I’ll Give You the Sun(5)
Author: Jandy Nelson

She’s trying to get in my mind, so I close the shutters. Fast, slam them right down with me on one side, her on the other. This isn’t like the other horror shows: The time she punched the boulder-come-to-life Michael Stein in the face last year during a soccer game for calling me a retard just because I got distracted by a supremely cool anthill. Or the time I got caught in a rip and she and Dad had to drag me out of the ocean in front of a whole beach of surftards. This is different. This secret is like having hot burning coals under my bare feet all the time. I rise up from the couch to get away from any potential telepathy—when the yelling reaches us.

It’s loud, like the house might break in two. Same as the other times lately.

I sink back down. Jude looks at me. Her eyes are the lightest glacier blue; I use mostly white when I draw them. Normally they make you feel floaty and think of puffy clouds and hear harps, but right now they look just plain scared. Everything else has been forgotten.

(PORTRAIT: Mom and Dad with Screeching Tea Kettles for Heads)

When Jude speaks, she sounds like she did when she was little, her voice made of tinsel. “Do you really think that’s why Grandma wants us to go to that school? Because she saw my flying sand women?”

“I do,” I say, lying. I think she was right the first time. I think it’s because of me.

She scoots over so we’re shoulder to shoulder. This is us. Our pose. The smush. It’s even how we are in the ultrasound photo they took of us inside Mom and how I had us in the picture Fry ripped up yesterday. Unlike most everyone else on earth, from the very first cells of us, we were together, we came here together. This is why no one hardly notices that Jude does most of the talking for both of us, why we can only play piano with all four of our hands on the keyboard and not at all alone, why we can never do Rochambeau because not once in thirteen years have we chosen differently. It’s always: two rocks, two papers, two scissors. When I don’t draw us like this, I draw us as half-people.

The calm of the smush floods me. She breathes in and I join her. Maybe we’re too old to still do this, but whatever. I can see her smiling even though I’m looking straight ahead. We exhale together, then inhale together, exhale, inhale, in and out, out and in, until not even the trees remember what happened in the woods yesterday, until Mom’s and Dad’s voices turn from mad to music, until we’re not only one age, but one complete and whole person.

• • •

A week later, everything changes.

It’s Saturday, and Mom, Jude, and I are in the city at the museum’s rooftop café because Mom won the argument and we’re both going to apply to CSA in a year.

Across the table, Jude’s talking to Mom and at the same time sending me secret silent death threats because she thinks my drawings came out better than hers and we’re having a contest. Mom’s the judge. And fine, maybe I shouldn’t have tried to fix Jude’s for her. She’s sure I was trying to ruin them. No comment.

She eye-rolls at me on the sly. It’s a 6.3 on the Richter scale. I think about giving her a dead leg under the table but resist. Instead, I drink some hot chocolate and covertly spy on a group of older guys to my left. As far as my eight-foot concrete dork goes, still no fallout except in my mind: (SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Gets Fed Piece by Piece to a Swarm of Fire Ants). But maybe Zephyr’s really not going to tell anyone.

The guys at the next table all have rubber plugs in their earlobes and studs in their eyebrows and are joking around with each other like otters. They probably go to CSA, I think, and the thought makes my whole body thrum. One of them has a moon face with blue saucer eyes and a bursting red mouth, the kind Renoir paints. I love those mouths. I’m doing a quick sketch of his face with my finger on my pants under the table when he catches me staring and instead of glaring at me so I’ll mind my beeswax, he winks at me, slowly, so there’s no mistaking it, then returns his attention to his friends as I go from solid to liquid mass.

He winked at me. Like he knows. But it doesn’t feel bad. Not at all. In fact, I wish I could stop smiling, and now, oh wow—he’s looking this way again and smiling too. My face is starting to boil.

I try to focus in on Mom and Jude. They’re talking about Grandma’s batshit bible. Again. How it’s like an encyclopedia of odd beliefs, Mom’s saying. How Grandma collected ideas from everywhere, everyone, even left the bible open on the counter next to the cash register in her dress shop so all her customers could write in their batshit hogwash too.

“On the very last page,” Mom tells Jude, “it says in case of her untimely death, it becomes yours.”

“Mine?” She throws me her smuggest look. “Just mine?” She’s all gift-wrapped now. Whatever. Like I even want some bible.

Mom says, “I quote, ‘This good book is bequeathed to my granddaughter, Jude Sweetwine, the last remaining bearer of The Sweetwine Gift.’”

I barf bright green barf all over the table.

Grandma Sweetwine decided Jude had The Sweetwine Gift of Intuition when she discovered Jude could do the flower tongue. We were four years old. After, Jude spent days with me in front of a mirror, pressing her finger into my tongue, again and again, trying to teach me so I could have The Sweetwine Gift too. But it was useless. My tongue could flip and curl, but it couldn’t blossom.

I look back over at the table of otters. They’re packing up to leave. Winking Moon Face swings a backpack over his shoulder and then mouths bye to me.

I swallow and look down and burst into flames.

Then start mind-drawing him from memory.

When I tune back in minutes later, Mom’s telling Jude that unlike Grandma Sweetwine, she’d haunt us flamboyantly and persistently, no quick visits in the car for her. “I’d be the kind of ghost that interferes with everything.” She’s laughing her rumbly laugh and her hands are twirling around in the air. “I’m too controlling. You’d never be rid of me! Never!” She bwah-ha-ha’s at us.

What’s weird is that she looks like she’s in a windstorm all of a sudden. Her hair’s blowing and her dress is slightly billowing. I check under the table to see if there’s a vent or something, but there isn’t. See? Other mothers don’t have their own private weather. She’s smiling at us so warmly, like we’re puppies, and something catches in my chest.

I shutter myself in while they talk more specifically about what kind of ghost Mom would make. If Mom died, the sun would go out. Period.