by Jandy Nelson
“You shouldn’t have been doing that!”
She looks down. “I know, which is why—”
“I thought you were going to tell Dad about me,” I blurt. “That’s why I followed you.”
“I told you I wasn’t going to.”
“I heard you say on the phone ‘something happened with Noah last night.’ I thought you were talking to Dad, not your boyfriend.”
Her face stiffens at the word. “I said that because when I heard myself telling you last night that it was your responsibility to be true to your heart, I realized I was being a hypocrite and I needed to take my own advice. I needed to be brave like my son.” Wait, did she just use me to justify her traitorous actions? She stands, hands me the drawing. “Noah, I’m asking Dad for a divorce. I’m going to tell him today. And I want to tell your sister myself.”
A divorce. Today. Now. “No!” This is my fault. If I hadn’t followed her. If I hadn’t seen. If I hadn’t drawn the picture. “Don’t you love us?” I meant to say don’t you love Dad, but that’s what came out.
“I love nothing more than you and your sister. Nothing. And your dad is a wonderful, wonderful man . . .”
But now I can’t focus on what she’s saying because a thought’s taken over my entire brain. “Is he going to live here?” I ask her, interrupting whatever she was saying. “That man? With us? Is he going to sleep on Dad’s side of the bed? Drink out of his coffee cup? Shave in his mirror? Is he? Are you going to marry him? Is that why you want a divorce?”
“Sweetheart . . .” She touches my shoulder, trying to comfort me. I pull away from her, hating her for the first time in my life, real live squawking hatred.
“You are,” I say in disbelief. “You’re going to marry him, aren’t you? That’s what you want.”
She doesn’t say no. Her eyes are saying yes. I can’t believe this.
“So you’re just going to forget about Dad? You’re going to pretend everything you had with him is nothing.” Like Brian’s doing to me. “He won’t survive it, Mom. You don’t see him at that hotel. He’s not like he used to be. He broke.” And me too. And what if I, in turn, broke Brian? How can love be such a wrecking ball?
“We tried, Dad and I,” she says. “We’ve been trying very hard for a very long time. All I ever wanted for you kids was the stability I didn’t have growing up. I never wanted this to happen.” She sits back down. “But I’m in love with another man.” Her face slides off her face—no one can keep their faces on today—and the one underneath is desperate. “I just am. I wish things were different but they’re not. It’s not right to live a lie. It never is, Noah.” There’s begging in her voice. “You can’t help who you love, can you?”
This silences the racket in me for a moment. I can’t help it, that’s for sure, and I suddenly want to tell her everything. I want to tell her that I’m in love too and I can’t help it either and that I just did the worst thing I could’ve possibly done to him and I don’t know how I could’ve done it and can’t believe how much I wish I could take it back.
But instead I walk out of the room.
THE HISTORY OF LUCK
Jude
Age 16
I’m lying in bed unable to sleep, thinking about Oscar kissing brown-haired Brooke while I karmically fermented in the closet. Thinking about Grandma’s and Mom’s ghosts uniting against me. Thinking mostly about Noah. What was he doing down by Guillermo’s studio today? And why did he look so frightened, so worried? He said he’d gone running and was totally fine and it was a coincidence we ran into each other on Day Street. But I didn’t believe him, like I didn’t believe him when he said he didn’t know how all the files I bookmarked about Guillermo got deleted. He must’ve followed me down there. But why? I had the strongest sense there was something he wanted to tell me. But like maybe he was too afraid.
Is he keeping something from me?
And why was he going through my stuff the other day? Maybe it wasn’t just curiosity. Also, the emergency money—what did he use it for? I looked all over his room when he went out tonight, found absolutely nothing new.
I sit up, hearing a suspicious noise. Ax-murderers. They always try to break in at night when Dad’s away at his conferences. I push off the blankets, get out of bed, grab the baseball bat I keep underneath it for such occasions, and do a quick walk-through of the house to make sure Noah and I will live another day. I end my patrol in the doorway of Mom and Dad’s bedroom thinking what I always do: The room’s still waiting for her to come back.
The dressing table’s still decorated with her antique atomizers, French perfume bottles, bowls shaped like shells filled with eye shadows, lipsticks, pencils. Black hair’s still webbed in the silver hairbrush. The biography of Wissily Kandinsky still rests facedown on it as if she’s going to pick it up and resume reading from where she left off.
But it’s the photograph that draws me in tonight. Dad keeps it on his night table, I imagine, so it’s the first thing he sees when he wakes up. Neither Noah nor I had ever seen this picture until after Mom died. Now I can’t seem to get enough of it, of Mom and Dad in this moment. She’s wearing an orange tie-dye hippie dress and her blustery black hair’s blowing into her face. Her eyes are painted dramatically with kohl like Cleopatra’s. She’s laughing, it seems, at Dad, who’s next to her on top of a unicycle, his arms out to the sides for balance. His grin is gleeful. On his head is a Mad Hatter–style black top hat and the sun-bleached blond hair beneath it goes halfway down his back. (The silent exchange between Dad and Noah when Noah saw the hair: Oh my Clark Gable.) There’s a satchel around Dad’s torso filled with a stack of vinyl. Matching wedding rings glint on their tan hands. Mom looks exactly like Mom but Dad looks like another person entirely, someone who might actually have been raised by Grandma Sweetwine. Apparently, this unicycle-riding super-kook asked Mom to marry him after knowing her for only three days. They were both in graduate school, he, eleven years older. He said he couldn’t risk her getting away. No other woman had ever made him feel so damn happy to be alive.
She said no other man had ever made her feel so safe. This super-kook made her feel safe!
I put down the photograph, wondering what would’ve happened had Mom lived and Dad moved back in with us like she’d decided. The mother I knew didn’t seem so interested in safety. The mother I knew had a glove compartment full of speeding tickets. She mesmerized lecture halls of students with her drama and passion, with ideas critics called daring and groundbreaking. She wore capes! Went skydiving on her fortieth birthday! And this: She’d secretly, regularly make plane reservations for one passenger to cities all over the world (I’d overhear her doing it), only to let them expire a day later—why? And for as long as I can remember, when she thought no one was looking, she played chicken with the stove, seeing how long she could keep her hand over the flame.
Noah once told me he could hear horses galloping inside her. I got it.
But I know so little about her life before all of us. Only that she was, in her words: a hellion, who was shuttled from one unhappy foster situation to another. She told us art books in the town libraries saved her life and taught her to dream and made her want to go to college. That’s it really. She always promised she was going to tell me everything when I was a little bit older.
I’m a little bit older and I want her to tell me everything.
I sit down at the makeup table in front of the long oval wood-framed mirror. Dad and I boxed up all the clothes, but neither of us could bear touching the dressing table. It felt sacrilegious. This was her altar.
When you talk to someone through a mirror,
your souls switch bodies
I dab her perfume on my neck and wrists, and then I’m remembering being thirteen years old, sitting right here before school, methodically putting on all the makeup of hers I wasn’t allowed to wear to school: the darkest red lipstick she had ca
lled Secret Embrace, black kohl eyeliner, bright blue and green shadows, glittery powders. Mom and I were enemy combatants then. I’d just stopped going to museums with her and Noah. She came up behind me but instead of getting mad, she picked up the silver-plaited hairbrush and started brushing my hair like she used to do when I was little. We were framed in the glass together. I noticed our hair was twining together in the hairbrush, light and dark, dark and light. Through the mirror, I looked at her and she at me. “It’d be easier with us and I’d worry less,” she said gently, “if you didn’t remind me so much of myself, Jude.”
I pick up the same brush she used that day, three years ago, and comb it through my hair until every gnarl and knot is freed, until there’s as much of my hair webbed in the brush as hers.
If your hair tangles with someone’s in a hairbrush,
your lives will forever tangle outside of it
No one tells you how gone gone really is, or how long it lasts.
• • •
Back in my bedroom, I have to stop myself from taking the baseball bat to everything, the missing’s so bad. If only there was something in the bible to really help us. If only there was something to unflip the car (five times, according to the eyewitness), unshatter the windshield, uncrinkle the guardrail, unspin the wheels, unslick the road. Something to unbreak the twenty-two bones in her body including the seven in her neck, uncollapse her lungs, unstop her heart, and unhemorrhage her brilliant brain.
But there isn’t.
There isn’t.
I want to heave the stupid useless bible at stupid useless Clark Gable.
Instead, I put my ear to the wall between our rooms to see if I can hear Noah. For months after Mom died when he used to cry in his sleep, I would get up at the first sound of it and go into his room and sit on his bed until he stopped. He never once woke up and found me there sitting in the dark with him.
I put both hands on the wall between us, wanting to push it down—
That’s when I get the idea. An idea so obvious I can’t believe it’s taken so long for it to occur to me. A moment later, I’m at my desk booting up the laptop.
I go straight to LostConnections.com.
There’s Noah’s post to Brian, his plea, like always:
I’d give ten fingers, both arms. I’d give anything. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Meet me 5 p.m. Thursday. You know where. I’ll be there every week at that time for the rest of my life.
No responses.
But what if there were a response? My pulse quickens. How could I not have thought of this before? I ask The Oracle: What if I contact Brian Connelly?
To my amazement, the divination is bountiful. Link after link about Brian has appeared:
Scouts Descend on Forrester Academy Eyeing Gay Pitcher “The Ax” for Third-Round Draft Pick
Connelly Dodges Draft and Opts for Free Ride to Stanford to Pitch for the Cardinal
And the one I click on: The Bravest Man in Baseball Is Seventeen Years Old
The other links were fairly recent ones from his school’s paper, The Forrester Daily, or the local town paper, the Westwood Weekly, but the one I click is linked everywhere.
I read the article three times. It describes how Brian came out to his entire school at a pep rally the spring of his sophomore year. The baseball team was in the middle of a winning streak where he’d pitched two no hitters and his fastball was coming in consistently at eighty-nine mph. On the field everything was going great, but off it there’d been rumors about Brian’s sexual orientation and the locker room had become a war zone. It says Brian realized he had two choices: Quit the team as he’d done in a similar situation when he was younger or think of something else quick. At the pep rally, in front of the Forrester student body, he got up and said his piece about all those past and present who’ve been forced off the field because of prejudice. He got a standing ovation. Key teammates rallied around him, and in time, the harassment abated. The Tigers won the league championship that spring. He became team captain as a junior and at the end of that year he was offered a minor-league contract, which he didn’t accept because he got a baseball scholarship to Stanford. The article concludes by saying the fact that MLB is now trying to recruit openly gay players is a sign that history is in the making.
Clark effing Gable! But none of it surprises me, just confirms what I already knew: Brian is a way cool person and he and my brother were in love.
The most eye-popping piece of information in this article, however, next to the fact that Brian might be changing history and all, is that he’s at Stanford. Now. Not even two hours away! It would mean he skipped his last year of high school, but that’s entirely possible considering how he spoke in incomprehensible scientific paragraphs when he got going. I find the Stanford University newspaper online and search for his name but nothing comes up. Then I do another search for “The Ax.” Nothing still. I return to the article. Maybe I misread and he didn’t skip a grade and is coming next fall? But no, I didn’t misread. Then I remember that baseball is a spring sport! The season hasn’t begun. That’s why he’s not in the newspaper. I go to the Stanford website, find a directory of undergraduates and lickety-split, I find his email. Should I do this? Should I? Is it wrong to meddle?
No. I have to do it for Noah.
Before I change my mind, I copy the URL for Noah’s post on LostConnections and email it to Brian Connelly from an anonymous email account I make up.
It’ll be up to him. If he wants to respond to Noah he can. At least he’ll see it—who knows if he has? I know things didn’t end well between them. Nothing to do with me. Brian could barely look Noah in the eye at Mom’s funeral. He didn’t even come to the house after. Not once. And yet, it’s Noah who’s been apologizing for years on that website. The article says Brian came out at that pep rally the spring of his sophomore year, which followed his last winter break here. After that, his mother moved farther north and he never returned. But the timing is suspicious. Were the rumors about him and Noah then? Is that what ended their relationship? Did Noah start the rumors? Could that be what he’s apologizing for? Oh, who knows?
I get back in bed, thinking how happy Noah will be if he finally gets a response to his post. For the first time, in a very long time, my heart feels light. I fall asleep immediately.
And dream of birds.
If you dream of birds, a great change in your life
is about to take place
• • •
When I wake the next morning, I check to see if Brian’s responded to Noah’s post (nope), check to see if Noah’s already gone like yesterday (yup), and then, despite bone-deep disappointment about Oscar the Girl-Exhaler and uneasiness about both bloody ferocious Guillermo and the vigilante ghost squad, I’m out the door.
I need to get NoahandJude out of that rock.
I’m a few steps down the hallway at Guillermo’s, when I hear raised voices coming from the mailroom. Guillermo and Oscar are arguing intently about something. I hear Oscar say, “You couldn’t possibly understand! How could you?” Then Guillermo, with an unfamiliar hardness in his voice: “I understand very well. You take risks on that motorcycle, but that is it. You are a coward in a tough leather jacket, Oscore. You let no one in. Not since your mother die. You hurt before you can be hurt. You are afraid of the shadow.” I about-face and am almost to the door and out of there, when Oscar says, “I let you in, G. You’re . . . like a father . . . the only one I’ve had.”
Something in his voice stops me, sears me.
I rest my forehead against the cold wall, their voices quieter now, unintelligible, not understanding how it can be that even after everything that happened yesterday with Brooke, all I want to do is run to the motherless boy in the next room who is afraid of the shadow.
I do not.
• • •
Instead, I go to church. And when I return to th
e studio an hour or so later, all’s quiet. I spent my time with Mr. Gable trying not to be a compassionate person. Trying not to think about a scared grieving boy in a tough leather jacket. Wasn’t too hard. I sat in the pew, the same one I was in when Oscar and I met, and repeated the mantra: Come here, sit on my lap, ad infinitum.
Guillermo greets me in the mailroom with safety goggles on his head. There’s nothing in his expression to indicate he’s recently taken a circular saw to Oscar. He does look different, though. His black hair’s powdered with dust like Ben Franklin. And a large paisley scarf, also dusted with white powder, is wrapped a few times around his neck. Has he been carving? I glance up at the loft—no sign of Oscar. He must’ve left. Not surprising. Guillermo sure wasn’t holding back on the tough love. I can’t even remember the last time Dad went at Noah or me like that. I can’t remember the last time Dad was really a dad.
“I was afraid we scare you away,” Guillermo says, examining me a little too closely. The examining and the “we” make me wonder what Oscar might’ve told him. And that makes me wonder if what I overheard before might’ve had something to do with me. “Oscore say you leave very upset yesterday.”
I shrug, feeling heat in my face. “It’s not like I wasn’t warned.”
He nods. “If only the heart listen to reason, right?” He puts an arm around me. “C’mon, what is bad for the heart is good for art. The terrible irony of our lives as artists.” Our lives as artists. I smile at him and he squeezes my shoulder the way I’ve seen him squeeze Oscar’s, and instantly, my mood brightens. How did I ever find this guy? How did I get so lucky?
When I pass the stone angel, I reach out my hand and touch hers.
“The rocks call me back,” he says, brushing dust off his smock. “I am outside with you today.” I notice how dingy and graying his smock is, like all the others that hang on hooks around the studio. I should make him a better one, a colorful one that suits him. A Floating Smock.
