I’ll Give You the Sun(33)
Author: Jandy Nelson

“I don’t want to go, okay?” There’s irritation in his voice. “It’s just a stupid game. Whatever. No big deal.”

I study him. Does he want to play? He does. He must.

He wants to be with Courtney because if it’s fixed and Courtney’s doing the fixing, that’s what’s going to happen. That’s why he won’t meet my eyes. The realization drains the blood out of me. But why did he tell me not to worry? Why did he grab my hand? Why everything?

All the empty cages begin to rattle inside me.

I stumble over to an ugly beige chair in the middle of this ugly beige room. I fall onto it, only to discover it’s hard as stone and it breaks my spine in two. I sit there, broken in half, chugging the rest of my beer like it’s orange juice, remembering the English guy downing the gin that day. Then I grab another cup of beer that someone left and drink what’s in that one too. Purgatory, I think. If hell is downstairs and heaven is the hallway, then this must be purgatory—what happens in purgatory again? I’ve seen paintings of it but can’t remember. I feel supremely woozy. Am I drunk?

The lights start flashing on and off. Courtney’s at the switch, Heather by her side. “Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you’ve all been waiting for.”

Clementine reaches in first and chooses a guy named Dexter. Some tall kid I’ve never seen before with a cool haircut and clothes ten times too big for him. Everyone jeers and cheers and generally acts lame as they get up and walk into the closet with we-are-so-beyond-this looks on their faces. Courtney makes a display of setting the egg-timer. All I can think about is how much I hate her, how much I want her to get stampeded by a herd of pissed-off snapping turtles before she can get in that closet with Brian.

I stand with the help of the armrest, then bushwhack through an impossible thicket of Jude’s blond hair to a bathroom, where I splash cold water on my face. Beer sucks. I lift my head. It’s still me in the mirror. It’s still me in me, right? I’m not sure. And I’m certainly not hot, I can see that. I look like a skinny pathetic coward too afraid to jump off his dad’s shoulder into the water. It’s a sink-or-swim world, Noah.

The second I walk back into the room, I’m assaulted by, “You’ve been chosen, dude,” and “Heather picked you,” and “Your turn, Picasso.”

I swallow. Brian’s still studying those spines of books, his back to me as Heather takes my hand and leads me toward the closet, her arm pulled tight as if forcing an unwilling dog on a leash.

What I notice right away about the walk-in closet is that there are tons of dark suits hanging everywhere, looking like rows of men at a funeral.

Heather switches off the light, then says softly, shyly, “Help me find you, okay?” I think about escaping into the hanging suits, joining the men in mourning until the egg-timer goes off, but then Heather bumps into me and laughs. Her hands quickly find my arms. Her touch is so light, like two leaves have fallen on me.

“We don’t have to,” she whispers. Then, “Do you want to?”

I can feel her breath on my face. Her hair smells like sad flowers.

“Okay,” I say, but don’t move a muscle.

Time passes. It feels like lots and lots of it, so much that when we walk out of this closet, it’ll be time for us to go to college or die even. Except, because I’m counting in my head, I know that not even seven seconds of the seven minutes have passed. I’m calculating how many seconds are in seven minutes when I feel her small cool hands leave my arms and land on my cheeks, then feel her lips brush across mine, once, then again, the second time staying there. It’s like being kissed by a feather, no, smoother, a petal. So soft. Too soft. We’re petal people. I think about the earthquake kiss in the alcove and want to cry again. This time because I am sad. And scared. And because my skin has never fit this badly before.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy in a Blender)

I realize my arms are lying limp at my sides. I should do something with them, shouldn’t I? I rest a hand on her waist, which totally feels like the wrong place for it, so I move it to her back, which also feels entirely wrong, but before I can reposition it, her lips open, so I open my mine too—it’s not disgusting. She doesn’t taste like a rancid orange but like mint, like she had a mint right before. I’m wondering what I taste like as her tongue slips into my mouth. It shocks me how wet it is. And warm. And tongue-y. My tongue’s going nowhere. I’m telling it to move and enter her mouth, but it won’t listen to me. I figure it out: There’s 420 seconds in seven minutes. Maybe twenty seconds have passed, which means we still have 400 seconds left of this. Oh fucking fuck.

And then it happens. Brian rises out of the darkness of my mind and takes my hand like he did in the movie theater and pulls me to him. I can smell his sweat, can hear his voice. Noah, he says in that bone-melting way and my hands are in Heather’s hair, and I’m pressing my body against hers hard, drawing her closer to me, pushing my tongue deep inside her mouth . . .

We must not hear the ding of the timer, because all of a sudden the light switches on and the mourning men are all around us again, not to mention Courtney in the doorway tapping an invisible watch on her wrist. “C’mon, lovebirds. Time’s up.” I blink a few hundred times at the invasion of light. At the invasion of the truth. Heather looks dizzy, dreamy. Heather looks one hundred percent like Heather. I’ve done a bad thing. To her, to me. To Brian, even if he doesn’t care, it still feels that way. Maybe the girl downstairs turned me into a demon like her with that kiss.

“Wow,” Heather whispers. “I’ve never . . . No one’s ever . . . Wow. That was incredible.”

She can barely walk. I look down to make sure I don’t have a tent in my pants as she takes my hand and we emerge from the closet like two unsteady cubs from a hibernation den. Everyone starts whistling and saying lame things like, “Bedroom’s down the hall.”

I scan the room for Brian, expecting him to be examining the spines of books still, but he’s not. His face is like I’ve seen it only once before, all bricked up with fury, like he wants to hurl a meteorite at my head and he’s not going to miss.

But?

Heather runs off to join the hornets. The whole room’s been engulfed by Jude’s hair. The whole universe has. I fall into a recliner. Nothing makes sense. It’s just a stupid game, he said. No big deal. But then, he said it was No big deal when his mother’s friend (boyfriend?) came on to him too and that seemed like it was a big deal to him. Maybe No big deal is code for: This is Supernaturally Screwed Up. I’m sorry, I tell him in my mind. It was you, I tell him. I kissed you.