I’ll Give You the Sun(21)
Author: Jandy Nelson

I lie down on my back, stretch out my arms as wide as I can, and whisper, “Help.”

Some time later, I wake to the sound of a garage opening. I get up on my elbows. The sky’s gone blue: azure, the ocean bluer: cerulean, the trees are swirls of every hella freaking green on earth and bright thick eggy yellow is spilling over everything. Awesome. Doomsday’s most definitely been cancelled.

(LANDSCAPE: When God Paints Outside the Lines)

I sit up, noticing then which garage it was that opened—his.

Several seconds that feel like several years later, he cruises down the driveway. Across his chest is a duffel-like black sack. The meteorite bag? He has a bag for meteorites. He carries pieces of the galaxy around in a bag. Oh man. I try to prick the balloon that’s lifting me into the air by telling myself I shouldn’t be this excited to see a guy I only met a day ago. Even if that guy carries the galaxy around in a bag!

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Last Sighting of Boy and Balloon Blowing West Over Pacific)

He crosses the street to the trailhead, then stops where we had our laughing fit, hesitating for a moment there before he turns around and looks right at me, like he’s known I’ve been here all along, like he knows I’ve been waiting for him since dawn. Our eyes lock and electricity rides up my spine. I’m pretty sure he’s telepathically telling me to follow him. After a minute of the kind of mind-meld I’ve only ever had with Jude, he turns and heads into the grove.

I’d like to follow him. A lot, very much, so much, except I can’t, because my feet are cemented to the roof. But why? What’s the big deal? He followed me all the way to CSA yesterday! People make friends. Everyone does it. I can too. I mean, we already are—we laughed together like hyenas. Okay. I’m going. I slide my sketchpad into my backpack, climb down the ladder, and take off for the trailhead.

He’s nowhere on the trail. I listen for footsteps, hear nothing but my pulse hammering in my ears. I continue down the path, clearing the first bend to find him on his knees, hunched over the ground. He’s examining something in his hand with a magnifying glass. What a toilet-licking idea this is. I won’t know what to say to him. I won’t know what to do with my hands. I need to get home. Immediately. I’m edging backward when he turns his head and looks up at me.

“Oh, hey,” he says casually, standing and dropping whatever was in his hand to the ground. Most of the time people look less like you remember when you see them again. Not him. He’s shimmering in the air exactly like he’s been in my mind. He’s a light show. He starts walking toward me. “I don’t know the woods. Was hoping . . .” He doesn’t finish, half smiles. This guy is just not an asshat. “What’s your name, anyway?” He’s close enough to touch, close enough to count his freckles. I’m having a hand problem. How come everyone else seems to know what to do with them? Pockets, I remember with relief, pockets, I love pockets! I slip the hands to safety, avoiding his eyes. There’s that thing about them. I’ll look at his mouth if I have to look somewhere.

His eyes are lingering on me. I can tell this even with my undivided attention on his mouth. Did he ask me something? I think he did. The IQ’s plummeting.

“Suppose I could guess,” he says. “I’ll go for Van, no got it, Miles, yeah, you totally look like a Miles.”

“Noah,” I blurt, sounding like the knowledge just flew into my head. “I’m Noah. Noah Sweetwine.” God. Lord. Dorkhead.

“Sure?”

“Yup, definitely,” I say, sounding chirpy and weird. My hands are totally and completely trapped now. Pockets are hand jails. I free them, only to clap them together like they’re cymbals. Jesus. “Oh, what’s yours?” I ask his mouth, remembering, despite the fact that my IQ is approaching the vegetal range, that he too must have a name.

“Brian,” he says, and that’s all he says because he functions.

Looking at his mouth is a bad idea too, especially when he speaks. Again and again his tongue returns to that space between his front teeth. I’ll look at this tree instead.

“How old are you?” I ask the tree.

“Fourteen. You?”

“Same,” I say. Uh-oh.

He nods, believing me, of course, because why would I lie? I have no idea!

“I go to boarding school back east,” he says. “I’ll be a sophomore next year.” He must see the confused look I’m giving the tree, because he adds, “Skipped kindergarten.”

“I go to California School of the Arts.” The words blasting out of my mouth without my consent.

I sneak a look at him. His brow’s creasing up and then I remember: It says California School of the Arts on practically every freaking wall of that freaking place. He saw me outside the building, not in it. He probably heard me tell the naked English guy I don’t go there.

I have two choices: Run home and then don’t come out of the house for the next two months until he leaves for boarding school, or—

“I don’t really go there,” I spill to the tree, really afraid to look at him now. “Not yet, anyway. I just want to. Like badly. It’s all I think about, and I’m thirteen still. Almost fourteen. Well, in five months. November twenty-first. It’s the painter Magritte’s birthday too, that day. He did that one with the green apple smack in front of that guy’s face. You’ve probably seen it. And the one where another guy has a birdcage instead of a body. Supremely cool and twisted. Oh, and there’s this one of a bird flying but the clouds are inside the bird, not outside of it. Really awesome—” I stop myself because, whoa—and I could go on too. There isn’t a painting I suddenly don’t want to tell this oak tree about in great detail.

I slowly turn to Brian, who’s staring at me with his squinting eyes, not saying anything. Why isn’t he saying anything? Maybe I used up all the words? Maybe he’s too freaked out that I lied, then unlied, then started a psychotic art history lesson? Why didn’t I stay on the roof? I need to sit down. Making friends is supremely stressful. I swallow a few hundred times.

Finally, he just shrugs. “Cool.” His lips curve into a half smile. “You are a bloody mess, dude,” he says, throwing in the English accent.

“Tell me about it.”

Then our eyes meet and we both crack up like we’re made of the same air.

After that, the forest, which had stayed out of it, joins in. I take a deep breath of pine and eucalyptus, hear mockingbirds and seagulls and the rumbling surf in the distance. I spot three deer munching on leaves just yards from where Brian is now rummaging through the meteorite bag with both hands.