The Sky is Everywhere(44)
Author: Jandy Nelson

Marcus is ebullient. “One hot tamale, John Lennon.”

Joe glares at him. “Shut the hell up, Marcus.” He has regained his composure and rage. Nope, Joe is definitely not this simpleminded. I know immediately this was a bad, bad move.

“What’s wrong with you two?” he says to Toby and me, throwing up his arms in a perfect mimicry of his father’s dervishness.

He pushes past his brothers and Toby, jumps off the stoop, comes up to me, so close that I can smell his fury. “Don’t you get it? What you did? It’s done, Lennie, we’re done.” Joe’s beautiful lips, the ones that kissed me and whispered in my hair, they are twisting and contorting around words I hate. The ground beneath me begins to tilt. People don’t really faint, do they? “Get it, because I mean it. It’s ruined. Everything is.”

I’m mortified. I’m going to kill Sarah. And what a total companion-pony move on my part. I knew this wouldn’t work. There was no way he was going to toss aside this behemoth betrayal because I squeezed myself into this ridiculously small dress. How could I be so stupid?

And it’s just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there’s no overlap.

He’s walking away from me. I don’t care that there are six pairs of eyes and ears on us. He can’t leave before I have a chance to say something, have a chance to make him understand what happened, how I feel about him. I grab the bottom of his T-shirt. He snaps around, flings my hand away, meets my eyes. I don’t know what he sees in them, but he softens a little. I watch some of the rage slip off of him as he looks at me. Without it, he looks unnerved and vulnerable, like a small disheartened boy. It makes me ache with tenderness. I want to touch his beautiful face. I look at his hands; they are shaking.

As is all of me.

He’s waiting for me to speak. But I realize the perfect thing to say must be in another girl’s mind, because it’s not in mine. Nothing is in mine.

“I’m sorry,” I manage out.

“I don’t care,” he says, his voice cracking a little. He looks down at the ground. I follow his gaze, see his bare feet sticking out of jeans; they are long and thin and monkey-toed. I’ve never seen his feet out of shoes and socks before. They’re perfectly simian – toes so long he could play the piano with them.

“Your feet,” I say, before I realize it. “I’ve never seen them before.”

My moronic words drum in the air between us, and for a split second, I know he wants to laugh, wants to reach out and pull me to him, wants to tease me about saying something so ridiculous when he’s about to murder me. I can see this in his face as if his thoughts were scribbled across it. But then all that gets wiped away as quickly as it came, and what’s left is the unwieldy hurt in his unbatting eyes, his grinless mouth. He will never forgive me.

I took the joy out of the most joyful person on planet Earth.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I—”

“God, stop saying that.” His hands swoop around me like lunatic bats. I’ve reignited his rage. “It doesn’t matter to me that you’re sorry. You just don’t get it.” He whips around and bolts into the house before I can say another word.

Marcus shakes his head and sighs, then follows his brother inside with DougFred in tow.

I stand there with Joe’s words still scorching my skin, thinking what a terrible idea it was to come up here, in this tiny dress, these skyscraping heels. I wipe the siren song off my lips. I’m disgusted with myself. I didn’t ask for his forgiveness, didn’t explain a thing, didn’t tell him that he is the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me, that I love him, that he’s the only one for me. Instead, I talked about his feet. His feet.

Talk about choking under pressure. And then I remember Hey Rachel, which explodes a Molotov cocktail of jealousy into my misery, completing the dismal picture.

I want to kick the postcard-perfect sky.

I’m so absorbed in my self-flagellation, I forget Toby’s there until he says, “Emotional guy.”

I look up. He’s sitting on the stoop now, leaning back on his arms, his legs kicked out. He must have come straight from work; he’s out of his usual skate rat rags and has on mud-splattered jeans and boots and button-down shirt and is only missing the Stetson to complete the Marlboro Man picture. He looks like he did the day he whisked my sister’s heart away: Bailey’s Revolutionary.

“He almost attacked me with his guitar yesterday. I think we’re making progress,” he adds.

“Toby, what’re you doing here?”

“What are you doing hiding in trees?” he asks back, nodding at the willow behind me.

“Trying to make amends,” I say.

“Me, too,” he says quickly, jumping to his feet. “But to you. Been trying to tell him what’s what.” His words surprise me.

“I’ll take you home,” he says.

We both get into his truck. I can’t seem to curb the nausea overwhelming me as a result of the hands-down worst seduction in love’s history. Ugh. And on top of it, I’m sure Joe is watching us from a window, all his suspicions seething in his hot head as I drive off with Toby.

“So, what’d you say to him?” I ask when we’ve cleared Fontaine territory.

“Well, the three words I got to say yesterday and the ten I got in today added up to pretty much telling him he should give you a second chance, that there’s nothing going on with us, that we were just wrecked…”

“Wow, that was nice. Busybody as you like, but nice.”

He looks over at me for a moment before returning his eyes to the road. “I watched you guys that night in the rain … I saw it, how you feel.”

His voice is full of emotion that I can’t decipher and probably don’t want to. “Thanks,” I say quietly, touched that he did this despite everything, because of everything.

He doesn’t respond, just looks straight ahead into the sun, which is obliterating everything in our path with unruly splendor. The truck blasts through the trees and I stick my hand out the window, trying to catch the wind in my palm like Bails used to, missing her, missing the girl I used to be around her, missing who we all used to be. We will never be those people again. She took them all with her.

I notice Toby’s tapping his fingers nervously on the wheel. He keeps doing it. Tap. Tap. Tap.