The Sky is Everywhere(13)
Author: Jandy Nelson

What was it she needed to find?

I put on her clothes
I button one of her frilly shirts
over my own t-shirt.
Or I wrap one, sometimes two,
sometimes all of her diva scarves around my neck.
Or I strip and slip one of her slinkier dresses over my head,
letting the fabric
fall over my skin like water.
I always feel better then,
like she’s holding me.
Then I touch all the things
that haven’t moved since she died:
crumpled up dollars
dredged from a sweaty pocket,
the three bottles of perfume
always with the same amount of liquid in them now,
the Sam Shepherd play
Fool for Love
where her bookmark will never move forward.
I’ve read it for her twice now,
always putting the bookmark back
where it was when I finish—
it kills me
she will never find out
what happens
in the end.

(Found on the inside cover of Wuthering Heights, Clover High library)

Gram spends the night
in front of The Half Mom.
I hear her weeping—
sad
endless
rain.
I sit at the top of the stairs,
know she’s touching
Mom’s cold flat cheek
as she says: I’m sorry
I’m so sorry.
I think a terrible thing.
I think: You should be.
I think: How could you have let this happen?
How could you have let both of
them leave me?

(Found written on the wall of the bathroom at Cecilia’s Bakery)

School’s been out for two weeks. Gram, Big and I are certifiably out of our trees and running loose through the park – all in opposite directions.

Exhibit A: Gram’s following me around the house with a teapot. The pot is full. I can see the steam coming out the spout. She has two mugs in her other hand. Tea is what Gram and I used to do together, before. We’d sit around the kitchen table in the late afternoons and drink tea and talk before the others came home. But I don’t want to have tea with Gram anymore because I don’t feel like talking, which she knows but still hasn’t accepted. So she’s followed me up the stairs and is now standing in the doorway of The Sanctum, pot in hand.

I flop onto the bed, pick up my book, pretend to read.

“I don’t want any tea, Gram,” I say, looking up from Wuthering Heights, which I note is upside down and hope she doesn’t.

Her face falls. Epically.

“Fine.” She puts a mug on the ground, fills the other one in her hand for herself, takes a sip. I can tell it’s burned her tongue, but she pretends it hasn’t. “Fine, fine, fine,” she chants, taking another sip.

She’s been following me around like this since school got out. Normally, summer is her busiest time as Garden Guru, but she’s told all her clients she is on hiatus until the fall. So instead of guruing, she happens into Maria’s while I’m at the deli, or into the library when I’m on my break, or she tails me to Flying Man’s and paces on the path while I float on my back and let my tears spill into the water.

But teatime is the worst.

“Sweet pea, it’s not healthy…” Her voice has melted into a familiar river of worry. I think she’s talking about my remoteness, but when I glance over at her I realize it’s the other thing. She’s staring at Bailey’s dresser, the gum wrappers strewn about, the hairbrush with a web of her black hair woven through the teeth. I watch her gaze drifting around the room to Bailey’s dresses thrown over the back of her desk chair, the towel flung over her bedpost, Bailey’s laundry basket still piled over with her dirty clothes…“Let’s just pack up a few things.”

“I told you, I’ll do it,” I whisper so I don’t scream at the top of my lungs. “I’ll do it, Gram, if you stop stalking me and leave me alone.”

“Okay, Lennie,” she says. I don’t have to look up to know I’ve hurt her.

When I do look up, she’s gone. Instantly, I want to run after her, take the teapot from her, pour myself a mug and join her, just spill every thought and feeling I’m having.

But I don’t.

I hear the shower turn on. Gram spends an inordinate amount of time in the shower now and I know this is because she thinks she can cry under the spray without Big and me hearing. We hear.

Exhibit B: I roll onto my back and before long I’m holding my pillow in my arms and kissing the air with an embarrassing amount of passion. Not again, I think. What’s wrong with me? What kind of girl wants to kiss every boy at a funeral, wants to maul a guy in a tree after making out with her sister’s boyfriend the previous night? Speaking of which, what kind of girl makes out with her sister’s boyfriend, at all?

Let me just unsubscribe to my own mind already, because I don’t get any of it. I hardly ever thought about sex before, much less did anything about it. Three boys at three parties in four years: Casey Miller, who tasted like hot dogs; Dance Rosencrantz, who dug around in my shirt like he was reaching into a box of popcorn at the movies. And Jasper Stolz in eighth grade because Sarah dragged me into a game of spin the bottle. Total blobfish feeling inside each time. Nothing like Heathcliff and Cathy, like Lady Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, like Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet! Sure, I’ve always been into the Big Bang theory of passion, but as something theoretical, something that happens in books that you can close and put back on a shelf, something that I might secretly want bad but can’t imagine ever happening to me. Something that happens to the heroines like Bailey, to the commotion girls in the leading roles. But now I’ve gone mental, kissing everything I can get my lips on: my pillow, armchairs, doorframes, mirrors, always imagining the one person I should not be imagining, the person I promised my sister I will never ever kiss again. The one person who makes me feel just a little less afraid.

The front door slams shut, jarring me out of Toby’s forbidden arms.

It’s Big. Exhibit C: I hear him stomp straight into the dining room, where only two days ago, he unveiled his pyramids. This is always a bad sign. He built them years ago, based on some hidden mathematics in the geometry of the Egyptian pyramids. (Who knows? The guy also talks to trees.) According to Big, his pyramids, like the ones in the Middle East, have extraordinary properties. He’s always believed his replicas would be able to prolong the life of cut flowers and fruit, even revive bugs, all of which he would place under them for ongoing study. During his pyramid spells, Big, Bails and I would spend hours searching the house for dead spiders or flies, and then each morning we’d run to the pyramids hoping to witness a resurrection. We never did. But whenever Big’s really upset, the necromancer in him comes out, and with it, the pyramids. This time, he’s at it with a fervor, sure it will work, certain that he only failed before because he forgot a key element: an electrically charged coil, which he’s now placed under each pyramid.