The Sky is Everywhere(10)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Who is this guy? I’ve talked more to him in this tree than I have to anyone at school since I’ve been back. But how could he have read Wuthering Heights and still fall for Rachel Bitchzilla? Maybe it’s because she’s been to Fronce. Or because she pretends to like music that no one else has heard of, like the wildly popular Throat Singers of Tuva.

“I saw you the other day,” he says, picking up the apple. He tosses it with one hand, catches it with the other. “By The Great Meadow. I was playing my guitar in the field. You were across the way. It looked like you were writing a note or something against a car, but then you just dropped the piece of paper—”

“Are you stalking me?” I ask, trying to keep my sudden delight at that notion out of my voice.

“Maybe a little.” He stops tossing the apple. “And maybe I’m curious about something.”

“Curious?” I ask. “About what?”

He doesn’t answer, starts picking at moss on a branch. I notice his hands, his long fingers full of calluses from guitar strings.

“What?” I say again, dying to know what made him curious enough to follow me up a tree.

“It’s the way you play the clarinet…”

The delight drains out of me. “Yeah?”

“Or the way you don’t play it, actually.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, knowing exactly what he means.

“I mean you’ve got loads of technique. Your fingering’s quick, your tonguing fast, your range of tones, man … but it’s like it all stops there. I don’t get it.” He laughs, seemingly unaware of the bomb he just detonated. “It’s like you’re sleep-playing or something.”

Blood rushes to my cheeks. Sleep-playing! I feel caught, a fish in a net. I wish I’d quit band altogether like I’d wanted to. I look off at the redwoods, each one rising to the sky surrounded only by its loneliness. He’s staring at me, I can feel it, waiting for a response, but one is not forthcoming – this is a no trespassing zone.

“Look,” he says cautiously, finally getting a clue that his charms have worn off. “I followed you out here because I wanted to see if we could play together.”

“Why?” My voice is louder and more upset than I want it to be. A slow familiar panic is taking over my body.

“I want to hear John Lennon play for real, I mean, who wouldn’t, right?”

His joke crashes and burns between us.

“I don’t think so,” I say as the bell rings.

“Look—” he starts, but I don’t let him finish.

“I don’t want to play with you, okay?”

“Fine.” He hurls the apple into the air. Before it hits the ground and before he jumps out of the tree, he says, “It wasn’t my idea anyway.”

I wake to Ennui, Sarah’s Jeep, honking down the road – it’s an ambush. I roll over, look out the window, see her jump out in her favorite black vintage gown and platform combat boots, back-to-blond hair tweaked into a nest, cigarette hanging from blood red lips in a pancake of ghoulish white. I look at the clock: 7.05 a.m. She looks up at me in the window, waves like a windmill in a hurricane.

I pull the covers over my head, wait for the inevitable.

“I’ve come to suck your blood,” she says a few moments later.

I peek out of the covers. “You really do make a stunning vampire.”

“I know.” She leans into the mirror over my dresser, wiping some lipstick off her teeth with her black-nail-polished finger. “It’s a good look for me … Heidi goes goth.” Without the accoutrements, Sarah could play Goldilocks. She’s a sun-kissed beach girl who goes gothgrungepunkhippierockeremocoremetalfreakfashionista-
braingeekboycrazyhiphoprastagirl
istabraingeekboycrazyhiphoprastagirl to keep it under wraps. She crosses the room, stands over me, then pulls a corner of the covers down and hops into bed with me, boots and all.

“I miss you, Len.” Her enormous blue eyes are shining down on me, so sincere and incongruous with her get-up. “Let’s go to breakfast before school. Last day of junior year and all. It’s tradition.”

“Okay,” I say, then add, “I’m sorry I’ve been so awful.”

“Don’t say that, I just don’t know what to do for you. I can’t imagine…” She doesn’t finish, looks around The Sanctum. I see the dread overtake her. “It’s so unbearable…” She stares at Bailey’s bed. “Everything is just as she left it. God, Len.”

“Yeah.” My life catches in my throat. “I’ll get dressed.”

She bites her bottom lip, trying not to cry. “I’ll wait downstairs. I promised Gram I’d talk with her.” She gets out of bed and walks to the door, the leap in her from moments before now a shuffle. I pull the covers back over my head. I know the bedroom is a mausoleum. I know it upsets everyone (except Toby, who didn’t even seem to notice), but I want it like this. It makes me feel like Bailey’s still here or like she might come back.

On the way to town, Sarah tells me about her latest scheme to bag a babe who can talk to her about her favorite existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre. The problem is her insane attraction to lumphead surfers who (not to be prejudicial) are not customarily the most well-versed in French literature and philosophy, and therefore must constantly be exempted from Sarah’s Must-Know-Who-Sartre-Is-or-at-Least-Have-Read-Some-of-D.H.Lawrence-or-at-the-Minimum-One-of-the-Brontës-Preferably-Emily criteria of going out with her.

“There’s an afternoon symposium this summer at the college in French Feminism,” she tells me. “I’m going to go. Want to come?”

I laugh. “That sounds like the perfect place to meet guys.”

“You’ll see,” she says. “The coolest guys aren’t afraid to be feminists, Lennie.”

I look over at her. She’s trying to blow smoke rings, but blowing smoke blobs instead.

I’m dreading telling her about Toby, but I have to, don’t I? Except I’m too chicken, so I go with less damning news.

“I hung out with Joe Fontaine the other day at lunch.”

“You didn’t!”

“I did.”

“No way.”

“Yes way.”

“Nah-uh.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Not possible.

“So possible.”

We have an incredibly high tolerance for yes-no.