I’ll Give You the Sun(58)
Author: Jandy Nelson

The third photo is of me, taken the same day but before I said he could take photos of me. He must’ve been stealth shooting. It’s the moment when I put my finger to my lips to shush him and my grin’s as law-breaking as his. The sticky says: She said you’d be a bit odd. He made a smiley face. Forgive me, don’t mean to offend, but you are bizarre.

Ha! He no offense, but–ed me, English-style.

It’s like his camera has found this other girl, one I wish I could be.

The next photo is of me taken today in the mailroom talking to Grandma Sweetwine, talking to no one. There’s no denying how completely empty the room is, how alone I am, how marooned. I swallow.

But the sticky note says: She said you would feel like family.

So he came up here to print photos and write these messages after he left me downstairs? He must’ve wanted to tell me these things even as he fled like his feet were on fire.

If you dream you’re taking a bath, you will fall in love

If you stumble going upstairs, you will fall in love

If you walk into someone’s room and find countless pictures of yourself with lovely notes attached to them, you will fall in love

I sit down, not quite believing any of this, that he might really like me too.

I pick up the last photo in the series. It’s of us kissing. Yes, kissing. He blurred out the background and added wild swirling color to everything around us so that we’re . . . exactly like the couple in the painting! How’d he do it? He must’ve used a photo he took of me kissing my hand and then manipulated one of himself into the image.

The sticky on this one reads: You asked what it would be like. This is what it would will be like. I don’t want to be just friends.

I don’t either.

Meeting your soul mate is like walking into a familiar house. I do recognize everything. I could find my way around in the dark. The bible rules.

I pick up the photograph of the kiss. I’m going to take it to La Lune and tell him I don’t want to be just friends either—

Then footsteps clomping up the steps, loud and hurried, mixed with laughter. I hear Oscar say, “Love when they overstaff. The extra helmet is right up here. And you can wear my jacket. It’s going to be cold on the bike.”

“So glad we finally get to hang out.” It’s a girl’s voice. Not Sophia’s from Transylvania either. Oh no, please. Something in my chest is collapsing. And I have about one second to make a decision. I choose the bad movie option, diving for the closet and shutting myself in before Oscar’s boots are stomping across the room. I do not like the way this girl said hang out. Not one bit. It was definitely code for hook up. Definitely code for kissing his lips, his closed eyelids, his scars, the tattoo of the beautiful blue horse.

Oscar: I could’ve sworn I left my jacket here.

Girl: Who’s she? She’s pretty.

Shuffling, shuffling. Is he sweeping the photos of me from sight?

Girl (voice tight): Is she your girlfriend?

Oscar: No, no. She’s nobody. It’s just a project for school.

Knife stab, center chest.

Girl: You sure? That’s a lot of pictures of one girl.

Oscar: Really, she’s nobody at all. Hey, come here. Sit on my lap.

Come here, sit on my lap?

Did I say knife? It’s an ice pick.

This time I’m certain no donuts are involved in the intimate sounds I’m hearing. This time I’m also certain I’m not misconstruing friendship for romance like I did with Sophia. I don’t understand. I don’t. How can the same guy who took those photos of me and wrote those notes to me be making out with another girl on the other side of this door? I hear him say the name Brooke in between heavy breaths. This is hell. This has to be karmic retribution for the last time I was in a closet I shouldn’t have been in.

I can’t stay in here.

Nobody-at-all pushes open the closet door. The girl springs out of Oscar’s lap like a crazed cat. She has long tumbling brown hair and almond-shaped eyes that are popping out of her head at the sight of me. She’s buttoning her shirt with frenzied fingers.

“CJ?” Oscar exclaims. There’s lipstick all over the bottom of his face. Again. “What’re you doing up here? In there?” Definitely a valid question. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the capacity for speech. And, I believe, for movement as well. I feel pinned to this awful moment like a dead insect. His eyes have landed on my chest. I realize I’m hugging the photograph of the kiss to me. “You saw,” he says.

“Nobody at all, huh?” the girl named Brooke says, picking up her bag from the floor and slinging it over her shoulder in preparation, it seems, for a quick, angry exit.

“Wait,” he says to her, but then his eyes dart back to me. “G.’s note?” he says, something dawning in his face. “You put it in my jacket?”

It hadn’t occurred to me he’d recognize Guillermo’s handwriting, but of course.

“What note?” I squeak out. Then I tell the girl, “I’m sorry. Really. I was just, oh I don’t know what I was doing in there, but there’s nothing between us. Nothing at all.” I find my legs are working enough to get me down the stairs.

I’m halfway across the mailroom when I hear Oscar from the stairs. “Check the other pockets.” I don’t turn around, just push down the hallway, through the door, then down the path, landing on the sidewalk, panting, sick to my stomach. I forge up the street on legs so weak and wobbly I can’t believe they’re carrying me. Then when I’m about a block away, throwing all dignity to the wind, I start checking the pockets of the jacket, finding nothing but a film canister, candy wrappers, a pen. Unless . . . I run my hands over the inside lining and there’s a zipper. I unzip it, reach in and pull out a piece of paper, carefully folded up. It looks like it’s been there a while. I open it. It’s a color copy of one of the photos of me in the church. The one with the law-breaking grin. He keeps me with him?

But wait. How can it matter? It can’t. It can’t matter if he chose to be with someone else anyway, to be with her right after writing those amazing notes to me, right after what happened between us on the floor of the jail cell room—not that I know what happened, but something did, something real, the laughing as well as the very intense rest of it when I had this sense there might be a key somewhere somehow that could set us both free. I really did.

And then: Nobody at all. And: Come here, sit on my lap.

I imagine him inhaling Brooke, inhaling girl after girl, like Guillermo said, like he’s done to me, so now he can exhale and blow me to smithereens.