I'll Give You the Sun

THE INVISIBLE MUSEUM

Noah

Ages 13¹/₂–14

The day after Brian leaves for boarding school, I sneak into Jude’s room while she’s in the shower and see a chat on the computer.

I blow up the entire country. No one freaking notices.

They’re in love. Like black vultures. And termites. Yes, turtle doves and swans aren’t the only animals that mate for life. Ugly, toilet-licking termites and death-eating vultures do too.

How could she do this? How could he?

It’s like having explosives on board 24/7, the way I feel. I can’t believe when I touch things they don’t blow to bits. I can’t believe I was so way off.

I thought, I don’t know, I thought wrong.

So wrong.

I do what I can. I turn each of Jude’s doodles I find around the house into a murder scene. I use the most hideous deaths from her stupid How Would You Rather Die? game. A girl being shoved out a window, knifed, drowned, buried alive, strangled by her own hands. I spare no detail.

I also put slugs in her socks.

Dip her toothbrush in the toilet bowl. Every morning.

Pour white vinegar into the glass of water by her bed.

But the worst part is that for the few minutes every hour when I’m not psychopathic, I know that to be with Brian: I would give all ten fingers. I would give anything.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Rowing Madly Back Through Time)

A week passes. Two. The house gets so big it takes hours for me to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen and back, so big that even with binoculars, I can’t make out Jude across a table or room. I don’t think our paths will ever cross again. When she tries to talk to me over the miles and miles of betrayal between us, I put in ear buds like I’m listening to music, when really, the other end is attached to my hand in my pocket.

I never want to speak to her again and make this very clear. Her voice is static. She is static.

I keep thinking Mom will realize that we’re at war and act like the United Nations as she’s done in the past, but she doesn’t.

(PORTRAIT: Disappearing Mother)

Then one morning, I hear voices in the hallway: Dad talking to a girl who isn’t Jude, who I quickly realize is Heather. I’ve barely given a speck of brain space to her, even after what happened between us in the closet. That horrible lie of a kiss. I’m sorry, Heather, I say in my head as I pad silently over to the window, sorry, so sorry, as I lift it as quietly as possible. I climb out, falling to safety below the sill as I hear the knock on the door and Dad saying my name. It’s all I can think to do.

Halfway down the hill, a car peels by me and I want to stick out my thumb. Because I should hitchhike to Mexico or Rio like a real artist. Or to Connecticut. Yes. Just show up where Brian is in that dorm—in a shower full of wet naked guys. The thought comes out of nowhere and all the explosives on board detonate at once. It’s worse than thinking about him and Jude in the closet. And better. And much worse.

When I emerge out of the nuclear mushroom of this thinking, burnt to a crisp, I’m at CSA. My feet somehow got here on their own. Summer classes have been over for more than two weeks and lots of the students who board are returning. They look like highly functioning graffiti. I watch them lug suitcases and portfolios and boxes out of car trunks, hug parents who are peering at each other with eyes that say, Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I vacuum it all in. The girls with blue green red purple hair shrieking into each other’s arms. A couple of tall weedy guys leaning against a wall smoking and laughing and radiating cool. A ragtag group with dreads who look like they just tumbled out of a dryer. A guy walking past me with a mustache on one side of his face and a beard on the other. So awesome. They not only make art, they are art.

I remember then the conversation I had with the naked English guy at the party and decide to take my burnt remains on a recon mission to the inland flats of Lost Cove, where he said that barking mad sculptor had a studio.

Before too long, a few seconds later maybe—because trying not to think about Brian turns me into a superhuman speed-walker—I’m standing in front of 225 Day Street. It’s a big warehouse and the door’s half-open, but there’s no way I can walk on in, can I? No. I don’t even have my sketchpad. I want to, though, want to do something, have to do something. Like kiss Brian. The idea snags me and then I can’t get out of it. I totally should’ve tried. But what if he’d punched me? Cracked my head open with a meteorite? Oh, but what if he hadn’t? What if he’d kissed me back? Because I’d catch him staring at me sometimes when he didn’t think I was paying attention to him. I was always paying attention to him.

I blew it. I did. I should’ve kissed him. One kiss, then I could die. Well, wait, no freaking way, if I’m going to die, I want to do more than kiss. Way way more. I’m sweating. And hard. I sit on the sidewalk, try to breathe, just breathe.

I pick up a stone and toss it into the street, trying to mimic his bionic wrist movement and after three pathetic tries, my whole thinking flips over. There was an electric fence between us. He put it up. Kept it up. He wanted Courtney. And he wanted Jude from the first moment he saw her. I just didn’t want to believe it. He’s a popular douchebag jock who likes girls. He’s the red giant. I’m the yellow dwarf. The end.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Everyone Lives Happily Ever After Except for the Yellow Dwarf)

I shake it off, all of it. All that matters is the worlds I can make, not this toilet-licking one I have to live in. In the worlds I make, anything can happen. Anything. And if—when—I get into CSA I’ll learn how to make it all come out half as decent on paper as it is in my head.

I stand, suddenly realizing I could totally climb the fire escape that scales the side of the warehouse. It leads to a landing where there’s a bank of windows, which must look down on something. All I’d have to do is hop the outside fence without anyone seeing me. Well, why not? Jude and I used to sneak over tons of fences so we could visit various horses or cows or goats or a certain madrone tree we both married when we were five (Jude was also the minister).

I glance up and down the quiet street. See in the distance the back of an old-looking woman in a bright-colored dress . . . who actually may be floating. I blink—she’s still floating and it looks like she’s barefoot for some reason. She’s entering a small church. Whatever. Once she’s inside, I cross to the other side of the street, then easily and quickly monkey up and over the fence. I bolt down the alley, climb carefully up the stairs of the escape, trying not to creak the old metal, grateful there’s some kind of construction going on nearby to cover up any sound I may be making. I scoot across the landing and peer around the side of the building, realizing the ear-splitting sound I’m hearing is not coming from a construction site, but the courtyard below, where I believe the apocalypse has just occurred, because whoa: It’s the scene after the aliens have launched a chemical attack on Earth. All over the yard, there are rescue workers in hazmat suits and face masks and goggles, wielding power drills and circular saws, emerging from and disappearing into white billowing clouds as they attack hunks of rock. This is a stone studio? These are stone sculptors? What would Michelangelo think? I watch and watch and when the dust settles, I see that three massive pairs of eyes are boring into me.

My breath catches. From across the yard, three enormous stone men-monsters are staring at me.

And they’re breathing. I swear it.

My ex-sister Jude would freak. Mom too.

I need to get closer to them, I’m thinking, when a tall, dark-haired man walks out of the building through an entire wall that’s pulled halfway up like a garage door. He’s talking with some kind of accent into a phone. I watch him throw his head back in supreme happiness, like he’s hearing that he gets to choose the colors for all the sunsets from now on or that Brian’s waiting for him in his bedroom naked. He’s practically dancing around with the phone now, then he laughs a laugh so happy it blasts about a billion balloons into the air. This must be the barking mad artist and the scary-ass granite men-monsters across from me must be his barking mad art.

“Hurry,” he says, his voice as big as he is. “Hurry, my love.” Then he kisses two of his own fingers and touches the phone, before slipping it in his pocket. Total whale dork move, right? But not when he did it, trust me. Now he has his back to the courtyard and is facing a pillar, his forehead touching it. He’s smiling at the concrete like a total whack job, but I’m the only one who knows, due to my stellar vantage point. He looks like he would give all ten fingers too. After a few minutes, he pivots out of his delirium and I get the first clear shot of his face. His nose is like a capsized ship, his mouth the size of three, his jaw and cheekbones hefty as armor, and his eyes are iridescent. His face is a room overstuffed with massive furniture. I want to draw it immediately. I watch as he surveys the apocalyptic scene before him, then raises his arms like a conductor and in an instant every power tool goes silent.

As do the birds, the passing cars. In fact, I can’t hear a rustle of wind, the buzz of a fly, a word of conversation. I can’t hear anything. It’s like someone pressed mute on the whole world because this man is about to speak.

Is he God?

“I talk very much about bravery,” he says. “I say to you carving is not for cowards. Cowards stick to clay, yes?”

All the rescue workers laugh.

He pauses, swipes a matchstick on a column. It bursts into flame. “I tell you, you must take risks in my studio.” He finds a cigarette behind his ear and lights it. “I tell you not to be timid. I tell you to make the choices, make the mistakes, big, terrible, reckless mistakes, really screw it all up. I tell you it is the only way.”

An affirmative murmur.

“I say this, yes, but I still see so many of you afraid to cut in.” He begins to pace, slowly like a wolf, which is definitely his mirror animal. “I see what you are doing. When you leave yesterday, I go from work to work. You feel like Rambo maybe with the drills, the saws. You make lots of noise, lots of dust, but very few of you have found even this much”—he pinches two fingers together—“of your sculptures. Today this changes.”

He walks over to a short blond-haired girl. “May I, Melinda?”

“Please,” she says. I can see how much she’s blushing even from up here. She’s totally in love with him. I look at the faces of the others who have gathered around them and realize they all are, male and female both.

(PORTRAIT, LANDSCAPE: A Man on a Geographic Scale)

He takes a long drag on the cigarette, then tosses it barely smoked onto the ground and steps on it. He smiles at Melinda. “We find your woman, yes?”

He studies the clay model beside the large rock, then closes his eyes and combs the surface with his fingers. He does the same with the hunk of stone next to it, examining it with his hands while his eyes are closed. “Okay,” he says, taking a power drill off the table. I can feel the excitement of the students, as he, without any hesitation, plows straight into the rock. Before long, a dust cloud forms and I can’t see any more. I need to get closer. I mean really close. I think I need to live on this man’s shoulder like a parrot.

When the noise stops and the dust clears, all the students start clapping. There in the rock is the curved back of a woman identical to the one on the clay model. It’s unbelievable.

“Please,” he says. “Back to your own work.” He hands Melinda the drill. “You will find the rest of her now.”

He goes from student to student, sometimes not saying a thing, sometimes exploding into praise. “Yes!” he cries to one of them. “You did it. Look at that breast. The most beautiful breast I ever see!” The kid cracks up and the artist cuffs him on the head like a proud father might. It makes something pull in my chest.

To another student, he says, “Very good. Now it’s time to forget everything I just say. Now you go slow. So, so slow. You caress the stone. You make love to it but gently, gently, gently, understand? Use the chisels, nothing else. One wrong move and you ruin everything. No pressure.” Same head cuff for him.

When he seems to determine that no one needs him, he goes back inside. I follow him, walking to the other side of the landing where the windows are, standing to the side so I can see in without being seen. Inside, there are more rock giants. And on the far side of the studio, three naked women, with thin red scarves veiling their bodies, are modeling on a platform surrounded by a group of students sketching.

No naked English guy.

I watch the artist as he goes from student to student, standing behind each one and peering down at their work with a cold hard stare. I tense up as if he’s looking at my sketches. He’s not pleased. All at once, he claps his hands and everyone stops drawing. Through the window I hear muffled words as he becomes increasingly animated and his hands begin to glide around like Malaysian flying frogs. I want to know what he’s telling them. I need to know.

Finally, they resume drawing. He grabs a pencil and pad off a table and joins them, saying the following so loudly and with so much rocket fuel in his voice I hear it through the window, “Sketch like it matters, people. No time to waste, nothing to lose. We are remaking the world, nothing less, understand?”

Just like Mom says. And yes, I do understand. My heart is speeding. I totally understand.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Remakes World Before World Remakes Boy)

He sits down and begins sketching with the group. I’ve never seen anything like the way his hand races back and forth across the pad, the way his eyes seem to suck in every morsel of the models posing before him. My stomach’s in my throat as I try to figure out what he’s doing, as I study the way he holds the pencil, the way he is the pencil. I don’t even need to see his sketchpad to know the genius that’s on it.

Until this moment, I didn’t realize how badly I sucked. How far I have to go. I really might not get in to CSA. The Ouija Board was right.

I stumble down the fire escape, lightheaded, unsteady. In one split second I saw everything I could be, everything I want to be. And all that I’m not.

The sidewalk has risen up and I’m sliding down it. I’m not even fourteen, I tell myself. I have years and years to get good. But I bet Picasso was already hella good at my age. What have I been thinking? I totally freaking blow. I’m never going to get in to CSA. I’m so stuck in this toilet-licking conversation in my head, I almost fly past the red car parked out front that looks just like Mom’s car. But it couldn’t be. What in the world would she be doing all the way over here? I glance at the plates—it is Mom’s car. I swivel around. Not only is it Mom’s car, but Mom’s in it, bent over the passenger seat. What’s she doing?

I knock on the window.

She springs up, but doesn’t seem as surprised to see me as I am to see her. She doesn’t seem surprised at all, in fact.

She rolls down the window, says, “You scared me, honey.”

“What were you doing bent over like that?” I ask instead of the more obvious question: What are you doing here?

“I dropped something.” She looks strange. Her eyes are too bright. There’s sweat on her lip. And she’s dressed like a fortune-teller, with a glittery purple scarf around her neck and a yellow river of a dress with a red sash. On her wrists are color bangles. Except the times when she wears one of Grandma’s Floating Dresses, she usually dresses like a black-and-white movie, not a circus.

“What?” I ask.

“What what?” she asks back, confused.

“What did you drop?”

“Oh, my earring.”

Both her ears have earrings in them. She sees me see this. “Another earring, I wanted to change pairs.”

I nod, pretty sure she’s lying to me, pretty sure she saw me and was hiding from me and that’s why she didn’t seem surprised to see me. But why would she hide from me?

“Why?” I ask.

“Why what?”

“Why did you want to change pairs?”

We need a translator. I’ve never needed a translator with Mom before.

She sighs. “I don’t know, I just did. Get in, honey.” She says this like we had a plan all along for her to pick me up here. This is so weird.

On the way home, the car is a box of tension and I don’t know why. It takes me two blocks to ask her what she was doing in that part of town. She tells me there’s a very good dry cleaner on Day Street. And there are about five closer to our house, I don’t say. But she hears anyway because she explains further, “It was one of the dresses Grandma made for me. My favorite. I wanted to make sure it was in very good hands, the best hands, and this cleaner is the best.” I look for the pink receipt, which she usually clips to the dash. Not there. But maybe it’s in her purse? I guess this could be true.

It takes another two blocks for her to say what she should’ve said immediately. “You’re a long way from home.”

I tell her I went for a walk and ended up there, not wanting to tell her I hopped a fence, climbed a fire escape, and stalked some genius, who made it very clear she’s wrong about me and my talent.

She’s about to question me further, I can tell, but then her phone vibrates on her lap. She looks at the number and presses the button to ignore it. “Work,” she says, glancing my way. I’ve never known her to perspire like this. There are darkened circles in the yellow fabric under her arms like she’s a construction worker.

She squeezes my knee with her hand when we pass the CSA studio buildings, now so familiar to me. “Soon,” she says.

Then it all becomes clear. She followed me. She’s worried about me because I’ve been such a hermit crab. There’s no other explanation that makes sense. And she hid and lied to me about the dry cleaner because she didn’t want me to freak out about her spying on me and invading my privacy. I relax into this explanation.

Until she takes the second instead of the third left up the hill, and near the top, pulls into a driveway. I stare in disbelief as she gets out, saying, “Well, aren’t you coming in?” She’s almost to the door, keys in hand, when she realizes she’s on her way into some other house, where some other family lives.

(PORTRAIT: Mom Sleepwalking into Another Life)

“Where’s my head?” she says, when she gets back in the car. This could be funny, it should be, but it’s not. Something’s not right. I can feel it in every bone, but I don’t know what it is. She doesn’t start up the engine either. We stay in this other family’s driveway in silence, staring out at the ocean, where the sun has made its gleaming road to the horizon. It looks like there are stars on the water and I want to take a walk on it. It totally sucks that only Jesus gets to walk on water. I’m about to say this to Mom when I realize the car has filled up with the thickest, heaviest kind of sadness and it’s not mine. I had no idea she was so sad. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t noticed Jude and I have gotten a divorce.

“Mom?” I say, my throat suddenly so dry it comes out like a croak.

“Everything’s going to work out,” she says quickly, quietly, and starts the engine. “Don’t worry, honey.”

I think about all the horrible things that happened the last time someone told me not to worry, but nod, just the same.

The end of the world begins with rain.

September washes away, then October. By November, even Dad can’t stay on top of it, which means it’s pretty much raining inside as well as outside the house. There are pans and pots and buckets everywhere. “Who knew we needed a new roof?” Dad mumbles to himself again and again like a mantra.

(PORTRAIT: Dad Balancing the House on His Head)

This, after a lifetime of replacing batteries before flashlights conk out, lightbulbs before they go dark: Can’t be too prepared, son.

However, after much observation, I’ve concluded that it’s not raining on Mom. I find her on the deck smoking (she’s not a smoker) as if under an invisible umbrella, always with the phone to her ear, not saying anything, just swaying and smiling like someone’s playing her music on the other end. I find her humming (she’s not a hummer) and jingling (she’s not a jingler) through the house, down the street, up the bluff in her new circus clothes and bangles, her own private sunbeam enclosing her while the rest of us grip the walls and furniture so we don’t wash away.

I find her at her computer where’s she’s supposed to be writing a book but instead is staring up at the ceiling like it’s full of stars.

I find her and find her and find her but I can’t find her.

I have to say her name three times before she hears it. I have to bang on the wall with my fist when I walk into her office or kick a chair across the kitchen before she even notices someone’s joined her in the room.

It occurs to me with rising concern that a blow-in can also blow away.

The only way I can snap her out of it is to talk about my CSA portfolio, but because she and I have already chosen the five drawings I’m painting in oils with Mr. Grady, there’s not much to discuss until the great unveiling and I’m not ready. I don’t want her to see them until they’re done. They’re close. I’ve worked on them every single day at lunch and after school all fall long. There’s no interview or anything, getting in is based pretty much only on your artwork. But after seeing that sculptor sketch, my eyes got swapped again. Sometimes now, I swear I can see sound, the dark green howling wind, the crimson crush of rain—all these sound-colors swirling around my room while I lie on my bed thinking about Brian. His name, when I say it aloud: azul.

In other news, I’ve grown over three inches since the summer. If anyone still messed with me, I could kick them off the planet. No problem. And my voice has dropped so low most humans can’t register it. I hardly use it, except occasionally with Heather. She and me, we’re sort of getting along again now that she likes some other boy. A couple times, I even went running with her and her runner friends. It was okay. No one cares if you don’t talk much when you’re running.

I’ve turned into a very quiet King Kong.

Today, a very worried, very quiet King Kong. I’m trudging up the hill from school in torrential rain with one thing on my mind: What am I going to do when Brian comes back for Christmas break and he’s with Jude?

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Drinking the Dark out of My Own Cupped Hands)

When I get home, I see no one’s here, as usual. Jude’s hardly ever home for very long these days—she’s taken to surfing in the rain after school with the diehard surftards—and when she is home she’s on the computer chatting with Brian aka Spaceboy. I saw a couple more of their exchanges. In one he talked about the movie—the one we were watching when he grabbed my hand under the armrest! I almost threw up on the spot.

Sometimes at night, I sit on the other side of the wall wanting to pull off my ears so I don’t hear the ding of yet another message from him over the hum of her stupid sewing machine.

(PORTRAIT: Sister in the Guillotine)

I drip through the house, a raincloud, dutifully kicking over a bucket by Jude’s bedroom so the dirty water soaks into her fluffy white carpet and hopefully mildews it, then enter my room, where I’m surprised to find Dad sitting on my bed.

I don’t cringe or anything. For some reason, he doesn’t bug me so much lately. It’s like he drank a potion, or maybe I did. Or maybe it’s because I’m taller. Or maybe it’s because we’re both all messed up. I don’t think he can find Mom either.

“Storm catch you?” he asks. “I’ve never seen anything like this rain. Time for you to build that ark, eh?”

This is a popular joke at school too. I don’t mind. I love Bible Noah. He was nearly 950 years old when he died. He got to leave with the animals. He started the whole world over: blank canvas and endless tubes of paint. Freaking the coolest.

“Totally got me,” I say, grabbing a towel off my desk chair. I start drying my head, waiting for the inevitable comment about the length of my hair, but it doesn’t come.

What comes is this: “You’re going to be bigger than me.”

“You think?” The idea’s an instant mood-lifter. I’m going to take up more space in a room than my father.

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Hops from Continent to Continent with Dad on Shoulders)

He nods, raises both eyebrows. “At the rate you’re going lately, sure seems like it.” He surveys the room as if taking inventory, museum print to print—they pretty much cover every inch of wall and ceiling—then he looks back at me and slaps his hands on his thighs. “So, I thought we could get some dinner. Have some father-son time.”

He must register the horror on my face. “No”—he makes fingers quotes—“talks. Promise. Just some grub. I need some mano a mano.”

“With me?” I ask.

“Who else?” He smiles and there’s absolutely no asshat anywhere in his face. “You’re my son.”

He gets up and walks to the door. I’m reeling from the way he said: You’re my son. It makes me feel like his son.

“I’m going to wear a jacket,” he says, meaning a suit jacket, I guess. “Want to?”

“If you want me to,” I say, bewildered.

Who knew the first date of my life would be with my father?

Only I realize as I put on my one jacket—I last wore it at Grandma Sweetwine’s funeral—that the sleeves come closer to my elbows than my wrists. Holy Jesus, I really am King Kong! I walk to Mom and Dad’s bedroom with the evidence of my gigantism still on my back.

“Ah,” Dad says, grinning. He opens his closet and pulls out a dark blue blazer. “This should do it, just a little snug on me.” He taps his non-existent belly.

I take off my jacket and slip his on. It fits perfectly. I can’t stop smiling.

“Told you,” he says. “Wouldn’t even think of wrestling you now, tough guy.”

Tough guy.

On my way out the door, I ask, “Where’s Mom?”

“Got me.”

Dad and I go to a restaurant on the water and sit by the window. The rain makes rivulets, distorting the view. My fingers twitch to draw it. We eat steaks. He orders a scotch, then another, and lets me have sips. We both get dessert. He doesn’t talk about sports or bad movies or loading the dishwasher properly or weird jazz. He talks about me. The whole time. He tells me that Mom showed him some of my sketchpads, he hoped that was all right, and he was blown away. He tells me he’s so excited I’m applying to CSA and that they’d be idiots not to take me. He said he can’t believe his one and only son is so talented and that he can’t wait to see my final portfolio. He said he’s so proud of me.

I’m not lying about any of this.

“Your mother thinks you’re both shoo-ins.”

I nod, wondering if I heard wrong. Last I knew, Jude wasn’t applying. I must’ve heard wrong. What would she even submit?

“You’re really lucky,” he says. “Your mom has so much passion for art. It’s contagious, isn’t it?” He smiles, but I can see his inside face and it isn’t smiling at all. “Ready to switch?”

I reluctantly lift my chocolate decadence to trade for his tiramisu.

“Nah, forget it,” he says. “Let’s get two more. How often do we do this?”

Over our second dessert, I gear up to say that the parasites and bacteria and viruses he studies are as cool as the art Mom studies, but then decide it’ll sound lame and phony, so I motor through the cake instead. I start to imagine people around us thinking to themselves, “Look at that father and son having dinner together, isn’t that nice?” It blows me up with pride. Dad and me. Buddies now. Chums. Bros. Oh, I’m feeling supernaturally good for once—it’s been so long—so good I start blabbing like I haven’t since Brian left. I tell Dad about these basilisk lizards I just found out about that can move so fast across the surface of water, they can go sixty-five feet without sinking. So Jesus isn’t the only one after all.

He tells me how the peregrine falcon hits speeds of 200 miles per hour in a dive. I raise my eyebrows in a wow to be polite, but hello, who doesn’t know that?

I tell him how giraffes eat up to seventy-five pounds of food a day, sleep for only thirty minutes a day, are not only the tallest animal on earth, but have the longest tail of any land mammal and tongues that are twenty inches long.

He tells me about these tiny microscopic water bears they’re thinking about sending into space because they can survive temperatures ranging from minus-328 Fahrenheit to 303 Fahrenheit, can cope with 1,000 times the radiation it would take to kill a human, and can be revived after being dried out for ten years.

For a moment, I want to kick the table over because I can’t tell Brian about the water bears in space, but then I climb right out of it by making Dad guess what the most deadly animal is to humans and totally stumping him after he goes for all the usual suspects: hippos, lions, crocs, etc. It’s the malaria-carrying mosquito.

We go back and forth exchanging facts about animals until the bill comes. It’s the most fun we’ve ever had together.

When he’s paying the check, I blurt out, “I didn’t know you like animal shows!”

“What do you mean? Why do you think you like them? That’s all you and I did together when you were little. Don’t you remember?”

I. Don’t. Remember.

I remember, It’s a sink-or-swim world, Noah. I remember, Act tough and you are tough. I remember every heart-stomping look of disappointment, of embarrassment, of bewilderment from him. I remember: If your twin sister wasn’t my spitting image I’d swear you came about from parthenogenesis. I remember the 49ers, the Miami Heat, the Giants, the World Cup. I do not remember Animal Planet.

When he pulls into the garage, I see Mom’s car’s still not there. He sighs. I sigh too. Like I’m catching him now.

“I had this dream last night,” he says, turning off the engine. He makes no move to get out of the car. I settle into my seat. We are so totally buddies now! “Your mother was walking through the house, and as she did, everything fell off the shelves and from the walls: books, pictures, knickknacks, everything. All I could do was follow her around the house trying to put everything back in its place.”

“Did you?” I ask. He looks at me, confused. I clarify, “Did you get everything back where it belonged.”

“Don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “Woke up.” He glides a finger around the steering wheel. “Sometimes you think you know things, know things very deeply, only to realize you don’t know a damn thing.”

“I totally get what you mean, Dad,” I say, thinking about what happened with Brian.

“You do? Already?”

I nod.

“Guess we have lots of catching up to do.”

I feel a springing in my chest. Could Dad and I be close? Like a real father and son? Like it could’ve been all along if I’d flown off his shoulder that day like Jude did? If I’d swum instead of sunk?

“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?” we hear and both laugh a little. Then he surprises me by saying, “You think we’ll ever find out where the hell Ralph is, kid?”

“I hope so,” I say.

“Me too.” A comfortable silence follows and I’m marveling at how supernaturally cool Dad’s being when he says, “So, you still seeing that Heather?” He nudges me. “Cute girl.” He gives my shoulder a squeeze of approval.

This sucks.

“Kind of,” I say, then add with more conviction because I have no choice, “Yeah, she’s my girlfriend.”

He gives me that dumb you-sly-dog expression. “We’re going to have to have a little talk, me and you, aren’t we, son? Fourteen years old.” He cuffs me on the head just like that sculptor did his students. And that gesture, plus the word son again, the way he keeps saying it: Yeah, I had no choice about Heather.

Once inside, I go to my room, noting that Jude knocked over a water bucket on my floor in retaliation. Whatever. I throw a towel down on the puddle and as I do, glance at the clock on my desk, which has the date as well as the time.

Oh.

Later, I find Dad sunk into the couch in front of a college football game. I went through all my sketchpads and couldn’t find one drawing of him with his head still on, so I took out my best pastels and did a new one of the two of us on the back of a blue wildebeest. On the bottom, I wrote, Happy Birthday.

He looks right in my eyes. “Thanks.” The word comes out all scrunched up like it was hard to get out. No one remembered. Not even Mom. What’s her problem? How could she not remember Dad’s birthday? Maybe she’s not a blow-in after all.

“She forgot the turkey on Thanksgiving too,” I say, trying to make him feel better, only realizing after I say it how lame it is to compare him to a turkey.

He laughs though, which is something. “Is that a blue wildebeest?” he asks, pointing to the drawing.

When we’re done with the world’s longest conversation on the blue wildebeest, he pats the couch and I sit down next to him. He puts his hand on my shoulder, leaves it there like it fits, and we watch the rest of the game together. It’s pretty boring, but the athletes, well, you know.

The lie I told him about Heather is a stone in my belly.

I ignore it.

A week after Dad’s forgotten birthday, with the rain beating the crap out of the house, Mom and Dad seat Jude and me in the frozen part of the living room no one ever sits in to inform us that Dad’s temporarily moving down to the Lost Cove Hotel. They, well actually, Mom tells us he’ll be renting a studio apartment by the week until they can work out some issues they’re having.

Even though we haven’t spoken in forever, I can feel Jude’s heart clenching and unclenching inside my chest with mine.

“What issues?” she asks, but after that the rain gets so loud I can’t hear what anyone’s saying anymore. I’m convinced the storm’s going to bust down the walls. Then it does and I’m remembering Dad’s dream because it’s happening. I watch as the wind sweeps everything off the shelves: knickknacks, books, a vase of purple flowers. No one else notices. I grip the armrests of the chair tight.

(FAMILY PORTRAIT: Assume the Crash Position)

I can hear Mom’s voice again. It’s calm, too calm, yellow fluttering birds that don’t belong in this life-bucking tempest. “We still love each other very much,” she says. “We just both need some space right now.” She looks at Dad. “Benjamin?”

At the mention of Dad’s name, all the paintings, mirrors, family photographs come crashing down from the walls. Again, only I notice. I glance at Jude. Tears suspend in her eyelashes. Dad seems like he’s going to say something, but when he opens his mouth, no words come out. He drops his head into his hands, his teeny-tiny hands, like raccoon paws—when did that happen? They’re too little to cover up what’s happening on his face, how his features have all squeezed shut. My stomach churns and churns. I hear pots and pans in the kitchen plummeting out of the cupboards now. I close my eyes for a second, see the roof whip off the house, reel across the sky.

Jude explodes, “I’m going with Dad.”

“Me too,” I say, shocking myself.

Dad lifts his head. Pain’s leaking out of every part of his face. “You’ll stay here with your mother, kids. It’s temporary.” His voice is so flimsy and I notice for the first time how thin his hair’s getting as he stands and leaves the room.

Jude gets up and walks over to Mom, looking down on her like she’s a beady little beetle. “How could you?” she says out of clenched teeth and makes her own exit, her hair twisting and winding angrily across the floor behind her. I hear her calling for Dad.

“Are you leaving us?” I say/think, rising to my feet. Because even though Dad’s leaving now, Mom’s already left. She’s been AWOL for months. I know this and I can’t look at her.

“Never,” she says, grabbing my shoulders. I’m surprised by the strength of her grip. “You hear me, Noah? I will never leave you and your sister. This is between your father and me. It has nothing to do with you kids.”

I melt into her arms like the traitor that I am.

She strokes my hair. It feels so good. “My boy. My tender boy. My dream boy. Everything’s going to be okay.” She repeats how okay everything’s going to be again and again like a chant, but I can tell she doesn’t believe it. Neither do I.

Later that evening, Jude and I are shoulder to shoulder at the window. Dad’s walking to his car carrying a suitcase. The rain’s wailing down on him, stooping him more and more with every step.

“I don’t think there’s anything in it,” I say, watching him toss the piece of luggage into the trunk like it’s filled with feathers.

“There is,” she says. “I checked. One thing. A drawing of you and him on some weird animal. Nothing else. Not even a toothbrush.”

These are the first words we’ve exchanged in months.

I can’t believe the only thing Dad took with him is me.

That night, I’m in bed unable to sleep, wondering if I’m staring at the darkness or it’s staring at me, when Jude opens the door, crosses the room, and gets in bed next to me. I flip the pillow so it won’t be wet. We’re lying on our backs.

“I wished for it,” I whisper, telling her what’s been tearing me up for hours. “Three times. Three different birthdays. I wished he would leave.”

She turns on her side, touches my arm, whispers back, “I once wished for Mom to die.”

“Take it back,” I say, turning onto my side. I can feel her breathing on my face. “I didn’t take it back in time.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Grandma would know how,” she says.

“That’s a load of help,” I say, and then out of nowhere and at the exact same moment, we both burst out laughing and can’t stop and it’s the gasping snorting kind and we have to put the pillow over our faces so Mom doesn’t hear and decide we think Dad being kicked out of the family is the funniest thing that’s ever happened to us.

When we settle back into our selves, everything feels different, like if I turned on the light we’d be bears.

The next thing I know, there’s a shuffling of motion and Jude’s sitting on me. I’m so surprised I do nothing. She takes a deep breath. “Okay, now that I have your undivided attention. Are you ready?” She bounces a few times.

“Get off me,” I say, but she’s talking over me.

“Nothing happened. You hear me? I’ve tried to tell you so many times but you wouldn’t listen.” She spells it out. “N-O-T-H-I-N-G. Brian is your friend, I get it. In the closet, he told me about something called a globular cluster, I think. He talked about how amazing your drawings are, for Pete’s sake! It’s true I was so mad at you because of Mom and because you totally stole all my friends too and because you threw away that note—I know you did that and it really sucked, Noah, because that was like the only sand sculpture I ever made that I thought was maybe good enough for Mom to see. So I might’ve had Brian’s name on a piece of paper in my hand at that party but NOTHING HAPPENED, okay? I did not steal your—” She pauses. “Your best friend, okay?”

“Okay,” I say. “Now get off me.” It comes out gruffer than I intend on account of my spanking new voice. She doesn’t move. I can’t let on what this information is doing to me. My mind is speeding around, rearranging that night, the last few months, rearranging everything. All the times she tried to talk to me, how I walked away, slammed the door, blasted the TV, unable to look at her, forget listen to her, how I even ripped up a card she gave me without reading it, until she gave up trying. Nothing happened. They’re not in love. Brian isn’t going to come back in a few weeks and escape with her into her bedroom like I kept imagining. They’re not going to be watching movies on the couch when I come home or looking for meteorites in the woods. Nothing happened. Nothing happened!

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Hitches Ride on Passing Comet)

But wait. “Who’s Spaceboy then?” I was so sure it was Brian. I mean: outer space, hello?

“Huh?”

“Spaceboy, on the computer.”

“Spy much? Jeez.” She sighs. “That’s Michael, you know, Zephyr. ‘Spaceboy’ is the name of some song he’s into.”

Oh.

OH!

And I guess other people—probably millions of them—besides Brian and me have seen that alien movie. Or might joke with her about teleporting. Or might use the name Spaceboy!

Now I’m remembering the Ouija Board. “Zephyr’s M.? You like Zephyr?”

“Maybe,” she says coyly. “I don’t know yet.”

This is news but Nothing Happened steamrolls right over it. I forget she’s in the room, not to mention sitting on me, until she says, “So are you and Brian like in love with each other or something?”

“What? No!” The words fly out of my mouth. “God, Jude. Can’t I have a friend? I totally hooked up with Heather, if you didn’t notice.” I don’t know why I say all this. I push her off me. I feel the stone in my stomach get bigger.

“Okay, fine. It’s just—”

“What?” Did Zephyr tell her what happened that day in the woods?

“Nothing.”

She gets back in bed and we shoulder up again into the smush. She says quietly, “So you can stop hating me now.”

“I never hated you,” I say, which is a total lie. “I’m really—”

“Me too. So sorry.” She holds my hand.

We start to breathe together in the dark.

“Jude, I’ve—”

“So much,” she finishes.

I laugh. I’d forgotten this.

“I know, me too,” she says, giggling.

My next sentence, however, she will not be able to mind-read. I tell her, “I’ve probably seen all of your sand sculptures.” I feel a stab of guilt. I wish I didn’t destroy the photographs now. I could’ve shown them to her. She could’ve gotten into CSA with them. She could’ve had them forever. She could’ve shown Mom. This will have to do. “They’re freaking amazing.”

“Noah?” I’ve caught her completely off guard. “Really?”

I know she’s smiling because my face is too. I want to tell her how scared I am that she’s better than me. Instead, I say, “I can’t stand the ocean washing them away.”

“But that’s the best part.”

I listen to the waves pounding away at the shore outside, and think about all those incredible sand women being swept off before anyone can see them and I’m wondering how in the world that could possibly be the best part, tumbling that around and around in my head, when she says very quietly, “Thank you.”

And everything in me goes quiet and peaceful and right.

We breathe and drift. I’m imagining us swimming through the night sky to the bright moon and hoping I remember the image in the morning so I can make it and give it to her. Before I’m all the way gone, I hear her say, “I still love you the most,” and I say, “Me too,” but in the morning I’m not sure if we said it or if I just thought it or dreamt it.

Not that it matters.

It’s the beginning of winter break, otherwise known as The Return of Brian, and the off-the-hook smell wafting out of the kitchen has brain-commanded me out of my chair and down the hallway.

“Is that you?” Jude yells from her room. “C’mere, please.”

I walk into her room, where she’s reading Grandma’s bible in bed. She’s been trying to find some hogwash in it that will bring Dad back.

She hands me a scarf. “Here,” she says. “Tie me to the bedpost.”

“What?”

“It’s the only solution. I need a little reminder not to be weak and go in the kitchen. I’m not giving Mom the satisfaction of eating one bite. How come she decides to become Julia Child now? You shouldn’t eat anything she makes either. I know you got into that chicken pot pie after we came home from Dad’s last night. I saw.” She gives me a hard look. “Promise not one morsel?” I nod, but there’s not a chance in hell I’m not having whatever it is that’s filling the house with this supernaturally awesome smell. “I mean it, Noah.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Only one wrist so I can turn the pages.” As I tie her wrist to the bedpost, she goes on. “It smells like pie, apple or pear, or maybe turnovers, or a crumble. God, I love crumbles. Of all unfairness. Who knew she even knew how to bake?” She turns the page of Grandma’s bible. “Be strong,” she says after me as I head for the door.

I salute her. “Aye, Captain.”

I’ve become a double agent. This is how it’s been since Dad left: After eating takeout with Jude and Dad in his dead-body blue hotel studio, I, on arriving home, wait for the moment Jude locks herself in her room to chat with Spaceboy, who is Zephyr! Not Brian! and then head for the kitchen to feast with Mom. But whether I’m sitting with Dad watching Animal Planet, breathing gray air, pretending not to notice he’s all folded up like a chair, or with Mr. Grady in the art room making the final touches on my CSA portfolio paintings, or learning salsa dancing in the kitchen with Mom while soufflés rise, or playing How Would You Rather Die? with Jude while she sews, I’m really only doing one thing. I’m a human hourglass: Waiting, waiting, waiting for Brian Connelly to come home.

Any day, hour, minute, second now.

Jude’s right. On the kitchen counter this morning is indeed an apple pie with a golden roof over it and a plate of turnovers.

Mom’s at the counter kneading dough, her face spotted in flour.

“Oh good,” she says. “Scratch my nose, will you? I’ve been going crazy.”

I walk over to her and scratch her nose. “Harder,” she says. “That’s it. Thanks.”

“It’s weird to scratch someone else’s nose,” I tell her.

“Just wait until you’re a parent.”

“It’s much squishier than it looks,” I say. She smiles at me and it sends a warm summer breeze around the room.

“You’re happy,” I say, but only meant to think it. My new trombone of a voice makes it sound like an accusation, which I guess it is. Not only is she happier since Dad’s been gone, she’s actually in a room when she’s in a room. She’s returned from the Milky Way. She even got drenched along with Jude and me in a downpour the other day.

She stops kneading.

“How come you didn’t cook like this when Dad lived here?” I ask, instead of what I want to ask: How come you don’t miss him? How come he had to leave for you to become normal again?

She sighs. “I don’t know.” She traces her finger through a mound of flour, starts spelling her name. Her face is closing up.

“It smells incredible,” I say, wanting her happiness back, needing it and hating it at the same time.

She smiles faintly. “Have a piece of pie and a turnover. I won’t tell your sister.”

I nod, grab a knife and cut an enormous slice, a quarter of the pan practically, and put it on a dinner plate. Then I take a turnover. Since I’ve become King Kong, I can’t get enough food in me ever. I’m heading over to the table with my full plate, the smell making me want to walk on my hands, when Jude’s bad mood ambles in.

The eye-roll is a 10.5 on the Richter. The Big One. California has slipped into the ocean. She puts her hands on her hips, exasperated. “What’s your problem, Noah?”

“How’d you get free anyway,” I say, my mouth full of turnover.

“Free?” Mom asks.

“I tied her up so she wouldn’t be tempted to come in here and eat.”

Mom laughs. “Jude, I know you’re furious with me. It doesn’t mean you can’t have a turnover for breakfast.”

“Never!” She walks across the room and takes a box of Cheerios from a cabinet and pours some into a sad old bowl.

“I think I used up all the milk,” Mom says.

“Of course you did!” Jude cries, sounding a lot like a braying donkey. She sits down next to me, crunching and martyring her way through the bowl of dry cereal, eyeing my plate the whole time. When Mom’s back is turned, I slide it over to her with the fork and she shovels pastry in until her mouth is stuffed, then slides it back over.

It’s this moment that Brian Connelly comes through the door.

“I knocked,” he says nervously. He’s older, taller, hatless, and he’s cut his hair—the white bonfire is gone.

I involuntarily jump up, then sit down, then jump up again, because this is what normal people do when someone walks into a room, right? Jude kicks me under the table, gives me a look that says: Stop being a freak, then tries to smile at Brian, but her mouth is too stuffed with pie, so she makes a weird disfigured chipmunk face at him. I certainly can’t talk because I’m too busy jumping up and down.

Fortunately, there’s Mom.

“Well, hello.” She wipes her hands on her apron, walks over, and shakes his hand. “Welcome back.”

“Thank you,” he replies. “Good to be back.” He takes a deep breath. “We can smell what you’re baking all the way down at our house. We were salivating over our cornflakes.”

“Please,” Mom says. “Help yourself. I’m going through a little cooking phase. And certainly bring something back for your mother.”

Brian looks at the counter with longing. “Maybe later.” His eyes travel to me. He licks his bottom lip and the gesture, so familiar, makes my heart lurch.

Somewhere in between up and down, I’ve frozen: humpbacked, arms swinging monkey-like. I register how crazy I look in the puzzled expression on his face. I choose up. Whew. Up was the right move! I’m standing. I’m a person on legs, which are designed for this purpose. And he’s five feet away, now four, three, two—

He’s in front of me.

Brian Connelly is standing in front of me.

What’s left of his hair is a deep buttery yellow. His eyes, his eyes, his amazing squinting eyes! are going to make me lose consciousness. There’s nothing hiding them anymore. I’m surprised all the passengers didn’t follow him off the plane and aren’t waiting outside the door. I want to draw him. Now. I want to do everything. Now.

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Two Boys Racing into Brightness)

I try to calm myself by counting his freckles to see if there are any that are new.

“Stare much?” he says quietly so only I hear. Practically the first words he ever said to me, all those months ago. His lips curl into the half smile. I catch his tongue poised on the precipice between his front teeth.

“You look different,” I say, wishing it didn’t come out so dreamily.

“Me? Dude, you’re huge. I think you’re bigger than me. How’d that happen?”

I glance down. “Yeah, super far from the toes now.” This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about. My toes are pretty much in another time zone.

He cracks up and then I do, and the sound of our laughter getting all mixed up together is like a time machine and we’re instantly back to last summer, the days in the woods, the nights on his roof. We haven’t talked in five months and we both look like different people, but it’s the same, same, same. I notice Mom watching us curiously, intently, not totally comprehending what she’s seeing, like we’re some foreign movie with no subtitles.

Brian turns to Jude, who’s finally managed to get her food down. “Hey,” he says.

She waves, then goes back to her dry Cheerios. It’s true. There’s nothing between them. It was probably like being in an elevator with a stranger in that closet. I get a pang of guilt over what I did in that closet.

“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?”

“Oh my God,” Brian exclaims. “I forgot! I can’t believe I’ve gone months without thinking about the whereabouts of Ralph!”

“Quite an existential dilemma that parrot has put us all in,” Mom says, smiling at him.

He returns her smile, then meets my eyes. “Ready?” he says, like we have some plan.

I notice he doesn’t have his meteorite bag and see out the window it’s probably going to pour any minute, but we need to get out of here. Immediately. “We’re going to search for meteorites,” I say, like that’s what most people do on winter mornings. I never really told either of them too much about last summer, which is reflected in both of their flummoxed faces. But who freaking cares?

Not us.

In a flash, we’re through the door, across the street and into the woods, running for no reason and laughing for no reason and totally out of breath and out of our minds when Brian catches me by my shirt, whips me around, and with one strong hand flat against my chest, he pushes me against a tree and kisses me so hard I go blind.

The blindness lasts just a second, then the colors start flooding into me: not through my eyes but right through my skin, replacing blood and bone, muscle and sinew, until I am redorangebluegreenpurpleyellowredorangebluegreenpurpleyellow.

Brian pulls away and looks at me. “Fuck,” he says. “I’ve wanted to do that for so long.” His breath’s on my face. “So long. You’re just . . .” He doesn’t finish, instead he brushes my cheek with the back of his hand. The gesture is startling, atom-splitting, because it’s so unexpected, so tender. As is the look in his eyes. It makes my chest ache with joy, horses-plunging-into-rivers joy.

“God,” I whisper. “It’s happening.”

“Yeah, it is.”

I think the heart of every living thing on earth is beating in my body.

I run my hands through his hair, finally, finally, then bring his head to mine and kiss him so hard our teeth collide, planets collide, kissing him now for each and every time we didn’t all summer long. I know absolutely everything about how to kiss him too, how to make his whole body tremble just from biting his lip, how to make him moan right inside my mouth by whispering his name, how to make his head fall back, his spine arch, how to make him groan through his teeth. It’s like I’ve taken every class there is on the subject. And even as I’m kissing him and kissing him and kissing him, I wish I were kissing him, wanting more, more, more, more, like I can’t get enough, never will be able to get enough.

“We’re them,” I think/say, stopping for a moment to catch my breath, my life, our mouths inches apart, our foreheads pressed together now.

“Who?” His voice is a rasp. It creates an immediate riot in my blood, so I can’t tell him about the guys in the alcove at the party. Instead, I place my hands under his shirt, because I can now, I can do everything I’ve thought and thought and thought about. I touch the river of his stomach, his chest and shoulders. He whispers the word yeah under his breath, which makes me shudder, which makes him shudder, and then his hands travel under my shirt and the demanding hungry feel of them on my skin burns me to the ground.

Love, I think and think and think and think and don’t say. Don’t say it.

Don’t say it. Don’t tell him you love him.

But I do. I love him more than anything.

I close my eyes and drown in color, open them and drown in light because billions and billions of buckets of light are being emptied on our heads from above.

This is it. This is freaking everything. This is the painting painting itself.

And that’s what I’m thinking when the asteroid comes crashing into us.

“No one can know,” he says. “Ever.”

I step back, look at him. In an instant, he’s turned into a siren. The whole forest goes mum. It doesn’t want anything to do with what he just said either.

He says more calmly, “It’d be the end. Of everything. My athletic scholarship at Forrester. I’m the assistant captain of the varsity team as a sophomore and—”

I want him to be quiet. I want him back with me. I want his face to look the way it did a minute ago when I touched his stomach, his chest, when he brushed my cheek with his hand. I lift up his shirt, slip it over his talking head, then take off my own, and step into him so we’re all lined up, legs to legs, groin to groin, bare chest to bare chest. His breath hitches. We fit perfectly. I kiss him slowly and deeply until the only word he can manage is my name.

He says it again.

And again.

Until we’re two lit candles melting into one.

“No one’s gonna find out. Don’t worry,” I whisper, not caring if everyone in the whole world knows, not caring about anything except more now him and me under the open sky as thunder cracks and the rain comes down.

I’m propped on my bed drawing Brian, who’s a few feet away at my desk watching a meteor shower on some astronomy site he’s addicted to. In the drawing, the stars and planets are storming out of the computer screen and into the room. This is the first time we’ve seen each other since the woods except for the kabillion times I’ve seen him in my mind over the last few days, which included Christmas. What happened between us has colonized every last brain cell. I can barely tie my shoelaces. I forgot how to chew this morning.

I thought maybe he’d hide from me for the rest of our lives, but a few minutes after I heard his mom’s car pull into the garage today, signaling their return from some Buddhist center up north, he was at my window. I’ve listened to an endless state of the intergalactic union and now we’re fighting about whose Christmas was worse. He’s acting like what happened between us didn’t happen, so I am too. Well, trying to. My heart’s bigger than a blue whale’s, which needs its own parking spot. Not to mention my eight feet of concrete, which has kept me perpetually in the shower. I am so clean. If there’s a drought, blame me.

In fact, I just happen to be thinking about the shower, him and me in it, thinking about hot water sliding down our naked bodies, thinking about pressing him against the wall, about gliding my hands all over him, thinking about the sounds he’d make, how he’d throw his head back and say yeah like he did in the woods, thinking all this, as I tell him in an even, controlled voice how Jude and I spent Christmas in Dad’s hotel room eating takeout Chinese food and breathing gray air. It’s amazing how many things you can do at once. It’s amazing how what goes on in the head stays in the head.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Do Not Disturb)

“Give it up,” he says. “No way you can beat this. I had to go to an all-day sit with my mom and then sleep on the floor on a mat and eat gross gruel for Christmas dinner. I got a prayer from the monks as my only present. A prayer for peace! I repeat: an all-day sit, me! I couldn’t say anything. Or do anything. For eight hours. And then gruel and a prayer!” He starts laughing and I catch it immediately. “And I had to wear a robe. A fricken dress.” He turns around, lit up like a lantern. “And what’s worse is the whole time, I couldn’t stop thinking about . . .”

I see him tremble. Oh God.

“It was so painful, dude. Luckily we had these weird pillow things on our laps so no one knew. Sucked.” He’s staring at my mouth. “And didn’t suck too.” He turns back to the stars.

I see him shudder again.

My hand goes limp and I drop my pencil. He can’t stop thinking about it either.

He swivels around. “So, who were the ‘them’ you mentioned, anyway?”

It takes me a second but then I understand. “I saw these guys making out at that party.”

His brow furrows. “The party where you hooked up with Heather?”

For months, I’ve been so pissed at him and Jude about something that didn’t happen, it never occurred to me that he could be mad at me about what actually did. Is he still? Is that why he never called or emailed? I want to tell him what really happened. I want to say sorry. Because I am. Instead, I just say, “Yeah, that party. They were . . .”

“What?”

“I don’t know, amazing or something . . .”

“Why?” His talking is turning into breathing. There’s no answer. Really, they were amazing only because they were guys kissing.

I tell him, “I decided I’d give up all my fingers, if . . .”

“If what?” he presses.

I realize I can’t possibly say it aloud but don’t have to because he does. “If it could’ve been us, right? I saw them too.”

It’s a thousand degrees in me.

“It’d be hard to draw with no fingers,” he says.

“I’d manage.”

I close my eyes, unable to contain the feeling inside me and when I open them a second later, it’s like he’s gotten hitched on a hook and I’m the hook. I follow his gaze to my bare stomach—my shirt’s ridden up—then lower to where there’s no hiding how I’m feeling. I think he’s Tasering me or something, because I can’t move.

He swallows, swivels back around to face the computer, and puts a hand on the mouse but doesn’t click the screensaver away. I watch his other hand travel down.

Still looking at the screen, he asks, “Want to?” and I’m a flood in a paper cup.

“Totally,” I say, knowing without a doubt what he means, and then our hands are on our belts, unbuckling. From across the room, I watch his back, unable to see much, but then his neck arches, and I can see his face, his eyes all swimming and wild, locking with mine, and it’s like we’re kissing again, but from across the room this time, kissing even more intensely than in the woods, where our pants stayed on. I didn’t know you could kiss with your eyes. I didn’t know anything. And then the colors are forcing down the walls of the room, the walls of me—

Then, the impossible.

My mother as in my mother bursts in, waving a magazine. I thought I’d locked the door. I could’ve sworn I locked it!

“This is the best essay I’ve ever read on Picasso, you’re going—” Her confused gaze darts from me to Brian. His hands, my hands, fumbling, shoving, zipping.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh. Oh.”

Then the door’s closed and she’s gone, like she was never there, like she hadn’t seen a thing.

She doesn’t pretend it didn’t happen.

An hour after Brian’s frantic dive-bomb out the window, there’s a knock at my bedroom door. I say nothing, just flip on my desk light so she doesn’t find me sitting in the dark, where I’ve been since he left. I grab a pencil, start to draw, but my hand won’t stop shaking, so I can’t make a decent line.

“Noah, I’m coming in.”

All the blood in my body mad-dashes to my face as the door slowly opens. I want to die.

“I’d like to talk to you, honey,” she says in the same voice she uses when talking to Crazy Charlie, the town loon.

Whatever. Whatever. Whatever, I chant in my head, drilling the pencil into the pad. I’m hunched over the paper now, hugging it practically, so I don’t have to see her. Whole forests are burning out of control inside me. How come she doesn’t know to leave me alone for the next fifty years after what just happened?

Her hand touches my shoulder as she passes. I cringe.

From the bed where she’s sat down, she says, “Love’s so complicated, Noah, isn’t it?”

I go rigid. Why did she say that? Why is she using the word love?

I throw the pencil down.

“It’s okay what you’re feeling. It’s natural.”

A giant No slams through me. How does she know what I’m feeling? How does she know anything about anything? She doesn’t. She can’t. She can’t just barge into my most secret world and then try to show me around it. Get out, I want to holler at her. Get out of my room. Get out of my life. Get out of my paintings. Get out of everything! Blow back to your realm already and leave me alone. How can you take this experience away from me before I’ve even gotten to experience it? I want to say all these things but can’t make any words. I can hardly breathe.

Brian couldn’t either. He was hyperventilating after she left the room. His hands covering his face, his body all contorted, repeating, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” I was wishing he’d say something besides “Oh God!” but when he started talking, I changed my mind.

I’d never seen anyone act like that. He was sweating and pacing and his hands were in his hair like he was going to rip it all out. I thought he was going to take apart the walls, or me. I really thought he might kill me.

“So at my old school,” he said. “There was this kid on the baseball team. People thought, I don’t know. They saw that he went to some website or something.” His inside face had become his outside face and it was all knotted up. “They made it impossible for him to play. Every day, they found another way to mess with him. Then one Friday after school, they locked him in the storage closet.” He winced, as if remembering and I knew. I knew then. “All night long and the whole next day. A tiny, dark, disgusting airless space. His parents thought he was at the away game and someone told the coaches he was sick, so no one even looked for him. No one knew he was trapped in there.” His chest was heaving and I was remembering how he told me he didn’t used to have claustrophobia and now he did. “He was really good too, probably the best player on the team or could have been. And he didn’t even do anything. The guy just went to these sites and someone saw. Do you get it? Do you get what it would mean for me? The assistant captain? I want to be captain next year so maybe I can graduate early. No scholarship. No nothing. These guys aren’t”—he made finger quotes—“evolved. They’re not from Northern California. They don’t do all-day sits or draw pictures.” The dagger went straight in. “It’s brutal in a locker room.”

“No one will find out,” I said.

“You don’t know that. You remember that idiot cousin of Fry’s I nearly decapitated last summer, the one who looks like an ape? His little brother goes to my school. I thought I was hallucinating. He looks exactly like him.” He licked his bottom lip. “Anyone could’ve seen us the other day, Noah. Anyone. Fry could’ve and then . . . I didn’t even think about it I was so . . .” He shook his head. “I can’t get forced off this team. Can’t lose my athletic scholarship. We have no money. And this high school—the physics teacher’s an astrophysicist . . . I just can’t. I need to get a baseball scholarship for college. Have to.”

He came over to where I was standing. His face was crazy red and his eyes were too intense and he seemed about twelve feet tall and I didn’t know if he was going to kiss me or punch me. He took me by the T-shirt again except this time he balled a piece of it up in his fist and said, “It’s done with us. It has to be. Okay?”

I nodded and something really big and bright in me crushed to nothing in an instant. I’m pretty sure it was my soul.

“And it’s all your fault!” I spit out at my mother.

“What is, honey?” she says, alarmed.

“Everything! Don’t you see? You’ve crushed Dad. You banished him like a leper. He loves you! How do you think he feels all alone in that dying room breathing gray air and eating cold stale pizza and watching shows about aardvarks while you cook feasts and wear circus clothes and hum all the time and have the sun follow you around in the pouring rain? How do you think that makes him feel?” I can see I’ve hurt her and don’t care. She deserves it. “Who knows if he even has a soul left thanks to you?”

“What do you mean by that? I don’t understand.”

“Maybe you stomped it to nothing and now he’s hollow and empty, a shell with no turtle inside.”

Mom pauses. “Why would you say that? Do you feel that way sometimes?”

“I’m not talking about me. And you know what else? You’re not special. You’re just like everyone else. You don’t float or walk through walls and you never will!”

“Noah?”

“I always thought that you blew in from somewhere so cool, but you’re just regular. And you don’t make anyone happy anymore like you used to. You make everyone miserable.”

“Noah, are you done?”

“Mom.” I say it like bugs live in the word. “I am.”

“Listen to me.” The sudden sternness of her voice jars me. “I didn’t come in here to talk about me or about me and Dad. We can have those conversations, I promise, but not now.”

If I don’t look at her, she’ll drop it, she’ll disappear, and what she saw Brian and me doing will disappear with her. “You didn’t see anything,” I yell, completely out of control now. “Guys do that. They do. Whole baseball teams do it. Circle jerks, that’s what it’s called, you know?” I drop my head in my hands, filling them with tears.

She gets up, walks over to me, puts her hand under my chin, and lifts my face so I’m forced into the earnest hold of her eyes. “Listen to me. It takes a lot of courage to be true to yourself, true to your heart. You always have been very brave that way and I pray you always will be. It’s your responsibility, Noah. Remember that.”

The next morning, I wake at dawn in a stark raving panic. Because she can’t tell Dad. She has to promise me that. After fourteen years, I have a father, I like it. No, I love it. He finally thinks I’m a fully functioning umbrella.

I prowl through the dark house like a thief. The kitchen’s empty. I tiptoe to Mom’s bedroom door and sit down with my ear to it and wait for her to stir. It’s possible she already told Dad, though it was late when she left my room last night. Could she ruin my life anymore? First she destroyed everything with Brian. Now she’s going to do the same with Dad.

I’m falling back asleep, Brian’s lips on mine, his hands on my chest, all over me, when the sound of Mom’s voice jolts me. I shake off the phantom embrace. She must be on the phone. I cup both hands around my ear and place it against the door—does this actually work? It actually does. I can hear better. Her voice sounds strained like it gets when she talks to Dad now. “I need to see you,” she says. “It can’t wait. I’ve been up all night thinking. Something happened with Noah yesterday.” She is going to tell him! I knew it. Dad must be talking now, because it’s silent until she says, “Okay, not the studio, at The Wooden Bird. Yes, one hour’s perfect.” I don’t think she’s ever even been to his studio. She just leaves him at that hotel to rot.

I knock and then swing open the door after I hear her say come in. She’s in her peach robe, cradling the phone to her chest. Mascara’s smudged all around her eyes like she’s been crying all night. Because of me? My stomach rolls over. Because she doesn’t want a gay son? Because no one does, not even someone as open-minded as her. Her face looks old, like she’s aged hundreds of years overnight. Look what I’ve done to her. Her disappointed skin is hanging all over her disappointed bones. So she just said what she did last night to make me feel better?

“Morning, sweetheart,” she says, sounding fake. She tosses the phone on the bed and walks over to the window, opening the curtains. The sky has barely woken up yet. It’s a gray, homely morning. I think about breaking my own fingers, I don’t know why. One by one. In front of her.

“Where’re you going?” I manage out.

“I have a doctor’s appointment.” What a liar! And she lies so easily too. Has she been lying to me my whole life? “How’d you know I was going out?”

Think of something, Noah. “I just assumed because you weren’t up early baking.”

This works. She smiles, walks over to her dressing table, and sits down in front of the mirror. The Kandinsky biography she’s reading is facedown beside her silver brush. She starts rubbing cream around her eyes, then takes cotton and wipes off darkness.

(PORTRAIT: Mom Replacing Her Face with Another)

When she’s finished doing her makeup, she starts sweeping her hair up into a clip, then changes her mind, shakes it back out, picks up the brush. “I’m going to make a red velvet cake later . . .” I zone out. I just have to say it. I’m the expert blurter too. Why can’t I get the words out?

“You look so upset, Noah.” She’s staring at me through the mirror.

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Trapped in a Mirror with Mom)

I’ll tell the Mom in the mirror. It’ll be easier. “I don’t want you to mention to Dad what you saw. Not that you saw anything. Because there was nothing to see. Not that it means anything anyway . . .” Mayday, mayday.

She puts her brush down. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Absolutely okay. It’s your private business. If you want to tell your father what I didn’t see, you will. If what I didn’t see ever actually does mean something, then I encourage you to. He’s not really the way he seems sometimes. You underestimate him. You always have.”

“I underestimate him? Are you serious? He underestimates me.”

“No he doesn’t.” She holds my eyes in the mirror. “He’s just a little afraid of you, always has been.”

“Afraid of me? Sure. Dad’s afraid of me.” What’s she saying?

“He thinks you don’t like him.”

“He doesn’t like me!” Well, he didn’t. Now he does for some reason and I want to keep it this way.

She shakes her head. “You two will figure it out. I know you will.” Maybe we will, maybe we are, but not if she tells him. “You’re very much alike. You both feel things very deeply, too deeply sometimes.” What? “Jude and I have quite a bit of armor on us,” she continues. “It takes a lot to break through it. Not you and Dad.” This is news. I never thought I was anything like Dad. But what she’s really saying is that we’re both wusses. That’s what Brian thinks too. I’m just someone who “draws pictures.” And it burns in my chest that she thinks Jude’s like her and I’m not. How come everything I think about our family keeps changing? How come the teams keep switching? Is this how all families are? And most importantly, how do I know she’s not lying to me about not telling Dad? She just lied about the doctor’s appointment. Why is she meeting him then? And hello? She said: Something happened with Noah last night.

She absolutely is going to tell him. That’s why they’re going to The Wooden Bird. I can’t trust her anymore.

She walks over to her closet. “We can talk more about this later, but I really do have to get ready. My doctor’s appointment’s in less than an hour.” Pinocchio! Pants on Fire!

As I turn to leave, she says, “Everything’s going to be okay, Noah. Don’t worry.”

“You know what?” I say, bunching my fingers into fists. “I really wish you’d stop saying that, Mom.”

Of course I’m going to follow her. When I hear the car back out of the driveway, I make a run for it. On the trails, I can get to The Wooden Bird almost as fast as she can by car.

No one knows who made The Wooden Bird. The artist carved it out of a humongous redwood stump, wooden feather by wooden feather. It must’ve taken years, ten or twenty even. It’s huge and each feather is unique. Now there’s a trail to it from the road and a bench by it that overlooks the ocean, but when the artist carved it, there was none of that. He was like Jude, doing it because he liked to, not really caring if anyone ever saw it. Or maybe he did care and liked the idea of strangers stumbling on it and wondering.

I’m hidden in the brush, yards away from Mom, who’s sitting on the bench staring out at the sea. The sun’s broken a hole in the fog and light’s reeling around in the trees. It’s going to be hot, one of those weird warm winter days. Dad’s not here yet. I close my eyes, find Brian; he’s everywhere inside me now, always swimming up my body. How can he shut this off? Will he change his mind? I’m reaching into my pocket for the rock when I hear footsteps.

I open my eyes expecting to see Dad; instead there’s a strange man strolling down the trail. He stops at the tree line and stares at my mother, who doesn’t seem to sense his presence at all. I pick up a stick. Is he a psycho? Then he turns his head slightly and I recognize him—that face, its geographic scale. It’s the artist from Day Street. Here! I drop my sword, relieved. He’s probably making a sculpture of her in his head, like I do with paintings. Is he out walking, I’m wondering, when all of a sudden, the sky comes crashing down in shards because my mother has flown to her feet, dashed over to him, and fallen into his open arms. I feel myself ignite.

I shake my head. Oh, it’s not Mom, of course, that’s it. The barking maniac sculptor has a wife who looks like my mother.

But it is her in his arms. I know my own mother.

What. Is. Going. On?

What. The. Hell. Is. Going. On?

Things start coming together. Fast. Why she was in front of his studio that day, her kicking Dad out, her phone conversations (his phone conversation! Hurry, my darling), her happiness, her unhappiness, her spaciness, her cooking and baking and stopping at green lights, her salsa dancing, her bangles and circus clothes! Everything clicking madly into place. Them, there, so clearly together.

The howling in my head is so loud I can’t believe they can’t hear it.

She’s having an affair. She’s cheating on Dad. She’s a two-timer. A toilet-licking asshat liar. Mom! How could this not have occurred to me? But it didn’t occur to me exactly because she’s Mom. My mother would never do anything like this. She brings donuts—the best donuts I ever tasted—for the toll collectors. She doesn’t have affairs.

Does Dad even know?

Affair. I whisper it aloud to the trees, but they’ve all run away. I know it’s my father she’s betraying, but it feels like it’s me too. And Jude. And every single day of our lives.

(FAMILY PORTRAIT: And Then We All Blew Away)

They’re kissing now and I’m watching and can’t stop watching. I’ve never seen her and Dad kiss like this. Parents aren’t allowed to kiss like this! Now Mom’s taken his hand and is leading him to the edge of the cliff. She looks so happy and it cuts into me. I have no idea who this lady is spinning around in this stranger’s arms, spinning and spinning, like they’re in some lame movie until they lose their footing and fall to the ground.

(PORTRAIT: Mother in Blinding Color)

What did she say this morning? It takes a lot to break through her armor. This man has broken through her armor.

I pick up the stick. I need to defend my father. I need to fight this asshat artist. I should throw a meteorite at his head. I should shove him off the cliff. Because my poor artichoke of a father doesn’t have a chance. And he knows it. I understand now that what is shrinking him, what is turning the air around him that awful gray, is defeat.

He’s a broken umbrella. Has he always been one? We both are. Like father, like son.

Because I know it too. I don’t have a chance either. “It’s done with us. It has to be. Okay?”

No, it is not okay. Nothing is okay! They’re kissing again. I think my eyes are going to fly from their sockets, my hands from my arms, my feet from my legs. I don’t know what do. I don’t know what to do. I need to do something.

So I run.

I run and run and run and run and run and when I reach one of the last bends before the trailhead onto our street, I see Brian walking with Courtney.

His meteorite bag is wrapped around his shoulder and their arms are crisscrossed behind them, his hand in the back pocket of her jeans and hers in the back pocket of his. Like they’re together. There’s a smudge of bright color on his lips, which confuses me for a second until I realize it’s her lipstick. Because he kissed her.

He kissed her.

It starts as a tremor deep inside, growing quickly into a quaking, and then it’s all erupting together, what happened at The Wooden Bird, what happened in my bedroom last night, what’s happening right now, all the rage and confusion, the hurt and helplessness, the betrayal, it’s a blowing volcano inside me and out of my mouth flies, “He’s gay, Courtney! Brian Connelly is gay!”

The words ricochet around in the air. I instantly want them back.

Brian’s face slides off and there’s loathing underneath it. Courtney’s mouth drops open. She believes me, I can see it. She steps away from him. “Are you, Brian? I thought—” She doesn’t finish her sentence because she sees his expression.

This is what his face must’ve looked like when he was inside that storage closet all alone hour after hour. This is what a face looks like when all the dreams get sucked out of it.

And I did it to him this time. Me.

I can’t stop seeing Brian’s face hating me as I bolt across the street. I’d do anything to take my words back, to put them again in the safe silent vault inside me where they belong. Anything. My stomach’s like I’ve eaten nails. How could I have done that after what he told me?

I’d do anything to not have seen what I saw at The Wooden Bird too.

Once in the house, I go straight to my room, open a sketchpad, and start drawing. First things first. I need to get Mom to stop this and I only know one way to do that. It takes a long time to get the picture right, but eventually I do.

When I finish, I leave the drawing on her bed, and then go look for Jude. I need Jude.

Fry tells me she went off with Zephyr, but I can’t find them anywhere.

I can’t find Brian either.

There’s only Prophet, who as usual won’t shut up about Ralph.

At the top of my lungs, I yell, “There is no Ralph, you stupid bird. Ralph does not exist!”

When I get back home, Mom’s waiting for me in my room, the picture I made on her lap. It’s of her and the sculptor kissing by The Wooden Bird in the foreground and Dad, Jude, and me as one blur making up the background.

Her mascara’s making black tears. “You followed me,” she says. “I really wish you hadn’t, Noah. I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have seen that.”

“You shouldn’t have been doing that!”

She looks down. “I know, which is why—”

“I thought you were going to tell Dad about me,” I blurt. “That’s why I followed you.”

“I told you I wasn’t going to.”

“I heard you say on the phone ‘something happened with Noah last night.’ I thought you were talking to Dad, not your boyfriend.”

Her face stiffens at the word. “I said that because when I heard myself telling you last night that it was your responsibility to be true to your heart, I realized I was being a hypocrite and I needed to take my own advice. I needed to be brave like my son.” Wait, did she just use me to justify her traitorous actions? She stands, hands me the drawing. “Noah, I’m asking Dad for a divorce. I’m going to tell him today. And I want to tell your sister myself.”

A divorce. Today. Now. “No!” This is my fault. If I hadn’t followed her. If I hadn’t seen. If I hadn’t drawn the picture. “Don’t you love us?” I meant to say don’t you love Dad, but that’s what came out.

“I love nothing more than you and your sister. Nothing. And your dad is a wonderful, wonderful man . . .”

But now I can’t focus on what she’s saying because a thought’s taken over my entire brain. “Is he going to live here?” I ask her, interrupting whatever she was saying. “That man? With us? Is he going to sleep on Dad’s side of the bed? Drink out of his coffee cup? Shave in his mirror? Is he? Are you going to marry him? Is that why you want a divorce?”

“Sweetheart . . .” She touches my shoulder, trying to comfort me. I pull away from her, hating her for the first time in my life, real live squawking hatred.

“You are,” I say in disbelief. “You’re going to marry him, aren’t you? That’s what you want.”

She doesn’t say no. Her eyes are saying yes. I can’t believe this.

“So you’re just going to forget about Dad? You’re going to pretend everything you had with him is nothing.” Like Brian’s doing to me. “He won’t survive it, Mom. You don’t see him at that hotel. He’s not like he used to be. He broke.” And me too. And what if I, in turn, broke Brian? How can love be such a wrecking ball?

“We tried, Dad and I,” she says. “We’ve been trying very hard for a very long time. All I ever wanted for you kids was the stability I didn’t have growing up. I never wanted this to happen.” She sits back down. “But I’m in love with another man.” Her face slides off her face—no one can keep their faces on today—and the one underneath is desperate. “I just am. I wish things were different but they’re not. It’s not right to live a lie. It never is, Noah.” There’s begging in her voice. “You can’t help who you love, can you?”

This silences the racket in me for a moment. I can’t help it, that’s for sure, and I suddenly want to tell her everything. I want to tell her that I’m in love too and I can’t help it either and that I just did the worst thing I could’ve possibly done to him and I don’t know how I could’ve done it and can’t believe how much I wish I could take it back.

But instead I walk out of the room.