I'll Give You the Sun (27 page)

“CJ?” Oscar exclaims. There's lipstick all over the bottom of his face. Again. “What're you doing up here? In there?” Definitely a valid question. Unfortunately, I've lost the capacity for speech. And, I believe, for movement as well. I feel pinned to this awful moment like a dead insect. His eyes have landed on my chest. I realize I'm hugging the photograph of the kiss to me. “You saw,” he says.

“Nobody at all, huh?” the girl named Brooke says, picking up her bag from the floor and slinging it over her shoulder in preparation, it seems, for a quick, angry exit.

“Wait,” he says to her, but then his eyes dart back to me. “G.'s note?” he says, something dawning in his face. “You put it in my jacket?”

It hadn't occurred to me he'd recognize Guillermo's handwriting, but of course.

“What note?” I squeak out. Then I tell the girl, “I'm sorry. Really. I was just, oh I don't know what I was doing in there, but there's nothing between us. Nothing at all.” I find my legs are working enough to get me down the stairs.

I'm halfway across the mailroom when I hear Oscar from the stairs. “Check the other pockets.” I don't turn around, just push down the hallway, through the door, then down the path, landing on the sidewalk, panting, sick to my stomach. I forge up the street on legs so weak and wobbly I can't believe they're carrying me. Then when I'm about a block away, throwing all dignity to the wind, I start checking the pockets of the jacket, finding nothing but a film canister, candy wrappers, a pen. Unless . . . I run my hands over the inside lining and there's a zipper. I unzip it, reach in and pull out a piece of paper, carefully folded up. It looks like it's been there a while. I open it. It's a color copy of one of the photos of me in the church. The one with the law-breaking grin. He keeps me with him?

But wait. How can it matter? It can't. It can't matter if he chose to be with someone else anyway, to be with her right after writing those amazing notes to me, right after what happened between us on the floor of the jail cell room—not that I know what happened, but something did, something real, the laughing as well as the very intense rest of it when I had this sense there might be a key somewhere somehow that could set us both free. I really did.

And then:
Nobody at all
. And:
Come here, sit on my lap
.

I imagine him inhaling Brooke, inhaling girl after girl, like Guillermo said, like he's done to me, so now he can exhale and blow me to smithereens.

I am so stupid.

They do make love stories for girls with black hearts after all. They go like this.

I'm not even a block away—the picture balled up in my hand—when I hear someone behind me. I turn around, certain that it's Oscar, hating the fountaining of hope in my chest, only to find Noah: wild-eyed, unhinged, no padlocks anywhere on him, looking petrified, looking like he has something to tell me.

THE INVISIBLE MUSEUM

Noah

Ages 13
¹
/
₂
–14

The day after Brian leaves for
boarding school, I sneak into Jude's room while she's in the shower and see a chat on the computer.

Spaceboy:
Thinking about you

Rapunzel:
Me too

Spaceboy:
Come here right this minute

Rapunzel:
Haven't perfected my teleporting

Spaceboy:
I'll get on it

I blow up the entire country. No one freaking notices.

They're in love. Like black vultures. And termites. Yes, turtle doves and swans aren't the only animals that mate for life. Ugly, toilet-licking termites and death-eating vultures do too.

How could she do this? How could he?

It's like having explosives on board 24/7, the way I feel. I can't believe when I touch things they don't blow to bits. I can't believe I was so way off.

I thought, I don't know, I thought wrong.

So wrong.

I do what I can. I turn each of Jude's doodles I find around the house into a murder scene. I use the most hideous deaths from her stupid How Would You Rather Die? game. A girl being shoved out a window, knifed, drowned, buried alive, strangled by her own hands. I spare no detail.

I also put slugs in her socks.

Dip her toothbrush in the toilet bowl. Every morning.

Pour white vinegar into the glass of water by her bed.

But the worst part is that for the few minutes every hour when I'm not psychopathic, I know that to be with Brian:
I would give all ten fingers
.
I would give anything.

(S
ELF-PORT
RAIT:
Boy Rowing Madly Back Through Time
)

A week passes. Two. The house gets so big it takes hours for me to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen and back, so big that even with binoculars, I can't make out Jude across a table or room. I don't think our paths will ever cross again. When she tries to talk to me over the miles and miles of betrayal between us, I put in ear buds like I'm listening to music, when really, the other end is attached to my hand in my pocket.

I never want to speak to her again and make this very clear. Her voice is static. She is static.

I keep thinking Mom will realize that we're at war and act like the United Nations as she's done in the past, but she doesn't.

(P
ORTRAIT:
Disappearing Mother
)

Then one morning, I hear voices in the hallway: Dad talking to a girl who isn't Jude, who I quickly realize is
Heather
. I've barely given a speck of brain space to her, even after what happened between us in the closet. That horrible lie of a kiss.
I'm sorry, Heather
, I say in my head as I pad silently over to the window,
sorry, so sorry,
as I lift it as quietly as possible. I climb out, falling to safety below the sill as I hear the knock on the door and Dad saying my name. It's all I can think to do.

Halfway down the hill, a car peels by me and I want to stick out my thumb. Because I should hitchhike to Mexico or Rio like a real artist. Or to Connecticut. Yes. Just show up where Brian is in that dorm—
in
a shower full of wet naked guys
. The thought comes out of nowhere and all the explosives on board detonate at once. It's worse than thinking about him and Jude in the closet. And better. And much worse.

When I emerge out of the nuclear mushroom of this thinking, burnt to a crisp, I'm at CSA. My feet somehow got here on their own. Summer classes have been over for more than two weeks and lots of the students who board are returning. They look like highly functioning graffiti. I watch them lug suitcases and portfolios and boxes out of car trunks, hug parents who are peering at each other with eyes that say,
Maybe this wasn't such a good idea
. I vacuum it all in. The girls with blue green red purple hair shrieking into each other's arms. A couple of tall weedy guys leaning against a wall smoking and laughing and radiating cool. A ragtag group with dreads who look like they just tumbled out of a dryer. A guy walking past me with a mustache on one side of his face and a beard on the other.
So
awesome. They not only make art, they
are
art.

I remember then the conversation I had with the naked English guy at the party and decide to take my burnt remains on a recon mission to the inland flats of Lost Cove, where he said that barking mad sculptor had a studio.

Before too long, a few seconds later maybe—because trying not to think about Brian turns me into a superhuman speed-walker—I'm standing in front of 225 Day Street. It's a big warehouse and the door's half-open, but there's no way I can walk on in, can I? No. I don't even have my sketchpad. I want to, though, want to do something, have to do something.
Like kiss Brian.
The idea snags me and then I can't get out of it. I totally should've tried. But what if he'd punched me? Cracked my head open with a meteorite? Oh, but what if he hadn't? What if he'd kissed me back? Because I'd catch him staring at me sometimes when he didn't think I was paying attention to him. I was always paying attention to him.

I blew it. I did. I should've kissed him. One kiss, then I could die. Well, wait, no freaking way, if I'm going to die, I want to do more than kiss. Way way more. I'm sweating. And hard. I sit on the sidewalk, try to breathe, just breathe.

I pick up a stone and toss it into the street, trying to mimic his bionic wrist movement and after three pathetic tries, my whole thinking flips over. There was an electric fence between us. He put it up. Kept it up. He wanted Courtney. And he wanted
Jude
from the first moment he saw her
.
I just didn't want to believe it. He's a popular douchebag jock who likes girls. He's the red giant. I'm the yellow dwarf. The end.

(S
ELF-PORTRAIT:
Everyone Lives Happily Ever After Except for the Yellow Dwarf
)

I shake it off, all of it. All that matters is the worlds I can make, not this toilet-licking one I have to live in. In the worlds I make, anything can happen.
Anything.
And if—when—I get into CSA I'll learn how to make it all come out half as decent on paper as it is in my head.

I stand, suddenly realizing I could totally climb the fire escape that scales the side of the warehouse. It leads to a landing where there's a bank of windows, which must look down on something. All I'd have to do is hop the outside fence without anyone seeing me. Well, why not? Jude and I used to sneak over tons of fences so we could visit various horses or cows or goats or a certain madrone tree we both married when we were five (Jude was also the minister).

I glance up and down the quiet street. See in the distance the back of an old-looking woman in a bright-colored dress . . . who actually may be floating. I blink—she's still floating and it looks like she's barefoot for some reason. She's entering a small church. Whatever. Once she's inside, I cross to the other side of the street, then easily and quickly monkey up and over the fence. I bolt down the alley, climb carefully up the stairs of the escape, trying not to creak the old metal, grateful there's some kind of construction going on nearby to cover up any sound I may be making. I scoot across the landing and peer around the side of the building, realizing the ear-splitting sound I'm hearing is not coming from a construction site, but the courtyard below, where I believe the apocalypse has just occurred, because whoa: It's the scene after the aliens have launched a chemical attack on Earth. All over the yard, there are rescue workers in hazmat suits and face masks and goggles, wielding power drills and circular saws, emerging from and disappearing into white billowing clouds as they attack hunks of rock. This is a stone studio? These are stone sculptors? What would Michelangelo think? I watch and watch and when the dust settles, I see that three massive pairs of eyes are boring into me.

My breath catches. From across the yard, three enormous stone men-monsters are staring at me.

And they're
breathing
. I swear it.

My ex-sister Jude would freak. Mom too.

I need to get closer to them, I'm thinking, when a tall, dark-haired man walks out of the building through an entire wall that's pulled halfway up like a garage door. He's talking with some kind of accent into a phone. I watch him throw his head back in supreme happiness, like he's hearing that he gets to choose the colors for all the sunsets from now on or that Brian's waiting for him in his bedroom naked. He's practically dancing around with the phone now, then he laughs a laugh so happy it blasts about a billion balloons into the air. This must be the barking mad artist and the scary-ass granite men-monsters across from me must be his barking mad art.

“Hurry,” he says, his voice as big as he is. “Hurry, my love.” Then he kisses two of his own fingers and touches the phone, before slipping it in his pocket. Total whale dork move, right? But not when he did it, trust me. Now he has his back to the courtyard and is facing a pillar, his forehead touching it. He's smiling at the concrete like a total whack job, but I'm the only one who knows, due to my stellar vantage point. He looks like he would give all ten fingers too. After a few minutes, he pivots out of his delirium and I get the first clear shot of his face. His nose is like a capsized ship, his mouth the size of three, his jaw and cheekbones hefty as armor, and his eyes are iridescent. His face is a room overstuffed with massive furniture. I want to draw it immediately. I watch as he surveys the apocalyptic scene before him, then raises his arms like a conductor and in an instant every power tool goes silent.

As do the birds, the passing cars. In fact, I can't hear a rustle of wind, the buzz of a fly, a word of conversation. I can't hear
anything
. It's like someone pressed mute on the whole world because this man is about to speak.

Is he God?

“I talk very much about bravery,” he says. “I say to you carving is not for cowards. Cowards stick to clay, yes?”

All the rescue workers laugh.

He pauses, swipes a matchstick on a column. It bursts into flame. “I tell you, you must take risks in my studio.” He finds a cigarette behind his ear and lights it. “I tell you not to be timid. I tell you to make the choices, make the mistakes, big, terrible, reckless mistakes, really screw it all up. I tell you it is the only way.”

An affirmative murmur.

“I say this, yes, but I still see so many of you afraid to cut in.” He begins to pace, slowly like a wolf, which is definitely his mirror animal. “I see what you are doing. When you leave yesterday, I go from work to work. You feel like Rambo maybe with the drills, the saws. You make lots of noise, lots of dust, but very few of you have found even this much”—he pinches two fingers together—“of your sculptures. Today this changes.”

He walks over to a short blond-haired girl. “May I, Melinda?”

“Please,” she says. I can see how much she's blushing even from up here. She's totally in love with him. I look at the faces of the others who have gathered around them and realize they all are, male and female both.

(P
ORT
RAIT,
L
ANDSCAPE:
A Man on a Geographic Scale
)

He takes a long drag on the cigarette, then tosses it barely smoked onto the ground and steps on it. He smiles at Melinda. “We find your woman, yes?”

He studies the clay model beside the large rock, then closes his eyes and combs the surface with his fingers. He does the same with the hunk of stone next to it, examining it with his hands while his eyes are closed. “Okay,” he says, taking a power drill off the table. I can feel the excitement of the students, as he, without any hesitation, plows straight into the rock. Before long, a dust cloud forms and I can't see any more. I need to get closer. I mean really close. I think I need to live on this man's shoulder like a parrot.

When the noise stops and the dust clears, all the students start clapping. There in the rock is the curved back of a woman identical to the one on the clay model. It's unbelievable.

“Please,” he says. “Back to your own work.” He hands Melinda the drill. “You will find the rest of her now.”

He goes from student to student, sometimes not saying a thing, sometimes exploding into praise. “Yes!” he cries to one of them. “You did it. Look at that breast. The most beautiful breast I ever see!” The kid cracks up and the artist cuffs him on the head like a proud father might. It makes something pull in my chest.

To another student, he says, “Very good. Now it's time to forget everything I just say. Now you go slow. So, so slow. You caress the stone. You make love to it but gently, gently, gently, understand? Use the chisels, nothing else. One wrong move and you ruin everything. No pressure.” Same head cuff for him.

When he seems to determine that no one needs him, he goes back inside. I follow him, walking to the other side of the landing where the windows are, standing to the side so I can see in without being seen. Inside, there are more rock giants. And on the far side of the studio, three naked women, with thin red scarves veiling their bodies, are modeling on a platform surrounded by a group of students sketching.

No naked English guy.

I watch the artist as he goes from student to student, standing behind each one and peering down at their work with a cold hard stare. I tense up as if he's looking at my sketches. He's not pleased. All at once, he claps his hands and everyone stops drawing. Through the window I hear muffled words as he becomes increasingly animated and his hands begin to glide around like Malaysian flying frogs. I want to know what he's telling them. I
need
to know.

Finally, they resume drawing. He grabs a pencil and pad off a table and joins them, saying the following so loudly and with so much rocket fuel in his voice I hear it through the window, “Sketch like it matters, people. No time to waste, nothing to lose. We are remaking the world, nothing less, understand?”