I’ll Give You the Sun(3)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Mom lifts her eyes, the amusement wiped off her face. “Except I don’t mean it metaphorically, Benjamin.” Dad used to make Mom’s eyes shine; now he makes her grind her teeth. I don’t know why. “What I meant quite literally,” she says/grinds, “is that the inimitable Grandma Sweetwine, dead and gone, was in the car, sitting next to me, plain as day.” She smiles at Jude. “In fact, she was all dressed up in one of her Floating Dresses, looking spectacular.” The Floating Dress was Grandma’s dress line.

“Oh! Which one? The blue?” The way Jude asks this makes my chest pang for her.

“No, the one with the little orange flowers.”

“Of course,” Jude replies. “Perfect ghost-wear. We discussed what her afterlife attire would be.” It occurs to me that Mom’s making all this up because Jude can’t stop missing Grandma. She hardly left her bedside at the end. When Mom found them that final morning, one asleep, one dead, they were holding hands. I thought this was supremely creepy but kept it to myself. “So . . .” Jude raises an eyebrow. “The message?”

“You know what I’d love?” Dad says, huffing and puffing himself back into the conversation so that we’re never going to find out what the freaking message is. “What I’d love is if we could finally declare The Reign of Ridiculous over.” This, again. The Reign he’s referring to began when Grandma moved in. Dad, “a man of science,” told us to take every bit of superstitious hogwash that came out of his mother’s mouth with a grain of salt. Grandma told us not to listen to her artichoke of a son and to take those grains of salt and throw them right over our left shoulders to blind the devil.

Then she took out her “bible”—an enormous leather-bound book stuffed with batshit ideas (aka: hogwash)—and started to preach the gospel. Mostly to Jude.

Dad lifts a slice of pizza off his plate. Cheese dives over the edges. He looks at me. “How about this, huh, Noah? Who’s a little relieved we’re not having one of Grandma’s luck-infused stews?”

I remain mum. Sorry, Charlie. I love pizza, meaning: Even when I’m in the middle of eating pizza, I wish I were eating pizza, but I wouldn’t jump on Dad’s train even if Michelangelo were on it. He and I don’t get on, though he tends to forget. I never forget. When I hear his big banging voice coming after me to watch the 49ers or some movie where everything gets blown up or to listen to jazz that makes me feel like my body’s on backward, I open my bedroom window, jump out, and head for the trees.

Occasionally when no one’s home, I go into his office and break his pencils. Once, after a particularly toilet-licking Noah the Broken Umbrella Talk, when he laughed and said if Jude weren’t my twin he’d be sure I’d come about from parthenogenesis (looked it up: conception without a father), I snuck into the garage while everyone was sleeping and keyed his car.

Because I can see people’s souls sometimes when I draw them, I know the following: Mom has a massive sunflower for a soul so big there’s hardly any room in her for organs. Jude and me have one soul between us that we have to share: a tree with its leaves on fire. And Dad has a plate of maggots for his.

Jude says to him, “Do you think Grandma didn’t just hear you insult her cooking?”

“That would be a resounding no,” Dad replies, then hoovers into the slice. The grease makes his whole mouth gleam.

Jude stands. Her hair hangs all around her head like lightcicles. She looks up at the ceiling and declares, “I always loved your cooking, Grandma.”

Mom reaches over and squeezes her hand, then says to the ceiling, “Me too, Cassandra.”

Jude smiles from the inside out.

Dad finger-shoots himself in the head.

Mom frowns—it makes her look a hundred years old. “Embrace the mystery, Professor,” she says. She’s always telling Dad this, but she used to say it different. She used to say it like she was opening a door for him to walk through, not closing one in his face.

“I married the mystery, Professor,” he answers like always, but it used to sound like a compliment.

We all eat pizza. It’s not fun. Mom’s and Dad’s thoughts are turning the air black. I’m listening to myself chew, when Jude’s foot finds mine under the table again. I press back.

“The message from Grandma?” she interjects into the tension, smiling hopefully.

Dad looks at her and his eyes go soft. She’s his favorite too. Mom doesn’t have a favorite, though, which means the spot is up for grabs.

“As I was saying.” This time Mom’s using her normal voice, husky, like a cave’s talking to you. “I was driving by CSA, the fine arts high school, this afternoon and that’s when Grandma swooped in to say what an absolutely perfect fit it would be for you two.” She shakes her head, brightening and becoming her usual age again. “And it really is. I can’t believe it never occurred to me. I keep thinking of that quote by Picasso: ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once one grows up.’” She has the bananas look on her face that happens in museums, like she’s going to steal the art. “But this. This is a chance of a lifetime, guys. I don’t want your spirits to get all tamped down like . . .” She doesn’t finish, combs a hand through her hair—black and bombed-out like mine—turns to Dad. “I really want this for them, Benjamin. I know it’ll be expensive, but what an oppor—”

“That’s it?” Jude interrupts. “That’s all Grandma said? That was the message from the afterlife? It was about some school?” She looks like she might start crying.

Not me. Art school? I never imagined such a thing, never imagined I wouldn’t have to go to Roosevelt, to Asshat High with everyone else. I’m pretty sure the blood just started glowing inside my body.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: A Window Flies Open in My Chest)

Mom has the bananas look again. “Not just any school, Jude. A school that will let you shout from the rooftops every single day for four years. Don’t you two want to shout from the rooftops?”

“Shout what?” Jude asks.

This makes Dad chuckle under his breath in a thistly way. “I don’t know, Di,” he says. “It’s so focused. You forget that for the rest of us, art’s just art, not religion.” Mom picks up a knife and thrusts it into his gut, twists. Dad forges on, oblivious. “Anyway, they’re in seventh grade. High school’s still a ways away.”