I'll Give You the Sun (13 page)

“But you're not an artist,” I whisper back.

She doesn't respond and her body has tensed up. I don't know why.

“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?”

This untenses her and she laughs. “I have a feeling Ralph is on his way,” she says. “The Second Coming is at hand.” She kisses the back of my head. “Everything's going to be okay, sweetheart,” she says because she's a people-mechanic and always knows when I'm malfunctioning. At least that's why I think she says it, until she adds, “It's going to be okay for all of us, I promise.”

Before we even land back on the rug, she's gone. I stay, staring out the window until darkness fills the room, until the five of them walk off in the direction of The Spot, Brian's lucky hat on Courtney's lucky head.

Paces behind the rest, Heather glides along, still looking up. I watch her raise her arms swanlike and then lower them. A bird, I think. Of course. Not a frog at all. I was wrong.

About everything.

• • •

T
he next morning, I do not go up on the roof at dawn because I'm not leaving my bedroom until Brian's back at boarding school three thousand miles from here. It's only seven weeks away. I'll drink the plant water if I get thirsty. I'm lying on the bed staring at a print on the ceiling of Munch's
The Scream,
an off-the-hook painting I wish I made of a guy blowing a gasket.

Like I am.

Jude and Mom are bickering on the other side of the wall. It's getting loud. I think she hates Mom even more than she hates me now.

Mom: You'll have plenty of time to be twenty-five when you're twenty-five, Jude.

Jude: It's just lipstick.

Mom: Lipstick you're not wearing, and while I'm on your bad side, that skirt is way too short.

Jude: Do you like it? I made it.

Mom: Well, you should've made more of it. Look in the mirror. Do you really want to be
that girl
?

Jude: Who else am I going to be? For the record,
that girl
in the mirror is me!

Mom: It's really scaring me how wild you're getting. I don't recognize you.

Jude: Well, I don't recognize you either, Mother.

Mom has been acting a little strange. I've noticed things too. Like how she sits lobotomized at red lights long after they turn green and doesn't hit the gas until everyone starts honking at her. Or how she says she's working in her office, but spying reveals that she's really going through boxes of old photographs she got down from the attic.

And there are horses galloping inside her now. I can hear them.

Today, she and Jude are going to the city together for a mother-daughter day to see if it can make them get along. Not a good start. Dad used to try to get me to go to ball games when they did this, but he doesn't bother anymore, not since I spent a whole football game facing the crowd instead of the field, sketching faces on napkins. Or maybe it was a baseball game?

Baseball. The Ax. The Axhat.

Jude rapid-fire knocks, doesn't wait for me to say come in, just swings open the door. I guess Mom won, because she's lipstick-free and wearing a colorful sundress that goes to her knees, one of Grandma's designs. She looks like a peacock tail. Her hair is calm, a placid yellow lake around her.

“You're home for once.” She seems genuinely happy to see me. She leans against the doorframe. “If Brian and I were drowning, who'd you save first?”

“You,” I tell her, glad she didn't ask me this yesterday.

“Dad and me?”

“Please. You.”

“Mom and me?”

I pause, then say, “You.”

“You paused.”

“I didn't pause.”

“You so did, but it's okay. I deserve it. Ask me.”

“Mom or me?”

“You, Noah. I'd always save you first.” Her eyes are clear blue skies. “Even though you almost beheaded me the other night.” She grins. “It's okay. I admit it. I've been awful, huh?”

“Totally rabid.”

She makes an eye-bulging crazy face that cracks me up even in my mood. “You know,” she says, “those girls are okay but they're so
normal
. It's boring.” She does a goofy, fake ballerina leap across the room, lands on the bed, and shoulders up to me. I close my eyes. “Been a while,” she whispers.

“So long.”

We breathe and breathe and breathe together. She takes my hand and I think how otters sleep floating on their backs in water, holding hands exactly like this, so they don't drift apart in the night.

After a while, she picks up her fist. I do the same.

“One two three,” we say at the same time.

Rock/Rock

Scissors/Scissors

Rock/Rock

Paper/Paper

Scissors/Scissors

“Yes!” she cries. “We still got it, yes we do!” She jumps to her feet. “We can watch the Animal Channel tonight. Or a movie? You can pick.”

“Okay.”

“I want to—”

“Me too,” I reply, knowing what she was going to say. I want to be us again too.

(P
ORTRAIT,
S
ELF-PORTRAIT:
Brother and Sister on a Seesaw, Blindfolded
)

She smiles, touches my arm. “Don't be sad.” She says it so warmly, it makes the air change color. “It came right through the wall last night.” This was worse when we were younger. If one cried, the other cried even if we were on different sides of Lost Cove. I didn't think it happened anymore.

“I'm fine,” I say.

She nods. “See you tonight then if Mom and I don't kill each other.” She gives a salute and is off.

I don't know how this can be but it can: A painting is both exactly the same and entirely different every single time you look at it. That's the way it is between Jude and me now.

• • •

A
little while later, I remember that it's Thursday, which means life drawing at CSA, which means I'm ending my house arrest. Anyway, why should I stay locked up just because Brian's a popular axhat jock covered in flame retardant who likes toilet-licking hornet girls like Courtney Barrett?

My stand and footstool are where I left them last week. I set them up, telling myself that nothing matters but getting into CSA and I can hang out with Jude for the rest of the summer. And Rascal. And go to the museum with Mom. I don't need Brian.

The teacher begins class—a different girl model today—lecturing about positive and negative space, about drawing the space around a form to reveal a form. I've never done this before and get lost in the exercise, concentrating on finding the model by drawing what is not her.

But during the second part of class, I sit down with my back against the wall and begin drawing Brian in this outside-in way, even though I said I'd never draw him again. I can't help it. He's in me and needs to get out. I do sketch after sketch.

I'm concentrating so hard that I don't sense anyone approaching until my light gets blocked. I spring back in surprise and an embarrassing garbled sound flies out of my mouth as my brain catches up to the fact that it's
him,
that Brian's standing in front of me. He has no meteorite bag, no magnet rake, which means he came all the way down here to find me.
Again
. I attempt to keep the joy behind my face, not on it.

“Waited this morning,” he says, and then licks his bottom lip so nervously, so perfectly, it causes pain deep in my chest. He glances at my pad. I flip it over before he can see himself, then get up, motioning for him to go back into the woods so no one inside hears us. I stow the stool and stand, hoping my knees don't give out, or alternatively, that I don't start dancing a jig.

He's waiting by the same tree as last time.

“So the English guy,” he says as we start walking. “He there today?”

If there's one thing I know how to read in a voice, thanks to Jude, it's jealousy. I take a supremely happy breath. “He got booted last week.”

“The drinking?”

“Yeah.”

The woods are quiet except for our crunching footsteps and a crooning mockingbird somewhere in the trees.

“Noah?”

I suck in air. How can someone just saying your name make you feel like this? “Yeah?” There's a lot of emotion running around his face, but I don't know what kind it is. I focus on my sneakers instead.

Minute after silent minute ticks by.

“It's like this,” he says eventually. He's stopped walking and is picking bark off an oak tree's trunk. “There are all these planets that get ejected from the planetary systems that they first belonged in and they just wander on their own through deep space, going their lonely way across the universe without a sun, you know, forever . . .”

His eyes are begging me to understand something. I think about what he just said. He's talked about this before, these lonely, drifting, sunless planets. So, what? Is he saying he doesn't want to be an outsider like me? Well, fine. I turn to go.

“No.” He grabs my sleeve.
He grabbed my sleeve.

The Earth pauses on its axis.

“Oh, fuck it.” He licks his lip, looks at me desperately. “Just . . .” he says. “Just . . .”

He's stammering?

“Just what?” I ask.

“Just don't worry, okay?” The words fly out of his mouth and loop around my heart and fling it right out of my chest. I know what he's saying.

“Worry about what?” I say to mess with him.

He half smiles. “About getting hit in the head by an asteroid. It's extremely unlikely.”

“Cool,” I say. “I won't.

And so, I stop worrying.

I don't worry when a few seconds later he says with a full-on grin, “I totally saw what you were drawing back there, dude.”

I don't worry that I blow off Jude that night and every single night that follows. I don't worry when she comes home and finds Brian and the hornets on the deck, all of the hornets posing for me like some photo they saw in a magazine. I don't worry that night when she says, “So Mom wasn't enough? You have to steal all my
friends
too?”

I don't worry that those are the last words she says to me all summer.

I don't worry that I seem to become cool by association,
me!,
that I hang out at The Spot with Brian and countless surftards and asshats and hornets encased in his Realm of Calm, hardly ever feeling like a hostage, mostly knowing what to do with my hands, and no one tries to chuck me off a cliff, or calls me anything but Picasso, a nickname started by Franklyn Fry of all asshats.

I don't worry that it's not as hard as I thought to pretend to be like everyone else, to change your skin color like a toad. To wear a little flame retardant.

I don't worry that when Brian and I are alone in the woods or up on his roof or in his living room watching baseball (whatever), he puts up an electrical fence between us, and never once do I risk death by brushing against it, but when we're in public, like at The Spot, the fence vanishes, and we become clumsy magnets, bumping and knocking into each other, grazing hands, arms, legs, shoulders, tapping the other on the back, even occasionally the leg, for no good reason except that it's like swallowing lightning.

I don't worry that all through the movie about the alien invasion, our legs microscopically drift: his, right, right, right, mine, left, left, left, until halfway through, they find each other and press so hard against each other for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight delirious seconds, that I have to get up and run to the bathroom because I'm exploding. I don't worry that when I get back to my seat, it all starts again, but this time our legs find each other immediately and he grabs my hand beneath the armrest and squeezes it and we electrocute and die.

I don't worry that when all that happened, Heather was on my other side and Courtney on his.

I don't worry that Courtney still hasn't given Brian his hat back or that Heather doesn't take her ancient gray eyes off me.

I don't worry that Brian and I never kiss, not once, no matter how much mind control I exert on him, no matter how much I beg God, the trees, every molecule I come across.

And most important, I don't worry when I come home one day and find a note on the kitchen table written by Jude asking Mom to come down to the beach to see a sculpture she's building out of sand. I don't worry that I take the note and bury it at the bottom of the garbage can. I don't worry, not really, even though it makes my stomach hurt to do it, no not my stomach, it makes my soul hurt that I could do it, that I actually did it.

I should've been worrying.

I should've been worrying a lot.

• • •

B
rian's leaving tomorrow morning to go back to boarding school for the fall, and tonight I'm in the underworld looking for him. I've never been to a party before, didn't know it was like being miles and miles underground, where demons walk around with their hair on fire. I'm pretty certain no one here can see me. It must be because I'm too young or skinny or something. Courtney's parents are out of town and she decided we'd use her older sister's party as a going away bash for Brian. I don't want to be at a going away party for Brian. I want to be going away
with
Brian, like on a plane to the Serengeti to watch the blue wildebeests migrate.

I head down a smoky crowded hall, where everyone's pressed to the walls in clumps like people-sculptures. No one's face is arranged right. In the next room, it's their bodies. People are dancing, and after I make sure Brian's not here yet, I lean against the wall and take in the whole mob of sweating gleaming people with their piercings and plumage and windmilling arms as they jump and sway and spin and lift off into the air. I'm staring and staring, getting eaten by the music, getting new eyes—when I feel a hand, or maybe it's a bird talon clawing into my shoulder. I turn to see an older girl with tons of springy red hair. She's wearing a short shimmery brown dress and is way taller than me. Winding around her entire arm is an off-the-hook tattoo of a red-and-orange fire-breathing dragon. “Lost?” she asks loudly over the music, like she's talking to a five-year-old.