The Sky is Everywhere(25)
Author: Jandy Nelson

We freeze and our eyes meet – a mid-air collision of shame: all the wreckage explodes inside me. I can’t bear it. I cover my face with my hands, hear myself groan. What am I doing? What did we almost do? I want to press the rewind button. Press it and press it and press it. But I can’t think about that now, can only think about not getting caught in this bed with Toby.

“Hurry,” I say, and it unfreezes and de-panics both of us.

He springs to his feet and I scramble across the floor like a crazed crab, put on my shirt, throw Toby his. We’re both dressing at warp speed—

“No more,” I say, fumbling with the buttons on my shirt, feeling criminal and wrong, full of ick and shame. “Please.”

He’s straightening the bedding, frenetically puffing pillows, his face flushed and wild, blond hair flying in every direction. “I’m sorry, Len—”

“It doesn’t make me miss her less, not anymore.” I sound half resolute, half frantic. “It makes it worse.”

He stops what he’s doing, nods, his face a wrestling match of competing emotions, but it looks like hurt is winning out. God, I don’t want to hurt him, but I don’t want to do this anymore either. I can’t. And what is this anyway? Being with him just now didn’t feel like the safe harbor it did before – it was different, desperate, like two people struggling for breath.

“John Lennon,” I hear from downstairs. “You home?”

This can’t be happening, it can’t. Nothing used to happen to me, nothing at all for seventeen years and now everything at once. Joe is practically singing my name, he sounds so elated, probably still riding high from that kiss, that sublime kiss that could make stars fall into your open hands, a kiss like Cathy and Heathcliff must have had on the moors with the sun beating on their backs and the world streaming with wind and possibility. A kiss so unlike the fearsome tornado that moments before ripped through Toby and me.

Toby is dressed and sitting on my bed, his shirt hanging over his lap. I wonder why he doesn’t tuck it in, then realize he’s trying to cover a freaking hard-on – oh God, who am I? How could I have let this get so out of hand? And why doesn’t my family do anything normal like carry house keys and lock front doors?

I make sure I’m buttoned and zipped. I smooth my hair and wipe my lips before I swing open the bedroom door and stick my head out just as Joe is barreling down the hallway. He smiles wildly, looks like love itself stuffed into a pair of jeans, black T-shirt, and backward baseball cap.

“Come over tonight. They’re all going to the city for some jazz show.” He’s out of breath – I bet he ran all the way here. “Couldn’t wait…” He reaches for my hand, takes it in his, then sees Toby sitting on the bed behind me. First he drops my hand, and then the impossible happens: Joe Fontaine’s face shuts like a door.

“Hey,” he says to Toby, but his voice is pinched and wary.

“Toby and I were just going through some of Bailey’s things,” I blurt out. I can’t believe I’m using Bailey to lie to Joe to cover up fooling around with her boyfriend. A new low even for the immoral girl I’ve become. I’m a Gila monster of a girl. Loch Ness Lennie. No convent would even take me.

Joe nods, mollified by that, but he’s still looking at me and Toby and back again with suspicion. It’s as if someone hit the dimmer switch and turned down his whole being.

Toby stands up. “I need to get home.” He crosses the room, his carriage slumped, his gait awkward, uncertain. “Good seeing you again,” he mumbles at Joe. “I’ll see you soon, Len.” He slips past us, sad as rain, and I feel terrible. My heart follows after him a few paces, but then it ricochets back to Joe, who stands before me without a trace of death anywhere on him.

“Lennie, is there—”

I have a pretty good idea what Joe is about to ask and so I do the only thing I can think of to stop the question from coming out of his mouth: I kiss him. I mean really kiss him, like I’ve wanted to do since that very first day in band. No sweet soft peck about it. With the same lips that just kissed someone else, I kiss away his question, his suspicion, and after a while, I kiss away the someone else too, the something else that almost just happened, until it is only the two of us, Joe and me, in the room, in the world, in my crazy swelling heart.

Holy horses.

I put aside for a moment the fact that I’ve turned into a total strumpet-harlot-trollop-wench-jezebel-tart-harridan-chippy-nymphet because I’ve just realized something incredible. This is it – what all the hoopla is about, what Wuthering Heights is about – it all boils down to this feeling rushing through me in this moment with Joe as our mouths refuse to part. Who knew all this time I was one kiss away from being Cathy and Juliet and Elizabeth Bennet and Lady Chatterley!?

Years ago, I was crashed in Gram’s garden and Big asked me what I was doing. I told him I was looking up at the sky. He said, “That’s a misconception, Lennie, the sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.”

Kissing Joe, I believe this, for the first time in my life.

I feel delirious, Joelirious, I think as I pull away for a moment, and open my eyes to see that the Joe Fontaine dimmer switch has been cranked back up again and that he is Joelirious too.

“That was—” I can hardly form words.

“Incredible,” he interrupts. “Totally incroyable.”

We’re staring at each other, stunned.

“Sure,” I say, suddenly remembering he invited me over tonight.

“Sure what?” He looks at me like I’m speaking Swahili, then smiles and puts his arms around me, says, “Ready?” He lifts me off my feet and spins me around and I am suddenly in the dorkiest movie ever, laughing and feeling a happiness so huge I am ashamed to be feeling it in a world without my sister.

“Sure, I’ll come over tonight,” I say as everything stops spinning and I land back on my own two feet.

What’s wrong, Lennie?
Nothing.
Tell me.
No
C’mon, spill it.
Okay. It’s just that you’re different now.
How?
Like Zombieville.
I’m in love, Len — I’ve never felt like this before.
Like what?
Like forever.
Forever?
Yeah. This is it. He’s it.
How do you know?
My toes told me. The toes knows

(Found on a napkin stuffed in a mug, Cecilia’s Bakery)

I’m going over to Joe’s,” I say to Gram and Big, who are both home now, camped out in the kitchen, listening to a baseball game on the radio, circa 1930.