I’ll Give You the Sun(20)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Okay already. Shut up! It does.

Do you have to be so you all the time, Noah?

They’re the team now, not Jude and me. So too bad. Why should I share Mom?

“This afternoon, for sure,” Jude’s saying to Dad. He smiles at her like she’s a rainbow, then fee-fi-fo-fums across the room, tapping me affectionately on the head and giving me a concussion.

Outside, Prophet squawks, “Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?”

Dad mimes strangling Prophet with his bare hands, then says to me, “How about that haircut? Looking pretty pre-Raphaelite there with all those long, dark locks.” Because of Mom’s contagiousness, even Dad, for all his asshatness, knows a lot about art, enough to insult me with anyway.

“I love pre-Raphaelite paintings,” I mumble.

“Loving them and looking like a model for one are two different things, huh, chief?” Another swipe to my head, another concussion.

After he’s gone, Jude says, “I like your hair long.” And it somehow vacuums up all the ick and yuck between us, all my mean cockroachy thoughts too. In a tentatively cheerful voice, she says, “Want to play?”

I turn around, remembering again that we got made together, cell for cell. We were keeping each other company when we didn’t have any eyes or hands. Before our soul even got delivered.

She’s taking some kind of board out of the box she brought in.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?” Prophet demands again, still in a tizzy. Jude leans out the window by the bed, hollers, “Sorry, Prophet, nobody knows!” I didn’t know she talks to Prophet too. I smile.

“A Ouija Board,” she says. “Found it in Grandma’s room. She and I did it once. We can ask it stuff and it gets the answers.”

“From who?” I ask, though I think I’ve seen one before in some movie.

“You know. The spirits.” She smiles and raises her eyebrows up and down and up and down in an exaggerated way. I feel my lips curving into a grin. I so want to be on a team with Jude again! I want things to be like they used to be with us.

“Okay,” I say, “sure.”

Her face lights up. “Come on.” And it’s like the whole horrible sticky stupid conversation didn’t even happen, like we weren’t just both in bits. How can everything change so quickly?

She teaches me how to do it, how to hold the pointer just barely so the hands of the spirits can push it through my hands to the letters or to the “yes” and “no” written on the board.

“I’m going to ask a question now,” she says, closing her eyes and putting her arms out like she’s being crucified.

I start to laugh. “And I’m the weirdo? Really?”

She opens one eye. “This is how you have to do it, I swear. Grandma taught me.” She closes the eye. “Okay, spirits. This is my question for you: Does M. love me?”

“Who’s M.?” I say.

“Just someone.”

“Michael Stein?”

“Uck, no way!”

“Not Max Fracker!”

“God no!”

“Then who?”

“Noah, the spirits aren’t going to come if you keep interrupting. I’m not going to say who.”

“Fine,” I say.

She spreads her arms and asks the spirits again, then puts her hands on the pointer.

I put mine on too. It beelines to No. I’m pretty sure I pushed it there.

“You’re cheating!” she cries.

The next time I don’t cheat and it still goes to No.

Jude’s supremely perturbed. “Let’s try again.”

This time I can tell she’s moving it to Yes. “Now you’re cheating,” I say.

“Okay, once more.”

It goes to No.

“Last try,” she says.

It goes to No.

She sighs. “Okay, you ask a question.”

I close my eyes and ask silently: Will I get into CSA next year?

“Out loud,” she says, exasperated.

“Why?”

“Because the spirits can’t hear inside your head.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Now spill. And don’t forget the arms.”

“Fine.” I put my arms out like I’m on the cross and ask, “Will I get into CSA next year?”

“That’s a wasted question. Of course you’re getting in.”

“I need to know for sure.”

I make her do it over ten times. Each time it goes to No. Finally, she flips the board. “It’s just a stupid thing,” she says, but I know she doesn’t believe it. M. doesn’t love her and I’m not going to CSA.

“Let’s ask if you’re going,” I say.

“That’s dumb. No way I’m getting in. Who knows if I’m even going to apply? I want to go to Roosevelt like everyone else. They have a swim team.”

“C’mon,” I say.

It goes to Yes.

Again.

And again.

And again.

• • •

I can’t lie awake in bed for another minute, so I put on some clothes and climb onto the roof to see if the new kid’s on his. He’s not, which isn’t totally surprising since it’s not even six in the morning and barely light yet, but I kept thinking while I was tossing around in bed like a caught fish, that he was awake too, that he was up on his roof shooting electric bolts out of his fingers through the ceiling and into me and that’s why I couldn’t sleep. But I was wrong. It’s just me up here with the fading fathead moon and every screaming seagull from far and wide visiting Lost Cove for a dawn concert. I’ve never been outside this early, didn’t realize it was so loud. And so dreary, I think, taking in all the gray huddled-up old men disguised as trees.

I sit down, open my pad to a blank page and try to draw, but I can’t concentrate, can’t even make a decent line. It’s the Ouija Board. What if it’s right and Jude gets into CSA and I don’t? What if I have to go to Roosevelt with 3,000 toilet-licking Franklyn Fry clones? If I suck at painting? If Mom and Mr. Grady just feel sorry for me? Because I’m so embarrassing, as Jude says. And Dad thinks. I drop my head in my hands, feel the heat of my cheeks on my palms, reliving what happened in the woods with Fry and Zephyr last winter.

(SELF-PORTRAIT, SERIES: Broken Umbrella No. 88)

I lift my head, look over at the new kid’s roof again. What if he realizes I’m me? A cold wind blows through me like I’m an empty room and I suddenly know everything’s going to be terrible and I’m doomed; not only me, but the whole gloomy grubby gray world too.