I’ll Give You the Sun(14)
Author: Jandy Nelson

And then what always happens: He slows down. I can’t explain it, but it takes my brother forever to hit the surface of the water. I blink a few times at him suspended there midair as if on a tight rope. I’ve come to think either he has a way with gravity or I’m seriously missing more than a few buttons. I did read once that anxiety can significantly alter space-time perception.

Usually Noah faces the horizon not the shore when he jumps, so I’ve never before had a full frontal, tip-to-toe view of my brother dropping through space. His neck’s arched, his chest’s thrust forward, and I can tell, even from this distance, that his face is blown open, like it used to be, and now his arms are reaching upward like he’s trying to hold up the whole sorry sky with his fingertips.

“Look at that,” Grandma says, her voice tinged with wonder. “There he is. Our boy has returned. He’s in the sky.”

“He’s like one of his drawings,” I whisper.

Is this why he keeps jumping, then? To become for the briefest moment who he used to be? Because the worst thing that could ever happen to Noah has happened. He’s become normal. He has the proper amount of buttons.

Except for this. This fixation with jumping Devil’s Drop.

At last, Noah hits the water without a splash as if he’s gathered no momentum on his way down, as if he’s been placed gently on the surface by a kindly giant. And then he’s under. I tell him: Come in, but our twin-telepathy is long gone. When Mom died, he hung up on me. And now, because of all that’s happened, we avoid each other—worse, repel each other.

I see his arms flail once. Is he struggling? The water must be freezing. He’s not wearing the trunks I sewed protective herbs into either. Okay, he’s swimming hard now, through the chaos of currents that surround the cliffs . . . and then, he’s out of danger. I exhale loudly, not realizing until I do that I’d been holding my breath.

I watch him scramble up the beach, then the bluff, with his head down, shoulders hunched, thinking about Clark Gable knows what. No traces of what I just saw in his face, in his very being, remain. His soul has crawled back into its trench.

This is what I want: I want to grab my brother’s hand and run back through time, losing years like coats falling from our shoulders.

Things don’t really turn out like you think.

To reverse destiny, stand in a field with a knife pointed in the direction of the wind

THE INVISIBLE MUSEUM

Noah

131/2 years old

The Neighborhood Terror Threat Level drops as I pan with Dad’s binoculars from the forest and street on the front side of our house to the bluff and ocean in the back. I’m on the roof, the best surveillance spot, and Fry and Zephyr are paddling through the break on their surfboards. I can tell it’s them because of the sign flashing over their heads that reads: Itchy Blistering Brain-Boiled Sociopathic Onion-Eyed Asshats. Good. I have to be down the hill at CSA in an hour and now I can take the streets, for once, instead of tearing through the woods, trying to give Fry the slip. Zephyr, for some reason (Into Jude? The concrete dork?), leaves me alone now, but everywhere I go, there’s Fry, like some mad dog on meat. Throwing me over Devil’s Drop is his obsession this summer.

I mentally send a school of famished great white sharks their way, then find Jude on the beach and zoom in. She’s surrounded by the same bunch of girls she’s been hanging around with all spring and so far this summer instead of me. Pretty hornet-girls in bright bikinis with suntans that glimmer for miles. I know all about hornets: If one sends out a distress signal, it can trigger a whole nest attack. This can be deadly to people like me.

Mom says Jude acts the way she does now on account of hormones, but I know it’s on account of her hating me. She stopped going to museums with us ages ago, which is probably a good thing, because when she did, her shadow kept trying to strangle mine. I’d see it happening on the walls or on the floor. Sometimes lately, I catch her shadow creeping around my bed at night trying to pull the dreams out of my head. I have a good idea what she does instead of coming to the museum, though. Three times now, I’ve seen hickeys on her neck. Bug bites, she said. Sure. I heard while spying that she and Courtney Barrett have been riding bikes down to the boardwalk on weekends, where they see who can kiss more boys.

(PORTRAIT: Jude Braiding Boy After Boy into Her Hair)

Truth is: Jude doesn’t have to send her shadow after me. It’s not like she can’t take Mom down to the beach and show her one of her flying sand women before the tide wipes it out. It would change everything. Not that I want that.

Not one bit.

The other day, I was watching her make one from the bluff. She was at her place, three coves away. This time it was a big round woman, done bas relief, like always, except she was halfway turned into a bird—so incredible it made my head vibrate. I snapped a picture with Dad’s camera, but then something really horrible and maggoty came over me and as soon as Jude had walked off and was out of sight and earshot, I slid down the whole cliff, raced through the sand, and, roaring like a howler monkey—its roar is epic—knocked into the awesome bird-woman with my whole body, toppling and kicking it to nothing. I couldn’t even wait for the tide to take it out this time. I got sand everywhere, in my eyes and ears and down my throat. I kept finding it on me days after, in my bed, in my clothes, under my nails. But I had to do it. It was too good.

What if Mom had gone for a walk and seen it?

Because what if it’s Jude who has it? Why wouldn’t that be the case? She surfs waves as big as houses and jumps off anything. She has skin that fits and friends and Dad and The Sweetwine Gift and gills and fins in addition to lungs and feet.

She gives off light. I give off dark.

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Twins: The Flashlight and the Flashdark)

Oh, my body’s tightening into a wrung towel from thinking like this.

And all the color’s spiraling off everything.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Gray Noah Eating Gray Apples on Gray Grass)

I pan back up the now colorless hill to the now colorless moving van parked in front of the now colorless house two doors down—

“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?” Prophet the parrot next door cries.

“Don’t know, buddy. Nobody seems to know,” I say under my breath, while I focus on the movers, the same two guys as yesterday—not colorless, oh man, so not colorless—horses, both of them, I already decided, one chestnut, one palomino. They’re hulking a black piano into the house. I zoom in until I can see the sweat on their flushed foreheads, dripping down their necks, leaving wet transparent patches on their white shirts, which stick to them like skin . . . These binoculars are so awesome. A tan swath of the chestnut guy’s smooth stomach slides out each time he raises his arms. He’s more ripped than David even. I sit down, rest my elbows on my bent knees, and watch and watch, the swimming, thirsty feeling taking me over. Now they’re lifting a couch up the front stairs—