I’ll Give You the Sun(77)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Then the mad dash home, with tears biting my cheeks, my skin crawling, my stomach in shambles, heading straight for Mom. I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.

I needed my mother.

I needed my mother.

There’s been an accident, that’s what Dad told me the moment I burst into the house.

There’d been an accident.

That’s when I threw my hands over Noah’s ears.

Dad took them off and held them in his.

So even as the police officer told us these unimaginable, world-breaking things, I was still crawling around in the wrongness of what I’d just done. It was caked along with sand in every pore of my body. The horrible wrong scent of it was still in my hair, on my skin, inside my nose, so every inhalation carried it deeper inside me. For weeks afterward, no matter how many times I showered, no matter how hard I scrubbed, no matter what kind of soap I used—I tried lavender and grapefruit and honeysuckle and rose—I couldn’t get it off me, couldn’t get Zephyr off me. Once, I went to a department store and used every single tester perfume on the counter, but it was still there. It’s always there. It’s still there. The smell of that afternoon with Zephyr, the smell of my mother’s death, one and the same.

Zephyr steps out of the glare of Franklyn’s headlights. This is how I think of him: like his namesake, the raven, a harbinger of death and doom. He’s a human hex, a tall blond column of darkness. Zephyr Ravens is an eclipse.

“So Noah went home?” I ask. “How long ago?”

He shakes his head. “No. Not home. He took off up there, Jude.” He points to the very top of the bluff to a ledge that doesn’t even have a name, because who would dare it? The hang-gliders use it occasionally, but that’s it. It’s too high to jump, probably double Dead Man’s, and below it there’s a shelf that juts out so if you don’t leap far enough and clear it, you slam into that before you ever hit water. I’ve only heard of one kid who’s ever jumped it. He didn’t make it.

My internal organs are failing, falling, one by one.

Zephyr says, “Got a text. They’re playing some drinking game. Loser jumps and apparently your brother’s losing on purpose. I was heading up there to try and stop it.”

Next thing, I’m diving through the crowd, knocking over drinks, people, not caring about anything except getting to the cliff path, the quickest way up the bluff. I hear Grandma’s voice blowing like wind at my back. She’s right behind me on the trail. Branches are cracking, her heavy footsteps hitting the path moments after mine, then I remember she doesn’t have footsteps. I stop and Zephyr barrels into me, grabbing my shoulders so I don’t careen face forward into the ground.

“Jesus,” I say, jumping quickly out of his grip, away from the smell of him, again so close.

“Oh man, sorry.”

“Stop following me, Zephyr. Go back, please.” I sound as desperate as I feel. The last thing I need in this moment is him.

“I’m on this trail every day. I know it so—”

“Like I don’t.”

“You’re going to need help.”

This is true. However, not from him. Anyone but him. Except it’s too late, he’s already brushed past me and is forging ahead into the moonlit dark.

After Mom died, he came over a few times, tried to get me back on my board, but the ocean had dried up as far as I was concerned. He also tried to be with me again in the guise of comforting me. Two words: as if. And not just him. So did Fry and Ryder and Buzzy and the rest of them, but not in the guise of anything except harassment. Incessantly. They’d all become jerks overnight, especially Franklyn, who was pissed and posted obscene things about me on the Hideaway message board and graffitied Slutever Sweetwine in the beach bathroom, rewriting it every time someone—Noah?—crossed it out.

Do you really want to be that girl? Mom had asked me over and over that summer and fall as my skirts got shorter, my heels higher, my lipstick darker, my heart angrier and angrier at her. Do you really want to be that girl? she asked me the night before she died—the last words she ever said to me—when she saw what I was wearing to go to the party with Zephyr (not that she knew I was going to a party with Zephyr).

Then she was dead and I was really and truly that girl.

Zephyr’s setting a fast pace. My breath’s tumbling around in my chest as we climb and climb and climb in silence.

Until he says, “I still got his back like I promised you.”

Once, long before we did what we did, I asked Zephyr to look out for Noah. Hideaway Hill can be very Lord of the Flies and in my seventh-grade mind, Zephyr was like the sheriff, so I asked for his help.

“Got your back too, Jude.”

I ignore this, then can’t. The words come out shrill and accusatory, sharp as darts. “I was too young!”

I think I hear him suck in air, but it’s hard to know because of the waves, loud and relentless, crashing into the rocks, eroding the continent.

As am I, kicking up dirt, kicking the shit out of the continent, driving my feet into the ground with every step. I was in eighth grade, he in eleventh—a whole year older than I even am now. Not that he should treat any girl at any age like that, like a dishrag. And then in the lightning bolt to the head kind of way, it occurs to me that Zephyr Ravens is not a harbinger of anything at all. He’s not bad luck—he’s a terminal burnout dimwit loser asshole, offense intended.

And what we did didn’t cause bad luck either—it caused endless inner-ick and regret and anger and—

I spit on him. Not metaphorically. I hit his jacket, his ass, then bean one right in the back of his mongrel head. That one he feels, but thinks it’s some kind of bug he can shoo off with his hand. I nail him again. He turns around.

“What the—? Are you spitting at me?” he asks, incredulous, his fingers in his hair.

“Don’t do it again,” I say. “To anyone.”

“Jude, I always thought you—”

“I don’t care what you thought then or what you think now,” I say. “Just don’t do it again.”

I blow past him and double our speed. Now I feel like a badass, thank you very much.

Maybe Mom was wrong about that girl after all. Because that girl spits on guys who treat her badly. Maybe it’s that girl who’s been missing. Maybe it’s that girl breaking her way out of that rock at Guillermo’s. Maybe it’s that girl who can see it’s not my fault that a car with my mother in it lost control no matter what I did with this jerkoff beforehand. I didn’t bring the bad luck to us, no matter how much it felt that way. It brought itself. It brings itself.