I'll Give You the Sun

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.

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 called 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.

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:

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:

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.

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 the 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.

When we pass by, I see that the clay man survived yesterday’s battery, more than survived. He’s no longer huddled and defeated but unfurling like a frond. He’s finished, drying, and beautiful.

“So I look at your practice rock and model last night,” Guillermo says. “I think you are ready for some electricity. You have a lot of stone to remove before you can even begin to find the brother and sister, understand? This afternoon I teach you to use the power tools. With these you must be so, so careful. The chisel, like life, allows for second chances. With the saws and drills, often there is no second chance.”

I stop walking. “You believe that? About second chances? In life, I mean.” I know I sound like an Oprah episode, but I want to know. Because to me, life feels more like realizing you’re on the wrong train barreling off in the wrong direction and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“Of course, why not? Even God, he have to make the world twice.” His hands take to the air. “He make the first world, decide it is a very terrible world he made, so he destroy with the flood. Then he try again, start it all over with—”

“With Noah,” I say, finishing his sentence.

“Yes, so if God can have two tries, why not us? Or three or three hundred tries.” He laughs under his breath. “You will see, only with the diamond blade circular saw do you have one chance.” He strokes his chin. “But even then sometimes you make a catastrophic mistake, you think I am going to kill myself because the sculpture is ruined, but in the end it come out more incredible than had you not made the mistake. This is why I love the rocks. When I sculpt with clay, it feel like cheating. It is too easy. It has no will of its own. The rocks are formidable. They stand up to you. It is a fair fight. Sometimes you win. Sometimes they win. Sometimes when they win, you win.”

Outside, sunlight has gathered from all corners of the earth. It’s a gorgeous day.

I watch Guillermo climb the ladder up to the female giant’s head. He pauses for a moment, pressing his forehead to her massive stone one, before rising above her. Then he lowers the safety goggles, lifts his scarf to cover his mouth—oh, I see, he’s too cool for a face mask—picks up the diamond blade circular saw that’s resting on top of the ladder, and wraps the cord around his shoulder. A loud jack-hammer-like noise fills the air, quickly followed by the shriek of granite, as Guillermo, without any hesitation, takes his one chance and slices into Dearest’s head, and then is lost in a cloud of dust.

It’s crowded in the yard today. In addition to Guillermo and the unfinished couple, The Three (extremely frightening) Brothers, and me, there’s Oscar’s motorcycle, for some reason. Also, Grandma and Mom are at the ready, I sense it. And I keep thinking someone’s watching me from the fire escape, but each time I look up, there’s only Frida Kahlo basking in the sun.

I forget everything else and work on freeing NoahandJude.

Slowly I chip, chip, chip away at the stone, and as I do, like yesterday, time begins to rewind, and I start to think and can’t stop thinking about things I don’t normally let myself think about, like how I wasn’t home when Mom left that afternoon to reconcile with Dad. I wasn’t there to hear her say that we were going to be a family again.

I wasn’t there because I’d run off with Zephyr.

I think about how she died believing I hated her because that’s all I’d been telling her since she kicked Dad out. Since before that.

I drive the chisel into a groove and hit it hard with the hammer, taking off a big chunk of rock, then another. Had I been at home that afternoon and not with Zephyr raining down bad luck, I know everything would’ve been different.

I take off another hunk, a whole corner, and the force of the hit sprays granules onto my goggles, into my exposed cheeks. I do it again on the other side, hit after hit, the misses bloodying my fingers, hitting and missing, hacking away at the stone, at my fingers, and then I’m remembering the moment Dad told me about the accident and how I threw my hands over Noah’s ears to protect him from what I was hearing. My first reaction. Not over my own ears but over Noah’s. I’d forgotten I’d done that. How could I have forgotten that?

What happened to that instinct to protect him? Where’d it go?

I take the hammer and crush it into the chisel.

I have to get him out of here.

I have to get both of us out of this fucking rock.

I slam into the stone again and again, remembering how Noah’s grief filled the whole house, every corner, every crevice. How there was no room left for mine or Dad’s. Maybe that’s why Dad started walking, to find some place where Noah’s heartbreak didn’t reach. I’d see Noah all curled up in his room and when I’d try to comfort him, he’d tell me how I didn’t understand. How I didn’t know Mom like he did. How I couldn’t possibly comprehend what he was feeling. Like I hadn’t just lost my mother too! How could he have said those things to me? I’m beating on the stone now, taking off more and more rock. Because I couldn’t believe he was hogging her in death, just like he had in life. Making me believe I had no right to grieve, to miss her, to love her, like he did. And the thing is I believed him. Maybe that’s why I never cried. I didn’t feel entitled to.

Then he threw himself off Devil’s Drop and almost drowned that day, almost died, and my anger toward him got wild and thrashing, monstrous and dangerous.

So maybe you’re right, I yell at Mom and Grandma in my mind. Maybe that’s why I did it.

I’m pounding on the stone now, cracking into it, opening it all up.

Opening it all up.

Noah’s application to CSA had been sitting on the kitchen counter radiating genius since the week before Mom died. He and Mom had sealed the envelope together for luck. They didn’t know I was watching from the door.

Three weeks after Mom’s accident, a week after Noah jumped off the cliff, the night before the CSA application was due, I wrote the application essays, stapled them to a couple dress patterns, added two sample dresses. What else did I have to submit? My sand women had all washed away.

Dad drove us to the post office to mail off the applications. We couldn’t find a parking spot so Dad and Noah waited in the car while I went in. That’s when I did it. I just did it.

I only mailed mine.

I took from my brother the thing he wanted most in the world. What kind of person does that?

Not that it matters, but I went back to the post office the next day, ran all the way there, but the garbage had been emptied. All his dreams got taken out with the trash. Mine went straight to CSA.

I kept telling myself I would tell Noah and Dad. I would tell them at breakfast, after school, at dinner, tomorrow, on Wednesday. I would tell Noah in time so he could reapply, but I didn’t. I was so ashamed—the kind that feels like suffocating—and the longer I waited, the more the shame grew and the more impossible it got to admit what I’d done. Guilt grew too, like a disease, like every disease. There weren’t enough diseases in Dad’s library. Days kept passing, then weeks, and then, it was too late. I was too scared if I confessed, I’d lose Dad and Noah forever, too cowardly to face it, to fix it, to make it right.

This is why my mother destroys everything I make. This is why she can’t forgive me.

When CSA announced the freshmen class on their website, his name wasn’t on the list. Mine was. When my acceptance letter came, I waited for him to ask about his rejection letter, but he didn’t. He’d already destroyed all his artwork by then. And sometime before this, he must’ve sent in pictures of my sand sculptures and gotten me in.

The world has gone dark. Guillermo’s standing in front of me blocking the sun. He takes the hammer and chisel out of my hands, which have long ago stopped carving. He takes off his scarf, shakes it out, and wipes the stripe of brow between my hat and goggles. “I don’t think you are okay,” he says. “Sometimes you work the stone, sometimes the stone works you. I think today the rock win.”

I slip down my face mask, and say, “So this is what you meant when you said what slumbers in here”—I touch my chest—“slumbers in here.” I touch the rock.

“This is what I meant,” he says. “I think we have a coffee?”

“No,” I say quickly. “I mean, thank you, but I need to keep working.”

And that’s what I do. I work for hours, obsessively, frenetically, unable to stop cutting into the stone, Grandma and Mom chanting at me with every hit: You crushed his dreams. You crushed his dreams. You crushed his dreams. Until for the first time since she died, Mom materializes and is standing before me, her hair a blaze of black fire, her eyes damning me.

“And you crushed mine!” I yell at her in my head before she vanishes again into thin air.

Because isn’t that also true. Isn’t it? Over and over again, day after day, all I wanted was for her to see me, to really see me. Not to forget me at the museum, like I didn’t exist, and go home without me. Not to call off a contest, certain of my failure, before she even looked at my drawings. Not to keep reaching inside me to turn down the light while at the same time reaching into Noah to turn his to full brightness. Always as if I were nothing but some stupid slutty girl named that girl. Invisible to her in every other way!

But what if I don’t need her permission, her approval, her praise to be who I want to be and do what I love? What if I’m in charge of my own damn light switch?

I put down the tools, take off the goggles, the mask, the plastic suit. I peel off my hat and toss it on the table. I’m so sick of being invisible. Sunshine tosses its giddy greedy fingers through my hair. Off comes my sweatshirt and I have arms again. The breeze welcomes them, skidding over the surface of my skin, raising hair after hair, tingling, awakening every exposed inch of me. What if my reasons for not sending Noah’s application had more to do with Mom and me than it did him and me?

(I never believed Noah and I shared a soul, that mine was half a tree with its leaves on fire, like he said. I never felt like my soul was something that could be seen. It felt like motion, like taking off, like swimming toward the horizon or diving off a cliff or making flying women out of sand, out of anything.)

I close my eyes for a moment and then it’s as if I’ve woken from the deepest slumber, as if someone has extricated me from granite. Because I realize: It doesn’t matter if Noah hates me, if he never forgives me. It doesn’t matter if I lose him and Dad forever. It just doesn’t. I have to uncrush his dream. That’s all that matters.

I go into the studio and climb the stairs to Oscar’s room, where there’s a computer. I turn it on, log onto my account, and write an email to Sandy at CSA asking if we can meet before school on Wednesday, the first day back after break. I tell him it’s urgent and that my brother will be coming to the meeting too with a painting portfolio that will blow his mind.

I’m going to give up my spot. It’s what I should’ve done every single day for the last two years.

I press SEND and the feeling is unmistakable: I’m free.

I’m me.

I text Noah: We need to talk. It’s important! Because he better get painting. He has four days to put a portfolio together. I lean back in the chair, feeling like I’ve emerged from the darkest cave into bountiful blinding sunlight. Only then do I look around the loft. At Oscar’s bed, his books, his shirts. Disappointment takes hold of me—but there’s nothing to do about it. The coward in the tough leather jacket has made it very clear how he feels about the coward in the invisibility uniform.

As I get up to leave, I spot Guillermo’s note that I gave Oscar on the bedside table by the photograph of his mother. I take it with me downstairs, and once I put it back in the notepad in Guillermo’s cyclone room where it belongs, I go outside and ask him to teach me how to use the diamond blade circular saw. He does.

It’s time for second chances. It’s time to remake the world.

Knowing I only have one shot to get it right with this tool, I wrap the cord around my shoulder, position the circular saw between Noah’s shoulder and my own, and turn on the power. The tool roars to life. My whole body vibrates with electricity as I split the rock in two.

So that NoahandJude becomes Noah and Jude.

“You kill them?” Guillermo says in disbelief.

“No, I saved them.”

Finally.

I walk home in moonlight, feeling absolutely incredible, like I’m standing in a clearing, in a river, in the most awesome shoes, high-heeled even. I know I still have to tell Noah and Dad about Noah’s CSA application, but that’s okay because no matter what happens, Noah will paint again. I know he will. Noah will be Noah again. And I can be someone I can stand to see in a mirror, in an art studio, in a Floating Dress, in good health, in a love story, in the world. It is bizarre, however, that Noah hasn’t responded to my texts. I tried several times too, each time with more urgency and more exclamation points. He usually gets back to me right away. I guess if he’s still out when I get home, I’ll just wait up.

I raise my arms to the bright bursting moon, thinking how I haven’t had a terminal illness in hours and how all’s quiet on the vigilante ghost front too, and what a relief both these things are when the text comes in from Heather:

At The Spot. Noah very drunk. Acting crazy. Wants to jump Dead Man’s! I have to leave in 5. Please come now! No idea what’s wrong w/him. Worried.

I’m at the edge of the world looking for my brother.

The wind’s pummeling me, the salty spray nicking my hot face, the ocean below drumming as ferociously in my head as out of it. Steeped in sweat from the sprint up the hill and with the full moon showering down so much light it could be daytime, I look up at Devil’s Drop and Dead Man’s Dive and see that both ledges are deserted. I thank Clark Gable profusely, catch my breath, and then even though she said she had to leave, I text Heather, then Noah again, trying to convince myself he’s come to his senses. I can’t.

I have a bad feeling.

I acted too late.

I turn around and head into the mayhem. In all directions, loud partying brigades from public and private high schools, from Lost Cove U., are gathered around kegs, bonfires, picnic tables, drum circles, car hoods. Every kind of music is blaring out of every kind of car.

Welcome to The Spot on a turbo-moonlit Saturday night.

I recognize no one until I return to the far side of the parking lot and spot Franklyn Fry, resident douchebag of epic proportions, with some older Hideaway surfers, all of them at least a year out of high school by now. Zephyr’s crew. They’re sitting on the flatbed of Franklyn’s truck, illuminated eerily in the headlights like jack-o’-lanterns.

At least Zephyr’s sun-blaze of long straggly surfer hair is nowhere in sight.

I want to get my invisibility sweatshirt and skullcap out of my bag and put them on. But I don’t. I want to believe the red ribbon around my wrist will keep me safe always. But it won’t. I want to play How Would You Rather Die? instead of figuring out how to live. But I can’t. I’m over being a coward. I’m sick of being on pause, of being buried and hidden, of being petrified, in both senses of the word.

I don’t want to imagine meadows, I want to run through them.

I approach the enemy. Franklyn Fry and I have bad blood.

My strategy is to offer no greeting and ask him calmly and politely if he’s seen Noah.

His strategy is to sing the opening lyrics of “Hey Jude”—why didn’t my parents think of this when they named me?—then to eye me slowly, stickily, up and down, down and up, making sure not to miss an inch before pit-spotting at my breasts. Make no mistake, there are advantages to an invisibility uniform. “Slumming it?” he says directly to my chest, then takes a slug of beer, wiping his mouth sloppily with the back of his hand. Noah was right; he looks exactly like a hippopotamus. “Come to apologize? Taken you long enough.”

Apologize? He’s got to be kidding.

“Have you seen my brother?” I repeat, louder this time, articulating every syllable, like he doesn’t speak the language.

“He took off,” a voice says from behind me, immediately silencing all music, all chatter, the wind and the sea. The same parched sandpapery voice that at one time made me melt into my surfboard. Michael Ravens, aka Zephyr, is standing behind me.

At least Noah decided against jumping, I tell myself, and then I turn around.

It’s been a very long time. The taillights from Franklyn’s truck are in Zephyr’s eyes and his hand’s cupped over them like a visor. Good. I don’t want to see his narrow green hawk eyes, see them enough in my mind.

This is what happened right after I lost my virginity to him two years ago: I sat up, pulled my knees to my chest, and gasped at the salty air as quietly as possible. I thought of my mother. Her disappointment blooming inside me like a black flower. Tears burned my eyes. I forbade them to fall and they didn’t. I was caked in sand. Zephyr handed me my bikini bottoms. It occurred to me to shove them down his throat. I saw a used condom dotted with blood splayed on a rock. That’s me, I thought: disgusting. I didn’t even know he’d put it on. I hadn’t even thought about condoms! Everything in my stomach was rising up, but I forbade that too. I put on my bathing suit, tried to hide the shaking as I did. Zephyr smiled at me like everything was fine. Like everything that had just happened was FINE! I smiled back like everything was. Does he know how old I am? I remember thinking. I remember thinking he must’ve forgot.

Franklyn saw Zephyr and me walking up the beach after. It had started to rain softly. I wished I was in my wetsuit, a thousand wetsuits. Zephyr’s arm was a lead weight on my shoulders, pushing me down into the sand. The night before, at the party he took me to, he kept telling everyone what an awesome surfer I was and how I’d been known not to jump but dive off Devil’s Drop. He kept saying I was: such a badass, and I’d felt like one.

That had been less than twenty-four hours earlier.

Somehow Franklyn knew what we’d done. When we reached him, he took my arm and whispered in my ear so Zephyr couldn’t hear: “Now it’s my turn,” he said. “Then Buzzy, then Mike, then Ryder, right? That’s how it works, just so you know. You don’t think Zeph actually likes you, do you?” That’s exactly what I’d thought. I had to wipe Franklyn’s words off my ear because they were covered in spit, and after I did that, I spun out of his grip, hollering, “No!” finally finding the godforsaken word, way too late, and in front of everyone, I kneed Franklyn Fry in the balls, hard, like Dad taught me in case of an emergency.

Then the mad dash home, with tears biting my cheeks, my skin crawling, my stomach in shambles, heading straight for Mom. I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.

I needed my mother.

I needed my mother.

There’s been an accident, that’s what Dad told me the moment I burst into the house.

There’d been an accident.

That’s when I threw my hands over Noah’s ears.

Dad took them off and held them in his.

So even as the police officer told us these unimaginable, world-breaking things, I was still crawling around in the wrongness of what I’d just done. It was caked along with sand in every pore of my body. The horrible wrong scent of it was still in my hair, on my skin, inside my nose, so every inhalation carried it deeper inside me. For weeks afterward, no matter how many times I showered, no matter how hard I scrubbed, no matter what kind of soap I used—I tried lavender and grapefruit and honeysuckle and rose—I couldn’t get it off me, couldn’t get Zephyr off me. Once, I went to a department store and used every single tester perfume on the counter, but it was still there. It’s always there. It’s still there. The smell of that afternoon with Zephyr, the smell of my mother’s death, one and the same.

Zephyr steps out of the glare of Franklyn’s headlights. This is how I think of him: like his namesake, the raven, a harbinger of death and doom. He’s a human hex, a tall blond column of darkness. Zephyr Ravens is an eclipse.

“So Noah went home?” I ask. “How long ago?”

He shakes his head. “No. Not home. He took off up there, Jude.” He points to the very top of the bluff to a ledge that doesn’t even have a name, because who would dare it? The hang-gliders use it occasionally, but that’s it. It’s too high to jump, probably double Dead Man’s, and below it there’s a shelf that juts out so if you don’t leap far enough and clear it, you slam into that before you ever hit water. I’ve only heard of one kid who’s ever jumped it. He didn’t make it.

My internal organs are failing, falling, one by one.

Zephyr says, “Got a text. They’re playing some drinking game. Loser jumps and apparently your brother’s losing on purpose. I was heading up there to try and stop it.”

Next thing, I’m diving through the crowd, knocking over drinks, people, not caring about anything except getting to the cliff path, the quickest way up the bluff. I hear Grandma’s voice blowing like wind at my back. She’s right behind me on the trail. Branches are cracking, her heavy footsteps hitting the path moments after mine, then I remember she doesn’t have footsteps. I stop and Zephyr barrels into me, grabbing my shoulders so I don’t careen face forward into the ground.

“Jesus,” I say, jumping quickly out of his grip, away from the smell of him, again so close.

“Oh man, sorry.”

“Stop following me, Zephyr. Go back, please.” I sound as desperate as I feel. The last thing I need in this moment is him.

“I’m on this trail every day. I know it so—”

“Like I don’t.”

“You’re going to need help.”

This is true. However, not from him. Anyone but him. Except it’s too late, he’s already brushed past me and is forging ahead into the moonlit dark.

After Mom died, he came over a few times, tried to get me back on my board, but the ocean had dried up as far as I was concerned. He also tried to be with me again in the guise of comforting me. Two words: as if. And not just him. So did Fry and Ryder and Buzzy and the rest of them, but not in the guise of anything except harassment. Incessantly. They’d all become jerks overnight, especially Franklyn, who was pissed and posted obscene things about me on the Hideaway message board and graffitied Slutever Sweetwine in the beach bathroom, rewriting it every time someone—Noah?—crossed it out.

Do you really want to be that girl? Mom had asked me over and over that summer and fall as my skirts got shorter, my heels higher, my lipstick darker, my heart angrier and angrier at her. Do you really want to be that girl? she asked me the night before she died—the last words she ever said to me—when she saw what I was wearing to go to the party with Zephyr (not that she knew I was going to a party with Zephyr).

Then she was dead and I was really and truly that girl.

Zephyr’s setting a fast pace. My breath’s tumbling around in my chest as we climb and climb and climb in silence.

Until he says, “I still got his back like I promised you.”

Once, long before we did what we did, I asked Zephyr to look out for Noah. Hideaway Hill can be very Lord of the Flies and in my seventh-grade mind, Zephyr was like the sheriff, so I asked for his help.

“Got your back too, Jude.”

I ignore this, then can’t. The words come out shrill and accusatory, sharp as darts. “I was too young!”

I think I hear him suck in air, but it’s hard to know because of the waves, loud and relentless, crashing into the rocks, eroding the continent.

As am I, kicking up dirt, kicking the shit out of the continent, driving my feet into the ground with every step. I was in eighth grade, he in eleventh—a whole year older than I even am now. Not that he should treat any girl at any age like that, like a dishrag. And then in the lightning bolt to the head kind of way, it occurs to me that Zephyr Ravens is not a harbinger of anything at all. He’s not bad luck—he’s a terminal burnout dimwit loser asshole, offense intended.

And what we did didn’t cause bad luck either—it caused endless inner-ick and regret and anger and—

I spit on him. Not metaphorically. I hit his jacket, his ass, then bean one right in the back of his mongrel head. That one he feels, but thinks it’s some kind of bug he can shoo off with his hand. I nail him again. He turns around.

“What the—? Are you spitting at me?” he asks, incredulous, his fingers in his hair.

“Don’t do it again,” I say. “To anyone.”

“Jude, I always thought you—”

“I don’t care what you thought then or what you think now,” I say. “Just don’t do it again.”

I blow past him and double our speed. Now I feel like a badass, thank you very much.

Maybe Mom was wrong about that girl after all. Because that girl spits on guys who treat her badly. Maybe it’s that girl who’s been missing. Maybe it’s that girl breaking her way out of that rock at Guillermo’s. Maybe it’s that girl who can see it’s not my fault that a car with my mother in it lost control no matter what I did with this jerkoff beforehand. I didn’t bring the bad luck to us, no matter how much it felt that way. It brought itself. It brings itself.

And maybe it’s that girl who’s now brave enough to admit to Noah what I did.

If he doesn’t die first.

As we get closer to the ledge, I begin to hear something strange. At first I think it’s the wind howling spookily in the trees, then realize it’s a human sound. Singing maybe? Or chanting? A moment later I realize what’s being chanted is my last name and my heart catapults out of my body. I think Zephyr realizes it at the same moment because we’ve both broken into a sprint.

Sweetwine, Sweetwine, Sweetwine.

Please, please, please, I think as we crest the last hill and reach the flat sandy area, where a bunch of people are in a semicircle like they’re at a sporting event. Zephyr and I elbow our way through, parting the curtain of bodies, until we have a front-row seat for the suicidal game that’s being played. On one side of a raging bonfire is a noodly guy with a bottle of tequila in his hand, swaying back and forth like a reed. He’s about twenty feet from the edge of the cliff. On the other side of the fire is Noah, ten feet from the edge, the crowd favorite to end his life. A half-empty bottle is on its side at his feet. He has his arms out like wings and is turning around and around, the wind rippling his clothes, the glow of the fire lighting him up like a phoenix.

I can feel his desire to jump as if it were in my own body.

A kid on a rock nearby shouts, “Okay, Round Five! Let’s roll!” He’s the master of ceremonies, and, it appears, as drunk as the contestants.

“You grab Noah,” Zephyr says, his voice all business now. At least he’s good for something. “I’ll get Jared. They’re so wasted, it’ll be easy.”

“On three,” I say.

We plunge forward, emerging in the center of the circle. From on top of the rock, the announcer slurs, “Hey, there appears to be some kind of interruption in The Death Match.”

My rage is meteoric. “Sorry to ruin the show,” I shout up at him. “But I have a really great idea. Next time why don’t you have your brother jump dead drunk off this cliff instead of mine?” Oh wow. That girl has many uses. I think I underutilized her in the past. I will not make that mistake again.

I grab Noah’s arm, hard, expecting a fight, but he melts into me, saying, “Hey, don’t cry. I wasn’t gonna jump.” Am I crying?

“I don’t believe you,” I say, looking into the open blooming face of the old Noah. So much love is filling my chest, it may explode.

“You’re right,” he laughs, then hiccups. “I’m totally gonna jump. Sorry, Jude.”

In a sudden swift movement that seems impossible considering how drunk he is, he spins out of my arms, casting me backward in slow, torturous motion. “No!” I reach for him as he dashes to the edge, raising his arms again.

It’s the last image I see before my head hits the ground and the crowd collectively gasps.

The ledge is now empty. But no one’s racing down the cliff path, the quickest way to the beach. No one’s even looking over the edge to see if Noah survived. The crowd’s in a mass exodus toward the street.

And I need to stop hallucinating.

I must’ve suffered some kind of brain trauma, because no matter how many times I blink or shake my head, they’re still there.

Belly-flopped on my brother not two feet from me is Oscar.

Oscar, who came out of absolutely nowhere to tackle Noah before he reached the edge.

“Hey, it’s you,” Noah says in wonderment as Oscar rolls off him and onto his back. Oscar’s panting like he just raced up Everest, and in motorcycle boots, I note. His arms are outspread, his hair wet with sweat. Thanks to the moon and the bonfire, my hallucination’s practically in high def. Noah’s sitting up now, gazing down at him.

“Picasso?” I hear Oscar say, still trying to catch his breath. It’s been ages since I’ve heard anyone call Noah that. “All grown up I see, and with a buzz cut.”

Now they’re fist-bumping. Yes, Noah and Oscar. The two I vote least likely to fist-bump. I have to be imagining this. Oscar’s sitting up now and has put a hand on Noah’s shoulder. “What the hell, mate?” He’s reprimanding Noah? “And what’s with the drinking? Following in my footsteps? This isn’t you, Picasso.”

How does Oscar know who Noah is to know who Noah isn’t?

“It isn’t me,” Noah slurs. “I’m not me anymore.”

“Know the feeling,” Oscar replies. Still seated, he holds out a hand to me.

I ask, “How are you here—”

But Noah interrupts, garbles at me, “You kept texting me, so I kept drinking ’cause I thought you knew . . .”

“Knew what?” I ask him. “This is all because of my texts?” I try to recall what I wrote, just that I had to speak with him and it was urgent. What did he think I wanted to talk about? What did he think I knew? There is definitely something he’s been keeping from me. “Knew what?” I ask him again.

He smiles stupidly at me, swiping the air with his hand. “Knew what,” he repeats like an imbecile. Okay, he’s drunk out of his gourd. I don’t think he ever has more than a beer or two. “My sister,” he says to Oscar. “She used to have hair that followed us around like a river of light, remember?” At least that’s what I believe he said. He’s speaking Swahili.

“Your sister!” Oscar cries. He falls onto his back again. Noah flops happily down next to him, a loony smile on his face. “That’s brilliant,” Oscar says. “Who’s Dad? Archangel Gabriel? And hair like a river of light, huh?” He lifts his head so he can see me. “You sure you’re okay? You seem a bit stunned. And you look great without your hat and that giant vegetable-stuffed sweatshirt. Great, but like you might be cold. You know what? I’d offer you my leather jacket, but someone stole it.” He’s back in fighting form, I see, recovered from this morning. Except I sort of feel like I’ve read his diary.

Still. “Don’t flirt with me,” I say. “I’m immune to your charms. I’ve been inoculated by one not-girlfriend too many.” For the record, that girl rocks.

I’m expecting a snappy retort but instead he looks at me in a completely unguarded way and says, “I’m so sorry about yesterday. I can’t tell you how sorry.”

I’m taken aback, have no idea how to respond. I’m not sure what he’s apologizing for either. For me seeing what I saw or for him doing what he did?

“Thank you for saving my brother’s life,” I say, ignoring the apology for now, and really, I’m just brimming with gratitude because: What in the world? “No clue how you appeared like this, like some superhero. Or how you two know each other . . .”

Oscar gets up on his elbows. “Proud to say, I’ve taken off my clothes for the both of you.”

This is strange. When would Oscar have modeled for Noah? Noah gets up on his elbows too because it appears he’s playing Follow the Leader with Oscar. His face is flushing. “I remember your eyes,” he says to Oscar. “But not those scars. They’re new.”

“Yeah, well, you should see the other guy, as they say. Or in this case the pavement along Highway 5.”

They’re chattering to each other, both flat on their backs again, batting words back and forth, English and Swahili, gazing up at the glowing night sky. It makes me smile; I can’t help it. It’s like when Oscar and I were on the floor of the jail cell room. I remember that sticky note: She said you would feel like family. Why does he? And what about that apology? What was that? He sounded earnest, real. So not full of it.

I smell weed and turn around. Zephyr and the noodly kid named Jared and a handful of others are smoking up as they leave, all walking in the direction of the street, probably on their way back to The Spot. Some help he was. If Oscar hadn’t dropped out of the sky, Noah would be dead. A loud bomb of a wave crashes into the shore below as if to confirm this. It’s some kind of miracle, I think, it has to be. Maybe Grandma’s right: You have to see the miracles for there to be miracles. Maybe I’ve been looking at the world, living in the world, in too much of a stingy cowardly way to see much at all.

“Do you realize Oscar saved your life?” I say to Noah. “Do you have any idea how high this cliff is?”

“Oscar,” Noah repeats, then wobbles to a sitting position and points at me, saying, “He didn’t save my life and it doesn’t matter how high it is.” He’s getting drunker by the minute, talking with two tongues now. “It’s Mom who keeps me up. It’s like I have a parachute on. Like I can practically fly.” He makes a slow swoosh with his hand through the air. “I sail all the way down so incredibly slowly. Every time.”

My mouth falls open. Yes, he does. I’ve seen it.

This is why he keeps jumping then, so Mom will break his fall? Isn’t that what I always think when I get The Poor Motherless Girl Look? Like I’ve been shoved out of the airplane without a parachute because mothers are the parachutes. I’m remembering the last time I watched him jump Devil’s. How he seemed to stay up forever. He could’ve had his nails done.

Oscar sits up. “That’s completely daft,” he says to Noah, his voice distressed. “Are you mad? You jump off that cliff in your present condition, you die. I don’t care who you have in your pocket on the other side.” He combs a hand through his hair. “You know, Picasso, I bet your mother would prefer it if you lived your life rather than risked it.” I’m surprised to hear these words out of Oscar’s mouth, wonder if they might’ve come out of Guillermo’s this morning.

Noah looks down at the ground, says quietly, “But it’s the only time she forgives me.”

Forgives him? “For what?” I ask.

He’s grown grave. “It’s all a big lie,” he says.

“What is?” I ask. Is he talking about liking girls? Or not doing art? Or wearing flame retardant? Or something else? Something that would make him jump off a cliff at night while drunk because he thought from my texts I might know what it is?

He looks up stunned like he realized he’s been talking, not thinking. I wish I could tell him the truth about CSA right now, but I can’t. He needs to be sober for that conversation. “You’re going to be okay,” I tell him. “I promise. Everything’s about to get better.”

He shakes his head. “No, it’s about to get worse. You just don’t know it yet.” A chill runs through me. What does he mean? I’m about to press him further when he rises to his feet and immediately falls over.

“Let’s get you home,” Oscar says, securing an arm around him. “So where’s home? I’d offer to ride him, but I’m on foot. G. stole my motorcycle in case I ended up like this tonight. We got in a big row this morning.” So that’s why the motorcycle was in the yard. I feel like maybe I should tell him I heard some of that row, but now’s not the time.

“G.?” Noah asks and then seems to forget he said anything.

“It’s close,” I tell Oscar. “Thank you,” I say. “Really, thank you.”

He smiles. “I’m the one you call, remember? Dead body, bloody knife.”

“She said you would feel like family,” I say to him, only realizing too late I probably should’ve kept this to myself. How corny.

But again he doesn’t react like I think. He breaks out the most genuine smile I’ve ever seen on him, one that starts in his eyes and doesn’t seem to end anywhere on his face. “She did and you do.”

While Oscar and Noah fumble along like they’re in a three-legged race, I try to calm the electrical storm in my head. She did and you do. And now I’m remembering how he had that picture of me in his jacket. And Brooke in his arms, Jude, please. Yeah, well, he just saved Noah’s life. And what about the way he said: I can’t tell you how sorry. And how he was this morning with Guillermo. And it’s not like he and I were really together. Oh boy. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

When we get to the road, Noah shakes free of Oscar’s hold and pushes ahead of us. I keep an eye on him as he hobbles along on his own.

Oscar and I walk side by side. A few times, our hands brush. I wonder if he’s doing it on purpose, if I am.

When we’re about halfway to the house, he says, “So this is how I’m here. I was at The Spot. I was very upset—G. said some things that really got to me. He has a way of holding up a mirror and what I saw in it was pretty horrifying. All I wanted was to get pissed, really smashed. I was contemplating taking my first drink in 234 days 10 hours—my last slip-up. I was calculating the minutes actually, had my eyes on my wristwatch, when this whirling dervish, who had a striking resemblance to you, came speeding out of nowhere and knocked the pint of gin out of my hand. It was incredible. A sign, right? My mum? A miracle? I didn’t know. Only, I didn’t get to contemplate the sublime or even divine nature of the occurrence, because I became immediately, frantically, and wrongly convinced you were being chased into the forest by some Nordic giant. So, I ask, who saved whose life tonight?”

I look up at the shining silvery coin of a moon rolling around in the sky and think I might be seeing the miracles.

Oscar takes something out of his pocket and holds it up. There’s enough light for me to make out that he’s mounted his mother’s seashell and strung it on a red ribbon that looks like the very same one I wrapped around Guillermo’s note to Dearest. The next thing I know, every part of him is so close to every part of me because he’s tying it around my neck.

“But you’ll die within minutes without it,” I whisper.

“I want you to have it.”

I’m too moved to say another word.

We continue walking. The next time our hands touch, I catch and hold his in mine.

I’m at my desk finishing up the studies for Mom’s sculpture, really working for a likeness. I’m going to show them to Guillermo tomorrow. Noah’s sleeping it off. Oscar’s long gone. I’m certain the magic seashell—his most beloved possession, he’d said!—around my neck radiates joy. I thought about calling Fish from school, dying to tell someone—someone among the living, for a change—about the seashell, about the photographs and sticky notes too, about everything that’s going on, but then I remembered it’s winter break and the dorms are closed (I’m one of a few people who don’t board), it’s the middle of the night, and we’re not really friends. But maybe we should be, I’m thinking. Maybe I need an alive friend badly. Sorry, Grandma. Someone to discuss how when Oscar and I were outside on the front step, just now, the two of us breathing and pulsing inches from each other, I thought for sure he was going to kiss me, but he didn’t, and I don’t know why. He didn’t even come in, which I guess is good, because he probably would’ve figured out that I’m still in high school. He was surprised I lived at home. He said, “Oh, I assumed you lived on campus. Did you stay to take care of your little brother after your mother died?”

I changed the subject. But I know I have to tell him and I will. About overhearing some of the fight with Guillermo too. Very shortly, I will be a girl without any secrets.

Feeling okay about the sketches, I close the pad and sit down at the sewing table. There’s no way I can sleep, not after everything that happened today and tonight, with Oscar, with Noah, with Zephyr, with the ghosts, and anyway, I want to get started on the smock I’m going to make for Guillermo out of floating dress scraps. I rummage through my bag for the old smock of his I swiped to use for a pattern. I start blocking it out on the table, and as I do, I feel something in the front pocket. I reach in and pull out a couple notepads. I leaf through one. Just notes and lists in Spanish, sketches, the usual. Nothing in English, nothing for Dearest. I flip through the second, much of the same, except then, in English and most definitely for Dearest, three drafts of the same note, each with slight variations, like he was intent on getting it right. Maybe he was going to send it as an email? Or in a card? Or with a black velvet box with a ring inside it.

The one with the least cross-outs:

I can no longer do this. I need to know an answer. I cannot live without you. I am half a man, with half a body, half a heart, half a mind, half a soul. There is only one answer, you know this. You must know this by now. How can you not know? Marry me, my love. Say yes.

I fall into my chair. She said no. Or maybe he never asked her. Either way, poor Guillermo. What did he say today? What is bad for the heart is good for art. Clearly, this was very bad for his heart and very good for his art. Well, I’m going to make him the most beautiful smock to make his art in. I sort through my bag of scraps for reds, oranges, purples, heart colors.

I start sewing the pieces together.

I have no idea how long the knocking’s been going on when it dawns on me that the noise I’m hearing isn’t coming from my sewing machine acting up but from someone at the window. Oscar? Did he take a risk on the only lit-up window in the house? It has to be him. A second later, I’m at the mirror, shaking my head a little to wake up my hair, then a lot to make it wild. I reach into the top drawer of my dresser and grab the reddest lipstick I have. Yes, I want to. I also want to take one of the prize dresses off the wall and put it on—The Gravity Dress maybe?—and then, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

“One sec,” I holler at the window.

I hear Oscar say, “Rightio.”

Rightio!

I’m standing before the full-length mirror in The Gravity Dress, my response to The Floating Dress. It’s a coral-colored, tight-fitting mermaid shape that flares and ruffles at the bottom. No one has ever seen me in it or in any of the dresses I’ve made over the last couple years. Including me. I make them all to fit my form but envision them for another girl, always thinking if someone opened my closet, they’d be certain there were two of us living in this room and they’d want to be friends with the other one.

There you are, I think, and it hits me. So she’s the one I’ve been designing for all along without realizing it. If I ever have a line of dresses like Grandma, I’m calling it: That Girl.

I cross the room, part the curtains, and slide open the window.

He does a double take. “Oh my God,” he exclaims. “Look at you. Bloody look at you. You’re stunning. And this is how you dress when you’re all alone in the middle of the night? And in potato sacks when you’re out in broad daylight?” He smiles his haywire smile. “I think you might very well be the most eccentric person I’ve ever met.” He puts his hands on the windowsill. “But that’s not what I’ve come to say. I was halfway home and I remembered something very important I needed to tell you.”

He gestures with his index finger for me to come closer. I bend down and lean out the window into the night. I feel the soft breeze in my hair.

His face has grown serious.

“What is it?” I ask.

“This.” So quickly I don’t see it coming he reaches both his hands around my head and kisses me.

I pull back for a moment, wondering if I can trust him, because I’d be crazy to. But what if I do? What if I just do? And you know, if he exhales me to kingdom come, so be it—

This is when it happens. Perhaps it’s the moonlight spilling down, alighting his features from above that does it, or maybe it’s the glow of my bedroom light on his face just so, or maybe it’s that I’m finally ready to see it, what’s been eluding me since the moment we first met.

He modeled for Noah.

Oscar’s the guy in the portrait.

He’s him.

And this is exactly like I always imagined it.

I lean back out again into the night. “I gave up practically the whole world for you,” I tell him, walking through the front door of my own love story. “The sun, stars, ocean, trees, everything, I gave it all up for you.”

Bafflement crosses his face, quickly followed by delight. Quickly followed by both of my hands reaching for him, pulling him to me, because he’s him, and all the years of not noticing and not doing and not living are breaking through the dam of the moment until I’m kissing him hungrily, wanting my hands on his body, and I’m reaching for him, and he me, and his fingers are knotting in my hair and before I know it I’m all the way out the window and toppling him to the ground.

“Man overboard,” he murmurs, wrapping me up in his arms and we’re laughing and then the laughing dies out because who knew kissing could be like this, could so alter the landscape within, tipping over oceans, sending rivers up mountains, unpouring the rain.

He rolls us over so his body is pressing into mine, the weight of him, the weight of that other day, and Zephyr begins elbowing his way between us. My muscles tense. I open my eyes, afraid of the unseeing stranger I’ll find this time, but I don’t find a stranger. It’s Oscar, present, so present, with love in his face. That’s how come I trust him. You can see love. It looks like this face. To me, it has always looked like this crazy mismatched face.

He touches my cheek with his thumb, says, “It’s okay.” Like he somehow knows what happened.

“You sure?”

Around us the trees rustle softly.

“One hundred percent sure.” He gently tugs at the seashell. “Promise.”

The night’s warm, shy, barely touching our skin. It envelops us, entwines us. He kisses me slowly, tenderly, so that my heart creaks open, so that all those moments on the beach from that horrid, horrid day wash away, so that, just like that, the boycott comes to an end.

It’s extremely difficult to concentrate on Oscar in my bedroom because: Oscar is in my bedroom! Oscar, who’s the guy in the portrait!

He’s flipped out that the dresses on the walls and the one on my body were made by me and has now picked up a framed photograph of me surfing. He’s excavating me, just without hammer and chisel. “Pornography for an English bloke,” he says, waving the picture at me.

“Haven’t surfed in years,” I tell him.

“Shame.” He taps the Physician’s Desk Reference. “Now this I expected.” He picks up another photo. A jump off Devil’s. He studies it. “So you used to be a daredevil?”

“Guess so. I didn’t think about it. I just loved doing that kind of stuff then.” He looks up like he’s expecting me to say more. “When my mom died . . . I don’t know, I got scared. Of pretty much everything.”

He nods like he gets it, says, “It’s like a hand at your throat all the time, isn’t it? Nothing’s inevitable anymore. Not the next heartbeat, not anything.” More than gets it. He sits down on my sewing chair, regards the photo again. “Though I went the other way. Started using all that fear as a punching bag. Nearly got myself killed on a daily basis.” He frowns, puts down the picture. “That’s partly what the row with G. was about. He thinks I take ridiculous risks on the bike or in the past with drugs but won’t—” He stops when he sees my face. “What is it?”

“Oscar, I overheard some of that fight this morning. As soon as I realized you guys were arguing, I left, but—” I stifle the confession because I’m thinking his organs may have caught fire.

Not sure what’s happening, except that he’s on his feet and bounding toward me at a breakneck un-Oscar-like pace. “Then you know,” he says. “You must, CJ.”

“Know what?”

He takes me by the arms. “That I’m fucking terrified of you. That I can’t seem to keep you out like I can everyone else. That I think you could devastate me.”

Our breathing’s loud, fast, in synch. “I didn’t know,” I whisper, barely getting the words out before his mouth lands hard and urgent on mine. I feel the unrestrained emotion in his lips, feel it unburying, unleashing something in me, something daring and fearless and winged.

Ka-effing-pow.

“I’m so dead,” he says into my hair, “so dead,” into my neck, then pulls back, his eyes shining. “You’re going to obliterate me, aren’t you? I know it.” He laughs in an even more tumbling, cascading way than usual and there’s something new in his face, an openness, a freedom maybe. “You already have. Look at me. Who is this guy? I assure you no one’s ever met this tempest before. I haven’t met him before. And none of what I just told you was really even part of the fight with G., for Christ’s sake! I just had to tell you. You have to know I’ve never”—he waves his hand in the air—“flipped the lid before. Not even close. Not a lid flipper.” He’s saying he’s never been in love? I remember Guillermo telling him how he hurts before he can be hurt, how he lets no one in. But he can’t keep me out?

“Oscar,” I say.

He puts his palms on my cheeks. “Nothing happened with Brooke after you left. Nothing. After I told you that stuff about my mother and me, I totally freaked out and was this total wanker. A coward—you probably heard that fine praise this morning on G.’s lips. I think I tried to ruin this before . . .” I follow his gaze to the window, to the black world outside this room. “I kept thinking now that you had a glimpse of the underbelly, of who I really was, you’d—”

“No,” I say, understanding. “It was the opposite. It made me feel closer to you. But I get it, I think the same way, like if people really knew me, they could never—”

“I could,” he says.

It kicks the breath out of me, kicks bright light into me.

At the same time, we reach for each other and then we’re in each other’s arms, joined together, pressed together, but this time not kissing, not moving, just holding each other so tightly. Moments pass, lots and lots of them, with us holding on, it feels like for dear life, or maybe holding on to dear life. So dear.

“Now that you have the seashell,” he says, “I’m thinking this is about as much distance I can safely be away from you at all times.”

“That’s why you gave it to me, then!”

“My entirely sinister plan.”

I didn’t think it possible, but he draws me even closer into him. “We’re Brancusi’s The Kiss,” I whisper. One of the most romantic sculptures ever made: a man and a woman pressed together into one.

“Yes!” he says. “Just like it.” He steps back, brushes a strand of hair out of my face.

“A perfect fit like we’re split-aparts.”

“Split-aparts?”

His face brightens. “So Plato talked about these beings that used to exist that had four legs and four arms and two heads. They were totally self-contained and ecstatic and powerful. Too powerful, so Zeus cut them all in half and scattered all the halves around the world so that humans were doomed to forever look for their other half, the one who shared their very soul. Only the luckiest humans find their split-apart, you see.”

I think about the latest note to Dearest. How Guillermo said he was half a man with half a soul, half a mind . . . “I found another note Guillermo wrote. It was in one of those notepads he has everywhere, a marriage proposal—”

“Yeah, I’m going to have to take the Fifth, isn’t that what you Americans say? He’ll tell you all about it one day, I’m sure. I’ve promised him—”

I nod. “I understand.”

“Those two were split-aparts, though, that’s certain,” he says. His hands find my waist. “I have a brilliant idea,” he says, his face whirring with emotion. Not any percent of him seems full of it anymore. “Let’s do it. Let’s flip our bloody lids together. Here it is, the rest of it: I was a mess at The Spot because I thought I blew it with you. I don’t care that G. has added a beheading to the list of barbaric punishments for my coming near you. I think my mother’s prophecy is real. I look everywhere. I search crowds. I take so many pictures. But I recognized you, only you. In all these years.” The most cockamamie grin has taken over his face. “So how about it? We’ll pop around on Hippity Hops. And talk to ghosts. And think we have the Ebola virus and not the common cold. And carry onions in our pockets until they sprout. And miss our mums. And make beautiful things—”

Completely swept up, I say, “And ride around on motorcycles. And go to abandoned buildings and take off our clothes. And maybe even teach an English bloke how to surf. Except I don’t know who just said all that.”

“I do,” he says.

“I feel so happy,” I say, overwhelmed. “I have to show you something.” I unclasp myself from him and reach under the bed for the plastic bag.

“So, Noah drew you. Not sure how—”

“You don’t know? He used to camp outside the window at that arts high school and draw the models.”

I cover my mouth with my hand.

“What?” Oscar says. “Did I say something wrong?”

I shake my head, try to make this image of Noah peering into a CSA classroom go away. He would have done anything. But then I take a deep breath, tell myself, it’s all right, because by next week he’ll be at CSA and that calms me enough to rummage around for the plastic bag. A moment later, I sit back down next to Oscar with it on my lap. “Okay. So once upon a time, I saw this cubist portrait my brother did of you and had to have it.” I look at him. “Had to have it. It was love at first sight.” He smiles. “He and I were always playing this game where we’d swap parts of the world for others in a quest for universe domination. He was winning. We’re . . . competitive, that’s the nice way of putting it. Anyway, he didn’t want me to have you. I had to give up almost everything. But it was worth it. I kept you here.” I show him the spot where the picture hung by my bed. “I would stare and stare at you and wish you were real and imagine you coming to that window, just like you did tonight.”

He bursts out laughing. “That’s incredible! We’re absolutely split-aparts.”

“I don’t know if I want a split-apart,” I say honestly. “I think I need my own soul.”

“That’s fair. Maybe we can be occasional split-aparts. On occasions like these, for instance.” He runs a finger slowly down the side of my neck, crossing over my collarbone, then down, down. What was I thinking with this plunging neckline? I wouldn’t say no to a fainting couch. I wouldn’t say no to anything. “But why rip me up and stuff me in a bag?” he asks.

“Oh, my brother did that. He was angry at me. I tried to put you back together many times.”

“Thank you,” he says, but then something across the room catches his attention and in a flash he’s up and walking toward my dresser. He picks up a photograph of my family and studies it. I’m watching him in the mirror. His face has turned ashen. What? He turns around and stares right through me. “You’re not his older sister,” he says more to himself than me. “You’re twins.” I can see the wheels spinning in his head. He must know how old Noah is and now he knows how old I am.

“I was going to tell you,” I say. “I guess I was afraid to. I was afraid you’d—”

“Holy hell.” He’s springing for the window. “Guillermo doesn’t know.” He’s halfway over the ledge. I don’t know what’s going on.

“Wait,” I say. “Wait. Oscar. Of course he does. Why would he care? Why is it that big of a deal?” I run to the window, yell out, “My father was eleven years older than my mother! It doesn’t matter.”

But he’s already gone.

I go to the dresser, pick up the photograph. It’s my favorite family portrait. Noah and I are about eight and dressed in matching sailor outfits looking totally daffy. But it’s because of my parents that I love it.

My mother and father are gazing at each other like they have the best secret.