I’ll Give You the Sun(18)
Author: Jandy Nelson

He points to my pad. “So I guess you just talk in there, is that it?”

“Pretty much,” I say. We’re under a streetlamp and I’m trying not to stare but it’s hard. I wish the world would stick like a clock so I could look at him for as long as I want. There’s something going on in his face right now, something very bright trying to get out—a dam keeping back a wall of light. His soul might be a sun. I’ve never met anyone who had the sun for a soul.

I want to say more so he doesn’t leave. I feel so good, the freaking green leafy kind of good. “I paint in my head,” I tell him. “I was the whole time.” I’ve never told anyone I do this, not even Jude, and I have no idea why I’m telling him. I’ve never let anyone into the invisible museum before.

“What were you painting?”

“You.”

The surprise opens his eyes wide. I shouldn’t have said it. I didn’t mean to, it just popped out. The air feels all crackly now and his smile’s vanished. Just yards away, my house is a lighthouse. Before I even realize, I’m darting across the street, a queasy feeling in my stomach like I ruined everything—that last brushstroke that always destroys the painting. He’ll probably try to throw me off Devil’s Drop tomorrow with Fry. He’ll probably take those rocks and—

As I reach the front step, I hear, “How’d I come out?” Curiosity in his voice, not a smidge of asshat.

I turn around. He’s moved out of the light. I can only see a shadowy shape in the road. This is how he came out: He floated into the air high above the sleeping forest, his green hat spinning a few feet above his head. In his hand was the open suitcase and out of it spilled a whole sky of stars.

I can’t tell him, though—how could I?—so I turn back around, jump the steps, open the door, and go inside without looking back.

• • •

The next morning, Jude calls my name from the hallway, meaning she’s a moment away from barging into my room. I flip the page of my sketchpad, not wanting her to see what I’ve been working on: the third version of the copper-eyed, rock-collecting, star-gazing, out-of-control-laughing new kid floating in the sky with his green hat and suitcase full of stars. I finally got the color so perfect, the squint just right, that looking at his eyes in the picture gives me the same hijacked feeling the real ones did. I got so excited when I nailed it I had to walk around my chair about fifty times before I could calm down.

I pick up a pastel and pretend to work on a portrait of the naked English guy that I finished last night. I did it cubist so his face looks even more like it’s in a smashed mirror. Jude teeters in wearing high heels and a tiny blue dress. Mom and she can’t stop fighting about what she wants to wear now, which is not much. Her hair’s snaky and swinging. When it’s wet like this, it usually takes the fluff and fairy tale off her, making her seem more ordinary, more like the rest of us, but not today. She has makeup all over her face. They fight about this too. And about her breaking curfew, talking back, slamming doors, texting boys not from school, surfing with the older surftards, jumping off Dead Man’s Dive—the highest, scariest jump on the hill—wanting to sleep at one of the hornet’s houses practically every night, spending her allowance on some lipstick called Boiling Point, sneaking out her bedroom window. Basically, everything. No one asks me, but I think she’s become BeelzeJude and wants every guy in Lost Cove to kiss her now because Mom forgot to look at her sketchbook that first day at the museum.

And because we left her. It was the Jackson Pollock exhibit. Mom and I had spent forever in front of the painting One: Number 31—because holy shit!—and when we walked out of the museum, Pollock’s bright spidery paint was still all over us, all over the people on the sidewalk, all over the buildings, all over our endless conversation in the car about his technique, and we didn’t realize Jude wasn’t with us until we were halfway over the bridge.

Mom said, “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod,” the whole speeding way back. All my organs were out of my body. When we screeched up to the museum, Jude was sitting on the sidewalk, her head tucked into her knees. She looked like a crumpled-up piece of paper.

Truth is: I think Mom and I had gotten used to not noticing her when the three of us were together.

She’s carrying a box, which she puts on the bed, then comes up behind me, where I’m sitting at my desk and peers over my shoulder. A damp rope of hair lands on my neck. I flick it off.

The naked English guy’s face stares up at us from the pad. I wanted to catch the unglued schizo way he looked before he got run over by misery, so I went way more abstract than usual. He probably wouldn’t recognize himself, but it came out all right.

“Who’s that?” she asks.

“No one.”

“Really, who is he?” she insists.

“Just someone I made up,” I say, pushing another wet squirrel tail of her hair off my neck.

“Nah-uh. He’s real. I can tell you’re lying.”

“I’m not, Jude. Swear.” I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want her to get any ideas. What if she starts sneaking down to stealth-take classes at CSA too?

She comes around to my side and leans in to better study the drawing.

“I wish he were real,” she says. “He’s so cool-looking. He’s so . . . I don’t know . . . There’s something . . .” This is weird. She never responds like this when she sees my stuff anymore. She usually looks like she has a turd in her mouth. She folds her arms across her chest, which is so full of boobs now, it’s like the clash of the titans. “Can I have it?”

This shocks me. She’s never asked for a drawing before. I’m horrible at giving them away. “For the sun, stars, oceans, and all the trees, I’ll consider it,” I say, knowing she’ll never agree. She knows how badly I want the sun and trees. We’ve been dividing up the world since we were five. I’m kicking butt at the moment—universe domination is within my grasp for the first time.

“Are you kidding?” she says, standing up straight. It annoys me how tall she’s getting. It’s like she’s being stretched at night. “That leaves me just the flowers, Noah.”

Fine, I think. She’ll never do it. It’s settled, but it isn’t. She reaches over and props up the pad, gazing at the portrait like she’s expecting the English guy to speak to her.