I’ll Give You the Sun(61)
Author: Jandy Nelson

No naked English guy.

I watch the artist as he goes from student to student, standing behind each one and peering down at their work with a cold hard stare. I tense up as if he’s looking at my sketches. He’s not pleased. All at once, he claps his hands and everyone stops drawing. Through the window I hear muffled words as he becomes increasingly animated and his hands begin to glide around like Malaysian flying frogs. I want to know what he’s telling them. I need to know.

Finally, they resume drawing. He grabs a pencil and pad off a table and joins them, saying the following so loudly and with so much rocket fuel in his voice I hear it through the window, “Sketch like it matters, people. No time to waste, nothing to lose. We are remaking the world, nothing less, understand?”

Just like Mom says. And yes, I do understand. My heart is speeding. I totally understand.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Remakes World Before World Remakes Boy)

He sits down and begins sketching with the group. I’ve never seen anything like the way his hand races back and forth across the pad, the way his eyes seem to suck in every morsel of the models posing before him. My stomach’s in my throat as I try to figure out what he’s doing, as I study the way he holds the pencil, the way he is the pencil. I don’t even need to see his sketchpad to know the genius that’s on it.

Until this moment, I didn’t realize how badly I sucked. How far I have to go. I really might not get in to CSA. The Ouija Board was right.

I stumble down the fire escape, lightheaded, unsteady. In one split second I saw everything I could be, everything I want to be. And all that I’m not.

The sidewalk has risen up and I’m sliding down it. I’m not even fourteen, I tell myself. I have years and years to get good. But I bet Picasso was already hella good at my age. What have I been thinking? I totally freaking blow. I’m never going to get in to CSA. I’m so stuck in this toilet-licking conversation in my head, I almost fly past the red car parked out front that looks just like Mom’s car. But it couldn’t be. What in the world would she be doing all the way over here? I glance at the plates—it is Mom’s car. I swivel around. Not only is it Mom’s car, but Mom’s in it, bent over the passenger seat. What’s she doing?

I knock on the window.

She springs up, but doesn’t seem as surprised to see me as I am to see her. She doesn’t seem surprised at all, in fact.

She rolls down the window, says, “You scared me, honey.”

“What were you doing bent over like that?” I ask instead of the more obvious question: What are you doing here?

“I dropped something.” She looks strange. Her eyes are too bright. There’s sweat on her lip. And she’s dressed like a fortune-teller, with a glittery purple scarf around her neck and a yellow river of a dress with a red sash. On her wrists are color bangles. Except the times when she wears one of Grandma’s Floating Dresses, she usually dresses like a black-and-white movie, not a circus.

“What?” I ask.

“What what?” she asks back, confused.

“What did you drop?”

“Oh, my earring.”

Both her ears have earrings in them. She sees me see this. “Another earring, I wanted to change pairs.”

I nod, pretty sure she’s lying to me, pretty sure she saw me and was hiding from me and that’s why she didn’t seem surprised to see me. But why would she hide from me?

“Why?” I ask.

“Why what?”

“Why did you want to change pairs?”

We need a translator. I’ve never needed a translator with Mom before.

She sighs. “I don’t know, I just did. Get in, honey.” She says this like we had a plan all along for her to pick me up here. This is so weird.

On the way home, the car is a box of tension and I don’t know why. It takes me two blocks to ask her what she was doing in that part of town. She tells me there’s a very good dry cleaner on Day Street. And there are about five closer to our house, I don’t say. But she hears anyway because she explains further, “It was one of the dresses Grandma made for me. My favorite. I wanted to make sure it was in very good hands, the best hands, and this cleaner is the best.” I look for the pink receipt, which she usually clips to the dash. Not there. But maybe it’s in her purse? I guess this could be true.

It takes another two blocks for her to say what she should’ve said immediately. “You’re a long way from home.”

I tell her I went for a walk and ended up there, not wanting to tell her I hopped a fence, climbed a fire escape, and stalked some genius, who made it very clear she’s wrong about me and my talent.

She’s about to question me further, I can tell, but then her phone vibrates on her lap. She looks at the number and presses the button to ignore it. “Work,” she says, glancing my way. I’ve never known her to perspire like this. There are darkened circles in the yellow fabric under her arms like she’s a construction worker.

She squeezes my knee with her hand when we pass the CSA studio buildings, now so familiar to me. “Soon,” she says.

Then it all becomes clear. She followed me. She’s worried about me because I’ve been such a hermit crab. There’s no other explanation that makes sense. And she hid and lied to me about the dry cleaner because she didn’t want me to freak out about her spying on me and invading my privacy. I relax into this explanation.

Until she takes the second instead of the third left up the hill, and near the top, pulls into a driveway. I stare in disbelief as she gets out, saying, “Well, aren’t you coming in?” She’s almost to the door, keys in hand, when she realizes she’s on her way into some other house, where some other family lives.

(PORTRAIT: Mom Sleepwalking into Another Life)

“Where’s my head?” she says, when she gets back in the car. This could be funny, it should be, but it’s not. Something’s not right. I can feel it in every bone, but I don’t know what it is. She doesn’t start up the engine either. We stay in this other family’s driveway in silence, staring out at the ocean, where the sun has made its gleaming road to the horizon. It looks like there are stars on the water and I want to take a walk on it. It totally sucks that only Jesus gets to walk on water. I’m about to say this to Mom when I realize the car has filled up with the thickest, heaviest kind of sadness and it’s not mine. I had no idea she was so sad. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t noticed Jude and I have gotten a divorce.