by Jandy Nelson
• • •
A few steps into the walk, I see the kid from the roof, leaning against a tree, the same grin, the same dark green hat spinning now on his hand. His hair’s a bonfire of white light.
I blink because sometimes I see things.
Blinking still. Then to further confirm his existence, he speaks.
“How was class?” he says like it’s not the strangest thing in the world that he’s here, not the strangest thing that I take drawing outside rather than inside a classroom, not the strangest thing that we don’t know each other, and yet, he’s smiling at me like we do, and mostly, not the strangest thing that he followed me, because there’s no other explanation for him standing here in front of me. As if he heard me thinking, he says, “Yeah, dude, I followed you, wanted to check out the woods, but I’ve been busy with my own stuff.” He points to an open suitcase full of rocks. He collects rocks? And carries them around in a suitcase? “My meteorite bag’s still packed,” he says, and I nod like this explains something. Aren’t meteors in the sky, not on the ground? I look at him more closely. He’s a bit older than me, taller and bigger anyway. I realize I have no idea what color I’d use for his eyes. None at all. Today is definitely the day of the supremely excellent-eyed people. His are such a light brown, practically yellow, or copper maybe, and all splintered with green. But you can only see flashes of the color because he squints, which is cool on a face. Maybe not a Bengal tiger after all . . .
“Stare much?” he says.
I drop my gaze, embarrassed, a total whale dick dork, my neck prickling and hot. I start shuffling some pine needles into a pyramid with the toe of my shoe.
He says, “Well, you’re probably just used to it from staring at that drunk guy for so long today.” I look up. Was he spying on me the whole time? He’s eyeing my pad curiously. “He was naked?” He breathes in as he says it and it makes my stomach drop to the ground floor. I try to keep my face calm. I think about him watching me watch the movers, about him following me down here. He glances at my pad again. Does he want me to show him the naked drawings of the English guy? I think he does. And I want to. Bad. A heat storm, way more intense than the one before, is whipping through me. I’m pretty sure I’ve been hijacked and am no longer at the brain controls. It’s his weird squinting copper-colored eyes. They’re hypnotizing me. Then he smiles but only with half his mouth, and I notice he has a space between his front teeth, also supremely cool on a face. He says with a laugh in his voice, “Look, dude, I have no idea how to get home. I tried and ended up back here. I’ve been waiting for you to lead the way.” He puts on his hat.
I point in the direction we need to go and make my hijacked body start walking. He latches the suitcase full of rocks (hello?), picks it up by the handle, and follows. I try not to look at him as we walk. I want to be rid of him. I think. I keep my eyes on the trees. Trees are safe.
And quiet.
And don’t want me to show them the naked pictures in my pad!
It’s a long way, mostly uphill, and more daylight’s seeping out of the woods every minute. Next to me, even with the suitcase of rocks, which must be heavy, because he keeps switching it from arm to arm, the guy bounces along under his hat, like his legs have springs in them.
After a while, the trees settle me back into my skin.
Or maybe he has.
Because it’s actually not awful or anything walking with him.
He might even have some kind of Realm of Calm thing going on around him—maybe he emits it from a finger—because yeah, I feel relaxed now, I mean supernaturally relaxed, like I’m left-out butter. This is highly weird.
He keeps stopping to pick up rocks, examining them, and then either tossing them back or stuffing them in his sweatshirt pocket, which is starting to sag with the weight. I stand by when he does this, wanting to ask what he’s searching for. Wanting to ask why he followed me. Wanting to ask about the telescope and if he can see the stars during the daytime. Wanting to ask where he’s from and what his name is and if he surfs and how old he is and what school he’s going to next fall. A few times I try to form a question so it sounds casual and normal, but each time the words get caught somewhere in my throat and never make it out. Finally, I give up and take out my invisible brushes and just start painting in my head. That’s when it occurs to me that maybe the rocks are weighing him down so he doesn’t rise into the air . . .
We walk and walk through the gray ashy dusk and the forest starts to fall asleep: The trees lie down side by side by side, the creek halts, the plants sink back into the earth, the animals switch places with their shadows, and then, so do we.
When we break out of the woods onto our road, he spins around. “Holy hella shit! That’s the longest I’ve gone without talking. Like in my life! It was like holding my breath! I was having a contest with myself. Are you always like this?”
“Like what?” I say, my voice hoarse.
“Dude!” he cries. “Do you know those are the first words you’ve said?” I didn’t. “Man. You’re like the Buddha or something. My mom’s a Buddhist. She goes to these silent retreats. She should just hang out with you instead. Oh, oh, not counting, of course, ‘I’m a bloody artist, a bloody mess, mate.’” He says this last part with a heavy English accent, then cracks up.
He heard me! Talking to the trees! So much blood’s rushing and gushing to my head it might blow straight off my neck. All the silence of our walk is gurgling madly out of him now and I can tell he’s someone who laughs a lot, the way it’s taking him over so easily and lighting him all up, and even though he’s laughing at me, it’s making me feel okay, accepted, and making me feel a little bubble-headed as laughter starts to fizz up in me too. I mean, it was supremely funny, me yammering away in an English accent all alone like that, and then he says it again, his accent super-thick, “I’m a bloody artist,” and then I say, “A bloody mess, mate,” and something gives way and I’m laughing outright, and he says it again, and I do, and then we’re both really laughing, then the doubled-over kind, and it’s ages before we calm down, because each time one of us does, the other says, “I’m a bloody mess, mate,” and the whole thing starts all over again.
When we finally get it back together, I realize I have no idea what just happened to me. Nothing like that has ever happened before. I feel like I just flew or something.
He points to my pad. “So I guess you just talk in there, is that it?”
“Pretty much,” I say. We’re under a streetlamp and I’m trying not to stare but it’s hard. I wish the world would stick like a clock so I could look at him for as long as I want. There’s something going on in his face right now, something very bright trying to get out—a dam keeping back a wall of light. His soul might be a sun. I’ve never met anyone who had the sun for a soul.
I want to say more so he doesn’t leave. I feel so good, the freaking green leafy kind of good. “I paint in my head,” I tell him. “I was the whole time.” I’ve never told anyone I do this, not even Jude, and I have no idea why I’m telling him. I’ve never let anyone into the invisible museum before.
“What were you painting?”
“You.”
The surprise opens his eyes wide. I shouldn’t have said it. I didn’t mean to, it just popped out. The air feels all crackly now and his smile’s vanished. Just yards away, my house is a lighthouse. Before I even realize, I’m darting across the street, a queasy feeling in my stomach like I ruined everything—that last brushstroke that always destroys the painting. He’ll probably try to throw me off Devil’s Drop tomorrow with Fry. He’ll probably take those rocks and—
As I reach the front step, I hear, “How’d I come out?” Curiosity in his voice, not a smidge of asshat.
I turn around. He’s moved out of the light. I can only see a shadowy shape in the road. This is how he came out: He floated into the air high above the sleeping forest, his green h
at spinning a few feet above his head. In his hand was the open suitcase and out of it spilled a whole sky of stars.
I can’t tell him, though—how could I?—so I turn back around, jump the steps, open the door, and go inside without looking back.
• • •
The next morning, Jude calls my name from the hallway, meaning she’s a moment away from barging into my room. I flip the page of my sketchpad, not wanting her to see what I’ve been working on: the third version of the copper-eyed, rock-collecting, star-gazing, out-of-control-laughing new kid floating in the sky with his green hat and suitcase full of stars. I finally got the color so perfect, the squint just right, that looking at his eyes in the picture gives me the same hijacked feeling the real ones did. I got so excited when I nailed it I had to walk around my chair about fifty times before I could calm down.
I pick up a pastel and pretend to work on a portrait of the naked English guy that I finished last night. I did it cubist so his face looks even more like it’s in a smashed mirror. Jude teeters in wearing high heels and a tiny blue dress. Mom and she can’t stop fighting about what she wants to wear now, which is not much. Her hair’s snaky and swinging. When it’s wet like this, it usually takes the fluff and fairy tale off her, making her seem more ordinary, more like the rest of us, but not today. She has makeup all over her face. They fight about this too. And about her breaking curfew, talking back, slamming doors, texting boys not from school, surfing with the older surftards, jumping off Dead Man’s Dive—the highest, scariest jump on the hill—wanting to sleep at one of the hornet’s houses practically every night, spending her allowance on some lipstick called Boiling Point, sneaking out her bedroom window. Basically, everything. No one asks me, but I think she’s become BeelzeJude and wants every guy in Lost Cove to kiss her now because Mom forgot to look at her sketchbook that first day at the museum.
And because we left her. It was the Jackson Pollock exhibit. Mom and I had spent forever in front of the painting One: Number 31—because holy shit!—and when we walked out of the museum, Pollock’s bright spidery paint was still all over us, all over the people on the sidewalk, all over the buildings, all over our endless conversation in the car about his technique, and we didn’t realize Jude wasn’t with us until we were halfway over the bridge.
Mom said, “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod,” the whole speeding way back. All my organs were out of my body. When we screeched up to the museum, Jude was sitting on the sidewalk, her head tucked into her knees. She looked like a crumpled-up piece of paper.
Truth is: I think Mom and I had gotten used to not noticing her when the three of us were together.
She’s carrying a box, which she puts on the bed, then comes up behind me, where I’m sitting at my desk and peers over my shoulder. A damp rope of hair lands on my neck. I flick it off.
The naked English guy’s face stares up at us from the pad. I wanted to catch the unglued schizo way he looked before he got run over by misery, so I went way more abstract than usual. He probably wouldn’t recognize himself, but it came out all right.
“Who’s that?” she asks.
“No one.”
“Really, who is he?” she insists.
“Just someone I made up,” I say, pushing another wet squirrel tail of her hair off my neck.
“Nah-uh. He’s real. I can tell you’re lying.”
“I’m not, Jude. Swear.” I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want her to get any ideas. What if she starts sneaking down to stealth-take classes at CSA too?
She comes around to my side and leans in to better study the drawing.
“I wish he were real,” she says. “He’s so cool-looking. He’s so . . . I don’t know . . . There’s something . . .” This is weird. She never responds like this when she sees my stuff anymore. She usually looks like she has a turd in her mouth. She folds her arms across her chest, which is so full of boobs now, it’s like the clash of the titans. “Can I have it?”
This shocks me. She’s never asked for a drawing before. I’m horrible at giving them away. “For the sun, stars, oceans, and all the trees, I’ll consider it,” I say, knowing she’ll never agree. She knows how badly I want the sun and trees. We’ve been dividing up the world since we were five. I’m kicking butt at the moment—universe domination is within my grasp for the first time.
“Are you kidding?” she says, standing up straight. It annoys me how tall she’s getting. It’s like she’s being stretched at night. “That leaves me just the flowers, Noah.”
Fine, I think. She’ll never do it. It’s settled, but it isn’t. She reaches over and props up the pad, gazing at the portrait like she’s expecting the English guy to speak to her.
“Okay,” she says. “Trees, stars, oceans. Fine.”
“And the sun, Jude.”
“Oh, all right,” she says, totally surprising me. “I’ll give you the sun.”
“I practically have everything now!” I say. “You’re crazy!”
“But I have him.” She carefully rips the naked English guy out of my sketchbook, thankfully not noticing the drawing beneath it, and carries him with her over to the bed and sits down.
She says, “Have you seen the new kid? He’s such a freak.” I look down at my sketchpad, where the freak is exploding into the room in a burst of color. “He wears this green hat with a feather in it. So lame.” She laughs in her new awful buzzy way. “Yeah. He’s weirder than you even.” She pauses. I wait, hoping she’ll turn back into my sister, the way she used to be, not this new hornet version. “Well, probably not weirder than you.” I turn around. The antennae are waving back and forth on her forehead. She’s here to sting me to death. “No one’s weirder than you.”
I saw this show about these Malaysian ants that internally combust under threat. They wait until their enemies (like hornets) are close enough, then detonate themselves into a poison bomb.
“I don’t know, Noah. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.”
She’s on a roll. I begin countdown to detonation. Ten, nine, eight, seven—
“Do you have to be so, buzz, buzz, buzz, so you, all the time. It’s . . .” She doesn’t finish.
“It’s what?” I ask, breaking my pastel in two, snapping it, like a neck.
She throws her hands up. “It’s embarrassing, okay?”
“At least I’m still me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Then more defensively, she says, “There’s nothing wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with having other friends. Friends who aren’t you.”
“I have other friends too,” I say, glancing down at the sketchpad.
“Oh yeah, who? Who’s your friend? Imaginary ones don’t count. Neither do the ones you draw.”
Six, five, four—what I don’t know is if the Malaysian ants kill themselves in the process of annihilating their enemies.
“Well, the new kid for one,” I tell her. I reach into my pocket and wrap my fingers around the rock he gave me. “And he’s not weird.” Though he is! He has a suitcase of rocks!
“He’s your friend? Sure he is,” she says. “What’s his name, if you’re such good friends?”
Well, this is a problem.
“That’s what I thought,” she snips. I can’t stand her. I’m allergic to her. I look at the Chagall print on the wall in front of me and try to dive into the swirly dream of it. Real life blows. I’m allergic to it too. Laughing with the new kid didn’t feel like real life. Not one bit. Being with Jude didn’t used to feel like real life either. Now it feels like the very worst strangling, toilet-licking kind. When Jude speaks again a moment later, her voice is sharp and tight. “And what’d you expect? I had to make other friends. All you do is hole up making your lame drawings and obsessing about that stupid school with Mom.”
Lame drawings?
Here I go. Three, two, one: I detonate with the only thing I have. “You�
�re just jealous, Jude,” I say. “All the time now, you’re so jealous.”
I flip the pad to a blank page, pick up a pencil to start on (PORTRAIT: My Hornet Sister), no: (PORTRAIT: My Spider Sister), that’s better, full of poison and skittering around in the dark on her eight hairy legs.
When the silence between us has just about broken my ears, I turn around to look at her. Her big blue eyes are shining on me. All the hornet’s buzzed out of her. And there’s no spider to her at all.
I put the pencil down.
So quietly I can barely make out the words, she says, “She’s my mom too. Why can’t you share?”
The kick of guilt goes straight to my gut. I turn back to the Chagall, begging it to suck me in, please, just as Dad fills up the doorway. He has a towel around his neck, his suntanned chest is bare. His hair’s wet too—he and Jude must’ve swum together. They do everything together now.
He tilts his head in a questioning way, like he can see the body parts and bug guts all around the room. “Everything okay in here, guys?”
We both nod. Dad puts one hand on either side of the frame, filling the entire doorway, filling the Continental United States. How can I hate him and wish I were more like him at the same time?
I didn’t always want a building to land on him, though. When we were little, Jude and I used to sit on the beach like two ducklings, his ducklings, waiting and waiting for him to finish his swim, to rise out of the white spray like Poseidon. He’d stand in front of us, so colossal he eclipsed the sun, shaking his head so droplets would shower down on us like salty rain. He’d reach for me first, sit me up on one shoulder, then heave-ho Jude onto the other. He’d walk us up the bluff like that, making every other kid on the beach with their flimsy fathers out of their minds with jealousy.
But that was before he realized I was me. This happened the day he did a U-ey on the beach and instead of heading up the bluff, he took the two of us, perched there on his shoulders, back into the ocean. The water was rough and white-capped and waves were hitting us from all sides as we walked deeper and deeper in. I held on to his arm, which was belted securely around me, feeling safe because Dad was in charge and it was his hand that pulled the sun up each morning and down at night.
