The Sky is Everywhere(34)
Author: Jandy Nelson

“Big!” Gram chastises. “Please.”

Joe laughs. “It’s over. My father is a very romantic man, it’s his best and worst trait, when I explained to him how I was feeling—” Joe looks at me, proceeds to turn red, which of course makes me go full-on tomato. It surely must be against the rules to feel like this when your sister is dead!

Gram shakes her head. “Who would have thought Lennie such a romantic?”

“Are you kidding?” Joe exclaims. “Her reading Wuthering Heights twenty-three times didn’t give it away?” I look down. I’m embarrassed at how moved I am by this. He knows me. Somehow better than they do.

“Touché, Mr Fontaine,” Gram says, hiding her grin as she goes back to the stove. Joe comes up behind me, wraps his arms around my waist. I close my eyes, think about his body, naked under his clothes, pressing into me, naked under mine. I turn my head to look up at him. “The melody you wrote is so beautiful. I want to play it for you.” Before the last word is out of my mouth, he kisses me. I twist around in his arms so that we are facing each other, then throw my arms around his neck while his find the small of my back, and sweep me into him. Oh God, I don’t care if this is wrong of me, if I’m breaking every rule in the Western World, I don’t care about freaking anything, because our mouths, which momentarily separated, have met again and anything but that ecstatic fact ceases to matter.

How do people function when they’re feeling like this?

How do they tie their shoes?

Or drive cars?

Or operate heavy machinery?

How does civilization continue when this is going on?

A voice, ten decibels quieter than its normal register, stutters out of Uncle Big. “Uh, kids. Might want to, I don’t know, mmmm…” Everything screeches to a halt in my mind. Is Big stammering? Uh, Lennie? Probably not cool to make out like this in the middle of the kitchen in front of your grandmother and uncle. I pull away from Joe; it’s like breaking suction. I look at Gram and Big, who are standing there fiddly and sheepish while the sausages burn. Is it possible that we’ve succeeded in embarrassing the Emperor and Empress of Weird?

I glance back at Joe. He looks totally cartoon-dopey, like he’s been bonked on the head with a club. The whole scene strikes me as hysterical, and I collapse into a chair laughing. Joe smiles an embarrassed half smile at Gram and Big, leans against the counter, his trumpet case now strategically held over his crotch. Thank God I don’t have one of those. Who’d want a lust-o-meter sticking out the middle of their body?

“You’re going to rehearsal, right?” he asks.

Bat. Bat. Bat.

Yes, if we make it.

We do make it, though in my case, in body only. I’m surprised my fingers can find the keys as I glide through the pieces Mr James has chosen for us to play at the upcoming River Festival. Even with Rachel sending me death-darts about Joe and repeatedly turning the stand so I can’t see it, I’m lost in the music, feel like I’m playing with Joe alone, improvising, reveling in not knowing what is going to happen note to note … but mid-practice, mid-song, mid-note, a feeling of dread sweeps over me as I start thinking about Toby, how he looked when he left last night. What he said in The Sanctum. He has to know we need to stay away from each other now. He has to. I tuck the panic away but spend the rest of rehearsal painfully alert, following the arrangement without the slightest deviation.

After practice, Joe and I have the whole afternoon together because he’s out of prison and I’m off work. We’re walking back to my house, the wind whipping us around like leaves.

“I know what we should do,” I say.

“Didn’t you want to play me the song?”

“I do, but I want to play it for you somewhere else. Remember I dared you in the woods that night to brave the forest with me on a really windy day? Today is it.”

We veer off the road and hike in, bushwhacking through thickets of brush until we find the trail I’m looking for. The sun filters sporadically through the trees, casting a dim and shadowy light over the forest floor. Because of the wind, the trees are creaking symphonically – it’s a veritable philharmonic of squeaking doors. Perfect.

After a while, he says, “I think I’m holding up remarkably well, considering, don’t you?”

“Considering what?”

“Considering we’re hiking to the soundtrack of the creepiest horror movie ever made and all the world’s tree trolls have gathered above us to open and close their front doors.”

“It’s broad daylight, you can’t be scared.”

“I can be, actually, but I’m trying not to be a wuss. I have a very low eerie threshold.”

“You’re going to love where I’m taking you, I promise.”

“I’m going to love it if you take off all your clothes there, I promise, or at least some of them, maybe even just a sock.” He comes over to me, drops his horn, and swings me around so we are facing each other.

I say, “You’re very repressed, you know? It’s maddening.”

“Can’t help it. I’m half French, joie de vivre and all. In all seriousness though, I haven’t yet seen you in any state of undress, and it’s been three whole days since our first kiss, quelle catastrophe, you know?” He tries to get my wind-blown hair out of my face, then kisses me until my heart busts out of my chest like a wild horse. “Though I do have a very good imagination…”

“Quel dork,” I say, pulling him forward.

“You know, I only act like a dork so you’ll say quel dork,” he replies.

The trail climbs to where the old growth redwoods rocket into the sky and turn the forest into their private cathedral. The wind has died down and the woods have grown unearthly still and peaceful. Leaves flicker all around us like tiny pieces of light.

“So, what about your mom?” Joe asks all of a sudden.

“What?” My head couldn’t have been further away from thoughts of my mother.

“The first day I came over, Gram said she’d finish the portrait when your mother comes back. Where is she?”

“I don’t know.” Usually I leave it at that and don’t fill in the spare details, but he hasn’t run away yet from all our other family oddities. “I’ve never met my mother,” I say. “Well, I met her, but she left when I was one. She has a restless nature, guess it runs in the family.”