I’ll Give You the Sun(30)
Author: Jandy Nelson

But during the second part of class, I sit down with my back against the wall and begin drawing Brian in this outside-in way, even though I said I’d never draw him again. I can’t help it. He’s in me and needs to get out. I do sketch after sketch.

I’m concentrating so hard that I don’t sense anyone approaching until my light gets blocked. I spring back in surprise and an embarrassing garbled sound flies out of my mouth as my brain catches up to the fact that it’s him, that Brian’s standing in front of me. He has no meteorite bag, no magnet rake, which means he came all the way down here to find me. Again. I attempt to keep the joy behind my face, not on it.

“Waited this morning,” he says, and then licks his bottom lip so nervously, so perfectly, it causes pain deep in my chest. He glances at my pad. I flip it over before he can see himself, then get up, motioning for him to go back into the woods so no one inside hears us. I stow the stool and stand, hoping my knees don’t give out, or alternatively, that I don’t start dancing a jig.

He’s waiting by the same tree as last time.

“So the English guy,” he says as we start walking. “He there today?”

If there’s one thing I know how to read in a voice, thanks to Jude, it’s jealousy. I take a supremely happy breath. “He got booted last week.”

“The drinking?”

“Yeah.”

The woods are quiet except for our crunching footsteps and a crooning mockingbird somewhere in the trees.

“Noah?”

I suck in air. How can someone just saying your name make you feel like this? “Yeah?” There’s a lot of emotion running around his face, but I don’t know what kind it is. I focus on my sneakers instead.

Minute after silent minute ticks by.

“It’s like this,” he says eventually. He’s stopped walking and is picking bark off an oak tree’s trunk. “There are all these planets that get ejected from the planetary systems that they first belonged in and they just wander on their own through deep space, going their lonely way across the universe without a sun, you know, forever . . .”

His eyes are begging me to understand something. I think about what he just said. He’s talked about this before, these lonely, drifting, sunless planets. So, what? Is he saying he doesn’t want to be an outsider like me? Well, fine. I turn to go.

“No.” He grabs my sleeve. He grabbed my sleeve.

The Earth pauses on its axis.

“Oh, fuck it.” He licks his lip, looks at me desperately. “Just . . .” he says. “Just . . .”

He’s stammering?

“Just what?” I ask.

“Just don’t worry, okay?” The words fly out of his mouth and loop around my heart and fling it right out of my chest. I know what he’s saying.

“Worry about what?” I say to mess with him.

He half smiles. “About getting hit in the head by an asteroid. It’s extremely unlikely.”

“Cool,” I say. “I won’t.

And so, I stop worrying.

I don’t worry when a few seconds later he says with a full-on grin, “I totally saw what you were drawing back there, dude.”

I don’t worry that I blow off Jude that night and every single night that follows. I don’t worry when she comes home and finds Brian and the hornets on the deck, all of the hornets posing for me like some photo they saw in a magazine. I don’t worry that night when she says, “So Mom wasn’t enough? You have to steal all my friends too?”

I don’t worry that those are the last words she says to me all summer.

I don’t worry that I seem to become cool by association, me!, that I hang out at The Spot with Brian and countless surftards and asshats and hornets encased in his Realm of Calm, hardly ever feeling like a hostage, mostly knowing what to do with my hands, and no one tries to chuck me off a cliff, or calls me anything but Picasso, a nickname started by Franklyn Fry of all asshats.

I don’t worry that it’s not as hard as I thought to pretend to be like everyone else, to change your skin color like a toad. To wear a little flame retardant.

I don’t worry that when Brian and I are alone in the woods or up on his roof or in his living room watching baseball (whatever), he puts up an electrical fence between us, and never once do I risk death by brushing against it, but when we’re in public, like at The Spot, the fence vanishes, and we become clumsy magnets, bumping and knocking into each other, grazing hands, arms, legs, shoulders, tapping the other on the back, even occasionally the leg, for no good reason except that it’s like swallowing lightning.

I don’t worry that all through the movie about the alien invasion, our legs microscopically drift: his, right, right, right, mine, left, left, left, until halfway through, they find each other and press so hard against each other for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight delirious seconds, that I have to get up and run to the bathroom because I’m exploding. I don’t worry that when I get back to my seat, it all starts again, but this time our legs find each other immediately and he grabs my hand beneath the armrest and squeezes it and we electrocute and die.

I don’t worry that when all that happened, Heather was on my other side and Courtney on his.

I don’t worry that Courtney still hasn’t given Brian his hat back or that Heather doesn’t take her ancient gray eyes off me.

I don’t worry that Brian and I never kiss, not once, no matter how much mind control I exert on him, no matter how much I beg God, the trees, every molecule I come across.

And most important, I don’t worry when I come home one day and find a note on the kitchen table written by Jude asking Mom to come down to the beach to see a sculpture she’s building out of sand. I don’t worry that I take the note and bury it at the bottom of the garbage can. I don’t worry, not really, even though it makes my stomach hurt to do it, no not my stomach, it makes my soul hurt that I could do it, that I actually did it.

I should’ve been worrying.

I should’ve been worrying a lot.

• • •

Brian’s leaving tomorrow morning to go back to boarding school for the fall, and tonight I’m in the underworld looking for him. I’ve never been to a party before, didn’t know it was like being miles and miles underground, where demons walk around with their hair on fire. I’m pretty certain no one here can see me. It must be because I’m too young or skinny or something. Courtney’s parents are out of town and she decided we’d use her older sister’s party as a going away bash for Brian. I don’t want to be at a going away party for Brian. I want to be going away with Brian, like on a plane to the Serengeti to watch the blue wildebeests migrate.