The Sky is Everywhere(27)
Author: Jandy Nelson

“Yeah, thought it best to wait to show you the bombroom until…”

“Until what?”

“I don’t know, until you realized…”

“Realized what?”

“I don’t know, Lennie.” I can see he’s embarrassed. Somehow things have turned uncomfortable.

“Tell me,” I say. “Wait until I realized what?”

“Nothing, it’s stupid.” He looks down at his feet, then back up at me. Bat. Bat. Bat.

“I want to know,” I say.

“Okay, I’ll say it: wait until you realized that maybe you liked me too.”

The flower is blooming again in my chest, this time three seconds from bud to showstopper.

“I do,” I say, and then without thinking, add, “A lot.” What’s gotten into me? Now I really can’t breathe. A situation made worse by the lips that are suddenly pressing into mine.

Our tongues have fallen madly in love and gotten married and moved to Paris.

After I’m sure I’ve made up for all my former years of kisslessness, I say, “I think if we don’t stop kissing, the world is going to explode.”

“Seems like it,” he whispers. He’s staring dreamily into my eyes. Heathcliff and Cathy have nothing on us. “We can do something else for a while,” he says. “If you want…” He smiles. And then: Bat. Bat. Bat. I wonder if I am going to survive the night.

“Want to play?” he asks.

“I do,” I tell him, “but I didn’t bring my instrument.”

“I’ll get one.” He leaves the room, which gives me a chance to recover, and unfortunately, to think about what happened with Toby earlier. How scary and out of control it was today, like we were trying to break each other apart. But why? To find Bailey? To wrench her from the other’s heart? The other’s body? Or was it something worse? Were we trying to forget her, to wipe out her memory for one passionate moment? But no, it’s not that, it can’t be, can it? When we’re together, Bailey’s all around us like air we can breathe; that’s been the comfort until today, until it got so out of hand. I don’t know. The only thing I do know is that it’s all about her, because even now if I imagine Toby alone with his heartache while I am here with Joe obliterating my own, I feel guilty, like I’ve abandoned him, and with him, my grief, and with my grief, my sister.

The phone rings again and it mercifully ejects me from these thoughts, and crash-lands me back into the bombroom – this room where Joe sleeps in this unmade bed and reads these books strewn everywhere and drinks out of these five hundred half-full glasses seemingly at once. I feel giddy with the intimacy of being where he thinks and dreams, where he changes his clothes and flings them absolutely all over the place, where he’s naked. Joe, naked. The thought of it, him, all of him – guh. I’ve never even seen a real live guy totally naked, ever. Only some Internet porn Sarah and I devoured for a while. That’s it. I’ve always been scared of seeing all, seeing it. The first time Sarah saw one hard, she said more animal names came flying out of her mouth in that one moment than all other moments in her life combined. Not animals you’d think either. No pythons and eels. According to her it was a full-on menagerie: hippos, elephants, orangutans, tapirs, gazelles, etc.

All of a sudden I’m walloped with missing her. How could I be in Joe Fontaine’s freaking bedroom without her knowing? How could I have blown her off like this? I take out my phone, text: Call back the search party. Please. Forgive.

I look around again, curbing all impulses to go through drawers, peek under the bed, read the notebook lying open at my feet. Okay, I curb two out of three of those impulses. It’s been a bad day for morality. And it’s not really reading someone’s journal if it’s open and you can glance down and make out your name, well, your name to him, in a sentence that says…

I bend my knees, and without touching the notebook in any way, read just the bit around the initials JL. I’ve never met anyone as heartbroken as JL, I want to make her feel better, want to be around her all the time, it’s crazy, it’s like she’s on full blast, and everyone else is just on mute, and she’s honest, so honest, nothing like Genevieve, nothing at all like Genevieve… I hear his steps in the hall, stand up. The phone is ringing yet again.

He comes back with two clarinets, a B flat and a bass, holds them up. I go for the soprano like I’m used to.

“What’s the deal with the phone?” I say, instead of saying Who’s Genevieve? Instead of falling to my knees and confessing that I’m anything but honest, that I’m probably just exactly like Genevieve, whoever she is, but without the exotic French part.

He shrugs. “We get a lot of calls,” he says, then begins his tuning ritual that makes everything in the world but him and a handful of chords disappear.

The untapped duet of guitar and clarinet is awkward at first. We stumble around in sound, fall over each other, look up embarrassed, try again. But after a while, we begin to click and when we don’t know where the other is going, we lock eyes and listen so intently that for fleeting moments it’s like our souls are talking. One time after I improvise alone for a while, he exclaims, “Your tone is awesome, so, so lonely, like, I don’t know, a day without birds or something,” but I don’t feel lonely at all. I feel like Bailey is listening.

“Well, you’re no different late at night, exactly the same John Lennon.” We’re sitting on the grass, drinking some wine Joe swiped from his father. The front door is open and a French chanteuse is blasting out of it into the warm night. We’re swigging out of the bottle and eating cheese and a baguette. I’m finally in France with Joe, I think, and it makes me smile.

“What?” he asks.

“I don’t know. This is nice. I’ve never drunk wine before.”

“I have my whole life. My dad mixed it with water for us when we were little.”

“Really? Drunken little Fontaine boys running into walls?”

He laughs. “Yup, exactly. That’s my theory of why French children are so well behaved. They’re drunk off their petits mignons asses most of the time.” He tips the bottle and takes a sip, passes it to me.

“Are both your parents French?”

“Dad is, born and raised in Paris. My mom’s from around here originally. But Dad makes up for it, he’s Central Casting French.” There’s a bitterness in his voice, but I don’t pursue it. I’ve only just recovered from the consequences of my snooping, have almost forgotten about Genevieve and the importance of honesty to Joe, when he says, “Ever been in love?” He’s lying on his back, looking up at a sky reeling with stars.