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He thinks about how to say it. “Like when everything happens at the same time and I can’t turn any of it down. School is loud. Church is loud. Sometimes dinner.” He shrugs. “I go in there and it gets quiet, and then I can come back.”
“That’s smart.”
“My therapist said it’s not running away. It’s taking a break.” He says it carefully, a rule he’s memorized because it matters. “Running away is when you don’t come back. I always come back.”
“I tell my clients that often,” I say.
Bo goes still. “Your clients? Are you a lawyer?”
“No. A therapist.”
His eyes widen. “You have a corner too?”
“I do, actually.” It’s true, which surprises me a little. “Mine is a chair by a window and a book. I listen to people all day. By the end my brain is loud too. So I sit in my chair until it’s quiet, and then I can come back.”
He nods slowly, like I’ve passed a test he didn’t tell me I was taking. “We’re the same.”
“A little bit,” I agree.
He puts Fluffy back and latches the cage with the focus of a safecracker.
“Do you talk to kids who have autism? Like me?”
And there it is.
I’d wondered. Not in a clinical way. I wasn’t sitting on this floor diagnosing a ten-year-old over a hamster. But I’ve spent enough hours across from enough people to recognize a brain that runs on its own wiring. The way he says exactly what he means and expects the world to do the same. The rules he keeps for himself. It never looks the same twice. Some of the people I see keep their whole life in color-coded order. Bo keeps his in a pile only he can read. I’d noticed. I just didn’t know if he had a word for it yet.
And sitting here, I realize I want to know more. Not because it’s my work. Because it’s Bo. I make a note to ask Luke sometime, when Bo isn’t listening.
“I don’t usually see kids,” I say. “But some of my adult clients have autism.”
He turns around. “Adults can have autism?”
“They can,” I say slowly. “You’ll still have autism when you’re an adult,” I say, gently, because I can tell that’s the real question under the question.
“Oh.” His face falls. He looks down at his hands.
I scoot closer to him so I’m not a tall person talking down at a small one.
“Hey. Why the sad face?”
He won’t look up. “I thought I would grow out of it. Like I grow out of my clothes.”
I take a second, because this one matters, and he’ll know if I rush it.
“Bo. Look at me.”
He does.
“Autism isn’t like clothes. You don’t grow out of it, because it was never too small for you.” I keep my voice even. “It’s part of how your brain is built. Take it away and you wouldn’t be Bo. And I like Bo.”
He studies me. “So I keep it forever?”
“Forever.”
“That’s a long time.”
“It is. But it’s not a bad thing.”
