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Pepa was always weird. Not in a conscious way, not the way where she engaged in odd interests or acted out for attention. There was just something about her that put people off. She was loud and awkward and never quite as pretty as the other girls in her grade.
It didn’t help that everything just felt so big to her. She wished she could be like Julieta, who could smile pretty and choke down her stress and sadness. Who suffered so beautifully in silence. Mamá loved that Julieta could keep a stiff upper lip and soldier on, no matter how much both Pepa and Bruno knew it was bad for her. Pepa wanted to be praised like that, somewhere deep inside.
But she wasn’t. She suffered loudly and with tears. When she was upset she sobbed and when she was angry she stomped her feet and yelled, her hair was frizzed out from the way she pulled on and ran her hand through her braid to calm herself down. The whole world would know what was in her soul and she could not help it. One girl can’t hold in a whole hurricane.
Except unlike Julieta and Bruno, the things that felt huge to Pepa were not normal . The feel of the seam of her socks was so unbearable she had taken to wearing them inside out, she cried when the tag of her shirt scratched at her neck. She was clumsy beyond any other girl in her grade, not helped by her early growth spurt.
None of these facts made her particularly popular with her peers. She would hang around Julieta, but Julieta was popular and kind. The girls around her looked at Pepa awkwardly when she sat with them, not to be cruel but just discomforted by her loud and off kilter presence,
The boys were even worse, the way they taunted her. When she fell behind in gym class they jeered at her, when she bit her cuticles they would point her out, groaning about how gross it was. About how gross she was. And if you tell someone they’re gross enough times, especially a teenage girl, they will believe you.
The worst part of the way the boys teased her was how they took advantage of her lack of awareness of social cues. Sometimes they would pretend to be her friend for days at a time, only to reveal that they were playing a trick on her. She would think they were laughing at a joke she told only to be utterly crushed when she found that they were laughing at her . It always made Pepa feel so stupid and so lost. How was she meant to make friends when she couldn’t even tell when people hated her?
For a long time she didn’t tell anyone. From 4th to 8th grade she just hunkered down and convinced herself that being treated like some repulsive thing by her cruel peers was something normal, something tolerable that wasn’t eroding away at her fragile self worth day by day until there was very little left.
It was better than whining, a thing her Mamá had often lightheartedly teased her about, a thing she still did despite Pepa’s efforts to be good . She didn’t mean it of course, but Pepa resented it. She resented being called whiney or a baby or a drama queen.
But despite everything Pepa was Alma’s “problem child”. It was a phrase that was thrown around by teachers and Mamá alike, used to summarize all her odd behaviors into one thing. If she fell behind in class it was because she was the problem child. It was easy enough.
There was another phrase thrown around in those meetings too, one Pepa wouldn’t hear about until a stormy afternoon where she came home with a roiling in her gut that matched the turmoil of the clouds above. Julieta and Bruno both had clubs after school today, but her’s was yesterday so she was the only triplet coming back to their small home before four. (Well, small wasn’t really the right word. Julieta and she shared the room that was meant to be the master bedroom, Alma taking the other bedroom and Bruno’s room being an office that had been converted. It was snug but they all fit. ) As she skulked in, she found that her Mamá was sitting at the kitchen table, flipping through mail and sorting it into things to keep and things to throw out. Her eyes perked up as they met her own.
“Pepita, how was your day? Come in you should change out of those wet clothes,” Her mamá’s heavily accented English soothed her as she finally relaxed at being home and away from those nasty boys and girls with piercing eyes. She hurried over to Mamá and wrapped her in as big a hug as she could manage, which was quite big given the recent growth spurt that had sent her from 5’2” to 5’7” in a matter of a year, and she was still getting taller. Mamá let out a small oomph as the weight of Pepa launching forward hit her. “¿Que pasa?”
“Is something wrong with me?” Pepa’s voice quivered and broke with teenage insecurity laced with something deeper. “Why do the kids at school look at me weird? I try to act normal, Mamá, why do they hate me?”
“Shh shh it’s okay,” Mamá quickly abandoned the task she was working on to give her full attention to soothing her. Pepa relaxed into the repetitive motion of being rocked back and forth in Mamá’s arms. It was similar to how she soothed herself, but the tight pressure of the hug made it better. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Eres perfecta. No las escuches,”
Pepa cried loudly (grossly, a tantrum, you’re acting like a child, get it together) into her Mamá for a long while until finally she could finally think of speaking again. Her voice was hoarse when she did.
“Why do they all think I’m weird Mamá?” The question was asked as though Pepa didn’t already know the answer. Of course they thought she was weird, she rocked on her heels and constantly shook her hands out and she could barely sit still without twitching her neck in class for more than ten minutes.
“You aren’t weird,” Mamá said the word like it tasted bad in her mouth, “You are my Pepa. And you have your quirks but that doesn’t make you abnormal. I had quirks just like yours when I was your age and younger,”
“You did?” Pepa was hopeful, finally. Mamá didn’t act like her, she was regal and put together, she had a presence that made people want to be around her rather than shun her.
“I did. But then I practiced. I used to sit on my hands to keep them quiet, and I would stay up all night practicing how to have conversations and how to stand correctly. And even though those urges to act… oddly never went away, I got better at hiding it,” The words were not reassuring, but in fact terrifying. It never went away? She would just have to hide it? Oh but Pepa already hid so much and that in and of itself was so draining. Still, she nodded into Mamá’s shoulder. Clearly it had worked for her, so it would work for Pepa too.
“Is there a name for what this is? Or is it just weird?” Pepa was grasping at straws, hoping that if she had the right word she would be able to go to the library and look it up.
“Well, I’ve always just called it my quirks. I-“ Mamá hesitated oddly here, seemingly thinking hard on what to say next, “I’ve been meeting with your teachers, you know that right?” Pepa nodded, “They think you may have ‘autism’. Apparently it is a disorder that can explain the quirks. I don’t think so though,”
“You don’t?”
“No no, we are the Madrigals! We are stronger than any disorder. We control how we act,” Pepa leaned into her Mamá, feeling that anxiety tightened in her stomach again.
The conversation, as far as it was memorable, ended there. But that word stuck in Pepa’s head, larger than the jeers and insults she heard from her classmates. Autism.
She researched it herself privately, spending hours at the library. Not that she minded, the library was quiet and cool and they didn’t mind as long as she didn’t make a mess. And inside herself she tested out the diagnostic criteria, finding that it fit. Mamá may not want this explanation but Pepa would have it.
It wasn’t until years later in college, when Pepa had become a master of sitting on her hands and biting her lips, and had already met the love of her life who didn’t need her to do any of that to love her, that she finally got the official diagnosis. And it was so freeing. There was nothing wrong with her, nothing about her was broken or weird or gross. Her brain simply worked a little to the left of what was considered ‘normal’. Mamá stubbornly refused to acknowledge the diagnosis, but this was no great shock to Pepa. She didn’t need that approval, she told herself. And she half believed it.