I’ll Give You the Sun(25)
Author: Jandy Nelson

He’s framed in the light from the room, looking like he stuck his toe in a socket. He’s not wearing his hat, and his hair’s amped out all over his head. His eyes are all sparked up too. I open the window.

“I totally want to meet him,” I hear Jude say from behind me.

I do not want that. Do not. I want her to fall in a hole.

I bend down and stick my head and shoulders out, spreading myself as much as I can across the windowsill so Jude can’t see out or Brian in. The air is cool, feathery on my face.

“Hey,” I say, like he always knocks at my window at night and I’m not gunning inside at top speed.

“You gotta come up,” he says. “Got to. It’s clear finally. And no moon. It’s an intergalactic gorge fest up there.”

Really, if someone told me I could hang out in da Vinci’s studio while he painted the Mona Lisa or go up on Brian’s roof with him at night—I’m on the roof. The other day he mentioned us going to some movie about an alien invasion and I almost blacked out thinking of it. I’d rather sit next to Brian for two hours in a dark theater than have a wall-painting party with Jackson Pollock. The only problem with spending time with him in the woods all day is that there’s so much space in there. The trunk of a car would be better, or a thimble.

Despite my efforts at hogging the window, I feel myself getting shoved aside as Jude squeezes her head and then her shoulders out beside mine until we’re a two-headed hydra. I watch Brian’s face light up at the sight of her and get seasick.

(PORTRAIT: Jude: Drawn and Quartered)

“Hi, Brian Connelly,” she says in a flirty bouncy way that makes my body temperature drop several degrees. When did she learn to talk like that?

“Wow, you guys look nothing alike,” Brian exclaims. “I thought you’d look like Noah except—”

“With boobs?” Jude interjects. She said boobs to him!

And why was he thinking about what she’d look like anyway?

Brian cracks the half smile. I need to throw a bag over his head before Jude comes under the spell of his strange, squinting eyes. Do they have those burka things for guys? At least he hasn’t licked his lips, I think. “Well, yeah. Exactly,” he says to her, and licks his lips. “Though I’m pretty sure I would’ve phrased it differently.”

It’s over. His eyes are squinting. My sister’s a lollipop—everyone loves lollipops. And my head’s been replaced by a cabbage.

“You should come up too,” he says to her. “I was going to show your brother Gemini—the Twins, you know, so it’s perfect.” Your brother? I’m her brother now?

(PORTRAIT: Jude in Her New Home in Timbuktu)

She’s about to speak, to say, “Cool!” or “Awesome!” or “I love you!” so I ram her with my elbow. It’s the only practical solution. She returns the ram with a ream to my ribs. We’re used to concealing battles under tables at restaurants or at home, so keeping Brian out of this particular scuffle is a piece of cake until I blurt out, “She can’t come. She has to go to ubudowasow for sodojiokoa—” I’m just making sounds, throwing syllables together, hoping they’ll collide and find a meaning in Brian’s head, as I, in one spectacularly spastic motion, hoist myself up and then frog-leap out the window, only narrowly landing on my feet and not tumbling headfirst into Brian. I right myself, brush the hair out of my eyes, noting the dampness of my forehead, then turn around and place my hand on the bottom of the window and start pulling down, only at the last minute deciding not to decapitate my sister, even though it really seems like a good idea. Instead, I push on her shoulder to get her and her yellow strangling sweep of hair and purple nails and shimmery blue eyes and bouncing bobbling boobs back inside—

“Jesus, Noah. Got the hint. Nice to meet you,” she manages before I slam down the window.

“You too,” he says, rapping on the glass with his knuckles. She raps back two confident knowing raps that match the confident knowing smile on her face. It’s like they’ve been rapping back and forth like this their whole lives and have their own special Bengal Tiger to Lollipop Morse code.

Brian and I walk down the road in silence. I’ve broken into a full body sweat. I feel exactly the way I do when I wake up from the dream where I’m naked in the school cafeteria and only have those flimsy pathetic napkin squares to cover myself up.

Brian speaks to what just happened succinctly. “Dude,” he says. “Mental.”

I sigh, mumble, “Thanks, Einstein.”

And then to my surprise and relief, he starts to laugh. Fountainous, mountainous laughter. “So mental.” He karate-chops the air. “I mean, I thought you were going to slice her in half with the window!” This sends him on a rollicking ride of hysterics that I soon find myself on too. Further fueled when Prophet starts in, “Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?”

“Oh my God. That freaking bird.” Brian holds his head with both his hands. “We have to find Ralph, man. We have to. It’s a national emergency.”

He doesn’t seem to care a bit that Jude didn’t come with us. Maybe I imagined it all? Maybe his face didn’t light up at the sight of her? Maybe he didn’t blush at her words? Maybe he doesn’t even like lollipops?

“The Ax?” I say, feeling loads better.

“Oh man.” He groans. “That was fast.” There’s both embarrassment and pride in his voice. He holds up his right arm. “No one messes with The Ax.” The Ax comes down on my shoulder and jostles me. We’re under a streetlamp and I pray my face isn’t revealing what’s happened inside me at this contact. It’s the first time he’s touched me.

I follow him up the ladder to the roof, my shoulder still tingling, wishing the ladder went for miles and miles. (PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: The Two Boys Breaking Out of the Two Boys) As we climb, I can hear plants growing in the dark, can feel the blood speeding around inside me.

And then the scent of jasmine engulfs us.

Grandma Sweetwine used to tell us to hold our breath around the scent of night-blooming jasmine if we didn’t want to give away all our secrets. She’d say the police would do much better handing out vines of the white trumpet flowers to the accused than hooking them up to a lie detector. I really hope this one bit of hogwash is true. I want to know Brian’s secrets.

Once up, he takes a flashlight from his sweatshirt pocket and shines our way to the telescope. The light from it is red, not white, he explains, so we don’t lose our night vision. Our night vision!