43. First impressions of Isla

FORTY-THREE

#1 Shes so much like Nathan

And so, almost as soon as we arrived at the enormous estate, Nathan and I got back into the fancy black Mercedes and drove away. I watched the Virginia countryside gradually grow more and more populated as we closed in on the outskirts of Washington, DC. Eventually, the car moved farther south, and close to an hour later, we parked on a large school campus outside of Alexandria.

The Ferndale Center for Autism and Other Developmental Disorders was one of those places that looked more like a summer camp than an educational facility. Children could live at the center and attend school there beginning at the age of five, which was when Isla began at a similar program in North Carolina before moving to Ferndale when she was twelve, Nathan had informed me on the drive down. Students could remain until they were twenty-five, depending on their individual needs.

The campus was split into several sections for different age groups, along with centers offering different forms of therapy, learning support, and vocational counseling for the students. We passed a culinary institute, a bar, a large gymnasium, a pool, and several other buildings dedicated to the needs of the center's three hundred and forty-seven residents. Including Isla's beloved stables.

We parked near the small administrative buildings at the center of campus. Nathan checked in at the front desk, and we were then escorted down a path and past a locked entrance to the section of the center designated for students between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Our guide led us to a waiting area in the bottom of the girls' dormitory, where Isla shared a suite with another person like her.

"One of the goals of the center is to help kids like Isla learn how to socialize well enough to function in the communities outside," Nathan told me while we waited. "Right now, she requires an EA—that's an educational assistant—to help her interact with others. But I'm hopeful that one day she'll be able to manage on her own."

"You don't think she could after high school?" I asked.

Nathan shook his head. "Not completely. Cognitively, she can probably handle the course load at one of the local universities with the help of her EA, but she still struggles enough with other independent living, social communication, and executive function skills that it would make it difficult for her to be on her own anywhere."

He explained that today, for example, there was a strong possibility she wouldn't even acknowledge either of our presence. Or if she did, she might not be able to talk about anything outside of her own specific interests.

I knew he was preparing me for potentially uncomfortable moments, but I honestly didn't mind. This girl was important to him, and so she was important to me. It didn't really matter if she was willing to speak to me or not. I just wanted her to know that I cared about Nathan, and therefore, I cared about her.

Impulsively, I grabbed Nathan's hand and kissed his knuckles.

He looked down at me. "Why?"

I smiled up at him. "Isla's lucky to have you in her life. And so am I."

The delight that crossed his face warmed my very soul. But before he could answer, the door to the dormitory opened, and a middle-aged woman carrying a basket of knitting walked in, followed by a girl of about seventeen.

Nathan stood up immediately.

I did with him.

"Good to see you so soon again, Dr. Hunt," said the woman as she reached out to shake Nathan's hand.

"It's good to see you too, Mary," Nathan said. "This is my girlfriend, Joni."

Mary smiled at me with warm gray eyes as she shook my hand as well. "Lovely to meet you. We've heard a lot about you, haven't we, Isla?"

Isla, who had already taken a seat across from us in one of the cozy armchairs, was fixedly drawing something on a sketch pad. We all watched as she worked diligently to finish some shading. And waited. When it appeared she wasn't going to respond, Nathan shrugged at me. I nodded. This was the kind of thing he had prepared me for.

Isla was beautiful. She was tall and blond, with sharp blue eyes the color of a robin's egg that darted around the room, clearly noticing everything. Not unlike her friend Nathan, I thought. Her blond hair was tied back in a very sensible braid, and she wore plain blue clothes without a discernible label, which I later found out were specifically tailored to avoid sensory irritations.

She also had extensive scarring on several parts of her face, also visible on her hands. I had a feeling it extended over other parts of her body too. The horrible remnants of the fire that killed her mother.

"You've been talking about me, huh?" I teased Nathan with a little poke to the side.

He blinked. "Yes. I saw her a few weeks ago and told her I was going to find you and bring you back."

I grinned. Gradually, he grinned back. I fought the urge to kiss him, but made a mental note to do it later as a thank you.

"But I thought your name was Giovanna." Isla surprised us all by putting the pencil down and looking up at me for a second before her gaze darted away almost as quickly.

Beside her, Mary smiled. "What a good observation, Isla. Thank you for joining the conversation."

Beside us, Nathan's entire face lit up. Clearly, he hadn't been expecting much from the interaction.

I smiled at Isla. "It is Giovanna, but everyone calls me Joni."

She worked very hard on shading something on her paper. "Why?"

I shrugged. "I'm not sure, actually. It's kind of short for Giovanna."

"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 me an 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 was finally focused 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, most people 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 I did get—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

She has no idea how pretty she is. That's always the best kind of pretty because people aren't full of themselves.

She was very, very smart. I think she might have a photographic memory. Or at least knows everything on earth about horses.

She adores Nathan. I know he thinks she's not very social, but she listens to everything he says, and she responds more to him than anyone. She and I will get along great.

Within about an hour, Isla started to get antsy. Her patience with the conversation began to erode as she tired of drawing and started struggling to control her body. I noticed more than once that she sat on her hands because if she didn't, she would shake them by her ears or start pulling on her chin.

"I would like to go back upstairs," she announced abruptly when Mary was in the middle of telling Nathan about a book Isla was reading for her English class.

Everyone turned to her as she yanked at the knees of her pants.

"Thank you for communicating that," Mary said kindly. "Would you like to say goodbye to Nathan and Joni first?"

She had the option not to, and for a moment, I wouldn't have blamed her if she had just left. It was obviously hard for her to do things like this, and I could tell how uncomfortable she was and how ready she was to leave.

But after she stood up, Isla paused and turned to Nathan and me with a few quick bobs of her head all the way down to her knees. "Goodbye, Nathan and Joni. Thank you for coming."

She turned to leave, but then, almost as quickly, she turned back and gave Nathan a very quick, very awkward embrace, then sprang back almost as though she couldn't handle anything else anymore. Isla grabbed her drawings and exited the room without another word.

Mary watched her go, then turned to us, eyes shining. "First hug, isn't that?"

Nathan swallowed hard and wiped the corner of his eye as if there was something in it. "Yes, it was."

Mary smiled warmly. "She likes it when you come. I hope you can continue to see her more often."

With a polite goodbye to both of us, she followed her ward upstairs, leaving Nathan and me to exit the way we had come.

We were both quiet as we drove back through the campus. As I looked around, I wondered vaguely how much a place like this cost. Probably more than college. More than most people made in a year. People like the Hunts wouldn't blink at paying that kind of price, but it was completely out of the question for most families struggling with disabilities.

Families like mine. If Nathan was right about me having ADHD, dyslexia, and who knew what else, how might I have benefited from some kind of intervention when I was a little kid? I doubted I would have needed this kind of twenty-four-hour therapy, but even so. What might I have been capable of as a child had I the benefit of therapists, counselors, or better tutors than the honor roll volunteers?

Even now, I made rudimentary spelling errors all the time, had never actually read a full book cover to cover, and couldn't do basic addition without my phone or my fingers. I had also learned little tricks to hide my awkwardness—things like flirting and smiling to cover up the fact that I hadn't been able to follow a conversation, staring a little too hard to demonstrate that I was actually listening, or making myself the butt of a joke when people pointed out how spacey I was. No one was better at making fun of me than me.

Sometimes, my life felt like one big mask.

But as I looked around the school, I couldn't help but wonder what would my life have been like if I'd had this kind of support from the get-go? Would I have been able to finish high school without seducing my teachers? Or actually finished college like some of my smarter siblings?

Would I have even become a dancer at all?

That thought sobered me. Dancing was everything to me. Already, I was eager to get back in the studio, to start practicing the routines that would get me back into shape, to go back to auditioning and performing, to what I'd always thought I'd been made for.

So, not a world without dance. Never that. But maybe a world where I had more options. A world where I might actually be able to choose what I did and when instead of feeling backed into a corner every time I hit a rough patch.

Yeah. That would be nice.

"Thank you for coming," Nathan interrupted my thoughts gently as he turned onto a freeway to head back to the farm. "She liked you. At least she's very interested in you."

I turned to him, suddenly full of more determination than ever to help him out of this horrible situation, but also to help the girl I'd just met.

"She's amazing," I said. "And she deserves to be free from your parents. You both do. And we're going to make it happen, no matter what it takes."