The Sky is Everywhere(32)
Author: Jandy Nelson

When I come out of the closet, he’s gone.

“I’m so sorry,” I say aloud to the empty orange room.

As if in response, thousands of hands begin tapping on the roof. I walk over to my bed, climb up to the window ledge and stick my hands out. Because we only get one or two storms a summer, rain is an event. I lean far over the ledge, palms to the sky, letting it all slip through my fingers, remembering what Big told Toby and me that afternoon. No way out of this but through. Who knew what through would be?

I see someone rushing down the road in the downpour. When the figure gets near the lit-up garden I realize it’s Joe and am instantly uplifted. My life raft.

“Hey,” I yell out and wave like a maniac.

He looks up at the window, smiles, and I can’t get down the stairs, out the front door, into the rain and by his side fast enough.

“I missed you,” I say, reaching up and touching his cheek with my fingers. Raindrops drip from his eyelashes, stream in rivulets all down his face.

“God, me too.” Then his hands are on my cheeks and we are kissing and the rain is pouring all over our crazy heads and once again my whole being is aflame with joy.

I didn’t know love felt like this, like turning into brightness.

“What are you doing?” I say, when I can finally bring myself to pull away for a moment.

“I saw it was raining – I snuck out, wanted to see you, just like this.”

“Why’d you have to sneak out?” The rain’s drenching us, my shirt clings to me, and Joe’s hands to it, rubbing up and down my sides.

“I’m in prison,” he says. “Got busted big-time, that wine we drank was like a four-hundred-dollar bottle. I had no idea. I wanted to impress you so took it from downstairs. My dad went ape-shit when he saw the empty bottle – he’s making me sort wood all day and night in the workshop while he talks to his girlfriend on the phone the whole time. I think he forgets I speak French.”

I’m not sure whether to address the four-hundred-dollar bottle of wine we drank or the girlfriend, decide on the latter. “His girlfriend?”

“Never mind. I had to see you, but now I have to go back, and I wanted to give you this.” He pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket, stuffs it quickly into mine before it can get soaked.

He kisses me again. “Okay, I’m leaving.” He doesn’t move.

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“I don’t want you to,” I say. His hair’s black and snaky all around his glistening face. It’s like being in the shower with him. Wow – to be in the shower with him.

He turns to go for real then and I notice his eyes narrow as he peers over my shoulder. “Why’s he always here?”

I turn around. Toby’s in the doorframe, watching us – he looks like he’s been hit by a wrecking ball. God. He must not have left, must have been in the art room with Gram or something. He pushes open the door, grabs his skateboard, and rushes past without a word, huddled against the downpour.

“What’s going on?” Joe asks, X-raying me with his stare. His whole body has stiffened.

“Nothing. Really,” I answer, just as I did with Sarah. “He’s upset about Bailey.” What else can I tell him? If I tell him what’s going on, what went on even after he kissed me, I’ll lose him.

So when he says, “I’m being stupid and paranoid?” I just say, “Yeah.” And hear in my head: Never cross a horn player.

He smiles wide and open as a meadow. “Okay.” Then he kisses me hard one last time and we are again drinking the rain off each other’s lips. “Bye, John Lennon.”

And he’s off.

I hurry inside, worrying about what Toby said to me and what I didn’t say to Joe, as the rain washes all those beautiful kisses off of me.

I’m lying down on my bed, holding in my hands the antidote to worrying about anything. It’s a sheet of music, still damp from the rain. At the top, it says in Joe’s boxlike weirdo boy handwriting: For a soulful, beautiful clarinettist, from a homely, boring, talentless though passionate guitarist. Part 1, Part 2 to come.

I try to hear it in my head, but my facility to hear without playing is terrible. I get up, find my clarinet, and moments later the melody spills into the room. I remember as I play what he said about my tone being so lonely, like a day without birds, but it’s as if the melody he wrote is nothing but birds and they are flying out of the end of my clarinet and filling the air of a still summer day, filling the trees and sky – it’s exquisite. I play it over and over again, until I know it by heart.

It’s 2 a.m. and if I play the song one more time, my fingers will fall off, but I’m too Joelirious to sleep. I go downstairs to get something to eat, and when I come back into The Sanctum, I’m blindsided by a want so urgent I have to cover my mouth to stifle a shriek. I want Bails to be sprawled out on her bed reading. I want to talk to her about Joe, want to play her this song.

I want my sister.

I want to hurl a building at God.

I take a breath and exhale with enough force to blow the orange paint right off the walls.

It’s no longer raining – the scrubbed newness of the night rolls in through the open window. I don’t know what to do, so I walk over to Bailey’s desk and sit down like usual. I look at the detective’s business card again. I thought about calling him but haven’t yet, haven’t packed up a thing either. I pull over a carton, decide to do one or two drawers. I hate looking at the empty boxes almost more than I hate the idea of packing up her things.

The bottom drawer’s full of school notebooks, years of work, now useless. I take one out, glide my fingers over the cover, hold it to my chest, and then put it in the carton. All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.

I stack the rest of the notebooks on top of the first, close the drawer, and do the same with the one above it. I close the carton and start a new one. There are more school notebooks in this drawer, some journals, which I will not read. I flip through the stack, putting them, one by one, into the box. At the very bottom of the drawer, there is an open one. It has Bailey’s chicken scrawl handwriting all over it; columns of words cover the whole page, with lines crossing out most of them. I take it out, feel a pang of guilt, but then my guilt turns to surprise, then fear, when I see what the words are.