I’ll Give You the Sun(6)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Instead, I think about today.

How I went around from painting to painting asking each to eat me and each did.

How my skin fit the whole time, didn’t once bunch up at my ankles or squeeze my head into a pin.

Mom’s drum roll on the table brings me back. “So, let’s see those sketchbooks,” she says, excited. I did four pastel drawings from the permanent collection—a Chagall, a Franz Marc, and two Picassos. I picked those because I could tell the paintings were looking at me as hard as I was looking at them. She’d said not to feel like we had to copy exactly. I didn’t copy at all. I shook up the originals in my head and let them out all covered in me.

“I’ll go first,” I say, shoving my book into Mom’s hands. Jude’s eye-roll is a 7.2 on the Richter this time, causing the whole building to sway. I don’t care, I can’t wait. Something happened when I was drawing today. I think my eyes got swapped for better ones. I want Mom to notice.

I watch her page through slowly, then put on the granny glasses that hang around her neck and go through the drawings again, and then again. At one point she looks up at me like I’ve turned into a star-nosed mole and then goes back to it.

All the café sounds: The voices, the whirring of the espresso machine, the clink and clatter of glasses and dishes go silent as I watch her index finger hover over each part of the page. I’m seeing through her eyes and what I’m seeing is this: They’re good. I start to get a rocket launch feeling. I’m totally going to get into CSA! And I still have a whole year to make sure of it. I already asked Mr. Grady, the art teacher, to teach me to mix oils after school and he said yes. When I think Mom’s finally done, she goes back to the beginning and starts again. She can’t stop! Her face is being swarmed by happiness. Oh, I’m reeling around in here.

Until I’m under siege. A psychic air raid discharging from Jude. (PORTRAIT: Green with Envy) Skin: lime. Hair: chartreuse. Eyes: forest. All of her: green, green, green. I watch her open a packet of sugar, spill some on the table, then press a fingerprint of the crystals into the cover of her sketchbook. Hogwash from Grandma’s bible for good luck. I feel a coiling in my stomach. I should grab my sketchbook out of Mom’s hands already, but I don’t. I can’t.

Every time Grandma S. read Jude’s and my palms, she’d tell us that we have enough jealousy in our lines to ruin our lives ten times over. I know she’s right about this. When I draw Jude and me with see-through skin, there are always rattlesnakes in our bellies. I only have a few. Jude had seventeen at last count.

Finally, Mom closes my book and hands it back to me. She says to us, “Contests are silly. Let’s spend our Saturdays for the next year appreciating art and learning craft. Sound good, guys?”

Before even opening Jude’s sketchbook, she says this.

Mom picks up her hot chocolate but doesn’t drink. “Unbelievable,” she says, shaking her head slowly. Has she forgotten Jude’s book altogether? “I see a Chagall sensibility with a Gauguin palette, but the point of view seems wholly your own at the same time. And you’re so young. It’s extraordinary, Noah. Just extraordinary.”

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Dives into a Lake of Light)

“Really?” I whisper.

“Really,” she says seriously. “I’m stunned.” Something in her face is different—it’s like a curtain’s been parted in the middle of it. I sneak a glance at Jude. I can tell she’s crumpled up in a corner of herself, just like I do in emergencies. There’s a crawlspace in me that no one can get to, no matter what. I had no idea she had one too.

Mom doesn’t notice. Usually she notices everything. But she’s sitting there not noticing anything, like she’s dreaming right in front of us.

Finally she snaps out of it, but it’s too late. “Jude, honey, let’s see that book, can’t wait to see what you’ve come up with.”

“That’s okay,” Jude says in the tinsely voice, her book already buried deep in her bag.

Jude and I play a lot of games. Her favorites are How Would You Rather Die? (Jude: freeze, me: burn) and The Drowning Game. The Drowning Game goes like this: If Mom and Dad were drowning, who would we save first? (Me: Mom, duh. Jude: depends on her mood.) And there’s the other variation: If we were drowning, who would Dad save first? (Jude.) For thirteen years, Mom’s stumped us. We had absolutely no idea who she’d dredge out of the water first.

Until now.

And without sharing a glance, we both know it.

THE HISTORY OF LUCK

Jude

Age 16

3 years later

Here I am.

Standing next to my sculpture in the studio at CSA with a four-leaf clover in my pocket. I spent all morning on hands and knees in a clover patch outside school, all for nothing—it was picked clean. But then, eureka! I super-glued a fourth leaf onto an ordinary old three-leafer, wrapped it in cellophane, and slipped it into my sweatshirt pocket right beside the onion.

I’m a bit of a bible thumper. Other people have the Gideon, I have Grandma Sweetwine’s. Some sample passages:

A person in possession of a four-leaf clover is able to thwart all sinister influences

(Art school is rife with sinister influences. Especially today—
not only is it my critique day, I have a meeting with my advisor
and I might be expelled.)

To avoid serious illness, keep an onion in your pocket

(Check. Can’t be too careful.)

If a boy gives a girl an orange, her love for him will multiply

(Jury’s out. No boy has ever given me an orange.)

The feet of ghosts never touch the ground

(We’ll get to this. Soon.)

The bell rings.

And there they are. The other clay second-years. Every last one of them ready to suffocate me with a pillow. Oops, I mean: staring dumbfounded at my sculpture. The assignment was to do another self-portrait. I went abstract, as in: blob. Degas had dancers, I have blobs. Broken, glued-together blobs. This is my eighth.

“What’s working here?” asks Sandy Ellis, master ceramicist, clay instructor, and my advisor. The way he begins every critique.

No one says a word. The proper California School of the Aliens feedback sandwich starts and ends with praise—in between, people say the terrible things they really think.

I scan the room without moving my head. The sophomore clay crew is a pretty good sampling of the CSA student body: freak-flags of every variety flying proud and loud. Normal run-of-the-mill people like me—except for a few discreet tics, sure, who doesn’t have something?—are the exception.