. Can I come in so it'd make me feel better?"

I said yes. She tiptoed around the mess of scrap paper, pencil crayons and blue that twinkled in the moonlight coming in from the window. I placed the half-complete diorama on my dresser. Usually I hated being interrupted in the middle of a project, but at some point I must have nodded off.

I rummaged my drawers for a fuzzy blanket and draped it over Tienne's shoulders. She hugged her knees. I stretched out the knots and cracks in my spine. The gears started to turn; my thoughts scrambled over each other; energy flooded my veins like I had a sugar high. It trickled out of my splayed palms and fingers and into the floor. The hardwood pattern changed from the oval swirls of wood to the rough texture of tree trunks before converging into the spindly limbs of neurons that relayed jumpy electrical impulses.

Shield lit up Tienne's face in pulses. My little sister was the only person who knew about Shield, and the only person I could use it around without the need of a physical barrier between us. She tentatively reached out to touch the floor. Though she could see what was happening, she didn't feel the tingling in my fingers that stole my breath away.

"Is it helping?"

"A little." She said irritably, "You don't need to ask me when you know."

"Yes I do."

"No you don't. It's annoying."

Stop lying, I wanted to say. But I knew her long enough to pick up on her social cues. Or maybe I was just perceptive with my family, because the emptiness she struggled with would swallow me up too. It overwhelmed me like dunking my bones in ice. As we got nightmares more often and came to each other, we worked out a system. It changed from calling Kimmy to wipe our snotty noses to texting in different rooms. And now Tienne's turmoil was more contained, while my meltdowns had decreased in frequency but were just as intense.

Sensing my emotions, Shield's patterns slowed and straightened into orderly hexagons, turning honey-coloured and staying static. Playing around with my magic was nice, but after a while the dynamic visuals would exhaust my brain from processing the information.

Doubt crept up on me. The Vuong household had settled into the tepid atmosphere of waiting out until the day of judgment. The more my parents and I gave each other space, the further I was from sorting out my feelings—especially when Nora was coming tomorrow.

I refused to think that Nora had ulterior motives. She'd say something like 'I don't have time for fake relationships' and raise an eyebrow. But I could never know, could I? I was blind to the social language that played in front of everyone else's eyes like how Shield was to me.

"We're grown-ups, Tai," Tienne said. "It's not like high school drama where everyone's playing the bitch game."

"But you understand, don't you?" I said. She had anxiety. She knew how reality amplified fear until you couldn't tell one from the other.

"Kind of. What I don't understand is you downplaying your musical ability. You got fame at Hidden Stars and you didn't tell them that."

"I did. I'm not sure if it would change their mind about this social thing though." I lowered my voice. "I met a music manager. We click, like we get each other. But is it weird that I don't want to tell Mama and Baba?"

She turned to me with interest. "Tell me more about this music manager?" Her voice lifted with hope, and as I told her, I reminded myself that I had to be the one sharing the details of my life. That was how she was: she needed other people to say things first, so she could exchange it with the debrief of her life.

"You know your situation best," she said. "Like, Baba's been handling me with kid gloves after I showed them my anxiety diagnosis. In a way it's relieving that the seniors at the long-term care residence don't even understand the concept of mental health and all things neuroscience, 'cause it's soooo scary to our parents' generation."

"Doctors are scarier," I argued. "They're the ones that told my parents all that crap about Autism! We learned way more by trial and error than we did from appointments."

"We could use that to our advantage," Tienne said thoughtfully. "When you're working with patients, you have to do a lot of intimate things to help them. It was a nightmare when I started working there because they didn't trust me, but that was because past employees were so rude. Mama and Baba are stubborn, but they're not stupid. They can use their own observations to realize that the world isn't going to blow up if you and Nora kiss."

"You don't have to put it like that."

She grinned. "Not saying that's the only thing you do—"

"Tienne!" I said, my cheeks burning.

We glanced towards the door in case I woke anyone up. When the floors didn't creak, we chuckled.

This was always how it'd been: Tienne and I leaving stuff unsaid because we understood each other so well it was redundant to state the obvious. My family loved me but Tienne was the least judgmental one, and I thought it was because getting my Autism diagnosis wasn't a huge deal to her. I was still her brother.

"Tai...."

"Yeah."

She pinched a strand of hair. It shone light blue in the moonlight before clouds shrouded the room in near-darkness. "You had a nightmare, didn't you? I feel like...it's always about Shield. That's what my gut says. If more jerks have been saying anything, then by all means, use Shield so you don't have to deal with them! But...you're not going to use it all the time, right?"

"Get to the point, Tienne."

"You're not going to use Shield on Nora, right?"

I hadn't thought of using it on Rajathiran. But I had.

"Just talk to her. Especially about your music. It'll make you feel better. I know you don't like talking, but if Nora knows you more, then there's no reason to hide."

My eyes picked out stray beads left from Nora's diorama that had rolled under the dresser. "Putting into words would be...."

"It'll change things for the better. Give yourself the choice to be open," she said. "You're half of your relationship. It's sucky to have Mama decide what you want, right? Why should you make that choice for Nora?"

Her brows furrowed. Under her pointed expression, I looked down. I didn't know where to begin. 

Is this how siblings talk to each other? I worry it is too much like a friend relationship. I cannot tell the difference. 

Also, here is the breakdown of my readership thus far: 

-37.5% - USA 

-18.75% - Philippines

-12.5% - Canada

-6.25% - Japan (who's in Japan?!) 

-6.25% - India

-6.25% - Nigeria 

-6.25% - South America