The Sky is Everywhere(17)
Author: Jandy Nelson

“Nope, sweet pea, never away, know that.” She squeezed my hand. “She was always running toward.”

Toward what? I think, getting up from Bailey’s desk. What was my mother running toward then? What is she running toward now? What was Bailey? What am I?

I walk over to the window, open the curtain a crack and see Toby, sitting under the plum tree, under the bright stars, on the green grass, in the world. Lucy and Ethel are draped over his legs – it’s amazing how those dogs only come around when he does.

I know I should turn off the light, get into bed, and moon about Joe Fontaine, but that is not what I do.

I meet Toby under the tree and we duck into the woods to the river, wordlessly, as if we’ve had a plan to do this for days. Lucy and Ethel follow on our heels a few paces, then turn back around and go home after Toby has an indecipherable talk with them.

I’m leading a double life: Lennie Walker by day, Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter fame by night.

I tell myself, I will not kiss him, no matter what.

It’s a warm, windless night and the forest is still and lonely. We walk side by side in the quiet, listening to the fluted song of the thrush. Even in the moonlit stillness, Toby looks sun-drenched and windswept, like he’s on a sailboat.

“I know I shouldn’t have come, Len.”

“Probably not.”

“Was worried about you,” he says quietly.

“Thanks,” I say, and the cloak of being fine that I wear with everyone else slips right off my shoulders.

Sadness pulses out of us as we walk. I almost expect the trees to lower their branches when we pass, the stars to hand down some light. I breathe in the horsy scent of eucalyptus, the thick sugary pine, aware of each breath I take, how each one keeps me in the world a few seconds longer. I taste the sweetness of the summer air on my tongue and want to just gulp and gulp and gulp it into my body – this living, breathing, heart-beating body of mine.

“Toby?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you feel more alive since…” I’m afraid to ask this, like I’m revealing something shameful, but I want to know if he feels it too.

He doesn’t hesitate. “I feel more everything since.”

Yeah, I think, more everything. Like someone flipped on the switch of the world and everything is just on now, including me, and everything in me, bad and good, all cranking up to the max.

He grabs a twig off a branch, snaps it between his fingers. “I keep doing this stupid stuff at night on my board,” he says, “gnarly-ass tricks only show-off dip-shits do, and I’ve been doing it alone … and a couple times totally wasted.”

Toby is one of a handful of skaters in town who regularly and spectacularly defy gravity. If he thinks he’s putting himself in danger he’s going full-on kamikaze.

“She wouldn’t want that, Toby.” I can’t keep the pleading out of my voice.

He sighs, frustrated. “I know that, I know.” He picks up his pace as if to leave behind what he just told me.

“She’d kill me.” He says it so definitively and passionately that I wonder if he’s really talking about skating or what happened between us.

“I won’t do it anymore,” he insists.

“Good,” I say, still not totally sure what he’s referring to, but if it’s us, he doesn’t have to worry, right? I’ve kept the curtains drawn. I’ve promised Bailey nothing will ever happen again.

Though even as I think this, I find my eyes drinking him in, his broad chest and strong arms, his freckles. I remember his mouth hungrily on mine, his big hands in my hair, the heat coursing through me, how it made me feel—

“It’s just so reckless…” he says.

“Yeah.” It comes out a little too breathy.

“Len?”

I need smelling salts.

He looks at me funny, but then I think he reads in my eyes what has been going on in my head, because his eyes kind of widen and spark, before he quickly looks away.

GET A GRIP, LENNIE.

We walk in silence then through the woods and it snaps me back into my senses. The stars and moon are mostly hidden over the thick tree cover, and I feel like I’m swimming through darkness, my body breaking the air as if it were water. I can hear the rush of the river getting louder with every step I take, and it reminds me of Bailey, day after day, year after year, the two of us on this path, lost in talk, the plunge into the pool, and then the endless splaying on the rocks in the sun—

I whisper, “I’m left behind.”

“Me too…” His voice catches. He doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t look at me; he just takes my hand and holds it and doesn’t let it go as the cover above us gets thicker and we push together farther into the deepening dark.

I say softly, “I feel so guilty,” almost hoping the night will suck my words away before Toby hears.

“I do too,” he whispers back.

“But about something else too, Toby…”

“What?”

With all the darkness around me, with my hand in Toby’s, I feel like I can say it. “I feel guilty that I’m still here…”

“Don’t. Please, Len.”

“But she was always so much … more—”

“No.” He doesn’t let me finish. “She’d hate for you to feel that way.”

“I know.”

And then I blurt out what I’ve forbidden myself to think, let alone say: “She’s in a coffin, Toby.” I say it so loud, practically shriek it – the words make me dizzy, claustrophobic, like I need to leap out of my body.

I hear him suck in air. When he speaks, his voice is so weak I barely hear it over our footsteps. “No, she isn’t.”

I know this too. I know both things at once.

Toby tightens his grip around my hand.

Once at Flying Man’s, the sky floods through the opening in the canopy. We sit on a flat rock and the full moon shines so brightly on the river, the water looks like pure rushing light.

“How can the world continue to shimmer like this?” I say as I lie down under a sky drunk with stars.

Toby doesn’t answer, just shakes his head and lies down next to me, close enough for him to put his arm around me, close enough for me to put my head on his chest if he did so. But he doesn’t, and I don’t.

He starts talking then, his soft words dissipating into the night like smoke. He talks about how Bailey wanted to have the wedding ceremony here at Flying Man’s so they could jump into the pool after saying their vows. I lean up on my elbows and can see it as clearly in the moonlight as if I were watching a movie, can see Bailey in a drenched bright orange wedding dress laughing and leading the party down the path back to the house, her careless beauty so huge it had to walk a few paces ahead of her, announcing itself. I see in the movie of Toby’s words how happy she would have been, and suddenly, I just don’t know where all that happiness, her happiness, and ours, will go now, and I start to cry, and then Toby’s face is above mine and his tears are falling onto my cheeks until I don’t know whose are whose, just know that all that happiness is gone, and that we are kissing again.