“But it’s not, really,” the girl pointed out. There was no annoyance in her tone. Just blunt observation. “Every time I’ve seen that name, it’s been in books, and the characters are usually called Joan or maybe Joanna or Johanne. Not Giovanna. They don’t even start with the same letter of the alphabet.”
The more she talked about it, the more stressed she seemed to get. It made me want to reach out and take her hand, but Nathan had warned me that Isla wouldn’t appreciate any unsolicited touch. So I kept my hands at my side.
“That’s true,” I said. “It’s probably more because my mom really liked Joni Mitchell, so even though my dad gave mean Italian name, it was close enough that she called me Joni anyway.”
“Is that true?” Nathan wondered.
I nodded. “Yeah. Kind of weird, but that’s what I’ve always been told.”
Isla seemed satisfied with my answer and went back to working on her drawing, which appeared to be a very realistic sketch of a horse.
“Would you be willing to tell me about your drawing?” I asked.
I wanted to be careful. As a kid, I fucking hated it when people pulled me out of something I was working on without asking first. Nonna did it all the time. If I was singing a song or practicing some dance steps and Nonna told me to sweep the porch, it took me until I was almost in middle school to stop shrieking at her out of frustration. Not because I had to do chores, but because I had to stop something I wasfinallyfocused on.
It was one of the reasons my siblings all thought I was so spoiled. And maybe I was. But looking at Isla, I wondered now if we weren’t similar in that way too. Maybe it hadn’t all been my fault.
“Is it all right if I keep working on it?” she asked with a quick glance at Mary.
“That’s a very good question,” Mary told her more than us. “Very thoughtful of you.”
“I’m fine with it,” I said. “I actually like having things to work on when I talk to people too. Otherwise, I fidget too much. I think it’s called ‘stimming’?”
I glanced at Nathan for confirmation. He was drumming his fingers on his knee again and smiled.
At that, Isla looked up again with another flash of recognition. “I stim too. Most people here do. Actually, mostpeople in the world stim in one way or another. It’s the body’s way of regulating itself, except some forms of it are more acceptable than others. Do you have autism too, Joni?”
I shook my head, a bit bowled over by the onslaught of facts. Part of me wanted to smile. Isla had a way of speaking that was a bit similar to Nathan’s. It was incredibly endearing. “I don’t think so. But I think I might be neurodiv-erse?” I glanced at Nathan again for confirmation.
“Neurodivergent,” he corrected me quietly. Kindly.
I couldn’t have appreciated it more.
I nodded and grinned. “That. Yeah. In other ways. I’m just kind of learning about them.”
Isla nodded as she outlined the shape of the horse’s ear. “There are a lot of ways to be neurodivergent. ASD, OCD, Down’s syndrome, bipolar disorder, ADHD, epilepsy, dyspraxia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, Tourette syndrome…”
Her aide, I noticed, didn’t stop her as she went on, and neither did Nathan. It was too easy to imagine the response I would have gotten—the responses Ididget—went I went on about something obsessively like that as a kid. One of my five siblings would have told me to shut up, another would have made fun of me, and someone else probably would have made fun of me for it later.
Eventually, I’d learned to stop sharing when my interest was piqued. I’d started making lists instead. Sometimes writing them down, but mostly in my head so I wouldn’t have to look at my terrible spelling.
Here, Isla could make her lists out loud with people who loved her enough to listen.
I found myself wanting to join her.
“Nathan has social pragmatic communication disorder,” Isla finished. “Which is kind of like autism, but missing some of the other traits that I have too.”
“Yes, I do,” Nathan told her. “Thank you for including me in the conversation. That’s really important to me, and I really like knowing that we have that in common.”
He was mimicking what Mary was doing, I realized, by praising Isla when she did something that was socially aware. No one was correcting the girl or pointing out her errors—instead, they were working in a system of open communication about her challenges and reinforcing her attempts at working through them.
It was a fucking revelation.
Isla’s eyes shone quickly toward Nathan as she continued working on her horse. “We do have that in common. We also have horses in common. We have a new horse that just arrived in the stables this week. His name is Crimson…”
She continued to talk about horses with Nathan, giving me the opportunity to sit back and just listen, observe, and make my own list in my head.
Things I Like About Isla
