The Sky is Everywhere(55)
Author: Jandy Nelson

We stare at each other and for the first time I wonder if she’s known all year that I threw the audition. I wonder if that’s why she’s been so horrible. Maybe she thought she could intimidate me into not challenging her. Maybe she thought that was the only way to keep her chair.

She bites her lip. “How about if I split the solos with you. And you can—”

I shake my head. I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.

“Come September,” I say. “May the best clarinettist win.”

Not just my ass, but every inch of me is in the wind as I fly out of the music room, away from school, and into the woods to go home and write the poem to Joe. Beside me, step for step, breath for breath, is the unbearable fact that I have a future and Bailey doesn’t.

This is when I know it.

My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That’s just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other. All I can do is love her and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.

Without thinking, I veer onto the trail to the forest bedroom. All around me, the woods are in an uproar of beauty. Sunlight cascades through the trees, making the fern-covered floor look jeweled and incandescent. Rhododendron bushes sweep past me right and left like women in fabulous dresses. I want to wrap my arms around all of it.

When I get to the forest bedroom, I hop onto the bed and make myself comfortable. I’m going to take my time with this poem, not like all the others I scribbled and scattered. I take the pen out of my pocket, a piece of blank sheet music out of my bag, and start writing.

I tell him everything – everything he means to me, everything I felt with him that I never felt before, everything I hear in his music. I want him to trust me so I bare all. I tell him I belong to him, that my heart is his, and even if he never forgives me it will still be the case.

It’s my story, after all, and this is how I choose to tell it.

When I’m done, I scoot off the bed and as I do, I notice a blue guitar pick lying on the white comforter. I must have been sitting on it all afternoon. I lean over and pick it up, and recognize it right away as Joe’s. He must’ve come here to play – a good sign. I decide to leave the poem here for him instead of sneaking it inside the Fontaine mailbox like I had planned. I fold it, write his name on it, and place it on the bed under a rock to secure it from the wind. I tuck his pick under the rock as well.

Walking home, I realize it’s the first time since Bailey died that I’ve written words for someone to read.

I’m too mortified to sleep. What was I thinking? I keep imagining Joe reading my ridiculous poem to his brothers, and worse to Rachel, all of them laughing at poor lovelorn Lennie, who knows nothing about romance except what she learned from Emily Brontë. I told him: I belong to him. I told him: My heart is his. I told him: I hear his soul in his music. I’m going to jump off of a building. Who says things like this in the twenty-first century? No one! How is it possible that something can seem like such a brilliant idea one day and such a bonehead one the next?

As soon as there’s enough light, I throw a sweatshirt over my pajamas, put on some sneakers, and run through the dawn to the forest bedroom to retrieve the note, but when I get there, it’s gone. I tell myself that the wind blew it away like all the other poems. I mean, how likely is it that Joe showed up yesterday afternoon after I left? Not likely at all.

Sarah is keeping me company, providing humiliation support while I make lasagnas.

She can’t stop squealing. “You’re going to be first clarinet, Lennie. For sure.”

“We’ll see.”

“It’ll really help you get into a conservatory. Juilliard even.”

I take a deep breath. How like an imposter I’d felt every time Marguerite mentioned it, how like a traitor, conspiring to steal my sister’s dream, just as it got swiped from her. Why didn’t it occur to me then I could dream alongside her? Why wasn’t I brave enough to have a dream at all?

“I’d love to go to Juilliard,” I tell Sarah. There. Finally. “But any good conservatory would be okay.” I just want to study music: what life, what living itself sounds like.

“We could go together,” Sarah’s saying, while shoveling into her mouth each slice of mozzarella as I cut it. I slap her hand. She continues, “Get an apartment together in New York City.” I think Sarah might rocket into outer space at the idea – me too, though, I, pathetically, keep thinking: What about Joe? “Or Berklee in Boston,” she says, her big blue eyes boinging out of her head. “Don’t forget Berklee. Either way, we could drive there in Ennui, zigzag our way across. Hang out at the Grand Canyon, go to New Orleans, maybe—”

“Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I groan.

“Not the poem again. What could be a better distraction than the divine goddesses Juilliard and Berklee. Sheesh. Unfreakingbelievable…”

“You have no idea how dildonic it was.”

“Nice word, Len.” She’s flipping through a magazine someone left on the counter.

“Lame isn’t lame enough of a word for this poem,” I mutter. “Sarah, I told a guy that I belong to him.”

“That’s what happens when you read Wuthering Heights eighteen times.”

“Twenty-three.”

I’m layering away: sauce, noodles, I belong to you, cheese, sauce, my heart is yours, noodles, cheese, I hear your soul in your music, cheese, cheese, CHEESE…

She’s smiling at me. “You know, it might be okay, he seems kind of the same way.”

“What way?”

“You know, like you.”

Bails?
Yeah.
Can you believe Cathy married Edgar Linton?
No.
I mean what she had with Heathcliff,
how could she have just thrown it away?
I don’t know. What is it, Len?
What’s what?
What’s with you and that book already?
I don’t know.
Yes you do. Tell me.
It’s cornball.
C’mon, Len.
I guess I want it.
What?
To feel that kind of love.
You will.
How do you know?
Just do.
The toes knows?
The toes knows.
But if I find it, I don’t want to screw it all up like they did.
You won’t. The toes knows that, too.
Night, Bails.
Len, I was just thinking something…