I’ll Give You the Sun(52)
Author: Jandy Nelson

It feels like this.

• • •

When I arrive at Guillermo’s studio the next afternoon at the scheduled time—he doesn’t seem to care it’s winter break and there’s nowhere I’d rather be, so—I find a piece of paper thumbtacked to the door that says: Be back soon—GG.

All morning, while sucking on anti-Oscar lemons, I listened from across town, hoping my practice rock would tell me what was inside it. So far, not a peep. Not a peep between Noah and me since yesterday either, and this morning he was gone before I woke up. As was all of the cash Dad left us for emergencies. Effing whatever.

Back to the clear and present danger: Oscar. I’m ready. In addition to the lemons, in preparation for a possible encounter, I did some catch-up reading on a myriad of particularly raunchy venereal diseases. Followed by some bible study:

People with two different-colored eyes are duplicitous cads

(Yes, I wrote this passage.)

The Oscar case is closed.

I slip quickly down the hallway, thrilled to find Grandma and no one else in the mailroom. She’s in a splendid outfit. A striped straight skirt. Vintage floral sweater. Red leather belt. Paisley scarf championed with attitude around her neck. All topped off with black felt beret and John Lennon sunglasses. Exactly what I’d wear to the studio if I weren’t bound to the root vegetable look.

“Perfect,” I tell her. “Very shabby chic.”

“Chic would suffice. Shabby as a label offends my sensibilities. I was going for Summer of Love with more than a smidgeon of Beatnik. All this art, the mess and disorder, these mysterious foreign men are making me feel very free-spirited, very throw caution to the wind, very daring, very—”

I laugh. “I get it.”

“No, I don’t think you do. I was going to say very Jude Sweetwine. Remember that intrepid girl?” She points to my pocket. I pull out the extinguished candle. She tsk tsks at me. “Don’t use my bible to forward your dreary agenda.”

“He has a girlfriend.”

“You don’t know that for sure. He’s European. They have different mores.”

“Haven’t you read Jane Austen? English people are more uptight than us, not less.”

“One thing that boy doesn’t seem is uptight.” Her whole face contorts with the effort of a wink. She’s not a subtle winker, not a subtle anything.

“He has trichomoniasis,” I grumble at her.

“Nobody has that. Nobody but you even knows what it is.”

“He’s too old.”

“Only I’m too old.”

“Well, he’s too hot. Way too hot. And he knows it. Did you see the way he leans?”

“The way he what?”

“Leans against a wall like James Dean, leans.” I do a quick demonstration against a pillar. “And he drives that motorcycle. And has that accent and those different-color eyes—”

“David Bowie has different-color eyes!” She throws up her arms, exasperated. Grandma has a great passion for David Bowie. “It’s good luck when a boy’s mother prophesizes about you.” Her face goes soft. “And he said you give him chills, honey.”

“I have a feeling his girlfriend gives him chills too.”

“How can you judge a fella until you picnic with him?” She opens her arms as if to embrace the whole world. “Pack a basket, pick a spot, and go. Simple as that.”

“So corny,” I say, spotting one of Guillermo’s notepads on a stack of mail. I quickly leaf through it for notes to Dearest. None.

“Who with a beating heart in her chest scoffs at a picnic?” she exclaims. “You have to see the miracles for there to be miracles, Jude.” She used to say this a lot. It’s the very first passage she wrote in the bible. I’m not a miracle-seer. The very last passage she wrote in the bible was: A broken heart is an open heart. I somehow know she wrote it for me, to help me after she died, but it didn’t help.

Throw a handful of rice into the air, and the number of kernels that land back in your hand are the amount of people you will love in your life

(Grandma would put up the closed sign for my sewing lessons.
At the table in the back of her shop, I’d sit on her lap and breathe in her flowery scent while learning to cut and drape and stitch. “Everyone gets a one-and-only and you’re mine,” she’d tell me. “Why me?” I’d always ask, and she’d nudge her elbow into my ribs and say something silly like, “Because you have such long toes, of course.”)

A knot’s forming in my throat. I walk over to the angel and when I’m finished wishing my second wish—you always get three wishes, right?—I join Grandma in front of the painting. Not Grandma. Grandma’s ghost. There’s a difference. Grandma’s ghost only knows things about her life that I know. Questions about Grandpa Sweetwine—he left when Grandma was pregnant with Dad and never came back—go unanswered like they did when she was alive. Lots of questions go unanswered. Mom used to say when you look at art, it’s half seeing, half dreaming. Same with ghosts, maybe.

“Meanwhile, this is one hell of a kiss,” she says.

“Sure is.”

We both sigh into our own thoughts, mine, much to my distress, becoming R-rated, Oscar-rated. I really don’t want to be thinking about him, but I am . . .

“What’s it like to be kissed like that?” I ask her. Even though I’ve kissed a bunch of boys, it never ever felt like this painting looks.

Before she can answer me, I hear, “I’d be more than happy to show you. If you’d break the boycott, that is. Give it a go, anyway. Even if you are barking mad.” I pull my hand away from my mouth—when had it crept up to my lips as a substitute for his?—and inch around to see that Oscar has jumped out of my mind and is standing in full flesh form on the landing of the loft. He’s leaning (a sexy lanky front forward one this time) on the railing with his camera focused on me. “Thought it only fair I pipe in before things went any further with that hand of yours.”

No.

I flail in place, suddenly finding my skin extremely confining. “I didn’t know anyone was here!”

“Quite apparent,” he says, trying not to laugh. “Quite, quite apparent.”

Oh no. How crazy must I have looked chattering away with the air? Heat pours into my face. How much of that conversation did he hear? Well, conversation, so to speak. Oh oh oh. And how long had I been making out with the hand? Does he know I was thinking about him? Kissing him? He continues. “Very fortunate for me. These zoom lenses. They miss nothing. Hell, oranges—who knew? Could’ve saved a bundle on cologne, candlelit dinners, et cetera, et cetera.”