I’ll Give You the Sun(59)
Author: Jandy Nelson

I am so stupid.

They do make love stories for girls with black hearts after all. They go like this.

I’m not even a block away—the picture balled up in my hand—when I hear someone behind me. I turn around, certain that it’s Oscar, hating the fountaining of hope in my chest, only to find Noah: wild-eyed, unhinged, no padlocks anywhere on him, looking petrified, looking like he has something to tell me.

THE INVISIBLE MUSEUM

Noah

Ages 131/2–14

The day after Brian leaves for boarding school, I sneak into Jude’s room while she’s in the shower and see a chat on the computer.

Spaceboy: Thinking about you

Rapunzel: Me too

Spaceboy: Come here right this minute

Rapunzel: Haven’t perfected my teleporting

Spaceboy: I’ll get on it

I blow up the entire country. No one freaking notices.

They’re in love. Like black vultures. And termites. Yes, turtle doves and swans aren’t the only animals that mate for life. Ugly, toilet-licking termites and death-eating vultures do too.

How could she do this? How could he?

It’s like having explosives on board 24/7, the way I feel. I can’t believe when I touch things they don’t blow to bits. I can’t believe I was so way off.

I thought, I don’t know, I thought wrong.

So wrong.

I do what I can. I turn each of Jude’s doodles I find around the house into a murder scene. I use the most hideous deaths from her stupid How Would You Rather Die? game. A girl being shoved out a window, knifed, drowned, buried alive, strangled by her own hands. I spare no detail.

I also put slugs in her socks.

Dip her toothbrush in the toilet bowl. Every morning.

Pour white vinegar into the glass of water by her bed.

But the worst part is that for the few minutes every hour when I’m not psychopathic, I know that to be with Brian: I would give all ten fingers. I would give anything.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Rowing Madly Back Through Time)

A week passes. Two. The house gets so big it takes hours for me to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen and back, so big that even with binoculars, I can’t make out Jude across a table or room. I don’t think our paths will ever cross again. When she tries to talk to me over the miles and miles of betrayal between us, I put in ear buds like I’m listening to music, when really, the other end is attached to my hand in my pocket.

I never want to speak to her again and make this very clear. Her voice is static. She is static.

I keep thinking Mom will realize that we’re at war and act like the United Nations as she’s done in the past, but she doesn’t.

(PORTRAIT: Disappearing Mother)

Then one morning, I hear voices in the hallway: Dad talking to a girl who isn’t Jude, who I quickly realize is Heather. I’ve barely given a speck of brain space to her, even after what happened between us in the closet. That horrible lie of a kiss. I’m sorry, Heather, I say in my head as I pad silently over to the window, sorry, so sorry, as I lift it as quietly as possible. I climb out, falling to safety below the sill as I hear the knock on the door and Dad saying my name. It’s all I can think to do.

Halfway down the hill, a car peels by me and I want to stick out my thumb. Because I should hitchhike to Mexico or Rio like a real artist. Or to Connecticut. Yes. Just show up where Brian is in that dorm—in a shower full of wet naked guys. The thought comes out of nowhere and all the explosives on board detonate at once. It’s worse than thinking about him and Jude in the closet. And better. And much worse.

When I emerge out of the nuclear mushroom of this thinking, burnt to a crisp, I’m at CSA. My feet somehow got here on their own. Summer classes have been over for more than two weeks and lots of the students who board are returning. They look like highly functioning graffiti. I watch them lug suitcases and portfolios and boxes out of car trunks, hug parents who are peering at each other with eyes that say, Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I vacuum it all in. The girls with blue green red purple hair shrieking into each other’s arms. A couple of tall weedy guys leaning against a wall smoking and laughing and radiating cool. A ragtag group with dreads who look like they just tumbled out of a dryer. A guy walking past me with a mustache on one side of his face and a beard on the other. So awesome. They not only make art, they are art.

I remember then the conversation I had with the naked English guy at the party and decide to take my burnt remains on a recon mission to the inland flats of Lost Cove, where he said that barking mad sculptor had a studio.

Before too long, a few seconds later maybe—because trying not to think about Brian turns me into a superhuman speed-walker—I’m standing in front of 225 Day Street. It’s a big warehouse and the door’s half-open, but there’s no way I can walk on in, can I? No. I don’t even have my sketchpad. I want to, though, want to do something, have to do something. Like kiss Brian. The idea snags me and then I can’t get out of it. I totally should’ve tried. But what if he’d punched me? Cracked my head open with a meteorite? Oh, but what if he hadn’t? What if he’d kissed me back? Because I’d catch him staring at me sometimes when he didn’t think I was paying attention to him. I was always paying attention to him.

I blew it. I did. I should’ve kissed him. One kiss, then I could die. Well, wait, no freaking way, if I’m going to die, I want to do more than kiss. Way way more. I’m sweating. And hard. I sit on the sidewalk, try to breathe, just breathe.

I pick up a stone and toss it into the street, trying to mimic his bionic wrist movement and after three pathetic tries, my whole thinking flips over. There was an electric fence between us. He put it up. Kept it up. He wanted Courtney. And he wanted Jude from the first moment he saw her. I just didn’t want to believe it. He’s a popular douchebag jock who likes girls. He’s the red giant. I’m the yellow dwarf. The end.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Everyone Lives Happily Ever After Except for the Yellow Dwarf)

I shake it off, all of it. All that matters is the worlds I can make, not this toilet-licking one I have to live in. In the worlds I make, anything can happen. Anything. And if—when—I get into CSA I’ll learn how to make it all come out half as decent on paper as it is in my head.

I stand, suddenly realizing I could totally climb the fire escape that scales the side of the warehouse. It leads to a landing where there’s a bank of windows, which must look down on something. All I’d have to do is hop the outside fence without anyone seeing me. Well, why not? Jude and I used to sneak over tons of fences so we could visit various horses or cows or goats or a certain madrone tree we both married when we were five (Jude was also the minister).