I’ll Give You the Sun(35)
Author: Jandy Nelson

I walk down the hill toward home, getting carpet-bombed with images of Brian and Jude, him all tangled up in her hair, in her light, in her normal. That’s what he wants. That’s why he erected the fence between us. Then electrified it for double protection against me, stupid weirdo me. I think how full-on I kissed Heather. Oh God. Is Brian kissing Jude like that? Is she him? A horrible flailing monster of a noise comes out of me and then the whole disgusting night wants to come out of me too. I run to the side of the road and throw up each grain of beer and that disgusting drag of a cigarette, every last lying, revolting kiss, until I’m just a bag of clattering bones.

When I get home, I see that there are lights on in the living room, so I climb through my window, always open a crack, in case Brian decided to break and enter one night, like I’d imagine before falling asleep, all summer long. I cringe at myself. At what I wanted.

(LANDSCAPE: The Collapsed World)

I turn on the lamp in my bedroom and beeline for Dad’s camera, but it’s not where I always leave it under my bed. I tear the room apart with my eyes, exhaling only when I spot it on my desk, sitting there like a live grenade. Who moved it? Who freaking moved it? Did I leave it there? Maybe I did. I don’t know. I lunge for it and call up the photos. The first one that comes up is from last year when Grandma died. A big round laughing sand lady with her arms open to the sky like she’s about to lift off. It’s freaking amazing. I put my finger on the delete button and press hard, press murderously. I call the rest up, each one more awesome and strange and cool than the next, and wipe them out, one by one, until every trace of my sister’s talent is gone from the world and only mine is left.

Then, after I sneak by the living room—Mom and Dad have fallen asleep in front of some war movie—I go into Jude’s room, take the portrait of the naked English guy off the wall, rip it to shreds and spread it like confetti all over the floor. Next, I return to my room and start on the drawings of Brian—it takes forever to tear them all to pieces, there are so many. When I’m done, I stuff his remains into three large black plastic bags and stow them under the bed. Tomorrow I’m going to throw him, every last bit of him, over Devil’s Drop.

Because he can’t swim.

Even after all that, Jude’s still not home! It’s an hour past our summer curfew now. I can only imagine. I have to stop imagining.

I have to stop holding this rock and praying he’s going to come to the window.

He doesn’t.

THE HISTORY OF LUCK

Jude

Age 16

I’m going to wish with my hands, like Sandy said.

I’m going to use The Oracle.

I’m going to sit here at my desk and use it—in the traditional way—to find out everything I can about Guillermo Garcia aka Drunken Igor aka The Rock Star of the Sculpture World. I have to make this sculpture and it has to be in stone and he’s the only one who can help me do that. This is the way to get through to Mom. I feel it.

However, before I do all this, I’m going to suck the living hell out of this lemon—the mortal enemy of the aphrodisiacal orange:

Nothing curdles love in the heart like lemon on the tongue

Because I have to nip this in the bud.

Grandma pipes in. “Ah yes, Him with a capital H and I don’t mean Mr. Gable. A certain big . . . bad . . . British . . . wolf?” She milks the last bit for all its worth.

“I don’t know what it was about him,” I tell her in my head. “Oh man. Besides everything,” I tell her outside my head.

And then I can’t help it. Giving it my best English accent, I say, “Such a chatterbox, a guy can’t get a word in.” The smile I denied him in church overtakes my face until I’m beaming at the wall.

Oh Clark Gable, stop.

I shove the half-lemon in, shove Grandma out, tell myself the English bloke has glandular fever, cold sores, and tooth decay, the trifecta of unkissability, like every other hot male in Lost Cove.

Cooties. Major cooties. English cooties.

With sour making my whole head pucker, with the boy boycott back in full swing, I boot up my laptop and type into The Oracle: Guillermo Garcia and Art Tomorrow, hoping to find Mom’s interview. But no luck. The magazine doesn’t archive online. I input his name again and do an image search.

And it’s Invasion of the Granite Giants.

Massive rock-beings. Walking mountains. Expression explosions. I love them instantly. Igor told me he wasn’t okay. Well, neither is his art. I start bookmarking reviews and pieces, choose a work that makes my heart sink and swell at the same time as a new screensaver, then grab my sculpture textbook off the shelf, certain he’s in it. His work is too amazing for him not to be.

He is, and I’m on the second read of his bona fide bonkers biography, one that belongs in Grandma’s bible, not a textbook, so I’ve ripped it out and clipped it into the over-stuffed leather-bound book, when I hear the front door open, followed by a flurry of voices and a stampede of footsteps coming down the hall.

Noah.

I wish I’d shut my door. Dive under the bed? Before I can make the move, they’re barreling by, peering in at me like I’m The Bearded Lady. And somewhere in that happy humming hive of athletic, preternaturally normal teenagers is my brother.

Best sit down for it:

Noah’s joined a sports team at Roosevelt High.

Granted, it’s cross-country, not football, and Heather’s on the team, but still. He’s a member of a gang.

To my surprise, a moment later, he doubles back and enters my room, and it’s as if Mom’s standing before me. It’s always been the case, me fair like Dad, him dark like Mom, but his resemblance to her has become uncanny, therefore: heart-snatching. Whereas there’s not a hint of Mom on me, never was. When people used to see us alone, I’m sure they assumed I was adopted.

It’s unusual, Noah in my room, and my stomach’s clenching up. I hate how nervous it makes me to be near him now. Also—what Sandy said today. How, unbeknownst to me, someone took pictures of my flying sand women and sent them in to CSA. It had to have been Noah, which means: He got me in only to end up having to go to Roosevelt himself.

I taste guilt right through the citrus.

“So, hey,” he says, shuffling back and forth on a pair of running mud-cakes, driving dirt deeper and deeper into my plush white carpet. I say nothing about it. He could chop off my ear and I’d say nothing about it. His face is the opposite of how it looked in the sky earlier today. It’s padlocked. “You know how Dad’s going away for the week? We—” He nods at his room, where music and laughter and uniformity resounds. “We thought it’d be cool to have a party here. You okay with that?”