I’ll Give You the Sun(68)
Author: Jandy Nelson

“Give it up,” he says. “No way you can beat this. I had to go to an all-day sit with my mom and then sleep on the floor on a mat and eat gross gruel for Christmas dinner. I got a prayer from the monks as my only present. A prayer for peace! I repeat: an all-day sit, me! I couldn’t say anything. Or do anything. For eight hours. And then gruel and a prayer!” He starts laughing and I catch it immediately. “And I had to wear a robe. A fricken dress.” He turns around, lit up like a lantern. “And what’s worse is the whole time, I couldn’t stop thinking about . . .”

I see him tremble. Oh God.

“It was so painful, dude. Luckily we had these weird pillow things on our laps so no one knew. Sucked.” He’s staring at my mouth. “And didn’t suck too.” He turns back to the stars.

I see him shudder again.

My hand goes limp and I drop my pencil. He can’t stop thinking about it either.

He swivels around. “So, who were the ‘them’ you mentioned, anyway?”

It takes me a second but then I understand. “I saw these guys making out at that party.”

His brow furrows. “The party where you hooked up with Heather?”

For months, I’ve been so pissed at him and Jude about something that didn’t happen, it never occurred to me that he could be mad at me about what actually did. Is he still? Is that why he never called or emailed? I want to tell him what really happened. I want to say sorry. Because I am. Instead, I just say, “Yeah, that party. They were . . .”

“What?”

“I don’t know, amazing or something . . .”

“Why?” His talking is turning into breathing. There’s no answer. Really, they were amazing only because they were guys kissing.

I tell him, “I decided I’d give up all my fingers, if . . .”

“If what?” he presses.

I realize I can’t possibly say it aloud but don’t have to because he does. “If it could’ve been us, right? I saw them too.”

It’s a thousand degrees in me.

“It’d be hard to draw with no fingers,” he says.

“I’d manage.”

I close my eyes, unable to contain the feeling inside me and when I open them a second later, it’s like he’s gotten hitched on a hook and I’m the hook. I follow his gaze to my bare stomach—my shirt’s ridden up—then lower to where there’s no hiding how I’m feeling. I think he’s Tasering me or something, because I can’t move.

He swallows, swivels back around to face the computer, and puts a hand on the mouse but doesn’t click the screensaver away. I watch his other hand travel down.

Still looking at the screen, he asks, “Want to?” and I’m a flood in a paper cup.

“Totally,” I say, knowing without a doubt what he means, and then our hands are on our belts, unbuckling. From across the room, I watch his back, unable to see much, but then his neck arches, and I can see his face, his eyes all swimming and wild, locking with mine, and it’s like we’re kissing again, but from across the room this time, kissing even more intensely than in the woods, where our pants stayed on. I didn’t know you could kiss with your eyes. I didn’t know anything. And then the colors are forcing down the walls of the room, the walls of me—

Then, the impossible.

My mother as in my mother bursts in, waving a magazine. I thought I’d locked the door. I could’ve sworn I locked it!

“This is the best essay I’ve ever read on Picasso, you’re going—” Her confused gaze darts from me to Brian. His hands, my hands, fumbling, shoving, zipping.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh. Oh.”

Then the door’s closed and she’s gone, like she was never there, like she hadn’t seen a thing.

• • •

She doesn’t pretend it didn’t happen.

An hour after Brian’s frantic dive-bomb out the window, there’s a knock at my bedroom door. I say nothing, just flip on my desk light so she doesn’t find me sitting in the dark, where I’ve been since he left. I grab a pencil, start to draw, but my hand won’t stop shaking, so I can’t make a decent line.

“Noah, I’m coming in.”

All the blood in my body mad-dashes to my face as the door slowly opens. I want to die.

“I’d like to talk to you, honey,” she says in the same voice she uses when talking to Crazy Charlie, the town loon.

Whatever. Whatever. Whatever, I chant in my head, drilling the pencil into the pad. I’m hunched over the paper now, hugging it practically, so I don’t have to see her. Whole forests are burning out of control inside me. How come she doesn’t know to leave me alone for the next fifty years after what just happened?

Her hand touches my shoulder as she passes. I cringe.

From the bed where she’s sat down, she says, “Love’s so complicated, Noah, isn’t it?”

I go rigid. Why did she say that? Why is she using the word love?

I throw the pencil down.

“It’s okay what you’re feeling. It’s natural.”

A giant No slams through me. How does she know what I’m feeling? How does she know anything about anything? She doesn’t. She can’t. She can’t just barge into my most secret world and then try to show me around it. Get out, I want to holler at her. Get out of my room. Get out of my life. Get out of my paintings. Get out of everything! Blow back to your realm already and leave me alone. How can you take this experience away from me before I’ve even gotten to experience it? I want to say all these things but can’t make any words. I can hardly breathe.

Brian couldn’t either. He was hyperventilating after she left the room. His hands covering his face, his body all contorted, repeating, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” I was wishing he’d say something besides “Oh God!” but when he started talking, I changed my mind.

I’d never seen anyone act like that. He was sweating and pacing and his hands were in his hair like he was going to rip it all out. I thought he was going to take apart the walls, or me. I really thought he might kill me.

“So at my old school,” he said. “There was this kid on the baseball team. People thought, I don’t know. They saw that he went to some website or something.” His inside face had become his outside face and it was all knotted up. “They made it impossible for him to play. Every day, they found another way to mess with him. Then one Friday after school, they locked him in the storage closet.” He winced, as if remembering and I knew. I knew then. “All night long and the whole next day. A tiny, dark, disgusting airless space. His parents thought he was at the away game and someone told the coaches he was sick, so no one even looked for him. No one knew he was trapped in there.” His chest was heaving and I was remembering how he told me he didn’t used to have claustrophobia and now he did. “He was really good too, probably the best player on the team or could have been. And he didn’t even do anything. The guy just went to these sites and someone saw. Do you get it? Do you get what it would mean for me? The assistant captain? I want to be captain next year so maybe I can graduate early. No scholarship. No nothing. These guys aren’t”—he made finger quotes—“evolved. They’re not from Northern California. They don’t do all-day sits or draw pictures.” The dagger went straight in. “It’s brutal in a locker room.”