The Sky is Everywhere(31)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Clouds have gathered and the air feels thick with the possibility of a rare summer rain. I see a takeaway cup on the ground, so I sit down, write a few lines on it, and then bury it under a mound of pine needles. Then I lie down on my back on the spongy forest floor. I love doing this – giving it all up to the enormity of the sky, or to the ceiling if the need arises while I’m indoors. As I reach my hands out and press my fingers into the loamy soil, I start wondering what I’d be doing right now, what I’d be feeling right this minute if Bailey were still alive. I realize something that scares me: I’d be happy, but in a mild kind of way, nothing demented about it. I’d be turtling along, like I always turtled, huddled in my shell, safe and sound.

But what if I’m a shell-less turtle now, demented and devastated in equal measure, an unfreakingbelievable mess of a girl, who wants to turn the air into colors with her clarinet, and what if somewhere inside I prefer this? What if as much as I fear having death as a shadow, I’m beginning to like how it quickens the pulse, not only mine, but the pulse of the whole world. I doubt Joe would even have noticed me if I’d still been in that hard shell of mild happiness. He wrote in his journal that he thinks I’m on full blast, me, and maybe I am now, but I never was before. How can the cost of this change in me be so great? It doesn’t seem right that anything good should come out of Bailey’s death. It doesn’t seem right to even have these thoughts.

But then I think about my sister and what a shell-less turtle she was and how she wanted me to be one too. C’mon, Lennie, she used to say to me at least ten times a day. C’mon, Len. And that makes me feel better, like it’s her life rather than her death that is now teaching me how to be, who to be.

I know Toby’s there even before I go inside, because Lucy and Ethel are camped out on the porch. When I walk into the kitchen, I see him and Gram sitting at the table talking in hushed voices.

“Hi,” I say, dumbfounded. Doesn’t he realize he can’t be here?

“Lucky me,” Gram says. “I was walking home with armfuls of groceries and Toby came whizzing by on his skateboard.” Gram hasn’t driven since the 1900s. She walks everywhere in Clover, which is how she became Garden Guru. She couldn’t help herself, started carrying her shears on her trips to town and people would come home and find her pruning their bushes to perfection: ironic yes, because of her hands-off policy with her own garden.

“Lucky,” I say to Gram as I take in Toby. Fresh scrapes cover his arms, probably from wiping out on his board. He looks wild-eyed and disheveled, totally unmoored. I know two things in this moment: I was wrong about the text and I don’t want to be unmoored with him anymore.

What I really want is to go up to The Sanctum and play my clarinet.

Gram looks at me, smiles. “You swam. Your hair looks like a cyclone. I’d like to paint it.” She reaches her hand up and touches my cyclone. “Toby’s going to have dinner with us.”

I can’t believe this. “I’m not hungry,” I say. “I’m going upstairs.”

Gram gasps at my rudeness, but I don’t care. Under no circumstances am I sitting through dinner with Toby, who touched my breasts, and Gram and Big. What is he thinking?

I go up to The Sanctum, unpack and assemble my clarinet, then take out the Edith Piaf sheet music that I borrowed from a certain garçon, turn to “La Vie en Rose,” and start playing. It’s the song we listened to last night while the world exploded. I’m hoping I can just stay lost in a state of Joeliriousness, and I won’t hear a knock at my door after they eat, but of course, I do.

Toby, who touched my breasts and, let’s not forget, put his hand down my jeans too, opens the door, walks tentatively across the room, and sits on Bailey’s bed. I stop playing, rest my clarinet on my stand. Go away, I think heartlessly, just go away. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen, none of it.

Neither of us says a word. He’s rubbing his thighs so intently, I bet the friction is generating heat. His gaze is drifting all around the room. It finally locks on a photograph of Bailey and him on her dresser. He takes a breath, looks over at me. His gaze lingers.

“Her shirt…”

I look down. I forgot I had it on. “Yeah.” I’ve been wearing Bailey’s clothes more and more outside The Sanctum as well as in it. I find myself going through my own drawers and thinking, Who was the girl who wore these things? I’m sure a shrink would love this, all of it, I think, looking over at Toby. She’d probably tell me I was trying to take Bailey’s place. Or worse, competing with her in a way I never could when she was alive.

But is that it? It doesn’t feel like it. When I wear her clothes, I just feel safer, like she’s whispering in my ear.

I’m lost in thought, so it startles me when Toby says in an uncharacteristic shaky voice, “Len, I’m sorry. About everything.” I glance at him. He looks so vulnerable, frightened. “I got way out of control, feel so bad.” Is this what he needed to tell me? Relief tumbles out of my chest.

“Me too,” I say, thawing immediately. We’re in this together.

“Me more, trust me,” he says, rubbing his thighs again. He’s so distraught. Does he think it’s all his fault or something?

“We both did it, Toby,” I say. “Each time. We’re both horrible.”

He looks at me, his dark eyes warm. “You’re not horrible, Lennie.” His voice is gentle, intimate. I can tell he wants to reach out to me. I’m glad he’s across the room. I wish he were across the equator. Do our bodies now think whenever they’re together they get to touch? I tell mine that is most definitely not the case, no matter that I feel it again. No matter.

And then a renegade asteroid breaks through the earth’s atmosphere and hurtles into The Sanctum: “It’s just that I can’t stop thinking about you,” he says. “I can’t. I just…” He’s balling up Bailey’s bedspread in his fists. “I want—”

“Please don’t say more.” I cross the room to my dresser, open the middle drawer, reach in and pull out a shirt, my shirt. I have to take Bailey’s off. Because I’m suddenly thinking that imaginary shrink is spot on.

“It’s not me,” I say quietly as I open the closet door and slip inside. “I’m not her.”

I stay in the dark quiet getting my breathing under control, my life under control, getting my own shirt on my own body. It’s like there’s a river under my feet tumbling me toward him, still, even with everything that’s happened with Joe, a roaring, passionate, despairing river, but I don’t want to go this time. I want to stay on the shore. We can’t keep wrapping our arms around a ghost.