I'll Give You the Sun (31 page)

Love, I think and think and think and think and don't say. Don't say it.

Don't say it. Don't tell him you love him.

But I do. I love him more than anything.

I close my eyes and drown in color, open them and drown in light because billions and billions of buckets of light are being emptied on our heads from above.

This is
it
. This is freaking
everything
. This is the painting painting itself.

And that's what I'm thinking when the asteroid comes crashing into us.

“No one can know,” he says. “Ever.”

I step back, look at him. In an instant, he's turned into a siren. The whole forest goes mum. It doesn't want anything to do with what he just said either.

He says more calmly, “It'd be the end. Of everything. My athletic scholarship at Forrester. I'm the assistant captain of the varsity team as a sophomore and—”

I want him to be quiet. I want him back with me. I want his face to look the way it did a minute ago when I touched his stomach, his chest, when he brushed my cheek with his hand. I lift up his shirt, slip it over his talking head, then take off my own, and step into him so we're all lined up, legs to legs, groin to groin, bare chest to bare chest. His breath hitches. We fit perfectly. I kiss him slowly and deeply until the only word he can manage is my name.

He says it again.

And again.

Until we're two lit candles melting into one.

“No one's gonna find out. Don't worry,” I whisper, not caring if everyone in the whole world knows, not caring about anything except more now him and me under the open sky as thunder cracks and the rain comes down.

• • •

I
'm propped on my bed drawing Brian, who's a few feet away at my desk watching a meteor shower on some astronomy site he's addicted to. In the drawing, the stars and planets are storming out of the computer screen and into the room. This is the first time we've seen each other since the woods except for the kabillion times I've seen him in my mind over the last few days, which included Christmas. What happened between us has colonized every last brain cell. I can barely tie my shoelaces. I forgot how to chew this morning.

I thought maybe he'd hide from me for the rest of our lives, but a few minutes after I heard his mom's car pull into the garage today, signaling their return from some Buddhist center up north, he was at my window. I've listened to an endless state of the intergalactic union and now we're fighting about whose Christmas was worse. He's acting like what happened between us didn't happen, so I am too. Well, trying to. My heart's bigger than a blue whale's, which needs its own parking spot. Not to mention my eight feet of concrete, which has kept me perpetually in the shower. I am so clean. If there's a drought, blame me.

In fact, I just happen to be thinking about the shower, him and me in it, thinking about hot water sliding down our naked bodies, thinking about pressing him against the wall, about gliding my hands all over him, thinking about the sounds he'd make, how he'd throw his head back and say
yeah
like he did in the woods, thinking all this, as I tell him in an even, controlled voice how Jude and I spent Christmas in Dad's hotel room eating takeout Chinese food and breathing gray air. It's amazing how many things you can do at once. It's amazing how what goes on in the head stays in the head.

(S
ELF-PORTRAIT
:
Do Not Disturb
)

“Give it up,” he says. “No way you can beat this. I had to go to an all-day sit with my mom and then sleep on the floor on a mat and eat gross gruel for Christmas dinner. I got a prayer from the monks as my only present. A prayer for peace! I repeat: an all-day sit,
me!
I couldn't say anything. Or do anything. For eight hours. And then gruel and a prayer!” He starts laughing and I catch it immediately. “And I had to wear a robe. A fricken dress.” He turns around, lit up like a lantern. “And what's worse is the whole time, I couldn't stop thinking about . . .”

I see him tremble. Oh God.

“It was
so
painful, dude. Luckily we had these weird pillow things on our laps so no one knew. Sucked.” He's staring at my mouth. “And didn't suck too.” He turns back to the stars.

I see him shudder again.

My hand goes limp and I drop my pencil. He can't stop thinking about it either.

He swivels around. “So, who were the ‘them' you mentioned, anyway?”

It takes me a second but then I understand. “I saw these guys making out at that party.”

His brow furrows. “The party where you hooked up with Heather?”

For months, I've been so pissed at him and Jude about something that didn't happen, it never occurred to me that he could be mad at me about what actually did. Is he still? Is that why he never called or emailed? I want to tell him what really happened. I want to say sorry. Because I am. Instead, I just say, “Yeah, that party. They were . . .”

“What?”

“I don't know, amazing or something . . .”

“Why?” His talking is turning into breathing. There's no answer. Really, they were amazing only because they were guys kissing.

I tell him, “I decided I'd give up all my fingers, if . . .”

“If what?” he presses.

I realize I can't possibly say it aloud but don't have to because he does. “If it could've been us, right? I saw them too.”

It's a thousand degrees in me.

“It'd be hard to draw with no fingers,” he says.

“I'd manage.”

I close my eyes, unable to contain the feeling inside me and when I open them a second later, it's like he's gotten hitched on a hook and I'm the hook. I follow his gaze to my bare stomach—my shirt's ridden up—then lower to where there's no hiding how I'm feeling. I think he's Tasering me or something, because I can't move.

He swallows, swivels back around to face the computer, and puts a hand on the mouse but doesn't click the screensaver away. I watch his other hand travel down.

Still looking at the screen, he asks, “Want to?” and I'm a flood in a paper cup.

“Totally,” I say, knowing without a doubt what he means, and then our hands are on our belts, unbuckling. From across the room, I watch his back, unable to see much, but then his neck arches, and I can see his face, his eyes all swimming and wild, locking with mine, and it's like we're kissing again, but from across the room this time, kissing even more intensely than in the woods, where our pants stayed on. I didn't know you could kiss with your eyes. I didn't know anything. And then the colors are forcing down the walls of the room, the walls of me—

Then, the impossible.

My mother as in
my mother
bursts in, waving a magazine. I thought I'd locked the door. I could've sworn I locked it!

“This is the best essay I've ever read on Picasso, you're going—” Her confused gaze darts from me to Brian. His hands, my hands, fumbling, shoving, zipping.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh. Oh.”

Then the door's closed and she's gone, like she was never there, like she hadn't seen a thing.

• • •

S
he doesn't pretend it didn't happen.

An hour after Brian's frantic dive-bomb out the window, there's a knock at my bedroom door. I say nothing, just flip on my desk light so she doesn't find me sitting in the dark, where I've been since he left. I grab a pencil, start to draw, but my hand won't stop shaking, so I can't make a decent line.

“Noah, I'm coming in.”

All the blood in my body mad-dashes to my face as the door slowly opens. I want to die.

“I'd like to talk to you, honey,” she says in the same voice she uses when talking to Crazy Charlie, the town loon.

Whatever. Whatever.
Whatever,
I chant in my head, drilling the pencil into the pad. I'm hunched over the paper now, hugging it practically, so I don't have to see her. Whole forests are burning out of control inside me. How come she doesn't know to leave me alone for the next fifty years after what just happened?

Her hand touches my shoulder as she passes. I cringe.

From the bed where she's sat down, she says, “Love's so complicated, Noah, isn't it?”

I go rigid. Why did she say that? Why is she using the word
love
?

I throw the pencil down.

“It's okay what you're feeling. It's
natural
.”

A giant
No
slams through me. How does she know what I'm feeling? How does she know anything about anything? She doesn't. She can't. She can't just barge into my most secret world and then try to show me around it. Get out, I want to holler at her. Get out of my room. Get out of my life. Get out of my paintings. Get out of everything! Blow back to your realm already and leave me alone. How can you take this experience away from me before I've even gotten to experience it? I want to say all these things but can't make any words. I can hardly breathe.

Brian couldn't either. He was hyperventilating after she left the room. His hands covering his face, his body all contorted, repeating, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” I was wishing he'd say something besides “Oh God!” but when he started talking, I changed my mind.

I'd never seen anyone act like that. He was sweating and pacing and his hands were in his hair like he was going to rip it all out. I thought he was going to take apart the walls, or me. I really thought he might kill me.

“So at my old school,” he said. “There was this kid on the baseball team. People thought, I don't know. They saw that he went to some website or something.” His inside face had become his outside face and it was all knotted up. “They made it impossible for him to play. Every day, they found another way to mess with him. Then one Friday after school, they locked him in the storage closet.” He winced, as if remembering and I knew. I knew then. “All night long and the whole next day. A tiny, dark, disgusting airless space. His parents thought he was at the away game and someone told the coaches he was sick, so no one even looked for him. No one knew he was trapped in there.” His chest was heaving and I was remembering how he told me he didn't used to have claustrophobia and now he did. “He was really good too, probably the best player on the team or could have been. And he didn't even
do
anything. The guy just went to these sites and someone saw. Do you get it? Do you get what it would mean for me? The assistant captain? I want to be captain next year so maybe I can graduate early. No scholarship. No
nothing
. These guys aren't”—he made finger quotes—“
evolved
. They're not from Northern California. They don't do all-day sits or draw pictures.” The dagger went straight in. “It's brutal in a locker room.”

“No one will find out,” I said.

“You don't know that. You remember that idiot cousin of Fry's I nearly decapitated last summer, the one who looks like an ape? His little brother goes to my school. I thought I was hallucinating. He looks exactly like him.” He licked his bottom lip. “Anyone could've seen us the other day, Noah. Anyone. Fry could've and then . . . I didn't even think about it I was so . . .” He shook his head. “I can't get forced off this team. Can't lose my athletic scholarship. We have no money. And this high school—the physics teacher's an astrophysicist . . . I just can't. I need to get a baseball scholarship for college. Have to.”

He came over to where I was standing. His face was crazy red and his eyes were too intense and he seemed about twelve feet tall and I didn't know if he was going to kiss me or punch me. He took me by the T-shirt again except this time he balled a piece of it up in his fist and said, “It's done with us. It has to be. Okay?”

I nodded and something really big and bright in me crushed to nothing in an instant. I'm pretty sure it was my soul.

“And it's all your fault!” I spit out at my mother.

“What is, honey?” she says, alarmed.

“Everything! Don't you see? You've crushed Dad. You banished him like a leper. He loves you! How do you think he feels all alone in that dying room breathing gray air and eating cold stale pizza and watching shows about aardvarks while you cook feasts and wear circus clothes and hum all the time and have the sun follow you around in the pouring rain? How do you think that makes him feel?” I can see I've hurt her and don't care. She deserves it. “Who knows if he even has a soul left thanks to you?”

“What do you mean by that? I don't understand.”

“Maybe you stomped it to nothing and now he's hollow and empty, a shell with no turtle inside.”

Mom pauses. “Why would you say that? Do you feel that way sometimes?”

“I'm not talking about me. And you know what else? You're not special. You're just like everyone else. You don't float or walk through walls and you never will!”

“Noah?”

“I always thought that you blew in from somewhere so cool, but you're just regular. And you don't make anyone happy anymore like you used to. You make everyone miserable.”

“Noah, are you done?”

“Mom.” I say it like bugs live in the word. “I am.”

“Listen to me.” The sudden sternness of her voice jars me. “I didn't come in here to talk about me or about me and Dad. We can have those conversations, I promise, but not now.”

If I don't look at her, she'll drop it, she'll disappear, and what she saw Brian and me doing will disappear with her. “You didn't see anything,” I yell, completely out of control now. “Guys do that. They do. Whole baseball teams do it. Circle jerks, that's what it's called, you know?” I drop my head in my hands, filling them with tears.

She gets up, walks over to me, puts her hand under my chin, and lifts my face so I'm forced into the earnest hold of her eyes. “Listen to me. It takes a lot of courage to be true to yourself, true to your heart. You always have been very brave that way and I pray you always will be. It's your responsibility, Noah. Remember that.”