I’ll Give You the Sun(19)
Author: Jandy Nelson

“Okay,” she says. “Trees, stars, oceans. Fine.”

“And the sun, Jude.”

“Oh, all right,” she says, totally surprising me. “I’ll give you the sun.”

“I practically have everything now!” I say. “You’re crazy!”

“But I have him.” She carefully rips the naked English guy out of my sketchbook, thankfully not noticing the drawing beneath it, and carries him with her over to the bed and sits down.

She says, “Have you seen the new kid? He’s such a freak.” I look down at my sketchpad, where the freak is exploding into the room in a burst of color. “He wears this green hat with a feather in it. So lame.” She laughs in her new awful buzzy way. “Yeah. He’s weirder than you even.” She pauses. I wait, hoping she’ll turn back into my sister, the way she used to be, not this new hornet version. “Well, probably not weirder than you.” I turn around. The antennae are waving back and forth on her forehead. She’s here to sting me to death. “No one’s weirder than you.”

I saw this show about these Malaysian ants that internally combust under threat. They wait until their enemies (like hornets) are close enough, then detonate themselves into a poison bomb.

“I don’t know, Noah. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.”

She’s on a roll. I begin countdown to detonation. Ten, nine, eight, seven—

“Do you have to be so, buzz, buzz, buzz, so you, all the time. It’s . . .” She doesn’t finish.

“It’s what?” I ask, breaking my pastel in two, snapping it, like a neck.

She throws her hands up. “It’s embarrassing, okay?”

“At least I’m still me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Then more defensively, she says, “There’s nothing wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with having other friends. Friends who aren’t you.”

“I have other friends too,” I say, glancing down at the sketchpad.

“Oh yeah, who? Who’s your friend? Imaginary ones don’t count. Neither do the ones you draw.”

Six, five, four—what I don’t know is if the Malaysian ants kill themselves in the process of annihilating their enemies.

“Well, the new kid for one,” I tell her. I reach into my pocket and wrap my fingers around the rock he gave me. “And he’s not weird.” Though he is! He has a suitcase of rocks!

“He’s your friend? Sure he is,” she says. “What’s his name, if you’re such good friends?”

Well, this is a problem.

“That’s what I thought,” she snips. I can’t stand her. I’m allergic to her. I look at the Chagall print on the wall in front of me and try to dive into the swirly dream of it. Real life blows. I’m allergic to it too. Laughing with the new kid didn’t feel like real life. Not one bit. Being with Jude didn’t used to feel like real life either. Now it feels like the very worst strangling, toilet-licking kind. When Jude speaks again a moment later, her voice is sharp and tight. “And what’d you expect? I had to make other friends. All you do is hole up making your lame drawings and obsessing about that stupid school with Mom.”

Lame drawings?

Here I go. Three, two, one: I detonate with the only thing I have. “You’re just jealous, Jude,” I say. “All the time now, you’re so jealous.”

I flip the pad to a blank page, pick up a pencil to start on (PORTRAIT: My Hornet Sister), no: (PORTRAIT: My Spider Sister), that’s better, full of poison and skittering around in the dark on her eight hairy legs.

When the silence between us has just about broken my ears, I turn around to look at her. Her big blue eyes are shining on me. All the hornet’s buzzed out of her. And there’s no spider to her at all.

I put the pencil down.

So quietly I can barely make out the words, she says, “She’s my mom too. Why can’t you share?”

The kick of guilt goes straight to my gut. I turn back to the Chagall, begging it to suck me in, please, just as Dad fills up the doorway. He has a towel around his neck, his suntanned chest is bare. His hair’s wet too—he and Jude must’ve swum together. They do everything together now.

He tilts his head in a questioning way, like he can see the body parts and bug guts all around the room. “Everything okay in here, guys?”

We both nod. Dad puts one hand on either side of the frame, filling the entire doorway, filling the Continental United States. How can I hate him and wish I were more like him at the same time?

I didn’t always want a building to land on him, though. When we were little, Jude and I used to sit on the beach like two ducklings, his ducklings, waiting and waiting for him to finish his swim, to rise out of the white spray like Poseidon. He’d stand in front of us, so colossal he eclipsed the sun, shaking his head so droplets would shower down on us like salty rain. He’d reach for me first, sit me up on one shoulder, then heave-ho Jude onto the other. He’d walk us up the bluff like that, making every other kid on the beach with their flimsy fathers out of their minds with jealousy.

But that was before he realized I was me. This happened the day he did a U-ey on the beach and instead of heading up the bluff, he took the two of us, perched there on his shoulders, back into the ocean. The water was rough and white-capped and waves were hitting us from all sides as we walked deeper and deeper in. I held on to his arm, which was belted securely around me, feeling safe because Dad was in charge and it was his hand that pulled the sun up each morning and down at night.

He told us to jump.

I thought I heard wrong until with an excited yelp, Jude flew off the shelf of his shoulder into the air, smiling crazily all the way down until the ocean swallowed her, still smiling like that when she broke through the surface of the water, where she bobbed like a happy apple, treading her legs, remembering everything we’d learned in our swimming class, while I, feeling Dad’s arm unfastening around me, grabbed at his head, his hair, his ear, the slippery slope of his back, but was unable to get a grip anywhere on him.

“It’s a sink-or-swim world, Noah,” he said very seriously, and then the secure belt of his arm became a sling that flung me into the water.

I sank.

All.

The.

Way.

Down.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Noah and the Sea Cucumbers)

The first Broken Umbrella Talk happened that night. You need to be brave even when you’re afraid, that’s what it means to be a man. More talks followed: You need to act tough, sit up, stand straight, fight hard, play ball, look me in the eye, think before you speak. If it weren’t for Jude being your twin, I’d think you came about by partheno-whatever. If it weren’t for Jude, you’d be mincemeat on that soccer field. If it weren’t for Jude. If it weren’t for Jude. Doesn’t it bother you to have a girl fight your battles for you? Doesn’t it bother you to be picked last for every team? Doesn’t it bother you to be alone all the time? Doesn’t it bother you, Noah? Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?