I’ll Give You the Sun(75)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Then he threw himself off Devil’s Drop and almost drowned that day, almost died, and my anger toward him got wild and thrashing, monstrous and dangerous.

So maybe you’re right, I yell at Mom and Grandma in my mind. Maybe that’s why I did it.

I’m pounding on the stone now, cracking into it, opening it all up.

Opening it all up.

Noah’s application to CSA had been sitting on the kitchen counter radiating genius since the week before Mom died. He and Mom had sealed the envelope together for luck. They didn’t know I was watching from the door.

Three weeks after Mom’s accident, a week after Noah jumped off the cliff, the night before the CSA application was due, I wrote the application essays, stapled them to a couple dress patterns, added two sample dresses. What else did I have to submit? My sand women had all washed away.

Dad drove us to the post office to mail off the applications. We couldn’t find a parking spot so Dad and Noah waited in the car while I went in. That’s when I did it. I just did it.

I only mailed mine.

I took from my brother the thing he wanted most in the world. What kind of person does that?

Not that it matters, but I went back to the post office the next day, ran all the way there, but the garbage had been emptied. All his dreams got taken out with the trash. Mine went straight to CSA.

I kept telling myself I would tell Noah and Dad. I would tell them at breakfast, after school, at dinner, tomorrow, on Wednesday. I would tell Noah in time so he could reapply, but I didn’t. I was so ashamed—the kind that feels like suffocating—and the longer I waited, the more the shame grew and the more impossible it got to admit what I’d done. Guilt grew too, like a disease, like every disease. There weren’t enough diseases in Dad’s library. Days kept passing, then weeks, and then, it was too late. I was too scared if I confessed, I’d lose Dad and Noah forever, too cowardly to face it, to fix it, to make it right.

This is why my mother destroys everything I make. This is why she can’t forgive me.

When CSA announced the freshmen class on their website, his name wasn’t on the list. Mine was. When my acceptance letter came, I waited for him to ask about his rejection letter, but he didn’t. He’d already destroyed all his artwork by then. And sometime before this, he must’ve sent in pictures of my sand sculptures and gotten me in.

The world has gone dark. Guillermo’s standing in front of me blocking the sun. He takes the hammer and chisel out of my hands, which have long ago stopped carving. He takes off his scarf, shakes it out, and wipes the stripe of brow between my hat and goggles. “I don’t think you are okay,” he says. “Sometimes you work the stone, sometimes the stone works you. I think today the rock win.”

I slip down my face mask, and say, “So this is what you meant when you said what slumbers in here”—I touch my chest—“slumbers in here.” I touch the rock.

“This is what I meant,” he says. “I think we have a coffee?”

“No,” I say quickly. “I mean, thank you, but I need to keep working.”

And that’s what I do. I work for hours, obsessively, frenetically, unable to stop cutting into the stone, Grandma and Mom chanting at me with every hit: You crushed his dreams. You crushed his dreams. You crushed his dreams. Until for the first time since she died, Mom materializes and is standing before me, her hair a blaze of black fire, her eyes damning me.

“And you crushed mine!” I yell at her in my head before she vanishes again into thin air.

Because isn’t that also true. Isn’t it? Over and over again, day after day, all I wanted was for her to see me, to really see me. Not to forget me at the museum, like I didn’t exist, and go home without me. Not to call off a contest, certain of my failure, before she even looked at my drawings. Not to keep reaching inside me to turn down the light while at the same time reaching into Noah to turn his to full brightness. Always as if I were nothing but some stupid slutty girl named that girl. Invisible to her in every other way!

But what if I don’t need her permission, her approval, her praise to be who I want to be and do what I love? What if I’m in charge of my own damn light switch?

I put down the tools, take off the goggles, the mask, the plastic suit. I peel off my hat and toss it on the table. I’m so sick of being invisible. Sunshine tosses its giddy greedy fingers through my hair. Off comes my sweatshirt and I have arms again. The breeze welcomes them, skidding over the surface of my skin, raising hair after hair, tingling, awakening every exposed inch of me. What if my reasons for not sending Noah’s application had more to do with Mom and me than it did him and me?

To awaken your spirit, throw a stone into your reflection in still water

(I never believed Noah and I shared a soul, that mine was half a tree with its leaves on fire, like he said. I never felt like my soul was something that could be seen. It felt like motion, like taking off, like swimming toward the horizon or diving off a cliff or making flying women out of sand, out of anything.)

I close my eyes for a moment and then it’s as if I’ve woken from the deepest slumber, as if someone has extricated me from granite. Because I realize: It doesn’t matter if Noah hates me, if he never forgives me. It doesn’t matter if I lose him and Dad forever. It just doesn’t. I have to uncrush his dream. That’s all that matters.

I go into the studio and climb the stairs to Oscar’s room, where there’s a computer. I turn it on, log onto my account, and write an email to Sandy at CSA asking if we can meet before school on Wednesday, the first day back after break. I tell him it’s urgent and that my brother will be coming to the meeting too with a painting portfolio that will blow his mind.

I’m going to give up my spot. It’s what I should’ve done every single day for the last two years.

I press SEND and the feeling is unmistakable: I’m free.

I’m me.

I text Noah: We need to talk. It’s important! Because he better get painting. He has four days to put a portfolio together. I lean back in the chair, feeling like I’ve emerged from the darkest cave into bountiful blinding sunlight. Only then do I look around the loft. At Oscar’s bed, his books, his shirts. Disappointment takes hold of me—but there’s nothing to do about it. The coward in the tough leather jacket has made it very clear how he feels about the coward in the invisibility uniform.

As I get up to leave, I spot Guillermo’s note that I gave Oscar on the bedside table by the photograph of his mother. I take it with me downstairs, and once I put it back in the notepad in Guillermo’s cyclone room where it belongs, I go outside and ask him to teach me how to use the diamond blade circular saw. He does.