I’ll Give You the Sun(22)
Author: Jandy Nelson

“There are mountain lions around here,” I say. “They sleep in trees.”

“Awesome,” he says, still searching. “Seen one?”

“No, a bobcat, though. Twice.”

“I’ve seen a bear,” he mumbles into the bag. What’s he looking for?

“A bear! Wow. I love bears! Brown or black?”

“Black,” he answers. “A mother with two cubs. At Yosemite.”

I want to know everything about this and I’m about to launch into a series of questions, wondering if he likes animal shows too, when it appears he’s found what he’s been looking for. He holds up an ordinary rock. The expression on his face is like he’s showing me a frill-necked lizard or a leafy seadragon, not a plain old hunk of nothing. “Here,” he says, putting it in my hand. It’s so heavy it bends my wrist back. I reinforce with my other hand so I don’t drop it. “This one’s for sure. Magnetized nickel—an exploded star.” He points to my backpack with the sketchpad sticking out. “You can draw it.” I look at the black lump in my hand—this is a star?—and think there’s nothing I can imagine less interesting to draw on earth, but say, “Okay. Sure.”

“Excellent,” he says, and turns around. I stand there with the star in my hand not sure what to do until he turns back around and says, “You coming or what? I brought an extra magnifying glass for you.”

This makes the ground tilt. He knew I was going to come even before he left his house. He knew. And I knew. We both knew.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: I’m Standing on My Own Head!)

He takes the extra magnifying glass out of his back pocket and holds it out to me.

“Cool,” I say, catching up with him and taking the glass by the handle.

“You can classify too in the pad,” he says. “Or draw what we find. Actually, that’d be totally stellar.”

“What are we looking for?” I ask.

“Space garbage,” he answers like it’s obvious. “The sky’s always falling. Always. You’ll see. People have no idea.”

No, people don’t, because they’re not revolutionaries like us.

Hours later, however, we haven’t found one meteorite, not one piece of sky litter, but I so don’t care. Instead of classifying, whatever that means, I’ve spent most of the morning in a belly flop, using the magnifying glass to look at slugs and beetles, all the time getting my head stuffed with intergalactic gobbledygook by Brian, who traipsed around me scouring the forest floor with his magnet rake—yes, a magnet rake, which he made. He’s the coolest person ever.

He’s a blow-in too, no question. Not from another realm like Mom, but probably from some exoplanet (I just learned this word) with six suns. It explains everything: the telescope, this mad search for pieces of his homeland, the Einstein talk about Red Giants and White and Yellow Dwarfs (!!!!), which I immediately started drawing, not to mention the hypnotizing eyes and the way he keeps cracking me up like I’m some skin-fitting someone who has tons of friends and knows the perfect place in every sentence to say dude or bro. Also: The Realm of Calm is real. Hummingbirds laze around him. Fruit falls out of trees right into his open palms. Not to mention the drooping redwoods, I think, looking up. And me. I’ve never felt this relaxed in my life. I keep forgetting my body and then have to go back and get it.

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: The Boy Who Watched the Boy Hypnotize the World)

I share this blow-in theory with him while we’re sitting on a slate slide at the edge of the creek, water lulling slowly by us like we’re on a rock boat.

“They’ve done a really good job in preparing you to pass as an earthling,” I say.

He half smiles. I notice a dimple I hadn’t before, at the top of his cheek. “No doubt,” he says. “They’ve prepared me well. I even play baseball.” He throws a pebble into the water. I watch it drown. He raises an eyebrow at me. “You, on the other hand . . .”

I pick up a stone and toss it in the same spot where his disappeared. “Yeah, no preparation whatsoever. They just threw me in. That’s why I’m so clueless.” I mean it as a joke, but it comes out serious. It comes out true. Because it is. I so totally missed class the day all the required information was passed out. Brian licks his bottom lip and doesn’t respond.

The mood’s changed and I don’t know why.

From underneath my hair, I study him. I know from doing portraits that you have to look at someone a really long time to see what they’re covering up, to see their inside face, and when you do see it and get it down, that’s the thing that makes people freak out about how much a drawing looks like them.

Brian’s inside face is worried.

“So, that picture . . .” he says hesitantly. He pauses, then licks his bottom lip again. Is he nervous? He seems to be, suddenly, though until this moment I didn’t think it possible. It makes me nervous thinking he’s nervous. He does it again, the tongue sweep across the bottom lip. Is that what he does when he’s nervous? I swallow. Now I’m waiting for him to do it again, willing it. Is he staring at my mouth too? I can’t help it. I sweep my tongue across my bottom lip.

He turns away, throws a few pebbles rapid-fire with some kind of bionic wrist movement that causes the stones to skip effortlessly across the surface of the water. I watch the vein in his neck pulse. I watch him convert oxygen to carbon dioxide. I watch him existing and existing and existing. Is he going to finish his sentence? Ever? Several more centuries of silence pass where the air gets more and more jumpy and alive, like all the molecules he previously put to sleep are waking up. And then it occurs to me he means the naked pictures from yesterday. Is that what he means? The thought’s a bolt.

“Of the English guy?” I squeak. Argh, I sound like a mite. I wish my voice would stop cracking and change already.

He swallows and turns toward me. “No, I was wondering if you ever actually make the drawings you do in your head?”

“Sometimes,” I answer.

“Well, did you make it?” His eyes catch me off guard, capturing me completely in some kind of net. I want to say his name.

“Make what?” I ask, stalling. My heart’s kicking around in my chest. I know what picture he means now.

“The one”—he licks his bottom lip—“of me?”

I feel possessed as I lunge for the pad and flip the pages until I find him, that final version. I place it in his hands, watch his eyes dart up and down, down and up. I’m spiking a fever trying to tell if he likes it or not. I can’t tell. Then I try to see the picture through his eyes and an uh-oh-kill-me-now feeling overtakes me. The Brian I made is him colliding at top speed into a wall of magic. It’s nothing like the drawings of people I do at school. I realize with horror it’s not a drawing of a friend. I’m getting dizzy. Every line and angle and color screams just how much I like him. I feel like I’m wrapped and trapped in plastic. And he’s still not saying a thing. Not one thing!