I'll Give You the Sun

THE HISTORY OF LUCK

Jude

Age 16

3 years later

Here I am.

Standing next to my sculpture in the studio at CSA with a four-leaf clover in my pocket. I spent all morning on hands and knees in a clover patch outside school, all for nothing—it was picked clean. But then, eureka! I super-glued a fourth leaf onto an ordinary old three-leafer, wrapped it in cellophane, and slipped it into my sweatshirt pocket right beside the onion.

I’m a bit of a bible thumper. Other people have the Gideon, I have Grandma Sweetwine’s. Some sample passages:

(Art school is rife with sinister influences. Especially today— not only is it my critique day, I have a meeting with my advisor and I might be expelled.)

(Check. Can’t be too careful.)

(Jury’s out. No boy has ever given me an orange.)

(We’ll get to this. Soon.)

The bell rings.

And there they are. The other clay second-years. Every last one of them ready to suffocate me with a pillow. Oops, I mean: staring dumbfounded at my sculpture. The assignment was to do another self-portrait. I went abstract, as in: blob. Degas had dancers, I have blobs. Broken, glued-together blobs. This is my eighth.

“What’s working here?” asks Sandy Ellis, master ceramicist, clay instructor, and my advisor. The way he begins every critique.

No one says a word. The proper California School of the Aliens feedback sandwich starts and ends with praise—in between, people say the terrible things they really think.

I scan the room without moving my head. The sophomore clay crew is a pretty good sampling of the CSA student body: freak-flags of every variety flying proud and loud. Normal run-of-the-mill people like me—except for a few discreet tics, sure, who doesn’t have something?—are the exception.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s Noah who belongs at this school, not me.

Sandy peers at the class over his round, tinted spectacles.

Usually everyone jumps right in, but the only sound in the studio is the electric hum of the fluorescent lights. I study the time on Mom’s old watch—she was wearing it when her car sailed off the cliff two years ago, killing her on impact—as it ticks around my wrist.

(It rained most of the December before she died.)

“C’mon guys, positive impressions of Broken Me-Blob No. 8?” Sandy slowly strokes his straggly beard. If we all morphed into our mirror animals (a game Noah made me play constantly when we were little), Sandy would poof into a billy goat. “We’ve been talking about point of view,” he says. “Let’s discuss CJ’s, shall we?”

CJ, short for Calamity Jane/Jude, is what everyone at school calls me on account of my “bad luck.” It’s not just breakage in the kiln. Last year, in pottery studio, some of my bowls allegedly took flying leaps off the shelves at night when no one was around, when the windows were all closed, when the closest earthquake was in Indonesia. The night janitor was confounded.

Everyone was but me.

Caleb Cartwright raises both hands in a gesture that further clinches his mime thing: black turtleneck, black skinny jeans, black eyeliner, black bowler hat. He’s actually quite hot in an arty cabaret kind of way, not that I’ve noticed. The boy boycott’s on. I come fully equipped with boy-blinders and failsafe invisibility uniform:

Caleb scans the room. “I’ll just say it for everyone, okay?” He pauses, taking great care to find the perfect words to throw me overboard. “It’s impossible to critique CJ’s work because it’s always mangled, glued together like this. I mean, we’re talking serious Humpty Dumpty every time.”

I imagine myself in a meadow. This is what the school counselor told me to do when I feel mental, or as Grandma used to say: minus some buttons.

And if anyone was wondering: DIY four-leaf clovers have no juice.

“Well, what does that say in and of itself?” Sandy asks the class.

Randall “no offense, but” Brown starts to sputter. He’s this all-star a-hole who believes he can say the most offensive things imaginable in critique if he precedes them with “No offense, but.” I’d like to bean him with a tranquilizer dart. “It would say a lot more, Sandy, if it were intentional.” He looks at me. Here it comes. “I mean, CJ, no offense, but it’s got to be that you’re fundamentally careless. The only rational explanation for so much breakage in the kiln is that you don’t knead your clay enough or let your work dry evenly.”

Nail on the head. Bingo. Pop goes the weasel.

Sometimes explanations are not rational.

Strange things happen. And if we were allowed to talk when our work was being critiqued, and if I could get a signed affidavit from someone very high up, like God for instance, that I wouldn’t be locked away for the rest of my life, then I’d say, “Doesn’t anyone else have a dead mother angry enough at them to rise from the grave and break their artwork?”

Then they’d understand what I’m up against.

“Randall brings up a good point,” Sandy says. “Does intentionality matter in our experience and appreciation of art? If CJ’s final sculpture is in pieces, does her original conception of wholeness even matter? Is it about the journey or the destination, so to speak?”

The whole class hums like a happy hive at this and Sandy launches them into a theoretical discussion about whether the artist even matters after the art has been created.

I’d rather think about pickles.

“Me too—kosher dills, big fat juicy ones. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm,” whispers Grandma Sweetwine in my head. She’s dead like Mom, but unlike Mom, who just breaks things, Grandma’s vocal and often visible. She’s the good cop of my ghost world; Mom, the bad. I try to keep my face blank as she continues. “Ho, dee, hum, what a snooze. And really, that’s a highly unattractive thing you’ve made. Why all this beating around the bush? Why don’t they tell you better luck next time and move on to their next victim like that fella there with the bananas springing out of his head.”

“Those are blond dreadlocks, Grandma,” I tell her in my mind, careful not to move my mouth.

“I say you make a run for it, dear.”

“I’m with you.”

Those discreet tics? I confess, maybe not so discreet.

But, for the record: Twenty-two percent of the world’s population sees ghosts—that’s over one and a half billion people worldwide. (Professors as parents. Mad research skills.)

While the theoretical clone-drone continues, I amuse myself by playing: How Would You Rather Die? I’m the reigning champion of this game. It’s not as simple as it seems, because making the deaths on either side of the equation comparably frightful takes enormous skill. For instance: eating fistful after fistful of crushed glass or—

I’m interrupted because to my surprise and everyone else’s as well, Fish (no last name) has raised her hand. Fish’s a mute like me, so this is something.

“CJ has good technique,” she says, her tongue stud flashing like a star in her mouth. “I propose it’s a ghost that’s breaking her work.” Everyone hardy-har-hars at this, including Sandy. I’m floored. She wasn’t joking, I can tell. She meets my eyes, then lifts her wrist and gives it a subtle shake. On it is a cool punky charm bracelet that perfectly matches the rest of her: purple hair, tattoo sleeves, acid attitude. Then I recognize the charms: three pieces of ruby red sea glass, two four-leaf clovers in plastic, and a handful of sand-dollar birds, all strung together with black ratty leather. Wow. I hadn’t realized I’d snuck so much luck into her bag, into her smock pockets. She just always seems so sad under all the ghoulish makeup. But how did she know it was me? Do the rest know too? Like that jittery new kid? Definitely minus some buttons. Been slipping him sand-dollar birds galore.

But Fish’s dead ringer of a pronouncement and bracelet are the lone fireworks. For the rest of the hour, one by one, the others skewer Broken Me-Blob No. 8 and I become more and more aware of my hands, which are in a white-knuckled clasp in front of me. They feel itchy. Very itchy. Finally, I unclasp them and try to examine them on the down low. No sign of a bite or rash. I search for a red spot that might indicate necrotizing fasciitis, more commonly referred to as flesh-eating disease, which I read all about in one of Dad’s medical journals—

Okay, got it: How Would You Rather Die? Eating handful after handful of crushed glass, or a whopping case of necrotizing fasciitis?

The voice of Felicity Stiles—signifying the end is nigh!—pulls me out of this brain-squeezing conundrum where I’m leaning toward eating the glass.

“Can I do the closing, Sandy?” she asks like she always does. She has this gorgeous lilting South Carolinian accent that she uses to give a sermon at the end of every critique. She’s like a flower that talks—an evangelical daffodil. Fish covertly mimes a dagger going into her chest. I smile at her and brace myself. “I just think it’s sad,” Felicity says, then pauses until the room is hers, which doesn’t take more than a second because she doesn’t only sound like a daffodil, she looks and acts like one too and we all become human sighs around her. She holds her hand out to my blob. “I can feel the pain of the whole wide world in this piece.” It takes a full rotation of that world for her to drawl out all those Ws. “Because we are all broken. I mean, aren’t we now? I am. The whole wide world is. We try to do our best and this is what happens, time and time again. That’s what all CJ’s work says to me, and it makes me really, really sad.” She faces me directly. “I understand how unhappy you are, CJ. I really do.” Her eyes are huge, swallowing. Oh, how I hate art school. She raises a fisted hand and clutches it to her chest, then beats it three times, saying, “I. Understand. You.”

I can’t help it. I’m nodding back at her like a fellow flower, when the table beneath Broken Me-Blob No. 8 gives way and my self-portrait tumbles to the floor and shatters into pieces. Again.

“That’s cold,” I tell Mom in my mind.

“You see,” Fish declares. “A ghost.”

This time nobody hardy-har-hars. Caleb shakes his head: “No way.” Randall: “What the hell?” Tell me about it, countrymen. Unlike Casper and Grandma S., Mom is not a friendly ghost.

Sandy’s under the table. “A screw fell out,” he says in disbelief.

I get the broom I keep at my station for such occasions and sweep up broken Broken Me-Blob No. 8 while everyone mutters about how unlucky I am. I empty the pieces into a trashcan. After the remains of my self-portrait, I toss in the useless DIY-clover.

I’m thinking maybe Sandy will feel sorry for me and postpone our big meeting until after winter break, which starts tomorrow, when he mouths at me My office, and gestures toward the door. I cross the studio.

I’m sunk into a giant plush leather chair across from Sandy. He’s just apologized about the screw falling out and joked that maybe Fish was right about that ghost, eh, CJ?

Chuckling politely here at the absurd notion.

His fingers are piano-ing on the desk. Neither of us is speaking. I’m fine with this.

To his left is a life-size print of Michelangelo’s David, so vivid in the fragile afternoon light that I keep expecting his chest to heave as he claims his first breath. Sandy follows my gaze over his shoulder to the magnificent stone man.

“Helluva biography your mother wrote,” he says, breaking the silence. “Fearless in her examination of his sexuality. Deserved every bit of acclaim it got.” He takes off his glasses and rests them on the desk. “Talk to me, CJ.”

I glance out the window at the long stretch of beach buried in fog. “A white-out’s coming for sure,” I say. One of the town of Lost Cove’s claims to fame is how often it disappears. “Do you know that some native peoples believe fog contains the restless spirits of the dead?” From Grandma’s bible.

“Is that right?” He strokes his beard, transporting flecks of clay from his hand to it. “That’s interesting, but right now we need to talk about you. This is a very serious situation.”

I think I was talking about me.

Silence prevails once again . . . and I’ve decided to eat the crushed glass. Final answer.

Sandy sighs. Because I’m disturbing him? I disturb people, I’ve noticed. Didn’t used to.

“Look, I know it’s been an extraordinarily hard time for you, CJ.” He’s searching my face with his kind billy goat eyes. It’s excruciating. “And we pretty much gave you a free pass last year because of the tragic circumstances.” He has on The Poor Motherless Girl Look—all adults get it at some point when they talk to me, like I’m doomed, shoved out of the airplane without a parachute because mothers are the parachutes. I drop my gaze, notice a fatal melanoma on his arm, see his life pass before my eyes, then realize with relief it’s a dot of clay. “But CSA is a tight ship,” he says more sternly. “Not passing a studio is grounds for expulsion, and we decided to just put you on probation.” He leans forward. “It’s not all the breakage in the kiln. That happens. Granted, it seems to always happen to you, which calls into question your technique and focus, but it’s the way you’ve isolated yourself and your clear lack of investment that deeply concern us. You must know there are young artists all around the country banging on our doors for a spot, for your very spot.”

I think how much Noah deserves my spot. Isn’t that what Mom’s ghost is telling me by breaking everything I make?

I know it is.

I take a breath and then I say it. “Let them have my spot. Really, they deserve it. I don’t.” I lift my head, look in his stunned eyes. “I don’t belong here, Sandy.”

“I see,” he says. “Well, you might feel that way, but the CSA faculty think differently. I think differently.” He picks up his glasses, begins cleaning them with his clay-splattered shirt, making them dirtier. “There was something so unique in those women you made out of sand, the ones that were part of your admission portfolio.”

Huh?

He closes his eyes for a moment like he’s listening to distant music. “They were so joyful, so whimsical. So much motion, so much emotion.”

What’s he talking about?

“Sandy, I submitted dress patterns and sample dresses I made. I talked about the sand sculptures in my essay.”

“Yes, I remember the essay. And I remember the dresses. Lovely. Too bad we don’t have a fashion focus. But the reason you’re sitting in that chair is because of the photographs of those wonderful sculptures.”

There are no photographs of those sculptures.

Okay then, feeling a little light-headed here in this episode of The Twilight Zone.

Because no one ever even saw them. I made sure of it, always sneaking far down the beach to an isolated cove, the tide taking them away . . . except Noah did tell me once, no, twice actually, that he followed me and watched me build. But did he take pictures? And send them to CSA? Nothing could seem less likely.

When he found out I got in and he didn’t, he destroyed everything he’d ever made. Not even a doodle remains. He hasn’t picked up a pencil, pastel, stick of charcoal, or paintbrush since.

I glance up at Sandy, who’s rapping his knuckles on the desk. Wait, did he just say my sand sculptures were wonderful? I think he did. When he sees I’m listening again, he stops knuckle-rapping and continues. “I know we inundate you with lots of theory your first two years here, but let’s you and me get back to basics. One simple question, CJ. Isn’t there anything you want to make anymore? You’ve been through so much for someone so young. Isn’t there something you want to say? Something you need to say?” He’s gotten very serious and intense. “Because that’s what all this is about. Nothing else. We wish with our hands, that’s what we do as artists.”

His words are loosening something inside. I don’t like it.

“Think about it,” he says more gently. “I’m going to ask again. Is there something you need in the world that only your two hands can create?”

I feel a searing pain in my chest.

“Is there, CJ?” he insists.

There is. But it’s off limits. Imagining that meadow now.

“No,” I say.

He grimaces. “I don’t believe you.”

“There’s nothing,” I say, holding my hands together as tight as I can in my lap. “Nada. Zip.”

He shakes his head, disappointed. “Okay then.”

I gaze up at David . . .

“CJ, where are you?”

“Here, I’m here. Sorry.” I turn my attention back to him.

He’s clearly upset. Why? Why does he care so much? Like he said, there are young artists all around the country dying for my spot. “We need to talk to your father,” he says. “You’d be giving up an opportunity of a lifetime. Is this really what you want?”

My eyes drift back to David. It’s like he’s made of light. What I want? I want only one thing—

Then it’s as if David’s jumped off the wall and swooped me into his massive stone arms and is whispering into my ear.

He reminds me that Michelangelo made him over five hundred years ago.

“Do you really want to transfer out?”

“No!” The vehemence in my voice surprises us both. “I need to work in stone.” I point to David. An idea’s exploding inside me. “There is something I need to make,” I tell him. I feel wild, like I’m gulping for air. “Badly.” I’ve wanted to make it since I got here, but I couldn’t bear it if Mom broke it. Just couldn’t bear it.

“This pleases me to no end,” Sandy says, clasping his hands together.

“But it can’t be built in clay. No kiln,” I say. “It has to be stone.”

“Much more resilient,” he says, smiling. He gets it. Well, part of it.

“Exactly,” I say. She will not be able to break this so easily! And more importantly, she’s not going to want to. I’m going to dazzle her. I’m going to communicate with her. This is the way. “I’m so sorry, Jude,” she’ll whisper in my ear. “I had no idea you had it in you.”

And then just maybe she’ll forgive me.

I don’t realize Sandy’s been talking, oblivious of the music swelling, of the mother-daughter reconciliation that’s occurring in my head. I try to focus.

“The problem is, with Ivan in Italy for the year, there’s no one in the department to help you. If you wanted to work in clay and cast in bronze I could—”

“No, it’s got to be stone, the harder the better, granite even.” This is genius.

He laughs, back to his mellow goat-grazing-in-a-field self. “Maybe, hmm, maybe . . . if you’re okay with mentoring with someone outside of school?”

“Sure.” You kidding? Bonus.

Sandy’s stroking his beard, thinking.

And thinking.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Well, there is someone.” Sandy raises his eyebrows. “A master carver. One of the last ones standing perhaps. But no, I don’t think it’s possible.” He pushes the idea away with his hand. “He doesn’t teach anymore. Doesn’t exhibit. Something happened to him. No one knows what the deal is, and even before all this, he wasn’t the most . . . hmm, how shall I put it?” He looks up at the ceiling, finds the word there: “Human.” He laughs, starts digging around in a pile of magazines on his desk. “An extraordinary sculptor and a helluva speaker. I heard him when I was in grad school, amazing, he—”

“If not human, what?” I interrupt, intrigued.

“Actually . . .” He smiles at me. “I think your mother said it best.”

“My mother?” I don’t even need to have The Sweetwine Gift to know this is a sign.

“Yes, your mother wrote about him in Art Tomorrow. Funny. I was just looking at the interview the other day.” He flips through a few issues of the magazine Mom used to write for, but doesn’t find it. “Oh well,” he says, giving up. He leans back in his chair. “Let me think . . . what were her words? Oh yes, yes, she said, ‘He was the kind of man who walks into a room and all the walls fall down.’”

A man who walks into a room and all the walls fall down? “What’s his name?” I ask, feeling a little breathless.

He presses his lips together for a long moment, studying me, then seems to make a decision. “I’ll give him a call first. If it’s a go, you can pay him a visit after winter break.” He writes a name and address on a piece of paper and hands it to me.

Smiling, he says, “Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

Grandma Sweetwine and I are lost in oblivion, unable to see anything in the fog as we make our way through the ground cloud to Day Street in the inland flats of Lost Cove where Guillermo Garcia’s studio is. That’s the name of the sculptor that was on the piece of paper Sandy gave me. I don’t want to wait to see if it’s a go, I just want to go.

Before leaving school I consorted with The Oracle: Google. Internet searches are better than tea leaves or a tarot deck. You put in your question: Am I a bad person? Is this headache a symptom of an inoperable brain tumor? Why won’t my mother’s ghost speak to me? What should I do about Noah? Then you sort through the results and determine the divination.

When I put in the question: Should I ask Guillermo Garcia to be my mentor? up popped a link for the cover of Interview Magazine. I clicked on it. The photograph was of a dark, imposing man with radioactive green eyes wielding a baseball bat at Rodin’s lovely romantic sculpture The Kiss. The caption read: Guillermo Garcia: The Rock Star of the Sculpture World. On the cover of Interview! I stopped there because of the cardiac symptoms.

“You look like a hoodlum in that getup,” Grandma Sweetwine says, sweeping along beside me a good foot above the ground, twirling a magenta sun parasol, without a care for the dismal weather. She’s dressed to the nines like always, in a color-splashed Floating Dress that makes her look like a billowy sunset, and enormous tortoiseshell movie-star sunglasses. She’s barefoot. Not much need for shoes if you hover. She got lucky on the foot-front.

(Beyond disturbing. Thankfully, hers are on right.)

She continues. “You look like that fella, you know, whosamacallit, Reese’s Pieces.”

“Eminem?” I ask, with a smile. The fog’s so thick, I have to walk with my arms out straight so I don’t collide into any mailboxes or telephone poles or trees.

“Yes!” She taps the sidewalk with the parasol. “I knew it was some kind of candy. Him.” The parasol’s pointing at me now. “All those dresses you make locked away in your bedroom. It’s a travesty.” She sighs one of her record-length sighs. “What about the suitors, Jude?”

“I don’t have any suitors, Grandma.”

“My point exactly, dear,” she says, then cackles with delight at her own wit.

A woman passes us with two kids in fog harnesses, also known as leashes, not unusual in Lost Cove during a white-out.

I look down at my invisibility uniform. Grandma still doesn’t get it. I tell her, “Being with boys is more dangerous for me than killing a cricket or having a bird fly into the house.” Other serious portents of death. “You know this.”

“Nonsense. What I know is you have an enviable love-line on your palm, just like your brother, but even fate needs a goose in the rear sometimes. Best stop dressing like a life-size rutabaga. And grow the hair back already, for Pete’s sake.”

“You’re very superficial, Grandma.”

She harrumphs at me.

I harrumph back, then turn the tables. “I don’t want to alarm you, but I think your feet are starting to point the wrong way. You know what they say. Nothing ruins an ensemble like ass-backward feet.”

She gasps, looking down. “How to give an old, dead woman a heart attack!”

By the time we get to Day Street, I’m damp through and shivering. I notice a small church at the end of the block, a perfect place to dry off, warm up, and strategize about how I’m going to convince this Guillermo Garcia to mentor me.

“I’ll wait outside,” Grandma tells me. “But please, take your time. Don’t worry about me, all alone out here in the cold, wet fog.” She wiggles her bare toes on both feet. “Shoeless, penniless, dead.”

“Subtle,” I say, heading down the path to the church.

“Regards to Clark Gable,” she calls after me as I pull the ring to open the door. Clark Gable is her pet name for God. A blast of warmth and light embraces me the moment I step in. Mom was a church-hopper, always dragging Noah and me with her, except never when a service was going on. She said she just liked to sit in holy spaces. Me too now.

(Mom told us she sometimes used to hide out from her foster “situations” in nearby churches. I suspect she needed more than a jar of help, though it was impossible to get her to talk much about that time in her life.)

This one is a beautiful boat-like room of dark wood and bright stained-glass panels of, it looks like, yup, Noah building the ark, Noah greeting the animals as they board, Noah, Noah, Noah. I sigh.

I take a seat in the second row. While rubbing my arms furiously to warm up, I think about what I’m going to say to Guillermo Garcia. What does a Broken Me-Blob say to The Rock Star of the Sculpture World? A man who walks into a room and all the walls fall down? How am I going to convey to him that it’s absolutely dire that he mentor me? That making this sculpture will—

A loud clatter blasts me out of my thoughts, my seat, and skin all at once.

“Oh bloody hell, you scared me!” The deep, whispery English-accented voice is coming out of a bent-over guy on the altar picking up the candlestick he just knocked off. “Oh Christ! I can’t believe I just said bloody hell in church. And Christ, I just said Christ! Jesus!” He stands up, rests the candlestick on the table, then smiles the most crooked smile I’ve ever seen, like Picasso made it. “Guess I’m damned.” There’s a scar zigzagging across his left cheek and one running from the base of his nose into his lip. “Well, doesn’t matter,” he continues in a stage whisper. “Always thought heaven would be crap anyway. All those preposterous puffy clouds. All that mind-numbing white. All those self-righteous, morally unambiguous goody two-shoes.” The smile and accompanying crookedness hijack his whole face. It’s an impatient, devil-may-care, chip-toothed smile on an off-kilter, asymmetrical face. He’s totally wild-looking, hot, in a let’s-break-the-law kind of way, not that I notice.

And where did he come from? England, it seems, but did he just teleport here mid-monologue?

“Sorry,” he whispers, taking me in. I realize I’m still frozen with my hand plastered to my chest and my mouth open in surprise. I quickly rearrange myself. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he says. “Didn’t think anyone else was here. No one’s ever here.” He comes to this church often? To repent probably. He looks like he has sins, big juicy ones. He gestures at a door behind the altar. “I was just skulking about, taking photos.” He pauses, tilts his head, studies me with curiosity. I notice a blue tattoo poking out of his collar. “You know, you really ought to put a lid on it. Such a chatterbox, a guy can’t get a word in.”

I feel a smile maneuvering its way around my face that I resist as per the tenets of the boycott. He’s charming, not that I notice that either. Charming is bad luck. I also don’t notice that his sinful self seems smart, nor how tall he is, nor the way his tangly brown hair falls over one eye, nor the black leather motorcycle jacket, perfectly worn in and ridiculously cool. He’s carrying a beat-up messenger bag on one shoulder that’s full of books—college books? Maybe, definitely a senior if still in high school. And he has a camera around his neck that is now pointing at me.

“No,” I shriek loud enough to blow the roof as I duck behind the pew in front of me. I must look like a cold wet ferret. I don’t want this guy having a picture of me looking like a cold wet ferret. And vanity aside:

“Hmm, yes,” he whispers. “You’re one of those, afraid the camera will steal your soul or some such.” I eye him. Is he versed in some such? “In any case, please keep your voice down. We are in church, after all.” He grins in his chaotic way, then turns the camera up at the wooden ceiling, clicks. There’s something else I’m not noticing: He seems familiar to me somehow, like we’ve met before, but I’ve no idea where or when.

I slip off my hat and start combing my fingers through the stubborn mat of neglected hair . . . like I’m not a girl with boy blinders! What am I thinking? I remind myself he’s decaying like every other living thing. I remind myself I’m a bible-thumping Broken Me-Blob with hypochondriachal tendencies whose only friend is possibly a figment of her imagination. Sorry, Grandma. I remind myself he’s probably worse luck than all the world’s black cats and broken mirrors combined. I remind myself some girls deserve to be alone.

Before I can get my skullcap back on, he says in a regular speaking voice, quite a deep, velvety one, not that I notice, “Change your mind? Please do. I’m going to have to insist on it.” He’s aiming the camera at me again.

I shake my head to indicate I am in no way changing my mind. I put my hat back on, pull it down low, practically over my eyes, but then I bring my index finger to my lips in a shhh, which might appear to be flirting to the casual viewer, but luckily there are no casual viewers present. I can’t seem to help it. And it’s not like I’ll ever see him again.

“Right, forgot where we were for a minute,” he says, smiling and bringing his voice down to a whisper again. He regards me for a long, unnerving moment. It’s like being held in a spotlight. Actually, I’m not sure it’s legal to be looked at like this. My chest starts humming. “Too bad about the photo,” he says. “Hope you don’t mind me saying, but you look like an angel sitting there.” He presses his lips together as if considering this. “But in disguise, like you just fell down and then borrowed some bloke’s clothes.”

What do I say to that? Especially now that the humming in my chest has turned into jackhammering.

“In any case, can’t blame you for wanting out of the angelic order.” He’s grinning again and I’m spinning. “Probably quite a bit more interesting to be among us screwed-up mortals, like I said before.” He sure has the gift of gab. I used to too, once, though you’d never know it. He must think my jaw’s wired shut.

Oh boy. He’s looking at me again in that way of his, like he’s trying to see beneath the skin.

“Let me,” he says, his hand circling the lens. It’s more command than question. “Just one.” There’s something in his voice, in his gaze, in his whole being, something hungry and insistent, and it’s untethering me.

I’m nodding. I can’t believe it, but I’m nodding. To hell with my vanity, my spirit, my old age. “Okay,” I say, my voice hoarse and strange. “Just one.” It’s possible he’s put me in a trance. It happens. There are people who are mesmerists. It’s in the bible.

He lands in a squat behind a pew in the front row, spins the lens a few times while looking through the camera. “Oh God,” he says. “Yes. Perfect. Fucking perfect.”

I know he’s taking a hundred pictures, but I don’t care anymore. A hot series of shivers is running through me as he continues clicking and saying: Yes, thank you, this is totally bloody it, perfect, yes, yes, sodding hell, God, look at you. It’s like we’re kissing, way more than kissing. I can’t imagine what my face must look like.

“You’re her,” he says finally, putting the cover over the lens. “I’m sure of it.”

“Who?” I ask.

But he doesn’t answer, just walks down the aisle toward me, a lazy, lanky walk that makes me think of summer. He’s completely unwound now, went from high gear to no gear the moment he covered the lens. As he approaches, I see that he has one green eye and one brown eye, like he’s two people in one, two very intense people in one.

“Well,” he says when he’s by my side. He pauses there as if he’s going to say something more, like, I’m hoping what he meant by “You’re her,” but instead he just adds, “I’ll leave you to it,” and points up at Clark Gable.

Looking at him from such close range, it strikes me now with certainty that it’s not the first time I’ve laid eyes on this totally unbelievable guy.

Okay, I effing noticed.

I think he’s going to shake my hand or touch my shoulder or something, but he just continues down the aisle. I turn around and watch him stroll along like he should have a piece of hay in his mouth. He picks up a tripod I didn’t notice when I came in and swings it over his shoulder. As he goes out the door, he doesn’t turn around, but raises his free hand in the air and waves slightly like he knows I’m watching him.

Which I am.

I leave the church a few minutes later feeling warmer, drier, and like I narrowly escaped something. Grandma Sweetwine’s nowhere in sight.

I press down the street looking for the address of the sculpture studio.

To be clear, when you’re me, guys like him are kryptonite, not that I’ve ever met a guy like him before, one who makes you feel like you’re being kissed, no, ravished, from across a room. He didn’t seem to notice I was roped off either. Well, I am and must remain that way. I can’t let my guard down. My mother was right after all. I don’t want to be that girl. I can’t be.

It wasn’t the first time she’d said it either. Do you really want to be that girl, Jude?

Well, yeah, I did, because that girl got her attention. That girl got everyone’s attention.

Especially the attention of the older guys on the hill, like Michael Ravens, aka Zephyr, who made me feel faint every time he spoke to me, every time he let me jump the line to catch a wave, every time he texted or messaged me at night, every time he casually touched me in conversation—above all, the time he looped his finger through the plastic ring of my bikini bottoms and pulled me to him so he could whisper in my ear: Come with me.

I went.

You can say no, he said.

His breath was ragged, his giant hands all over me, his fingers in me, the sand burning into my back, my brand-new cherub tattoo burning into my belly. The sun burning up the sky. You can totally say no, Jude. That’s what he said, but it seemed like he meant the opposite. It seemed like he weighed as much as the ocean, like my bikini bottoms were already bunched in his hand, like I was being sucked into that wave you hope never finds you, the one that takes you under, takes your breath, your bearings, disorients you completely and never brings you back to the surface again. You can say no. The words rumbled between us. Why didn’t I? It seemed like my mouth was filling with sand. Then the whole world filled with it. I didn’t say a thing. Not aloud anyway.

It’d all happened so quickly. We were a few coves down from everyone else, hidden from the beach traffic by rocks. Minutes before we’d been talking about the surf, talking about his friend who’d done my tattoo, talking about the party we went to the previous night, where I’d sat on his lap and drank the first beer of my life. I’d just turned fourteen. He was almost four years older than me.

Then we stopped talking and he kissed me. Our first kiss.

I kissed him back. His lips tasted salty. He smelled like coconut suntan lotion. In between kisses, he started saying my name like it was this scalding thing in his mouth. Then he slipped the cups of my yellow bikini top to the sides and swallowed hard as he looked at me. I moved the fabric back in place, not because I didn’t want him to stare at me like that, but because I did and it embarrassed me. It was the first time any guy had ever seen me without a bra or anything and my cheeks flamed. He smiled. His pupils were big and black, his eyes so dark as he lowered me onto my back in the sand and slowly pushed the fabric of my top again to the sides. This time I let him. I let him look at me. I let my cheeks flame. I could hear his breathing in my own body. He started to kiss my breasts. I wasn’t sure I liked it. Then his mouth was on mine so hard I could barely breathe. That’s when his eyes got unseeing and his hands and hands and hands were everywhere at once. That’s when he started telling me I could say no and that’s when I didn’t. Then his whole body was pressing me into the hot sand, burying me in it. I kept thinking, it’s okay, I can handle this. I can. It’s okay, okay, okay. But it wasn’t and I couldn’t.

I didn’t know you could get buried in your own silence.

And then it was over.

And then everything was.

There’s more, but I’m not going to get into it now. Just know: I cut off three feet of blond hair and swore away boys forever because after this happened with Zephyr, my mother died. Right after. It was me. I brought the bad luck to us.

This boycott isn’t whimsy. To me, boys don’t smell like soap or shampoo or cut grass or sweat from soccer practice or suntan lotion or the ocean from hours spent in the green curl of a wave anymore, they smell like death.

I exhale, shove all that out the door of my mind with a swift kick, take a deep breath of the wet pulsing air, and start looking for Guillermo Garcia’s studio. It’s Mom I need to think about, and making this sculpture. I’m going to wish with my hands. I’m going to wish hard.

A few moments later I’m standing in front of a big brick warehouse: 225 Day Street.

The fog’s barely lifted and the volume of the world’s down way low—just me in the hush.

There’s no bell by the door, or there was a bell, but it’s been dismantled, or chewed up by a wild animal, only a bunch of ravaged wires sticking out. How very neighborly. Sandy wasn’t kidding. I cross the fingers of my left hand for luck and knock on the door with my right.

Nothing.

I look around for Grandma—I wish she’d print out her daily schedule and give it to me—and try again.

Then I knock a third time, but more tentatively, because maybe this isn’t a good idea. Sandy said this sculptor wasn’t human, um, what does that mean anyway? And what my mother said about the walls? That doesn’t sound, well, safe, now does it? Actually, what the hell am I thinking stopping in like this? Before Sandy’s even talked to him to see if he’s of sound mind. And in this fog, which is totally creepy and cold and foreboding. I cast around, jump down the step, ready to leap into the mist and disappear, when I hear the door creak open.

Horror movie creak.

There’s a large man who’s been sleeping for several centuries framed in the doorway. Igor, I think; if he/it had a name, it would be Igor. Hair crawls all over his head, culminating in a black wiry beard uncoiling in every direction at once.

His palms are practically blue with thick calluses, like he’s spent his life walking on his hands. This can’t be the same guy in the photograph. This can’t be Guillermo Garcia: The Rock Star of the Sculpture World.

“Sorry,” I say quickly. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.” I have to get out of here. Whoever this is, no offense, but he eats puppies.

He brushes hair out of his eyes and color jumps from them—a light green that is near fluorescent like in the picture. It is him. Everything’s telling me to turn and run, but I can’t seem to look away, and I guess, like the English guy, no one ever taught Igor it’s not polite to stare, because we’re in a deadlock—our gazes have glued themselves together—until he trips on absolutely nothing and almost falls, grabbing on to the door to keep himself up. Is he drunk? I inhale deeply, and yes, smell faintly the sweet acrid smell of alcohol.

Something happened to him, Sandy had said. No one knows what the deal is.

“Are you okay?” I ask, my voice barely audible. It’s like he’s fallen out of time.

“No,” he answers firmly. “I am not.” A Hispanic accent breaks through the words.

I’m surprised by his answer, find myself thinking: Oh me neither, I’m not okay at all, haven’t been in forever, and I feel like saying it aloud for some reason to this crazy man. Maybe I’ve fallen out of time right along with him.

He looks me over as if inventorying my whole being. Sandy and Mom were right. This is not a normal dude. His gaze lands back in my eyes—it’s like an electro-shock, a jolt straight to my core.

“Go away,” he says forcefully, his voice as big as the whole block. “Whoever you are, whatever you want, do not come back here.” Then he turns unsteadily, grabs the doorknob for balance, and shuts the door.

I stand there for a long time letting the fog erase me piece by piece.

Then, I knock again. Hard. I’m not going away. I can’t. I need to make this sculpture.

“That’s right.” It’s Grandma in my head. “That’s my girl.”

But it isn’t Igor who opens the door this time, it’s the English guy from the church.

Holy effing hell.

Surprise sparks in his mismatched eyes as he recognizes me. I hear banging and clattering and breaking from within the studio, like some super-humans are having a furniture-throwing contest. “Not a good time,” he says. Then I hear Igor’s voice erupt in Spanish as he throws a car across the room, from the way it sounds. The English guy looks over his shoulder, then back to me, his wild face wild with worry now. All his cocky confidence, his cheerfulness, his flirtatiousness have vanished. “I’m very sorry,” he says politely, like an English butler in a movie, then closes the door in my face without another word.

A half hour later, Grandma and I are hidden in the brush above the beach waiting, if necessary, to save Noah’s life. On the way home from Drunken Igor’s, while already plotting my return visit, I received an emergency text from Heather, my informant: Noah at Devil’s Drop in 15.

I don’t take chances when it comes to Noah and the ocean.

The last time I stepped foot in the water was to drag him out of it. Two years ago, a couple weeks after Mom died, he jumped off this same Devil’s Drop, got caught in a rip, and almost drowned. When I finally got his body—twice my size, chest still as stone, eyes slung back—to shore, and to revive, I was so furious at him I almost rolled him back into the surf.

The fog’s mostly burned off down here. Surrounded by water on three sides and forest everywhere else, Lost Cove is the end, the farthest point west you can go before falling off the world. I scan the bluff for our red house, one of many ramshackles up there, clinging to the edge of the continent. I used to love living on the cliffs—surfed and swam so much that even when I was out of the water, I could feel the ground rocking under my feet like a moored boat.

I check the ledge again. Still no Noah.

Grandma’s peering at me over her sunglasses. “Quite the pair, those two foreign fellas. The older one doesn’t have a button left on him.”

“You’re telling me,” I say, digging my fingers into the cold sand. How am I ever going to convince that hairy, drunken, furniture-throwing, scary-ass Igor to mentor me? And if I do, how will I steer clear of that unremarkable, plain-faced, dull-witted English guy who turned boycotting-me into a molten mess in a matter of minutes—and in a church!

A flock of gulls swoops down to the breakers, wings outspread, crying.

And for some reason, I keep wishing I’d told Drunken Igor that I wasn’t okay either.

Grandma releases her parasol into the air. I look up, see the pink disc whirling off into the steely sky. Beautiful. Like something Noah would’ve drawn when he used to draw. “You have to do something about him,” she says. “You know you do. He was supposed to be the next Chagall, not the next doorstop. You are your brother’s keeper, dear.”

This is one of her refrains. She’s like my conscience or something. That’s what the counselor at school said anyway about Grandma’s and Mom’s ghosts, which was pretty astute considering I hardly told her anything.

One time, she made me do this guided meditation where I had to imagine myself walking in the woods and tell her what I saw. I saw woods. But then, a house appeared, only there was no way to get in it. No doors or windows. Major heebie-jeebies. She told me the house was me. Guilt is a prison, she said. I stopped going to see her.

I don’t realize I’m checking my palms for creeping lesions, eruptions called cutaneous larva migrans, until Grandma gives me The Eye-Roll. It’s dizzying. I’m pretty sure I acquired this skill from her.

“Hookworm,” I say sheepishly.

“Do us all a favor, morbid one,” she chides. “Stay out of your father’s medical journals.”

Though she’s been dead for over three years, Grandma didn’t start visiting me like this until two years ago. Just days after Mom died, I hauled the old Singer out of the closet and the moment I flipped the switch and the familiar hummingbird heartbeat of her sewing machine filled my bedroom, there she was in the chair beside me, pins in her mouth like always, saying, “The zigzag stitch is all the rage. Makes such a glamorous hem. Wait until you see.”

We were partners in sewing. And partners in luck-hunting: four-leaf clovers, sand-dollar birds, red sea glass, clouds shaped like hearts, the first daffodils of spring, ladybugs, ladies in oversized hats. Best to bet on all the horses, dear, she’d say. Quick, make a wish, she’d say. I bet. I wished. I was her disciple. I still am.

“They’re here,” I tell her, and my heart begins pacing around inside my chest in anticipation for the jump.

Noah and Heather are standing on the ledge gazing out over the whitecaps. He’s in swimming trunks, she in a long blue coat. Heather’s a great informant because she’s never more than a shout away from my brother. She’s like his spirit animal, a gentle, odd, spritely being who I’m pretty sure has a storage space somewhere full of fairy dust. We’ve had this secret Keep Noah from Drowning Treaty for a while now. The only problem is she’s not lifeguard material herself. She never goes in the water.

A moment later, Noah’s flying through the air, arms outstretched like he’s on the cross. I feel a surge of adrenaline.

And then what always happens: He slows down. I can’t explain it, but it takes my brother forever to hit the surface of the water. I blink a few times at him suspended there midair as if on a tight rope. I’ve come to think either he has a way with gravity or I’m seriously missing more than a few buttons. I did read once that anxiety can significantly alter space-time perception.

Usually Noah faces the horizon not the shore when he jumps, so I’ve never before had a full frontal, tip-to-toe view of my brother dropping through space. His neck’s arched, his chest’s thrust forward, and I can tell, even from this distance, that his face is blown open, like it used to be, and now his arms are reaching upward like he’s trying to hold up the whole sorry sky with his fingertips.

“Look at that,” Grandma says, her voice tinged with wonder. “There he is. Our boy has returned. He’s in the sky.”

“He’s like one of his drawings,” I whisper.

Is this why he keeps jumping, then? To become for the briefest moment who he used to be? Because the worst thing that could ever happen to Noah has happened. He’s become normal. He has the proper amount of buttons.

Except for this. This fixation with jumping Devil’s Drop.

At last, Noah hits the water without a splash as if he’s gathered no momentum on his way down, as if he’s been placed gently on the surface by a kindly giant. And then he’s under. I tell him: Come in, but our twin-telepathy is long gone. When Mom died, he hung up on me. And now, because of all that’s happened, we avoid each other—worse, repel each other.

I see his arms flail once. Is he struggling? The water must be freezing. He’s not wearing the trunks I sewed protective herbs into either. Okay, he’s swimming hard now, through the chaos of currents that surround the cliffs . . . and then, he’s out of danger. I exhale loudly, not realizing until I do that I’d been holding my breath.

I watch him scramble up the beach, then the bluff, with his head down, shoulders hunched, thinking about Clark Gable knows what. No traces of what I just saw in his face, in his very being, remain. His soul has crawled back into its trench.

This is what I want: I want to grab my brother’s hand and run back through time, losing years like coats falling from our shoulders.

Things don’t really turn out like you think.