I'll Give You the Sun

THE INVISIBLE MUSEUM

Noah

13¹/₂ years old

The Neighborhood Terror Threat Level drops as I pan with Dad’s binoculars from the forest and street on the front side of our house to the bluff and ocean in the back. I’m on the roof, the best surveillance spot, and Fry and Zephyr are paddling through the break on their surfboards. I can tell it’s them because of the sign flashing over their heads that reads: Itchy Blistering Brain-Boiled Sociopathic Onion-Eyed Asshats. Good. I have to be down the hill at CSA in an hour and now I can take the streets, for once, instead of tearing through the woods, trying to give Fry the slip. Zephyr, for some reason (Into Jude? The concrete dork?), leaves me alone now, but everywhere I go, there’s Fry, like some mad dog on meat. Throwing me over Devil’s Drop is his obsession this summer.

I mentally send a school of famished great white sharks their way, then find Jude on the beach and zoom in. She’s surrounded by the same bunch of girls she’s been hanging around with all spring and so far this summer instead of me. Pretty hornet-girls in bright bikinis with suntans that glimmer for miles. I know all about hornets: If one sends out a distress signal, it can trigger a whole nest attack. This can be deadly to people like me.

Mom says Jude acts the way she does now on account of hormones, but I know it’s on account of her hating me. She stopped going to museums with us ages ago, which is probably a good thing, because when she did, her shadow kept trying to strangle mine. I’d see it happening on the walls or on the floor. Sometimes lately, I catch her shadow creeping around my bed at night trying to pull the dreams out of my head. I have a good idea what she does instead of coming to the museum, though. Three times now, I’ve seen hickeys on her neck. Bug bites, she said. Sure. I heard while spying that she and Courtney Barrett have been riding bikes down to the boardwalk on weekends, where they see who can kiss more boys.

(PORTRAIT: Jude Braiding Boy After Boy into Her Hair)

Truth is: Jude doesn’t have to send her shadow after me. It’s not like she can’t take Mom down to the beach and show her one of her flying sand women before the tide wipes it out. It would change everything. Not that I want that.

Not one bit.

The other day, I was watching her make one from the bluff. She was at her place, three coves away. This time it was a big round woman, done bas relief, like always, except she was halfway turned into a bird—so incredible it made my head vibrate. I snapped a picture with Dad’s camera, but then something really horrible and maggoty came over me and as soon as Jude had walked off and was out of sight and earshot, I slid down the whole cliff, raced through the sand, and, roaring like a howler monkey—its roar is epic—knocked into the awesome bird-woman with my whole body, toppling and kicking it to nothing. I couldn’t even wait for the tide to take it out this time. I got sand everywhere, in my eyes and ears and down my throat. I kept finding it on me days after, in my bed, in my clothes, under my nails. But I had to do it. It was too good.

What if Mom had gone for a walk and seen it?

Because what if it’s Jude who has it? Why wouldn’t that be the case? She surfs waves as big as houses and jumps off anything. She has skin that fits and friends and Dad and The Sweetwine Gift and gills and fins in addition to lungs and feet.

She gives off light. I give off dark.

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Twins: The Flashlight and the Flashdark)

Oh, my body’s tightening into a wrung towel from thinking like this.

And all the color’s spiraling off everything.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Gray Noah Eating Gray Apples on Gray Grass)

I pan back up the now colorless hill to the now colorless moving van parked in front of the now colorless house two doors down—

“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?” Prophet the parrot next door cries.

“Don’t know, buddy. Nobody seems to know,” I say under my breath, while I focus on the movers, the same two guys as yesterday—not colorless, oh man, so not colorless—horses, both of them, I already decided, one chestnut, one palomino. They’re hulking a black piano into the house. I zoom in until I can see the sweat on their flushed foreheads, dripping down their necks, leaving wet transparent patches on their white shirts, which stick to them like skin . . . These binoculars are so awesome. A tan swath of the chestnut guy’s smooth stomach slides out each time he raises his arms. He’s more ripped than David even. I sit down, rest my elbows on my bent knees, and watch and watch, the swimming, thirsty feeling taking me over. Now they’re lifting a couch up the front stairs—

But then I drop the binoculars because on the roof of the house I’m casing, there’s a boy pointing a telescope right at me. How long has he been there? I peek up at him through my hair. He’s wearing a weird hat, one of those old gangster movie ones, and there’s white surfer hair sticking out every which way under it. Great, another surftard. Even without the binoculars, I can see he’s grinning. Is he laughing at me? Already? Does he know I was watching the movers? Does he think . . . ? He must, he must. I clench up, dread rising in my throat. But maybe not. Maybe he’s just grinning in a hello-I’m-new kind of way? Maybe he thinks I was checking out the piano? And asshats usually don’t have telescopes, do they? And that hat?

I stand, watching as he takes something out of his pocket, winds his arm back, and then lobs whatever it is into the air over the house between us. Whoa. I stick out my palm and as I do, something slaps hard in the center of it. I think it’s burned a hole in my hand and broken my wrist, but I don’t flinch.

“Nice catch,” he yells.

Ha! It’s the first time anyone has said those words to me in my life. I wish Dad heard. I wish a reporter for the Lost Cove Gazette heard. I have an allergy to catching and throwing and kicking and dribbling of any kind. Noah is not a team player. Well, duh. Revolutionaries aren’t team players.

I examine the flat black rock in my hand. It’s about the size of a quarter and has cracks all over it. What am I supposed to do with it? I look back at him. He’s redirecting the telescope upward. I can’t tell what animal he is. Maybe a white Bengal tiger with that hair? And what’s he looking at? It’s never occurred to me that the stars are still up there shining even in the daytime when we can’t see them. He doesn’t turn my way again. I slip the rock into my pocket.

“Where the hell is Ralph?” I hear as I quickly climb down the ladder at the side of the house. Maybe he’s Ralph, I think. Finally. That would be it.

I whip across the street to take the woods down the hill to CSA after all, because I’m too embarrassed to pass the new kid. Plus, now that color has refastened itself to everything, it’s supernaturally amazing to be in the trees.

People think people are in charge, but they’re wrong; it’s the trees.

I start to run, start to turn into air, the blue careening off the sky, careening after me, as I sink into green, shades and shades of it, blending and spinning into yellow, freaking yellow, then head-on colliding into the punk-hair purple of lupine: everywhere. I vacuum it in, all of it, in, in—(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Detonates Grenade of Awesome)—getting happy now, the gulpy, out-of-breath kind that makes you feel you have a thousand lives crammed inside your measly one, and then before I know it, I’m at CSA.

When school got out two weeks ago, I started doing recon down here, peering in the studio windows when no one was around. I had to see the student artwork, had to find out if it was better than mine, had to know if I really had a shot. For the last six months, I’ve stayed after school almost every day oil painting with Mr. Grady. I think he wants me to get into CSA as much as Mom and I do.

The artwork must be stowed away, though, because in all my spying I didn’t see one painting. I did, however, stumble onto a life drawing class being taught in one of the studio buildings off the main campus—a building with one whole side of it tucked into thick old-growth trees. A freaking miracle. Because what could stop me from taking this class? Covertly, you know, from outside the open window?

So here I am. Both classes so far, there’s been a real live naked girl with missile boobs sitting on a platform. We do speed drawings of her every three minutes. Totally cool, even if I have to stand on tiptoe to see in and then bend down to draw, but so what. The most important part is that I can hear the teacher and I already learned this totally new way to hold the charcoal so it’s like drawing with a motor.

Today I’m the first to arrive, so I wait for class to start, my back against the warm building, the sun smothering me through a hole in the trees. I take the black stone out of my pocket. Why did the kid on the roof give me this? Why was he smiling at me like that? It didn’t seem mean, it really didn’t, it seemed—a sound breaks into my thoughts, a very human sound, branches cracking: footsteps.

I’m about to bolt back into the woods, when, in my periphery, I catch some kind of movement on the other side of the building, then hear the same crunching noises as the footsteps retreat. Where there was nothing, a brown bag’s lying on the ground. Weird. I wait a bit, then sneak to the other side of the building and peek around the corner: no one. I go back to the bag wishing I had X-ray eyes, then crouch down and with one hand, shake it open. There’s a bottle inside. I take it out: Sapphire gin, half full. Someone’s stash. I quickly stuff it back in the bag, place it on the ground, and return to my side of the building. Hello? I’m not getting busted with it and blacklisted from going to CSA.

Peering through the window, I see that everyone’s there now. The teacher, who has a white beard and holds his balloon belly when he talks, is by the door with a student. The rest of the class is setting up their pads on their stands. I was right too. They don’t even need to turn on the overhead lights at the school. All the students have glowing blood. All revolutionaries. A room of Bubbles. There’s not an asshat or surftard or hornet among them.

The curtain around the model’s dressing area opens and a tall guy in a blue robe walks out. A guy. He undoes the robe, hangs it on a hook, walks naked to the platform, jumps the step, almost falls, then makes some joke that causes everyone to laugh. I don’t hear it because of the heat storm roaring through my body. He’s so naked, way more naked than the girl model was. And unlike the girl, who sat and covered parts of herself with her bony arms, this guy’s standing on the platform, in a hand-on-hip pose, like a dare. God. I can’t breathe. Then someone says something I don’t catch, but it makes the model smile and when he does, it’s like all his features shift and scramble into the most disordered face I’ve ever seen. A face in a broken mirror. Whoa.

I wedge my pad against the wall, holding it in place with my right hand and knee. When my left hand finally stops shaking, I start to draw. I keep my eyes clamped on him, not looking at what I’m doing. I work on his body, feeling the lines and curves, muscle and bone, feeling every last bit of him travel through my eyes to my fingers. The teacher’s voice sounds like waves on the shore. I hear nothing . . . until the model speaks. I don’t know if it’s ten minutes or an hour later. “How about a break, then?” he says. I catch an English accent. He shakes his arm out, then his legs. I do the same, realizing how cramped I’ve been, how my right arm has gone dead, how I’ve been balancing on one leg, how my knee is aching and numb from being jammed into the wall. I watch him cross to the dressing room, wobbling a little, and that’s when it occurs to me the brown bag is his.

A minute later, he lazes across the classroom in his robe toward the door—he moves like glue. I wonder if he’s in college around here like the teacher said the girl model was. He looks younger than she did. I’m certain he’s coming for the bag even before I smell the cigarette smoke and hear the footsteps. I think about hightailing it into the woods, but I’m frozen.

He rounds the corner and immediately lowers to the ground, his back sliding down the building, not noticing me standing just yards away. His blue robe glitters in the sun like a king’s. He stubs the cigarette out in the dirt, then drops his head into his hands—wait, what? And then I see it. This is the real pose, head in hands with sadness leaping off of him all the way to me.

(PORTRAIT: Boy Blows into Dust)

He reaches for the bag, takes the bottle out and uncaps it, then starts chugging with his eyes closed. There’s no way you’re supposed to drink alcohol like this, like it’s orange juice. I know I shouldn’t be watching, know this is a no-trespassing zone. I don’t move a muscle, afraid he’ll sense me and realize he has a witness. Several seconds pass with him holding the bottle to his face like a compress, his eyes still closed, the sun streaming down on him like he’s being chosen. He takes another sip, then opens his eyes and turns his head my way.

My arms fly up to block his gaze as he scoots back, startled. “Jesus!” he says. “Where the hell did you come from?”

I can’t find any words anywhere.

He composes himself quickly. “You scared the life out of me, mate,” he says. Then he laughs and hiccups at the same time. He looks from me to my pad resting against the wall, the sketch of him facing out. He recaps the bottle.

“Cat got your tongue? Or wait—do you Americans even say that?”

I nod.

“Right, then. Good to know. Only been here a few months.” He gets up, using the wall as support. “So let’s have a look,” he says, walking unsteadily over to me. He fumbles a cigarette out of a pack that was in his robe pocket. The sadness seems to have evaporated right off him. I notice something remarkable.

“Your eyes are two different colors,” I blurt out. Like a Siberian husky’s!

“Brilliant. He speaks!” he says, smiling so that a riot breaks out in his face again. He lights the cigarette, inhales deeply, then makes the smoke come out his nose like a dragon. He points to his eyes, says, “Heterochromia iridium, would’ve had me burned at the stake with the witches, I’m afraid.” I want to say how supremely cool it is, but of course I don’t. All I can think about now is that I’ve seen him naked, I’ve seen him. I pray my cheeks aren’t as red as they are hot. He nods toward my pad. “Can I?”

I hesitate, worried to have him look at it. “Go on, then,” he says, motioning for me to get it. It’s like singing the way he talks. I pick up the pad and hand it to him, wanting to explain the octopus-like position I had to be in on account of not having a stand, how I didn’t hardly look down as I was drawing, how I suck. How my blood doesn’t glow at all. I swallow it all, say nothing. “Well done,” he says with enthusiasm. “Very well done, you.” He seems like he means it. “Couldn’t afford the summer class, then?” he asks.

“I’m not a student here.”

“You should be,” he says, which makes my hot cheeks even hotter. He puts his cigarette out on the building, causing a shower of red sparks. He’s definitely not from here. This is fire season. Everything’s waiting to go up.

“I’ll see if I can smuggle you out a stand on my next break.” He stashes the bag by a rock. Then he holds up his hand, points his index finger at me. “You don’t tell, I won’t tell,” he says, like we’re allies now. I nod, smiling. English people are so not asshats! I’m going to move there. William Blake was English. Frances freaking-the-most-awesome-painter Bacon too. I watch him walking away, which takes forever on account of his sloth pace, and want to say something more to him, but I don’t know what. Before he turns the corner, I think of something. “Are you an artist?”

“I’m a mess is what I am,” he says, holding on to the building for support. “A bloody mess. You’re the artist, mate.” Then he’s gone.

I pick up the pad and look at the drawing I did of him, his broad shoulders, his narrow waist, long legs, the trail of hair on his navel going down, down, down. “I’m a bloody mess,” I say out loud with his bubbling accent, feeling giddy. “I’m a bloody artist, mate. A bloody mess.” I say it a few more times, louder and with more and more gusto, then realize I’m talking with an English accent to a bunch of trees and go back to my spot.

A couple times in the following session, he looks right at me and winks because we’re conspirators now! And on the next break, he brings me a stand and a footstool so I can really see in. I set it up—it’s perfect—then lean against the wall next to him while he sips from the bottle and smokes. I feel way cool, like I’m wearing sunglasses even though I’m not. We’re buds, we’re mates, except he doesn’t say anything to me this time, nothing at all, and his eyes have turned cloudy and dim. And it’s like he’s melting into a puddle of himself.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“No,” he answers. “Not okay at all.” Then he throws the burning cigarette into a dry patch of grass before he gets up and stumbles away, not even turning around or saying good-bye. I stomp out the fire he’s started until it’s dead, feeling as gloomy as I felt giddy before.

With the new footstool, I can see all the way to everyone’s feet even, so I witness what happens next in perfect detail. The teacher meets the model at the door and motions for him to go out into the hall. When the English guy comes back in, his head’s down. He crosses the classroom to the dressing area, and when he emerges in clothes, he seems even more lost and out of it than he did on the last break. He never once looks up at the students or at me on his way out.

The teacher explains that he’d been under the influence and won’t be modeling at CSA anymore, that CSA has zero tolerance, blah blah blah. He tells us to finish our drawings from memory. I wait a bit to see if the English guy’s going to come back, at least for the bottle. When he doesn’t, I hide the stand and stool in some bushes for next week and head back into the woods toward home.

A few steps into the walk, I see the kid from the roof, leaning against a tree, the same grin, the same dark green hat spinning now on his hand. His hair’s a bonfire of white light.

I blink because sometimes I see things.

Blinking still. Then to further confirm his existence, he speaks.

“How was class?” he says like it’s not the strangest thing in the world that he’s here, not the strangest thing that I take drawing outside rather than inside a classroom, not the strangest thing that we don’t know each other, and yet, he’s smiling at me like we do, and mostly, not the strangest thing that he followed me, because there’s no other explanation for him standing here in front of me. As if he heard me thinking, he says, “Yeah, dude, I followed you, wanted to check out the woods, but I’ve been busy with my own stuff.” He points to an open suitcase full of rocks. He collects rocks? And carries them around in a suitcase? “My meteorite bag’s still packed,” he says, and I nod like this explains something. Aren’t meteors in the sky, not on the ground? I look at him more closely. He’s a bit older than me, taller and bigger anyway. I realize I have no idea what color I’d use for his eyes. None at all. Today is definitely the day of the supremely excellent-eyed people. His are such a light brown, practically yellow, or copper maybe, and all splintered with green. But you can only see flashes of the color because he squints, which is cool on a face. Maybe not a Bengal tiger after all . . .

“Stare much?” he says.

I drop my gaze, embarrassed, a total whale dick dork, my neck prickling and hot. I start shuffling some pine needles into a pyramid with the toe of my shoe.

He says, “Well, you’re probably just used to it from staring at that drunk guy for so long today.” I look up. Was he spying on me the whole time? He’s eyeing my pad curiously. “He was naked?” He breathes in as he says it and it makes my stomach drop to the ground floor. I try to keep my face calm. I think about him watching me watch the movers, about him following me down here. He glances at my pad again. Does he want me to show him the naked drawings of the English guy? I think he does. And I want to. Bad. A heat storm, way more intense than the one before, is whipping through me. I’m pretty sure I’ve been hijacked and am no longer at the brain controls. It’s his weird squinting copper-colored eyes. They’re hypnotizing me. Then he smiles but only with half his mouth, and I notice he has a space between his front teeth, also supremely cool on a face. He says with a laugh in his voice, “Look, dude, I have no idea how to get home. I tried and ended up back here. I’ve been waiting for you to lead the way.” He puts on his hat.

I point in the direction we need to go and make my hijacked body start walking. He latches the suitcase full of rocks (hello?), picks it up by the handle, and follows. I try not to look at him as we walk. I want to be rid of him. I think. I keep my eyes on the trees. Trees are safe.

And quiet.

And don’t want me to show them the naked pictures in my pad!

It’s a long way, mostly uphill, and more daylight’s seeping out of the woods every minute. Next to me, even with the suitcase of rocks, which must be heavy, because he keeps switching it from arm to arm, the guy bounces along under his hat, like his legs have springs in them.

After a while, the trees settle me back into my skin.

Or maybe he has.

Because it’s actually not awful or anything walking with him.

He might even have some kind of Realm of Calm thing going on around him—maybe he emits it from a finger—because yeah, I feel relaxed now, I mean supernaturally relaxed, like I’m left-out butter. This is highly weird.

He keeps stopping to pick up rocks, examining them, and then either tossing them back or stuffing them in his sweatshirt pocket, which is starting to sag with the weight. I stand by when he does this, wanting to ask what he’s searching for. Wanting to ask why he followed me. Wanting to ask about the telescope and if he can see the stars during the daytime. Wanting to ask where he’s from and what his name is and if he surfs and how old he is and what school he’s going to next fall. A few times I try to form a question so it sounds casual and normal, but each time the words get caught somewhere in my throat and never make it out. Finally, I give up and take out my invisible brushes and just start painting in my head. That’s when it occurs to me that maybe the rocks are weighing him down so he doesn’t rise into the air . . .

We walk and walk through the gray ashy dusk and the forest starts to fall asleep: The trees lie down side by side by side, the creek halts, the plants sink back into the earth, the animals switch places with their shadows, and then, so do we.

When we break out of the woods onto our road, he spins around. “Holy hella shit! That’s the longest I’ve gone without talking. Like in my life! It was like holding my breath! I was having a contest with myself. Are you always like this?”

“Like what?” I say, my voice hoarse.

“Dude!” he cries. “Do you know those are the first words you’ve said?” I didn’t. “Man. You’re like the Buddha or something. My mom’s a Buddhist. She goes to these silent retreats. She should just hang out with you instead. Oh, oh, not counting, of course, ‘I’m a bloody artist, a bloody mess, mate.’” He says this last part with a heavy English accent, then cracks up.

He heard me! Talking to the trees! So much blood’s rushing and gushing to my head it might blow straight off my neck. All the silence of our walk is gurgling madly out of him now and I can tell he’s someone who laughs a lot, the way it’s taking him over so easily and lighting him all up, and even though he’s laughing at me, it’s making me feel okay, accepted, and making me feel a little bubble-headed as laughter starts to fizz up in me too. I mean, it was supremely funny, me yammering away in an English accent all alone like that, and then he says it again, his accent super-thick, “I’m a bloody artist,” and then I say, “A bloody mess, mate,” and something gives way and I’m laughing outright, and he says it again, and I do, and then we’re both really laughing, then the doubled-over kind, and it’s ages before we calm down, because each time one of us does, the other says, “I’m a bloody mess, mate,” and the whole thing starts all over again.

When we finally get it back together, I realize I have no idea what just happened to me. Nothing like that has ever happened before. I feel like I just flew or something.

He points to my pad. “So I guess you just talk in there, is that it?”

“Pretty much,” I say. We’re under a streetlamp and I’m trying not to stare but it’s hard. I wish the world would stick like a clock so I could look at him for as long as I want. There’s something going on in his face right now, something very bright trying to get out—a dam keeping back a wall of light. His soul might be a sun. I’ve never met anyone who had the sun for a soul.

I want to say more so he doesn’t leave. I feel so good, the freaking green leafy kind of good. “I paint in my head,” I tell him. “I was the whole time.” I’ve never told anyone I do this, not even Jude, and I have no idea why I’m telling him. I’ve never let anyone into the invisible museum before.

“What were you painting?”

“You.”

The surprise opens his eyes wide. I shouldn’t have said it. I didn’t mean to, it just popped out. The air feels all crackly now and his smile’s vanished. Just yards away, my house is a lighthouse. Before I even realize, I’m darting across the street, a queasy feeling in my stomach like I ruined everything—that last brushstroke that always destroys the painting. He’ll probably try to throw me off Devil’s Drop tomorrow with Fry. He’ll probably take those rocks and—

As I reach the front step, I hear, “How’d I come out?” Curiosity in his voice, not a smidge of asshat.

I turn around. He’s moved out of the light. I can only see a shadowy shape in the road. This is how he came out: He floated into the air high above the sleeping forest, his green hat spinning a few feet above his head. In his hand was the open suitcase and out of it spilled a whole sky of stars.

I can’t tell him, though—how could I?—so I turn back around, jump the steps, open the door, and go inside without looking back.

The next morning, Jude calls my name from the hallway, meaning she’s a moment away from barging into my room. I flip the page of my sketchpad, not wanting her to see what I’ve been working on: the third version of the copper-eyed, rock-collecting, star-gazing, out-of-control-laughing new kid floating in the sky with his green hat and suitcase full of stars. I finally got the color so perfect, the squint just right, that looking at his eyes in the picture gives me the same hijacked feeling the real ones did. I got so excited when I nailed it I had to walk around my chair about fifty times before I could calm down.

I pick up a pastel and pretend to work on a portrait of the naked English guy that I finished last night. I did it cubist so his face looks even more like it’s in a smashed mirror. Jude teeters in wearing high heels and a tiny blue dress. Mom and she can’t stop fighting about what she wants to wear now, which is not much. Her hair’s snaky and swinging. When it’s wet like this, it usually takes the fluff and fairy tale off her, making her seem more ordinary, more like the rest of us, but not today. She has makeup all over her face. They fight about this too. And about her breaking curfew, talking back, slamming doors, texting boys not from school, surfing with the older surftards, jumping off Dead Man’s Dive—the highest, scariest jump on the hill—wanting to sleep at one of the hornet’s houses practically every night, spending her allowance on some lipstick called Boiling Point, sneaking out her bedroom window. Basically, everything. No one asks me, but I think she’s become BeelzeJude and wants every guy in Lost Cove to kiss her now because Mom forgot to look at her sketchbook that first day at the museum.

And because we left her. It was the Jackson Pollock exhibit. Mom and I had spent forever in front of the painting One: Number 31—because holy shit!—and when we walked out of the museum, Pollock’s bright spidery paint was still all over us, all over the people on the sidewalk, all over the buildings, all over our endless conversation in the car about his technique, and we didn’t realize Jude wasn’t with us until we were halfway over the bridge.

Mom said, “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod,” the whole speeding way back. All my organs were out of my body. When we screeched up to the museum, Jude was sitting on the sidewalk, her head tucked into her knees. She looked like a crumpled-up piece of paper.

Truth is: I think Mom and I had gotten used to not noticing her when the three of us were together.

She’s carrying a box, which she puts on the bed, then comes up behind me, where I’m sitting at my desk and peers over my shoulder. A damp rope of hair lands on my neck. I flick it off.

The naked English guy’s face stares up at us from the pad. I wanted to catch the unglued schizo way he looked before he got run over by misery, so I went way more abstract than usual. He probably wouldn’t recognize himself, but it came out all right.

“Who’s that?” she asks.

“No one.”

“Really, who is he?” she insists.

“Just someone I made up,” I say, pushing another wet squirrel tail of her hair off my neck.

“Nah-uh. He’s real. I can tell you’re lying.”

“I’m not, Jude. Swear.” I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want her to get any ideas. What if she starts sneaking down to stealth-take classes at CSA too?

She comes around to my side and leans in to better study the drawing.

“I wish he were real,” she says. “He’s so cool-looking. He’s so . . . I don’t know . . . There’s something . . .” This is weird. She never responds like this when she sees my stuff anymore. She usually looks like she has a turd in her mouth. She folds her arms across her chest, which is so full of boobs now, it’s like the clash of the titans. “Can I have it?”

This shocks me. She’s never asked for a drawing before. I’m horrible at giving them away. “For the sun, stars, oceans, and all the trees, I’ll consider it,” I say, knowing she’ll never agree. She knows how badly I want the sun and trees. We’ve been dividing up the world since we were five. I’m kicking butt at the moment—universe domination is within my grasp for the first time.

“Are you kidding?” she says, standing up straight. It annoys me how tall she’s getting. It’s like she’s being stretched at night. “That leaves me just the flowers, Noah.”

Fine, I think. She’ll never do it. It’s settled, but it isn’t. She reaches over and props up the pad, gazing at the portrait like she’s expecting the English guy to speak to her.

“Okay,” she says. “Trees, stars, oceans. Fine.”

“And the sun, Jude.”

“Oh, all right,” she says, totally surprising me. “I’ll give you the sun.”

“I practically have everything now!” I say. “You’re crazy!”

“But I have him.” She carefully rips the naked English guy out of my sketchbook, thankfully not noticing the drawing beneath it, and carries him with her over to the bed and sits down.

She says, “Have you seen the new kid? He’s such a freak.” I look down at my sketchpad, where the freak is exploding into the room in a burst of color. “He wears this green hat with a feather in it. So lame.” She laughs in her new awful buzzy way. “Yeah. He’s weirder than you even.” She pauses. I wait, hoping she’ll turn back into my sister, the way she used to be, not this new hornet version. “Well, probably not weirder than you.” I turn around. The antennae are waving back and forth on her forehead. She’s here to sting me to death. “No one’s weirder than you.”

I saw this show about these Malaysian ants that internally combust under threat. They wait until their enemies (like hornets) are close enough, then detonate themselves into a poison bomb.

“I don’t know, Noah. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.”

She’s on a roll. I begin countdown to detonation. Ten, nine, eight, seven—

“Do you have to be so, buzz, buzz, buzz, so you, all the time. It’s . . .” She doesn’t finish.

“It’s what?” I ask, breaking my pastel in two, snapping it, like a neck.

She throws her hands up. “It’s embarrassing, okay?”

“At least I’m still me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Then more defensively, she says, “There’s nothing wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with having other friends. Friends who aren’t you.”

“I have other friends too,” I say, glancing down at the sketchpad.

“Oh yeah, who? Who’s your friend? Imaginary ones don’t count. Neither do the ones you draw.”

Six, five, four—what I don’t know is if the Malaysian ants kill themselves in the process of annihilating their enemies.

“Well, the new kid for one,” I tell her. I reach into my pocket and wrap my fingers around the rock he gave me. “And he’s not weird.” Though he is! He has a suitcase of rocks!

“He’s your friend? Sure he is,” she says. “What’s his name, if you’re such good friends?”

Well, this is a problem.

“That’s what I thought,” she snips. I can’t stand her. I’m allergic to her. I look at the Chagall print on the wall in front of me and try to dive into the swirly dream of it. Real life blows. I’m allergic to it too. Laughing with the new kid didn’t feel like real life. Not one bit. Being with Jude didn’t used to feel like real life either. Now it feels like the very worst strangling, toilet-licking kind. When Jude speaks again a moment later, her voice is sharp and tight. “And what’d you expect? I had to make other friends. All you do is hole up making your lame drawings and obsessing about that stupid school with Mom.”

Lame drawings?

Here I go. Three, two, one: I detonate with the only thing I have. “You’re just jealous, Jude,” I say. “All the time now, you’re so jealous.”

I flip the pad to a blank page, pick up a pencil to start on (PORTRAIT: My Hornet Sister), no: (PORTRAIT: My Spider Sister), that’s better, full of poison and skittering around in the dark on her eight hairy legs.

When the silence between us has just about broken my ears, I turn around to look at her. Her big blue eyes are shining on me. All the hornet’s buzzed out of her. And there’s no spider to her at all.

I put the pencil down.

So quietly I can barely make out the words, she says, “She’s my mom too. Why can’t you share?”

The kick of guilt goes straight to my gut. I turn back to the Chagall, begging it to suck me in, please, just as Dad fills up the doorway. He has a towel around his neck, his suntanned chest is bare. His hair’s wet too—he and Jude must’ve swum together. They do everything together now.

He tilts his head in a questioning way, like he can see the body parts and bug guts all around the room. “Everything okay in here, guys?”

We both nod. Dad puts one hand on either side of the frame, filling the entire doorway, filling the Continental United States. How can I hate him and wish I were more like him at the same time?

I didn’t always want a building to land on him, though. When we were little, Jude and I used to sit on the beach like two ducklings, his ducklings, waiting and waiting for him to finish his swim, to rise out of the white spray like Poseidon. He’d stand in front of us, so colossal he eclipsed the sun, shaking his head so droplets would shower down on us like salty rain. He’d reach for me first, sit me up on one shoulder, then heave-ho Jude onto the other. He’d walk us up the bluff like that, making every other kid on the beach with their flimsy fathers out of their minds with jealousy.

But that was before he realized I was me. This happened the day he did a U-ey on the beach and instead of heading up the bluff, he took the two of us, perched there on his shoulders, back into the ocean. The water was rough and white-capped and waves were hitting us from all sides as we walked deeper and deeper in. I held on to his arm, which was belted securely around me, feeling safe because Dad was in charge and it was his hand that pulled the sun up each morning and down at night.

He told us to jump.

I thought I heard wrong until with an excited yelp, Jude flew off the shelf of his shoulder into the air, smiling crazily all the way down until the ocean swallowed her, still smiling like that when she broke through the surface of the water, where she bobbed like a happy apple, treading her legs, remembering everything we’d learned in our swimming class, while I, feeling Dad’s arm unfastening around me, grabbed at his head, his hair, his ear, the slippery slope of his back, but was unable to get a grip anywhere on him.

“It’s a sink-or-swim world, Noah,” he said very seriously, and then the secure belt of his arm became a sling that flung me into the water.

I sank.

All.

The.

Way.

Down.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Noah and the Sea Cucumbers)

The first Broken Umbrella Talk happened that night. You need to be brave even when you’re afraid, that’s what it means to be a man. More talks followed: You need to act tough, sit up, stand straight, fight hard, play ball, look me in the eye, think before you speak. If it weren’t for Jude being your twin, I’d think you came about by partheno-whatever. If it weren’t for Jude, you’d be mincemeat on that soccer field. If it weren’t for Jude. If it weren’t for Jude. Doesn’t it bother you to have a girl fight your battles for you? Doesn’t it bother you to be picked last for every team? Doesn’t it bother you to be alone all the time? Doesn’t it bother you, Noah? Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?

Okay already. Shut up! It does.

Do you have to be so you all the time, Noah?

They’re the team now, not Jude and me. So too bad. Why should I share Mom?

“This afternoon, for sure,” Jude’s saying to Dad. He smiles at her like she’s a rainbow, then fee-fi-fo-fums across the room, tapping me affectionately on the head and giving me a concussion.

Outside, Prophet squawks, “Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?”

Dad mimes strangling Prophet with his bare hands, then says to me, “How about that haircut? Looking pretty pre-Raphaelite there with all those long, dark locks.” Because of Mom’s contagiousness, even Dad, for all his asshatness, knows a lot about art, enough to insult me with anyway.

“I love pre-Raphaelite paintings,” I mumble.

“Loving them and looking like a model for one are two different things, huh, chief?” Another swipe to my head, another concussion.

After he’s gone, Jude says, “I like your hair long.” And it somehow vacuums up all the ick and yuck between us, all my mean cockroachy thoughts too. In a tentatively cheerful voice, she says, “Want to play?”

I turn around, remembering again that we got made together, cell for cell. We were keeping each other company when we didn’t have any eyes or hands. Before our soul even got delivered.

She’s taking some kind of board out of the box she brought in.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?” Prophet demands again, still in a tizzy. Jude leans out the window by the bed, hollers, “Sorry, Prophet, nobody knows!” I didn’t know she talks to Prophet too. I smile.

“A Ouija Board,” she says. “Found it in Grandma’s room. She and I did it once. We can ask it stuff and it gets the answers.”

“From who?” I ask, though I think I’ve seen one before in some movie.

“You know. The spirits.” She smiles and raises her eyebrows up and down and up and down in an exaggerated way. I feel my lips curving into a grin. I so want to be on a team with Jude again! I want things to be like they used to be with us.

“Okay,” I say, “sure.”

Her face lights up. “Come on.” And it’s like the whole horrible sticky stupid conversation didn’t even happen, like we weren’t just both in bits. How can everything change so quickly?

She teaches me how to do it, how to hold the pointer just barely so the hands of the spirits can push it through my hands to the letters or to the “yes” and “no” written on the board.

“I’m going to ask a question now,” she says, closing her eyes and putting her arms out like she’s being crucified.

I start to laugh. “And I’m the weirdo? Really?”

She opens one eye. “This is how you have to do it, I swear. Grandma taught me.” She closes the eye. “Okay, spirits. This is my question for you: Does M. love me?”

“Who’s M.?” I say.

“Just someone.”

“Michael Stein?”

“Uck, no way!”

“Not Max Fracker!”

“God no!”

“Then who?”

“Noah, the spirits aren’t going to come if you keep interrupting. I’m not going to say who.”

“Fine,” I say.

She spreads her arms and asks the spirits again, then puts her hands on the pointer.

I put mine on too. It beelines to No. I’m pretty sure I pushed it there.

“You’re cheating!” she cries.

The next time I don’t cheat and it still goes to No.

Jude’s supremely perturbed. “Let’s try again.”

This time I can tell she’s moving it to Yes. “Now you’re cheating,” I say.

“Okay, once more.”

It goes to No.

“Last try,” she says.

It goes to No.

She sighs. “Okay, you ask a question.”

I close my eyes and ask silently: Will I get into CSA next year?

“Out loud,” she says, exasperated.

“Why?”

“Because the spirits can’t hear inside your head.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Now spill. And don’t forget the arms.”

“Fine.” I put my arms out like I’m on the cross and ask, “Will I get into CSA next year?”

“That’s a wasted question. Of course you’re getting in.”

“I need to know for sure.”

I make her do it over ten times. Each time it goes to No. Finally, she flips the board. “It’s just a stupid thing,” she says, but I know she doesn’t believe it. M. doesn’t love her and I’m not going to CSA.

“Let’s ask if you’re going,” I say.

“That’s dumb. No way I’m getting in. Who knows if I’m even going to apply? I want to go to Roosevelt like everyone else. They have a swim team.”

“C’mon,” I say.

It goes to Yes.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I can’t lie awake in bed for another minute, so I put on some clothes and climb onto the roof to see if the new kid’s on his. He’s not, which isn’t totally surprising since it’s not even six in the morning and barely light yet, but I kept thinking while I was tossing around in bed like a caught fish, that he was awake too, that he was up on his roof shooting electric bolts out of his fingers through the ceiling and into me and that’s why I couldn’t sleep. But I was wrong. It’s just me up here with the fading fathead moon and every screaming seagull from far and wide visiting Lost Cove for a dawn concert. I’ve never been outside this early, didn’t realize it was so loud. And so dreary, I think, taking in all the gray huddled-up old men disguised as trees.

I sit down, open my pad to a blank page and try to draw, but I can’t concentrate, can’t even make a decent line. It’s the Ouija Board. What if it’s right and Jude gets into CSA and I don’t? What if I have to go to Roosevelt with 3,000 toilet-licking Franklyn Fry clones? If I suck at painting? If Mom and Mr. Grady just feel sorry for me? Because I’m so embarrassing, as Jude says. And Dad thinks. I drop my head in my hands, feel the heat of my cheeks on my palms, reliving what happened in the woods with Fry and Zephyr last winter.

(SELF-PORTRAIT, SERIES: Broken Umbrella No. 88)

I lift my head, look over at the new kid’s roof again. What if he realizes I’m me? A cold wind blows through me like I’m an empty room and I suddenly know everything’s going to be terrible and I’m doomed; not only me, but the whole gloomy grubby gray world too.

I lie down on my back, stretch out my arms as wide as I can, and whisper, “Help.”

Some time later, I wake to the sound of a garage opening. I get up on my elbows. The sky’s gone blue: azure, the ocean bluer: cerulean, the trees are swirls of every hella freaking green on earth and bright thick eggy yellow is spilling over everything. Awesome. Doomsday’s most definitely been cancelled.

(LANDSCAPE: When God Paints Outside the Lines)

I sit up, noticing then which garage it was that opened—his.

Several seconds that feel like several years later, he cruises down the driveway. Across his chest is a duffel-like black sack. The meteorite bag? He has a bag for meteorites. He carries pieces of the galaxy around in a bag. Oh man. I try to prick the balloon that’s lifting me into the air by telling myself I shouldn’t be this excited to see a guy I only met a day ago. Even if that guy carries the galaxy around in a bag!

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Last Sighting of Boy and Balloon Blowing West Over Pacific)

He crosses the street to the trailhead, then stops where we had our laughing fit, hesitating for a moment there before he turns around and looks right at me, like he’s known I’ve been here all along, like he knows I’ve been waiting for him since dawn. Our eyes lock and electricity rides up my spine. I’m pretty sure he’s telepathically telling me to follow him. After a minute of the kind of mind-meld I’ve only ever had with Jude, he turns and heads into the grove.

I’d like to follow him. A lot, very much, so much, except I can’t, because my feet are cemented to the roof. But why? What’s the big deal? He followed me all the way to CSA yesterday! People make friends. Everyone does it. I can too. I mean, we already are—we laughed together like hyenas. Okay. I’m going. I slide my sketchpad into my backpack, climb down the ladder, and take off for the trailhead.

He’s nowhere on the trail. I listen for footsteps, hear nothing but my pulse hammering in my ears. I continue down the path, clearing the first bend to find him on his knees, hunched over the ground. He’s examining something in his hand with a magnifying glass. What a toilet-licking idea this is. I won’t know what to say to him. I won’t know what to do with my hands. I need to get home. Immediately. I’m edging backward when he turns his head and looks up at me.

“Oh, hey,” he says casually, standing and dropping whatever was in his hand to the ground. Most of the time people look less like you remember when you see them again. Not him. He’s shimmering in the air exactly like he’s been in my mind. He’s a light show. He starts walking toward me. “I don’t know the woods. Was hoping . . .” He doesn’t finish, half smiles. This guy is just not an asshat. “What’s your name, anyway?” He’s close enough to touch, close enough to count his freckles. I’m having a hand problem. How come everyone else seems to know what to do with them? Pockets, I remember with relief, pockets, I love pockets! I slip the hands to safety, avoiding his eyes. There’s that thing about them. I’ll look at his mouth if I have to look somewhere.

His eyes are lingering on me. I can tell this even with my undivided attention on his mouth. Did he ask me something? I think he did. The IQ’s plummeting.

“Suppose I could guess,” he says. “I’ll go for Van, no got it, Miles, yeah, you totally look like a Miles.”

“Noah,” I blurt, sounding like the knowledge just flew into my head. “I’m Noah. Noah Sweetwine.” God. Lord. Dorkhead.

“Sure?”

“Yup, definitely,” I say, sounding chirpy and weird. My hands are totally and completely trapped now. Pockets are hand jails. I free them, only to clap them together like they’re cymbals. Jesus. “Oh, what’s yours?” I ask his mouth, remembering, despite the fact that my IQ is approaching the vegetal range, that he too must have a name.

“Brian,” he says, and that’s all he says because he functions.

Looking at his mouth is a bad idea too, especially when he speaks. Again and again his tongue returns to that space between his front teeth. I’ll look at this tree instead.

“How old are you?” I ask the tree.

“Fourteen. You?”

“Same,” I say. Uh-oh.

He nods, believing me, of course, because why would I lie? I have no idea!

“I go to boarding school back east,” he says. “I’ll be a sophomore next year.” He must see the confused look I’m giving the tree, because he adds, “Skipped kindergarten.”

“I go to California School of the Arts.” The words blasting out of my mouth without my consent.

I sneak a look at him. His brow’s creasing up and then I remember: It says California School of the Arts on practically every freaking wall of that freaking place. He saw me outside the building, not in it. He probably heard me tell the naked English guy I don’t go there.

I have two choices: Run home and then don’t come out of the house for the next two months until he leaves for boarding school, or—

“I don’t really go there,” I spill to the tree, really afraid to look at him now. “Not yet, anyway. I just want to. Like badly. It’s all I think about, and I’m thirteen still. Almost fourteen. Well, in five months. November twenty-first. It’s the painter Magritte’s birthday too, that day. He did that one with the green apple smack in front of that guy’s face. You’ve probably seen it. And the one where another guy has a birdcage instead of a body. Supremely cool and twisted. Oh, and there’s this one of a bird flying but the clouds are inside the bird, not outside of it. Really awesome—” I stop myself because, whoa—and I could go on too. There isn’t a painting I suddenly don’t want to tell this oak tree about in great detail.

I slowly turn to Brian, who’s staring at me with his squinting eyes, not saying anything. Why isn’t he saying anything? Maybe I used up all the words? Maybe he’s too freaked out that I lied, then unlied, then started a psychotic art history lesson? Why didn’t I stay on the roof? I need to sit down. Making friends is supremely stressful. I swallow a few hundred times.

Finally, he just shrugs. “Cool.” His lips curve into a half smile. “You are a bloody mess, dude,” he says, throwing in the English accent.

“Tell me about it.”

Then our eyes meet and we both crack up like we’re made of the same air.

After that, the forest, which had stayed out of it, joins in. I take a deep breath of pine and eucalyptus, hear mockingbirds and seagulls and the rumbling surf in the distance. I spot three deer munching on leaves just yards from where Brian is now rummaging through the meteorite bag with both hands.

“There are mountain lions around here,” I say. “They sleep in trees.”

“Awesome,” he says, still searching. “Seen one?”

“No, a bobcat, though. Twice.”

“I’ve seen a bear,” he mumbles into the bag. What’s he looking for?

“A bear! Wow. I love bears! Brown or black?”

“Black,” he answers. “A mother with two cubs. At Yosemite.”

I want to know everything about this and I’m about to launch into a series of questions, wondering if he likes animal shows too, when it appears he’s found what he’s been looking for. He holds up an ordinary rock. The expression on his face is like he’s showing me a frill-necked lizard or a leafy seadragon, not a plain old hunk of nothing. “Here,” he says, putting it in my hand. It’s so heavy it bends my wrist back. I reinforce with my other hand so I don’t drop it. “This one’s for sure. Magnetized nickel—an exploded star.” He points to my backpack with the sketchpad sticking out. “You can draw it.” I look at the black lump in my hand—this is a star?—and think there’s nothing I can imagine less interesting to draw on earth, but say, “Okay. Sure.”

“Excellent,” he says, and turns around. I stand there with the star in my hand not sure what to do until he turns back around and says, “You coming or what? I brought an extra magnifying glass for you.”

This makes the ground tilt. He knew I was going to come even before he left his house. He knew. And I knew. We both knew.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: I’m Standing on My Own Head!)

He takes the extra magnifying glass out of his back pocket and holds it out to me.

“Cool,” I say, catching up with him and taking the glass by the handle.

“You can classify too in the pad,” he says. “Or draw what we find. Actually, that’d be totally stellar.”

“What are we looking for?” I ask.

“Space garbage,” he answers like it’s obvious. “The sky’s always falling. Always. You’ll see. People have no idea.”

No, people don’t, because they’re not revolutionaries like us.

Hours later, however, we haven’t found one meteorite, not one piece of sky litter, but I so don’t care. Instead of classifying, whatever that means, I’ve spent most of the morning in a belly flop, using the magnifying glass to look at slugs and beetles, all the time getting my head stuffed with intergalactic gobbledygook by Brian, who traipsed around me scouring the forest floor with his magnet rake—yes, a magnet rake, which he made. He’s the coolest person ever.

He’s a blow-in too, no question. Not from another realm like Mom, but probably from some exoplanet (I just learned this word) with six suns. It explains everything: the telescope, this mad search for pieces of his homeland, the Einstein talk about Red Giants and White and Yellow Dwarfs (!!!!), which I immediately started drawing, not to mention the hypnotizing eyes and the way he keeps cracking me up like I’m some skin-fitting someone who has tons of friends and knows the perfect place in every sentence to say dude or bro. Also: The Realm of Calm is real. Hummingbirds laze around him. Fruit falls out of trees right into his open palms. Not to mention the drooping redwoods, I think, looking up. And me. I’ve never felt this relaxed in my life. I keep forgetting my body and then have to go back and get it.

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: The Boy Who Watched the Boy Hypnotize the World)

I share this blow-in theory with him while we’re sitting on a slate slide at the edge of the creek, water lulling slowly by us like we’re on a rock boat.

“They’ve done a really good job in preparing you to pass as an earthling,” I say.

He half smiles. I notice a dimple I hadn’t before, at the top of his cheek. “No doubt,” he says. “They’ve prepared me well. I even play baseball.” He throws a pebble into the water. I watch it drown. He raises an eyebrow at me. “You, on the other hand . . .”

I pick up a stone and toss it in the same spot where his disappeared. “Yeah, no preparation whatsoever. They just threw me in. That’s why I’m so clueless.” I mean it as a joke, but it comes out serious. It comes out true. Because it is. I so totally missed class the day all the required information was passed out. Brian licks his bottom lip and doesn’t respond.

The mood’s changed and I don’t know why.

From underneath my hair, I study him. I know from doing portraits that you have to look at someone a really long time to see what they’re covering up, to see their inside face, and when you do see it and get it down, that’s the thing that makes people freak out about how much a drawing looks like them.

Brian’s inside face is worried.

“So, that picture . . .” he says hesitantly. He pauses, then licks his bottom lip again. Is he nervous? He seems to be, suddenly, though until this moment I didn’t think it possible. It makes me nervous thinking he’s nervous. He does it again, the tongue sweep across the bottom lip. Is that what he does when he’s nervous? I swallow. Now I’m waiting for him to do it again, willing it. Is he staring at my mouth too? I can’t help it. I sweep my tongue across my bottom lip.

He turns away, throws a few pebbles rapid-fire with some kind of bionic wrist movement that causes the stones to skip effortlessly across the surface of the water. I watch the vein in his neck pulse. I watch him convert oxygen to carbon dioxide. I watch him existing and existing and existing. Is he going to finish his sentence? Ever? Several more centuries of silence pass where the air gets more and more jumpy and alive, like all the molecules he previously put to sleep are waking up. And then it occurs to me he means the naked pictures from yesterday. Is that what he means? The thought’s a bolt.

“Of the English guy?” I squeak. Argh, I sound like a mite. I wish my voice would stop cracking and change already.

He swallows and turns toward me. “No, I was wondering if you ever actually make the drawings you do in your head?”

“Sometimes,” I answer.

“Well, did you make it?” His eyes catch me off guard, capturing me completely in some kind of net. I want to say his name.

“Make what?” I ask, stalling. My heart’s kicking around in my chest. I know what picture he means now.

“The one”—he licks his bottom lip—“of me?”

I feel possessed as I lunge for the pad and flip the pages until I find him, that final version. I place it in his hands, watch his eyes dart up and down, down and up. I’m spiking a fever trying to tell if he likes it or not. I can’t tell. Then I try to see the picture through his eyes and an uh-oh-kill-me-now feeling overtakes me. The Brian I made is him colliding at top speed into a wall of magic. It’s nothing like the drawings of people I do at school. I realize with horror it’s not a drawing of a friend. I’m getting dizzy. Every line and angle and color screams just how much I like him. I feel like I’m wrapped and trapped in plastic. And he’s still not saying a thing. Not one thing!

I wish I were a horse.

“You don’t have to like it or anything,” I say finally, trying to get the pad back. My mind’s bursting. “It’s not a big deal. I draw everyone.” I can’t stop talking. “I draw everything. Even dung beetles and potatoes and driftwood and mounds of dirt and redwood stumps and—”

“Are you kidding?” he interrupts, not letting me take the pad away. It’s his turn to go red. “I totally like it.” He pauses. I watch him breathe. He’s breathing fast. “I look like the freaking aurora borealis.” I don’t know what this is, but I can tell from his voice it’s a very cool thing.

A circuit flips in my chest. One I didn’t know I had.

“I’m so happy I’m not a horse!” I realize I’ve said it aloud only when Brian says, “What?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing.” I try to calm down, try to stop smiling. Was the sky always this shade of magenta?

He’s laughing for real like yesterday. “Dude, you are the strangest person ever. Did you actually just say you’re so happy you’re not a horse?”

“No,” I say, trying not to laugh and failing. “I said—”

But before I can get another word out, a voice crashes into all this perfect. “Oh how romantic!” I freeze, knowing immediately whose hippo-head the sneering asshat words are coming out of. I swear the guy’s installed a tracking device on me—it’s the only explanation.

With him is a great ape: Big Foot. At least no Zephyr.

“Time for a dip, Bubble?” Fry says.

This is my cue to hightail it to the other side of the world.

WE NEED TO RUN, I tell Brian telepathically.

Except when I glance at him, I see that his face has bricked up and I can tell running away is not part of his modus operandi. Which really sucks. I swallow.

Then holler, “Fuck off, you toilet-licking sociopaths!” only it comes out as complete silence. So I heave a mountain range at them. They don’t budge.

My whole being focuses into one wish: Please don’t let me be humiliated in front of Brian.

Fry’s attention has shifted from me to Brian. He’s smirking. “Nice hat.”

“Thanks,” Brian replies coolly, like he owns the air in the Northern Hemisphere. He’s no broken umbrella, this is clear. He doesn’t seem one bit afraid of these garbage-headed scum-suckers.

Fry raises an eyebrow, which turns his gigantic greasy forehead into a relief map. Brian’s piqued his psychopathic interest. Great. I appraise Big Foot. He’s a slab of concrete in a Giants baseball cap. His hands are pushed deep into his sweatshirt pockets. They look like grenades through the fabric. I note the width of his right wrist, note that his fist is probably as large as my whole face. I’ve never actually been punched before, only shoved around. I imagine it, imagine all the paintings bursting out of my skull at impact.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Pow)

“So did you homos pack a picnic?” Fry says to Brian. My muscles tighten.

Brian slowly stands. “I’ll give you a chance to apologize,” he says to Fry, his voice icy and calm, his eyes the opposite. The rock-boat has given him a few extra feet, so he’s looking down on all of us. His meteorite bag hangs heavy on his side. I need to stand but have no legs.

“Apologize for what?” Fry says. “For calling you homos homos?”

Big Foot laughs. It shakes the ground. In Taipei.

I can see Fry’s exhilarated—no one challenges him around here, especially not any of us younger losers he’s been calling homos and pussies and whatevers since we got ears.

“You think that’s funny?” Brian says. “’Cuz I don’t.” He moves a step backward so he’s even higher on the rock now. He’s becoming someone else. Darth Vader, I think. The Realm of Calm’s been sucked back into his index finger and now he looks like he eats human livers. Sautéed with eyeballs and toe-tips.

Hatred’s rising off him in waves.

I want to run away with the circus but take a deep breath and stand, crossing my arms, which have grown skinnier in the past few moments, against my newly sunken chest. I do this as threateningly as I can, thinking of crocodiles, sharks, black piranhas for courage. Not working. Then I remember the honey badger—pound for pound the most powerful creature on earth! An unlikely furry little killer. I narrow my eyes, clamp my mouth shut.

Then the worst thing happens. Fry and Big Foot start to laugh at me.

“Ooooo, so scary, Bubble,” Fry coos. Big Foot crosses his arms in an imitation of me, which Fry finds so hilarious, he does it too.

I hold my breath so I don’t collapse into a heap.

“I really think it’s time you two apologized and were on your way,” I hear from behind me. “If not, I can’t be responsible for what happens next.”

I spin around. Is he freaking crazy? Does he not realize he’s half Fry’s size and a third of Big Foot’s? And I’m me? Is he packing an Uzi?

But above us, poised on the rock, he seems unconcerned. He’s tossing a stone from hand to hand, a stone like the one that’s still in my pocket. We all watch as it pops between his palms, his hands hardly moving, as if he’s making it jump with his mind. “I guess you’re not leaving?” he says to his hands, then looks up at Fry and Big Foot, somehow without breaking the rhythm of the skipping stone. It’s incredible. “I just want to know one thing then.” Brian smiles a slow careful smile, but the vein in his neck’s pulsing furiously and it seems likely that whatever’s about to come out of his mouth next is going to get us killed.

Fry glances at Big Foot and the two of them seem to come to a quick, silent understanding about what to do with our earthly remains.

I’m holding my breath again. All of us are waiting for Brian to speak, watching the dancing stone, mesmerized by it, as the air sizzles with coming violence. It’s the real kind too. The lying in a hospital bed with only a straw sticking out of your bandaged head kind. The sick pounding kind of violence that I have to mute the TV to get through, unless Dad’s around and then I have to endure it. I hope Mr. Grady gives the paintings I left in the art room to Mom. They can show my stuff at the memorial—my first and last art exhibit.

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Brian and Noah Buried Side by Side)

I make a fist but can’t remember if you’re supposed to keep your thumb inside or outside of it when you punch. Why did Dad teach me to wrestle? Who on earth wrestles? He should’ve taught me how to make a freaking fist. And what about my fingers? Will I still be able to draw after this is over? Picasso must’ve gotten in fights. Van Gogh and Gauguin fought each other. It’ll be okay. Sure it will. And black eyes are cool, colorful.

Then all of a sudden Brian snatches the dancing stone into one of his fists, stopping time.

“What I want to know,” he says, drawling out each word. “Is who the hell let you out of your cages?”

“Do you believe this guy?” Fry says to Big Foot, who grunts out an incomprehensible something in Big Footese. They lunge—

I’m telling Grandma Sweetwine I will be joining her shortly when I catch the whipping movement of Brian’s arm a second before Fry cries out, his fingers flying to his ear, “What the hell?” Then Big Foot yelps and covers his head. I whirl around, see Brian’s hand in the bag. Now Fry’s ducking, and so is Big Foot, because meteorites are wailing at them, raining on them, hailing down on them, zooming past their skulls at the speed of sound, faster, at the speed of light, each time whooshing close enough to shave hairs, a millimeter away from ending their brain activity permanently. “Stop it!” Big Foot screams. Both of them are twisting and hopping and trying to shield their heads with their arms as more bits and pieces of fallen sky race through the air at warp speed. Brian’s a machine, a machine gun, two at a time, three, four, underhand, overhand, both hands. His arm’s a blur, he’s a blur—each rock—each star—just barely missing, barely sparing Fry and Big Foot until they’re both balled up on the ground, hands over their heads, saying, “Please, dude, stop.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that apology,” Brian says, whipping one so close to Fry’s head it makes me wince. Then another few for good measure. “Two apologies, actually. One to Noah. And one to me. Like you mean it.”

“Sorry,” Fry says, completely stunned. Maybe one did bean him in the head. “Now stop.”

“Not good enough.”

An additional series of meteorites rocket at their skulls at a billion miles per hour.

Fry cries out, “Sorry, Noah. Sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“Brian.”

“Sorry, Brian!”

“Do you accept their apology, Noah?”

I nod. God and his son have been demoted.

“Now, get the hell out of here,” Brian says to them. “Next time I won’t miss your thick skulls on purpose.”

And then they’re fleeing in a second rain of meteorites, their arms helmetting their heads, as they run away from us.

“The pitcher?” I ask him as I grab my pad.

He nods. I catch the half smile breaking through the wall of his face. He hops off the rock-slide and starts picking up the meteorites and loading them back into his bag. I grab the magnet rake, lying there like a sword. This guy’s so totally more magic-headed than anyone, even Picasso or Pollock or Mom. We jump the creek and then we’re tearing through the trees together in the opposite direction of home. He’s as fast as I am, fast like we could run down jumbo jets, comets.

“You know we’re dead, right?” I shout, thinking of the coming payback.

“Don’t count on it,” Brian shouts back.

Yeah, I think, we’re invincible.

We’re sprinting at the speed of light when the ground gives way and we rise into the air as if racing up stairs.

I give up on the sketch, close my eyes, lean back in my desk chair. In my mind, I can draw Brian with lightning.

“What?” I hear. “You meditating now? Swami Sweetwine has a certain ring.”

I keep my eyes shut. “Go away, Jude.”

“Where’ve you been all week?”

“Nowhere.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Nothing.”

Each morning since he hurled those meteorites at Fry and Big Foot, five mornings so far to be exact, I’ve waited on the roof, totally deranged, my head a few feet above my neck, for his garage to open so we can plunge into the woods again and become imaginary—that’s the only way I can describe it.

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Two Boys Jump and Stay Up)

“So is Brian nice?” I open my eyes. She knows his name now. He’s no longer such a freak? She’s leaning against the doorframe in lime-green pajama bottoms and a fuchsia tank top, looking like one of those color-swirled lollipops you get on the boardwalk. If you squint your eyes, lots of girls look like those lollipops.

Jude holds out her hand in front of her, examines five shiny purple nails. “Everyone’s talking about him like he’s this baseball god, like he’s headed for the major leagues. Fry’s cousin—he’s here for the summer—his little brother goes to the same school back east. They call him The Ax or something.”

I burst out laughing. The Ax. Brian is called The Ax! I flip the page and start drawing it.

Is this why there’s been no retaliation? Why Fry passed me the other day while I was having a discussion with Rascal the horse and before I could even think of peeling away to Oregon, he pointed at me and said, “Dude.” And that was it.

“So is he?” she repeats. Her hair’s particularly bloodthirsty tonight, snaking all around the room, swarming the furniture, vining up the legs of chairs, stretching over the walls. I’m next.

“Is he what?”

“Nice, Bubble, is Brian, your new best friend, nice?”

“He’s fine,” I say, ignoring the Bubble, whatever. “Like anyone.”

“But you don’t like anyone.” I hear the jealousy now. “What animal is he, then?” She’s twirling a string of hair around her index finger so tightly the tip’s ballooning red and bulbous like it might burst.

“A hamster,” I say.

She laughs. “Yeah, right. The Ax is a hamster.”

I have to get her off Brian. Forget shutters, if I could put the Great Wall of China around him and me, I would. “So who’s M.?” I ask, remembering the asshat Ouija board.

“He’s no one.”

Fine. I turn back around to The Ax drawing—

I hear, “How would you rather die? Drinking gasoline and then lighting a match in your mouth or getting buried alive?”

“The explosion,” I say, trying to hide my smile because after all these months of ignoring me, she’s sucking up. “Duh. Obviously.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just warming you up. It’s been a while. How about—”

There’s a tapping at the window.

“Is that him? At the window?” I hate the excitement in her voice.

Is it, though? At night? I did casually mention to him which room was mine—right on the street with easy access—a few dozen times because, well, I have my reasons. I get up from my desk and walk over to the window and flip the shade. It is him. Real and everything. Sometimes I wonder if I’m making the whole thing up and if someone were looking down from above they’d see me alone all day, talking and laughing by myself in the middle of a forest.

He’s framed in the light from the room, looking like he stuck his toe in a socket. He’s not wearing his hat, and his hair’s amped out all over his head. His eyes are all sparked up too. I open the window.

“I totally want to meet him,” I hear Jude say from behind me.

I do not want that. Do not. I want her to fall in a hole.

I bend down and stick my head and shoulders out, spreading myself as much as I can across the windowsill so Jude can’t see out or Brian in. The air is cool, feathery on my face.

“Hey,” I say, like he always knocks at my window at night and I’m not gunning inside at top speed.

“You gotta come up,” he says. “Got to. It’s clear finally. And no moon. It’s an intergalactic gorge fest up there.”

Really, if someone told me I could hang out in da Vinci’s studio while he painted the Mona Lisa or go up on Brian’s roof with him at night—I’m on the roof. The other day he mentioned us going to some movie about an alien invasion and I almost blacked out thinking of it. I’d rather sit next to Brian for two hours in a dark theater than have a wall-painting party with Jackson Pollock. The only problem with spending time with him in the woods all day is that there’s so much space in there. The trunk of a car would be better, or a thimble.

Despite my efforts at hogging the window, I feel myself getting shoved aside as Jude squeezes her head and then her shoulders out beside mine until we’re a two-headed hydra. I watch Brian’s face light up at the sight of her and get seasick.

(PORTRAIT: Jude: Drawn and Quartered)

“Hi, Brian Connelly,” she says in a flirty bouncy way that makes my body temperature drop several degrees. When did she learn to talk like that?

“Wow, you guys look nothing alike,” Brian exclaims. “I thought you’d look like Noah except—”

“With boobs?” Jude interjects. She said boobs to him!

And why was he thinking about what she’d look like anyway?

Brian cracks the half smile. I need to throw a bag over his head before Jude comes under the spell of his strange, squinting eyes. Do they have those burka things for guys? At least he hasn’t licked his lips, I think. “Well, yeah. Exactly,” he says to her, and licks his lips. “Though I’m pretty sure I would’ve phrased it differently.”

It’s over. His eyes are squinting. My sister’s a lollipop—everyone loves lollipops. And my head’s been replaced by a cabbage.

“You should come up too,” he says to her. “I was going to show your brother Gemini—the Twins, you know, so it’s perfect.” Your brother? I’m her brother now?

(PORTRAIT: Jude in Her New Home in Timbuktu)

She’s about to speak, to say, “Cool!” or “Awesome!” or “I love you!” so I ram her with my elbow. It’s the only practical solution. She returns the ram with a ream to my ribs. We’re used to concealing battles under tables at restaurants or at home, so keeping Brian out of this particular scuffle is a piece of cake until I blurt out, “She can’t come. She has to go to ubudowasow for sodojiokoa—” I’m just making sounds, throwing syllables together, hoping they’ll collide and find a meaning in Brian’s head, as I, in one spectacularly spastic motion, hoist myself up and then frog-leap out the window, only narrowly landing on my feet and not tumbling headfirst into Brian. I right myself, brush the hair out of my eyes, noting the dampness of my forehead, then turn around and place my hand on the bottom of the window and start pulling down, only at the last minute deciding not to decapitate my sister, even though it really seems like a good idea. Instead, I push on her shoulder to get her and her yellow strangling sweep of hair and purple nails and shimmery blue eyes and bouncing bobbling boobs back inside—

“Jesus, Noah. Got the hint. Nice to meet you,” she manages before I slam down the window.

“You too,” he says, rapping on the glass with his knuckles. She raps back two confident knowing raps that match the confident knowing smile on her face. It’s like they’ve been rapping back and forth like this their whole lives and have their own special Bengal Tiger to Lollipop Morse code.

Brian and I walk down the road in silence. I’ve broken into a full body sweat. I feel exactly the way I do when I wake up from the dream where I’m naked in the school cafeteria and only have those flimsy pathetic napkin squares to cover myself up.

Brian speaks to what just happened succinctly. “Dude,” he says. “Mental.”

I sigh, mumble, “Thanks, Einstein.”

And then to my surprise and relief, he starts to laugh. Fountainous, mountainous laughter. “So mental.” He karate-chops the air. “I mean, I thought you were going to slice her in half with the window!” This sends him on a rollicking ride of hysterics that I soon find myself on too. Further fueled when Prophet starts in, “Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?”

“Oh my God. That freaking bird.” Brian holds his head with both his hands. “We have to find Ralph, man. We have to. It’s a national emergency.”

He doesn’t seem to care a bit that Jude didn’t come with us. Maybe I imagined it all? Maybe his face didn’t light up at the sight of her? Maybe he didn’t blush at her words? Maybe he doesn’t even like lollipops?

“The Ax?” I say, feeling loads better.

“Oh man.” He groans. “That was fast.” There’s both embarrassment and pride in his voice. He holds up his right arm. “No one messes with The Ax.” The Ax comes down on my shoulder and jostles me. We’re under a streetlamp and I pray my face isn’t revealing what’s happened inside me at this contact. It’s the first time he’s touched me.

I follow him up the ladder to the roof, my shoulder still tingling, wishing the ladder went for miles and miles. (PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: The Two Boys Breaking Out of the Two Boys) As we climb, I can hear plants growing in the dark, can feel the blood speeding around inside me.

And then the scent of jasmine engulfs us.

Grandma Sweetwine used to tell us to hold our breath around the scent of night-blooming jasmine if we didn’t want to give away all our secrets. She’d say the police would do much better handing out vines of the white trumpet flowers to the accused than hooking them up to a lie detector. I really hope this one bit of hogwash is true. I want to know Brian’s secrets.

Once up, he takes a flashlight from his sweatshirt pocket and shines our way to the telescope. The light from it is red, not white, he explains, so we don’t lose our night vision. Our night vision!

While he’s crouched over a bag at the foot of the telescope, I listen to the crashing sea, imagining all the fish swimming through the endless freezing darkness.

“I could never be a fish,” I say.

“Me neither,” he replies, his words obstructed by the end of the flashlight, which he’s holding in his mouth so he can use both hands to rifle through the bag.

“Maybe an eel, though,” I say, still amazed how I say aloud so many things I’d normally just say to myself. “It’d be cool to have electric body parts, you know? Like your hair.”

I hear his muffled laugh through the flashlight and it shoots me dead with happiness. I’m thinking the reason I’ve been so quiet all these years is only because Brian wasn’t around yet for me to tell everything to. He takes a book out of the bag, then standing, flips through it until he finds what he’s looking for. He passes the open book to me, then steps real close so he can shine the flashlight—back in his hand now—on the page. “Here,” he says. “The Twins.”

I feel his hair on my cheek, on my neck.

I have the same feeling I get right before I start crying.

“That star,” he says, pointing, “is Castor, that one Pollux. They’re the heads of the Twins.” He takes a pen out of his pocket and starts drawing—it’s a glow-in-the-dark pen. Cool. He makes light-lines between stars until two stick figures appear.

I can smell his shampoo, his sweat. I breathe in deeply, silently.

“They’re both dudes,” he says. “Castor was mortal. Pollux, immortal.”

Do guys normally stand so close to other guys? I wish I’d paid more attention to these kinds of things before. I notice my fingers are trembling and I can’t be one hundred percent sure they won’t reach across the air and touch his bare wrist or neck, so I slip them in the hand jails to be safe. I close my fingers around the rock he gave me.

“When Castor died,” he says, “Pollux missed him too much, so he made a deal to share his immortality with him and that’s how they both ended up in the sky.”

“I’d do that,” I say. “Totally.”

“Yeah? Must be a twin thing,” he says, misunderstanding. “Though you’d never know it from that Death by Window Maneuver.” I feel my face flush because I’d meant him, duh, I’d share my immortality with him. I meant you, I want to holler.

Brian’s bent over the telescope adjusting something. “The Twins are thought to be responsible for shipwrecks, said to appear to sailors as St. Elmo’s Fire. Know what that is?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, just plows on in his Einstein mode. “It’s an electrical weather phenomenon where a luminous plasma’s created because charged particles separate and create electric fields that in turn create this corona discharge—”

“Whoa,” I say.

He laughs, but continues on just as incomprehensibly. I get the gist: The Twins cause things to burst into flames. He turns around, shines the flashlight in my face. “It’s crazy that it happens,” he says. “But it does, all the time too.”

He’s like a bag of selves. This Einstein one. The fearless meteor-hurling god. The crazy laughing guy. The Ax! There’s more too, I know it. Hidden ones. Truer ones. Because why is his inside face so worried?

I grab the flashlight out of his hand and shine it on him. The wind’s billowing his shirt against his chest. I want to flatten the ripples with my hand, want to so bad my mouth goes dry.

It’s not just me that’s staring this time.

“The smell of jasmine makes people tell their secrets,” I say to him, my voice low.

“Is that jasmine?” he asks, swirling the air with his hand.

I nod. The flashlight’s bright on his face. It’s an inquisition.

“Why do you think I have secrets?” He crosses his arms.

“Who doesn’t?”

“Tell me one of yours, then?”

I pull out a fairly harmless one, though juicy enough to get him to reveal something good. “I spy on people.”

“Who?”

“Well, basically, everyone. Usually I’m drawing, but sometimes not. I hide in trees, bushes, on my roof with the binoculars, wherever.”

“Ever get caught?”

“Yeah, twice. Both times by you.”

He laughs a little. “So . . . ever spy on me?” The question makes my breath catch in my throat. The truth is, after an in-depth investigation, I’ve determined his room spy-proof.

“No. Your go.”

“Okay.” He motions toward the ocean. “I can’t swim.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Hate the water. Don’t even like hearing it. Baths freak me out. Sharks freak me out. Living here freaks me out. You go.”

“I hate sports.”

“But you’re fast.”

I shrug. “Go.”

“Okay.” He licks his lip, then exhales slowly. “I’m claustrophobic.” He frowns. “I can’t be an astronaut now. It blows.”

“You weren’t always?”

“No.” He looks away and for a split second I see his inside face again. “Your turn.”

I flick off the flashlight.

My turn. My turn. My turn. I want to put my hands on your chest. I want to be in a thimble with you.

“I keyed my father’s car once,” I say.

“I stole a telescope from school.”

It’s easier with the flashlight off. The words falling in the dark, like apples from trees.

“Rascal, the horse across the street, talks to me.”

I can tell he’s smiling, then not. “My dad left.”

I pause. “I wish my dad would.”

“No, you don’t,” he says, his voice serious. “It sucks. My mom spends all her time on this website LostConnections writing him notes he’s never even going to see. Totally pathetic.” There’s a silence. “Oh, still my go? I do math problems in my head, like all the time. Even on the pitcher’s mound.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“Like I mind-paint.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“I’m scared I suck,” I say.

He laughs. “Me too.”

“I mean suck bad.”

“Me too,” he insists.

We’re quiet for a second. The ocean rumbles beneath us.

I close my eyes, take a breath. “I’ve never kissed anyone.”

“No one?” he says. “No one meaning no one?” Does this mean something?

“No one.”

The moment stretches and stretches and stretches—

Then snaps. He says, “A friend of my mom’s came on to me.”

Whoa. I turn the flashlight back on his face. He’s blinking, looking uneasy, embarrassed. I watch his Adam’s apple as he swallows once, then again.

“How old? How much on?” I ask, instead of what I want to ask, wishing he’d used a pronoun. Was it a boyfriend?

“Not that old. On enough. Just one time. No big deal.” He takes the flashlight out of my hand and goes back to the telescope, ending the conversation. Clearly it was a big deal. I have a googleplex of questions about on enough, which I keep to myself.

I wait in the cold air where his body was.

“Okay,” he says a little while later. “All set up.”

I go behind the telescope, peer into the eyepiece, and all the stars crash down on my head. It’s like taking a shower in the cosmos. I gasp.

“Knew you’d freak,” he says.

“Oh man. Poor van Gogh,” I say. “Starry Night could’ve been so much cooler.”

“I totally knew it!” he exclaims. “If I were an artist, I’d go crazy.” I need something to hold on to, besides him. I grab one of the legs of the telescope with my hand. No one has ever been this excited to show me something, not even Mom. And he kind of just called me an artist.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Throwing Armfuls of Air into the Air)

He comes up behind me. “Okay, now check this out. You’re going to lose your mind.” He leans over my shoulder and pulls down some lever and the stars rush even closer and he’s right, I am losing my mind, but not because of the stars this time. “Can you see the Twins?” he asks. “They’re in the upper right quadrant.” I can’t see a thing because my eyes are closed. All I care about the cosmos is happening here on this roof. I think how to respond so his hand stays on that lever, so he remains this close to me, so close I can feel his breathing on the back of my neck. If I say yes, he’ll probably step backward. If I say no, maybe he’ll adjust the telescope again and we can stay like this a minute longer. “I don’t think I see them,” I say, my voice rough, unsteady. This was the right answer, because he says, “Okay, here,” and he does something that brings not only the stars but him a breath closer.

My heart stops beating.

My back is to his front and if I move an inch backward I’d fall into him and then if it were a movie, not one I’ve ever seen, mind you, he’d put his hands all over me, I know he would, and then I’d twist around and we’d melt together like hot wax. I can see it happening in my head. I don’t move.

“Well?” He breathes the word more than says it, and that’s when I know he feels it too. I think about those two guys in the sky causing shipwrecks, causing things to burst into flames, just like that with no warning. “It’s crazy that it happens,” he’d said about them. “But it just does.”

It just does.

It’s happening to us.

“I have to go,” I say, helpless.

What makes you say the opposite of what every cell in your body wants you to say?

“Yeah,” he replies. “Okay.”

The Hornet Girls: Courtney Barrett, Clementine Cohen, Lulu Mendes, and Heather somebody are propped on the big rock beside the trailhead when Brian and I come out of the woods the next afternoon. At the sight of us, Courtney leaps from her perch, lands with hands on hips, creating a pink-bikini-clad human roadblock in our path, thereby cutting short my diatribe about the genius of the blobfish, the world’s most underrated waste-of-space animal, forever in the shadow of the three-toed sloth. This followed Brian’s breaking news about a boy in Croatia he read about on the web who’s magnetic. His family and friends throw coins at him, which stick. As do frying pans. He says this is indeed possible for a gobbledygook reason I didn’t follow.

“Hey,” Courtney says. She’s a year older than the other hornets, going to high school next year, so the same age as Brian. Her smile’s all scarlet lips, sparkling white teeth, and menace. The antennae on her head are pointing right at him. “Wow!” she exclaims. “Who knew you were hiding those eyes under that silly hat?” Her bikini top, two pink strips and a string, covers very little of her. She plucks the string, revealing a secret line of white skin that wraps around her neck. She’s plucking it like a guitar string.

I watch Brian watch this. Then I watch Brian being watched by her, knowing Courtney’s registering the way his T-shirt falls like water over his broad chest, registering his tanned strong baseball arms, registering the totally cool space between the teeth, the squint, the freckles, registering that there’s no word in her hornet head to describe the particular color of his eyes.

“Think I take offense on behalf of my lucky hat,” Brian replies with a smoothness and coolness that drive spikes into my eardrums. Another Brian’s emerging, I can tell. One I’m certain I’m not going to like at all.

It occurs to me that Jude does this too, changes who she is depending on who she’s with. They’re like toads changing their skin color. How come I’m always just me?

Courtney fake pouts. “No offense intended.” She lets go of the bikini string and flicks the rim of his hat with two long fingers. Her nails are the same purple color as Jude’s. “Why lucky?” she says, tilting her head, tilting the whole world so everything flows in her direction. Without a doubt, this is the girl who’s been giving Jude flirting lessons. Hey, where is Jude? How come she skipped this ambush?

“It’s lucky,” he says, “because good things happen when I wear it.” It’s possible Brian glances at me for a nanosecond when he says this, but lots of things are possible and extremely unlikely, like world peace and summer snowstorms and blue dandelions and what I think happened on the roof last night. Did I imagine it? Each time I think of it, every ten seconds or so all day long, I faint inside.

Clementine, posed on the rock not unlike the girl model from CSA—her body in three triangles—says in the same hornet dialect as Courtney, “Fry’s cousin from LA says he wishes the rocks you threw at him didn’t miss so he could’ve charged people to see the scar when you’re in the major leagues.” She tells all this to the purple-polished nails on one of her hands. Jesus. How blown away must Fry and Big Foot have been by The Ax and his bionic arm to admit defeat like this to a bunch of hornets.

“Good to know,” Brian replies. “Next time he acts like a jerkoff I’ll aim to maim.”

A wave of awe at Brian’s comment ripples from girl to girl. Barf. Barf. Barf. Something alarming’s occurring to me, more alarming than the fact that Jude’s joined this purple polish cult. It’s that this Brian is cool. His alien kin have not only prepared him to pass but to surpass. He’s probably supernaturally popular at that boarding school. A jock and popular! How could I not have noticed? I must’ve gotten thrown off by the endless geek rants about globular clusters orbiting galactic cores, rants that I see are being kept under wraps in present company. Doesn’t he know popular people are covered in flame retardant? Doesn’t he know popular people aren’t revolutionaries?

I want to grab him by the wrist and head back into the woods, tell these guys, sorry but I found him first. But then I think, no, that’s not true: He found me. He tracked me like a Bengal tiger. I wish he’d choose that self and stick to it.

Clementine, still talking to her nails, says, “Should we call you The Ax? Or maybe just Ax? Ooooo.” She squeals exactly like a warthog. “I like that.”

“I’d prefer Brian,” he says. “It’s the off-season.”

“Okay, Brian,” Courtney says like she invented his name. “You guys should totally come hang out at The Spot.” She looks at me. “Jude does.”

I’m shocked to be acknowledged. My cabbagehead nods without my consent.

She smiles at me in a way that could just as easily be a scowl. “Your sister says you’re some kind of prodigy.” She plucks on the bikini string. “Maybe I’ll let you draw me sometime.”

Brian crosses his arms in front of his chest. “Ah, no. You’d be lucky if he lets you pose for him sometime.”

I grow sixty thousand feet taller.

But then Courtney slaps her own wrist, mewing at Brian. “Bad girl. Got it.”

Okay, time to torch the neighborhood. And the worst part is, her lameness breaks out his half smile, which she’s mirroring back at him with one of her radiant own.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy in Plastic Bag Turning Blue)

A few sandpipers skitter down the road toward Rascal’s stable. I do wish I were a horse.

Several moments pass and then Lulu slides off the rock and stands beside Courtney. Clementine follows, slipping in next to Lulu. The hornets are swarming. Only Heather remains on the rock.

“You surf?” Lulu asks Brian.

“I’m not much into the beach,” he replies.

“Not into the beach?” Lulu and Courtney cry at once, but this inconceivability is eclipsed by Clementine, who says, “Can I try on your hat?”

“No, let me,” Courtney says.

“I want to!” says Lulu.

I roll my eyes and then hear someone laugh without a trace of hornet hum. I look over at Heather, who’s looking back at me sympathetically like she alone can see the cabbage on my neck. I’ve hardly noticed her over there. Or ever. Even though she’s the only one of the hornets who goes to the public middle school like we do. A mess of black curls, similar to mine, falls around her small face. No antennae. And she looks more like a frog than a lollipop, a chachi tree frog. She’s the one I’d draw, perched in an oak, hidden away. I check her nails: They’re light blue.

Brian’s taken his hat off his head. “Hmm.”

“You choose,” Courtney says, confident she’ll be chosen.

“I couldn’t,” Brian says. He starts spinning the hat on his finger. “Unless . . .” With a quick flick of his wrist, he tosses the hat onto my head. And I’m soaring. I take back everything. He is a revolutionary.

Until I realize they’re all laughing, including him, like this is the funniest thing ever.

“Cop-out,” Courtney says. She takes the hat off my head like I’m a hat rack and hands it back to Brian. “Now, choose.”

Brian smiles fully at Courtney, showcasing the space between his teeth, then cocks his hat over her brow, like she knew he would. The look on her face is unmistakably mission accomplished.

He leans back and regards her. “Suits you.”

I want to kick him in the head.

Instead, I let the wind at my back scoop me up and toss me over the cliff into the sea.

“Gotta bounce,” I say, remembering that’s what I heard someone say to someone sometime somewhere, at school or maybe it was on TV, or in a movie, probably not even from this decade, but who cares, all I know is I have to get away before I evaporate or crumple or cry. I think for a hopeful moment that Brian might follow me across the street but he just says, “Later.”

My heart leaves, hitchhikes right out of my body, heads north, catches a ferry across the Bering Sea and plants itself in Siberia with the polar bears and ibex and long-horned goats until it turns into a teeny-tiny glacier.

Because I imagined it. Last night, this is what happened: He adjusted a lever on the telescope, that’s it. I just happened to be standing in the way. Noah has an overactive imagination, written on every school report I’ve ever gotten. To which Mom would laugh and say, “A leopard can’t change its spots, now can it?”

When I get inside the house, I go immediately to the front window that frames the street to watch them. The sky’s overflowing with orange clouds and each time one floats down, Brian bats it back up like a balloon. I watch him hypnotize the girls as he does the fruit in the trees, the clouds in the sky, as he did me. Only Heather seems immune. She’s lying on the rock, looking at the orange paradise above instead of in his direction.

I tell myself: He didn’t find me, didn’t track me. He’s not a Bengal tiger. He’s just some new kid who saw someone around his age and mistakenly befriended him before the cool kids came along and saved him.

Reality is crushing. The world is a wrong-sized shoe. How can anyone stand it?

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Keep Out)

I hear Mom’s footsteps only a moment before I feel the warm press of her hands on my shoulders. “Beautiful sky, huh?” I breathe in her perfume. She’s changed kinds. This one smells like the forest, like wood and earth, with her mixed in. I close my eyes. A sob’s rising in me as if it’s being pulled up by her hands. I keep it down by saying, “Only six months now until the application’s due.”

She squeezes my shoulders. “So proud of you.” Her voice is calm and deep and safe. “Do you know how proud I am?” This I know. Nothing else. I nod and she wraps her arms around me. “You’re my inspiration,” she says, and we rise together into the air. She’s become my real eyes. It’s like I haven’t even drawn or painted anything until she sees it, like it’s all invisible until she gets that look on her face and says, “You’re remaking the world, Noah. Drawing by drawing.” I want to show her the ones of Brian so bad. But I can’t. As if he heard me thinking about him, he turns in my direction, all silhouette in the firelight, a perfect painting, so good it makes my fingers flit at my side. But I’m not going to draw him anymore. “It’s okay to be addicted to beauty,” Mom says, all dreamy. “Emerson said ‘Beauty is God’s handwriting.’” There’s something about her voice when she talks about being an artist that always makes me feel like the whole sky is in my chest. “I’m addicted to it too,” she whispers. “Most artists are.”

“But you’re not an artist,” I whisper back.

She doesn’t respond and her body has tensed up. I don’t know why.

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

This untenses her and she laughs. “I have a feeling Ralph is on his way,” she says. “The Second Coming is at hand.” She kisses the back of my head. “Everything’s going to be okay, sweetheart,” she says because she’s a people-mechanic and always knows when I’m malfunctioning. At least that’s why I think she says it, until she adds, “It’s going to be okay for all of us, I promise.”

Before we even land back on the rug, she’s gone. I stay, staring out the window until darkness fills the room, until the five of them walk off in the direction of The Spot, Brian’s lucky hat on Courtney’s lucky head.

Paces behind the rest, Heather glides along, still looking up. I watch her raise her arms swanlike and then lower them. A bird, I think. Of course. Not a frog at all. I was wrong.

About everything.

The next morning, I do not go up on the roof at dawn because I’m not leaving my bedroom until Brian’s back at boarding school three thousand miles from here. It’s only seven weeks away. I’ll drink the plant water if I get thirsty. I’m lying on the bed staring at a print on the ceiling of Munch’s The Scream, an off-the-hook painting I wish I made of a guy blowing a gasket.

Like I am.

Jude and Mom are bickering on the other side of the wall. It’s getting loud. I think she hates Mom even more than she hates me now.

Mom: You’ll have plenty of time to be twenty-five when you’re twenty-five, Jude.

Jude: It’s just lipstick.

Mom: Lipstick you’re not wearing, and while I’m on your bad side, that skirt is way too short.

Jude: Do you like it? I made it.

Mom: Well, you should’ve made more of it. Look in the mirror. Do you really want to be that girl?

Jude: Who else am I going to be? For the record, that girl in the mirror is me!

Mom: It’s really scaring me how wild you’re getting. I don’t recognize you.

Jude: Well, I don’t recognize you either, Mother.

Mom has been acting a little strange. I’ve noticed things too. Like how she sits lobotomized at red lights long after they turn green and doesn’t hit the gas until everyone starts honking at her. Or how she says she’s working in her office, but spying reveals that she’s really going through boxes of old photographs she got down from the attic.

And there are horses galloping inside her now. I can hear them.

Today, she and Jude are going to the city together for a mother-daughter day to see if it can make them get along. Not a good start. Dad used to try to get me to go to ball games when they did this, but he doesn’t bother anymore, not since I spent a whole football game facing the crowd instead of the field, sketching faces on napkins. Or maybe it was a baseball game?

Baseball. The Ax. The Axhat.

Jude rapid-fire knocks, doesn’t wait for me to say come in, just swings open the door. I guess Mom won, because she’s lipstick-free and wearing a colorful sundress that goes to her knees, one of Grandma’s designs. She looks like a peacock tail. Her hair is calm, a placid yellow lake around her.

“You’re home for once.” She seems genuinely happy to see me. She leans against the doorframe. “If Brian and I were drowning, who’d you save first?”

“You,” I tell her, glad she didn’t ask me this yesterday.

“Dad and me?”

“Please. You.”

“Mom and me?”

I pause, then say, “You.”

“You paused.”

“I didn’t pause.”

“You so did, but it’s okay. I deserve it. Ask me.”

“Mom or me?”

“You, Noah. I’d always save you first.” Her eyes are clear blue skies. “Even though you almost beheaded me the other night.” She grins. “It’s okay. I admit it. I’ve been awful, huh?”

“Totally rabid.”

She makes an eye-bulging crazy face that cracks me up even in my mood. “You know,” she says, “those girls are okay but they’re so normal. It’s boring.” She does a goofy, fake ballerina leap across the room, lands on the bed, and shoulders up to me. I close my eyes. “Been a while,” she whispers.

“So long.”

We breathe and breathe and breathe together. She takes my hand and I think how otters sleep floating on their backs in water, holding hands exactly like this, so they don’t drift apart in the night.

After a while, she picks up her fist. I do the same.

“One two three,” we say at the same time.

Rock/Rock

Scissors/Scissors

Rock/Rock

Paper/Paper

Scissors/Scissors

“Yes!” she cries. “We still got it, yes we do!” She jumps to her feet. “We can watch the Animal Channel tonight. Or a movie? You can pick.”

“Okay.”

“I want to—”

“Me too,” I reply, knowing what she was going to say. I want to be us again too.

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Brother and Sister on a Seesaw, Blindfolded)

She smiles, touches my arm. “Don’t be sad.” She says it so warmly, it makes the air change color. “It came right through the wall last night.” This was worse when we were younger. If one cried, the other cried even if we were on different sides of Lost Cove. I didn’t think it happened anymore.

“I’m fine,” I say.

She nods. “See you tonight then if Mom and I don’t kill each other.” She gives a salute and is off.

I don’t know how this can be but it can: A painting is both exactly the same and entirely different every single time you look at it. That’s the way it is between Jude and me now.

A little while later, I remember that it’s Thursday, which means life drawing at CSA, which means I’m ending my house arrest. Anyway, why should I stay locked up just because Brian’s a popular axhat jock covered in flame retardant who likes toilet-licking hornet girls like Courtney Barrett?

My stand and footstool are where I left them last week. I set them up, telling myself that nothing matters but getting into CSA and I can hang out with Jude for the rest of the summer. And Rascal. And go to the museum with Mom. I don’t need Brian.

The teacher begins class—a different girl model today—lecturing about positive and negative space, about drawing the space around a form to reveal a form. I’ve never done this before and get lost in the exercise, concentrating on finding the model by drawing what is not her.

But during the second part of class, I sit down with my back against the wall and begin drawing Brian in this outside-in way, even though I said I’d never draw him again. I can’t help it. He’s in me and needs to get out. I do sketch after sketch.

I’m concentrating so hard that I don’t sense anyone approaching until my light gets blocked. I spring back in surprise and an embarrassing garbled sound flies out of my mouth as my brain catches up to the fact that it’s him, that Brian’s standing in front of me. He has no meteorite bag, no magnet rake, which means he came all the way down here to find me. Again. I attempt to keep the joy behind my face, not on it.

“Waited this morning,” he says, and then licks his bottom lip so nervously, so perfectly, it causes pain deep in my chest. He glances at my pad. I flip it over before he can see himself, then get up, motioning for him to go back into the woods so no one inside hears us. I stow the stool and stand, hoping my knees don’t give out, or alternatively, that I don’t start dancing a jig.

He’s waiting by the same tree as last time.

“So the English guy,” he says as we start walking. “He there today?”

If there’s one thing I know how to read in a voice, thanks to Jude, it’s jealousy. I take a supremely happy breath. “He got booted last week.”

“The drinking?”

“Yeah.”

The woods are quiet except for our crunching footsteps and a crooning mockingbird somewhere in the trees.

“Noah?”

I suck in air. How can someone just saying your name make you feel like this? “Yeah?” There’s a lot of emotion running around his face, but I don’t know what kind it is. I focus on my sneakers instead.

Minute after silent minute ticks by.

“It’s like this,” he says eventually. He’s stopped walking and is picking bark off an oak tree’s trunk. “There are all these planets that get ejected from the planetary systems that they first belonged in and they just wander on their own through deep space, going their lonely way across the universe without a sun, you know, forever . . .”

His eyes are begging me to understand something. I think about what he just said. He’s talked about this before, these lonely, drifting, sunless planets. So, what? Is he saying he doesn’t want to be an outsider like me? Well, fine. I turn to go.

“No.” He grabs my sleeve. He grabbed my sleeve.

The Earth pauses on its axis.

“Oh, fuck it.” He licks his lip, looks at me desperately. “Just . . .” he says. “Just . . .”

He’s stammering?

“Just what?” I ask.

“Just don’t worry, okay?” The words fly out of his mouth and loop around my heart and fling it right out of my chest. I know what he’s saying.

“Worry about what?” I say to mess with him.

He half smiles. “About getting hit in the head by an asteroid. It’s extremely unlikely.”

“Cool,” I say. “I won’t.

And so, I stop worrying.

I don’t worry when a few seconds later he says with a full-on grin, “I totally saw what you were drawing back there, dude.”

I don’t worry that I blow off Jude that night and every single night that follows. I don’t worry when she comes home and finds Brian and the hornets on the deck, all of the hornets posing for me like some photo they saw in a magazine. I don’t worry that night when she says, “So Mom wasn’t enough? You have to steal all my friends too?”

I don’t worry that those are the last words she says to me all summer.

I don’t worry that I seem to become cool by association, me!, that I hang out at The Spot with Brian and countless surftards and asshats and hornets encased in his Realm of Calm, hardly ever feeling like a hostage, mostly knowing what to do with my hands, and no one tries to chuck me off a cliff, or calls me anything but Picasso, a nickname started by Franklyn Fry of all asshats.

I don’t worry that it’s not as hard as I thought to pretend to be like everyone else, to change your skin color like a toad. To wear a little flame retardant.

I don’t worry that when Brian and I are alone in the woods or up on his roof or in his living room watching baseball (whatever), he puts up an electrical fence between us, and never once do I risk death by brushing against it, but when we’re in public, like at The Spot, the fence vanishes, and we become clumsy magnets, bumping and knocking into each other, grazing hands, arms, legs, shoulders, tapping the other on the back, even occasionally the leg, for no good reason except that it’s like swallowing lightning.

I don’t worry that all through the movie about the alien invasion, our legs microscopically drift: his, right, right, right, mine, left, left, left, until halfway through, they find each other and press so hard against each other for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight delirious seconds, that I have to get up and run to the bathroom because I’m exploding. I don’t worry that when I get back to my seat, it all starts again, but this time our legs find each other immediately and he grabs my hand beneath the armrest and squeezes it and we electrocute and die.

I don’t worry that when all that happened, Heather was on my other side and Courtney on his.

I don’t worry that Courtney still hasn’t given Brian his hat back or that Heather doesn’t take her ancient gray eyes off me.

I don’t worry that Brian and I never kiss, not once, no matter how much mind control I exert on him, no matter how much I beg God, the trees, every molecule I come across.

And most important, I don’t worry when I come home one day and find a note on the kitchen table written by Jude asking Mom to come down to the beach to see a sculpture she’s building out of sand. I don’t worry that I take the note and bury it at the bottom of the garbage can. I don’t worry, not really, even though it makes my stomach hurt to do it, no not my stomach, it makes my soul hurt that I could do it, that I actually did it.

I should’ve been worrying.

I should’ve been worrying a lot.

Brian’s leaving tomorrow morning to go back to boarding school for the fall, and tonight I’m in the underworld looking for him. I’ve never been to a party before, didn’t know it was like being miles and miles underground, where demons walk around with their hair on fire. I’m pretty certain no one here can see me. It must be because I’m too young or skinny or something. Courtney’s parents are out of town and she decided we’d use her older sister’s party as a going away bash for Brian. I don’t want to be at a going away party for Brian. I want to be going away with Brian, like on a plane to the Serengeti to watch the blue wildebeests migrate.

I head down a smoky crowded hall, where everyone’s pressed to the walls in clumps like people-sculptures. No one’s face is arranged right. In the next room, it’s their bodies. People are dancing, and after I make sure Brian’s not here yet, I lean against the wall and take in the whole mob of sweating gleaming people with their piercings and plumage and windmilling arms as they jump and sway and spin and lift off into the air. I’m staring and staring, getting eaten by the music, getting new eyes—when I feel a hand, or maybe it’s a bird talon clawing into my shoulder. I turn to see an older girl with tons of springy red hair. She’s wearing a short shimmery brown dress and is way taller than me. Winding around her entire arm is an off-the-hook tattoo of a red-and-orange fire-breathing dragon. “Lost?” she asks loudly over the music, like she’s talking to a five-year-old.

I guess I’m not invisible after all. Her whole face is sparkling, especially the emerald-green wings around her icy blue eyes. Her pupils are huge black caves where bats live. “You’re so cute,” she shouts into my ear. She has a strange accent, kind of like Dracula’s, and looks like one of the ladies Klimt paints. “Your hair.” She pulls one of my curls until it’s perfectly straight. I can’t look away from her because that’s what happens with demons. “Such big, dark, soulful eyes,” she says slowly in her thick accent, like she’s making a meal of each word. The music has quieted down and thankfully so has her voice. “Bet all the little girls are after you.” I shake my head. “They will be, trust me.” She smiles and there’s a gash of red lipstick on one of her fangs. “Ever kiss a girl?” I shake my head again. I can’t seem to lie to her or break the demon spell in any way. And then with no warning, her crackly lips are pushing against mine, in between mine, and I can taste her, all smoky and the gross kind of too sweet like an orange that’s been in the sun all day. My eyes are open, so I can see the black spidery eyelashes sleeping on her cheeks. She’s really kissing me! Why? She pulls back, opens her eyes, and laughs when she sees the expression on my face. Putting one of her talons on my shoulder again, she leans in and whispers in my ear, “See you in a few years.” Then she turns and walks away on long bare legs, her devil tail swishing back and forth. I watch the fire-breathing dragon tattoo on her arm slither all the way up her shoulder and wrap around her neck.

Did that really just happen to me? Did I imagine it? Um, don’t think so, because I certainly wouldn’t have picked her if my imagination were in charge. I bring my hand to my mouth and wipe my lips. Red comes off on my fingers, her lipstick. It did happen. Do all people taste like sun-rancid oranges on the inside? Do I? Does Brian?

Brian.

I start toward the front door. I’ll wait for him outside and convince him to go up to the roof instead for his last night, like I wanted to anyway, so all the stars can fall on our heads one final time, so maybe what hasn’t happened all summer might finally happen, but as I enter the front hallway, I spot him following Courtney up a staircase, watch him as he razors through the crowd, nodding his head to guys, returning the smiles of girls, like he belongs. How is it he belongs everywhere?

(PORTRAIT: The Boy with All the Keys in the World with All the Locks)

When he reaches the top of the stairs, he turns around. His hands are on the banister and he’s leaning forward, surveying the room—is he looking for me? Yes, I know he is and it shape-shifts me into a waterfall. Can you die of this feeling? I’m thinking yes. I can’t even draw or paint it out of me anymore. When it comes on, and it comes on all the time now, I just have to lie down on my back and let it wash me away.

Courtney tugs on his arm and he slips off behind her without having found me and so I turn back into a person.

I squeeze up the steps after them with my head down. I don’t want to make eye contact, don’t want anyone talking to me, kissing me! Do people at parties just kiss other people for no reason? I know nothing. When I’ve almost reached the top of the stairs, I feel a hand on my arm. Not again. A small girl who looks like a gothed-out chipmunk hands me a red plastic cup full of beer. “Here,” she says, smiling. “You seem like you need one.” I say thanks and continue up. Maybe I do need one. I hear her say, “Isn’t he a little hottie?” to someone who replies, “Cradle robber.” God. So much for my secret garage workouts with Dad’s weights. Everyone here thinks I’m in kindergarten. But am I hot? It’s not possible, is it? I always assume girls look at me because they think I’m strange, not because they think I’m cute. Mom tells me I’m so handsomeadorablegorgeous, but that’s her job. How do you know if you’re hot? The redheaded kissing demon did say that my eyes were soulful.

Does Brian think I’m hot?

The idea goes straight to my groin and jerks me awake. He grabbed my hand under the armrest at the movie. More than awake. I stop, breathe, try to get under control, take a sip of the beer, well more like a giant gulp. It’s not horrible. I continue up the stairs.

The second floor is the opposite of the first, as it’s in heaven. I’m standing in a long, white-carpeted, white-walled cloud of a hallway with a bunch of closed doors on either side.

Which room did Brian and Courtney go into? What if they’re alone? What if they’re kissing? Or worse? Maybe she already has her shirt off. I take another drink of beer. What if he’s licking her boobs? Guys are really into that. He told me not to worry. He told me not to worry. He told me not to worry. Which was code, wasn’t it? Code for: I will not lick Courtney Barrett’s boobs, right? I take a huge gulp of the beer, worrying a real real lot.

In movies, terrible haywire things always happen on people’s last night places.

I go left down the hall, where it looks like some of the doors might be open a crack. In an alcove, I spot two people in a frenzy of red-hot making out. I slip back to watch. The guy has an incredible back that narrows just so into his jeans and the girl’s sandwiched between his body and the wall. His head’s moving like he can’t kiss her hard enough or fast enough. I tell myself to move on already, but then something catches my eye. The girl’s hands reaching around the guy’s back aren’t girls’ hands at all—no, there’s no way in hell those hands are anything but another guy’s. My chest starts to vibrate. I lean to the left and then I see flashes of both faces, strong-boned male faces, eyes closed like moons, smashed noses, mouths crushing together, their bodies climbing up each other and falling down each other at the same time. My legs start to shake, every part of me starts to shake. (SELF-PORTRAIT: Earthquake) I’ve never seen two guys kiss like this, like the world’s ending, except in my own head and it wasn’t half this good. Not even close. They’re so hungry.

I step back and steady myself against the wall out of sight.

I’m not sad, far far from it, so I don’t know why tears are busting out of my eyes.

Then I hear the squeak of a door opening on the other side of the hall. I wipe my face with the back of my hand and turn in the direction of the sound. Heather’s stepping out of a room—everything in me stills. It’s horrible to see her, like walking out of the best movie ever into some same old afternoon.

“Oh!” she cries, her face beaming. “I was coming to look for you.” I give my head a shake so hair curtains my face as much as possible. She’s walking toward me, getting closer and closer to the three of us. I kick into gear, rushing to intercept her. Her smile grows bigger and more welcoming and I realize she’s misinterpreted my leap across the hall as excitement to see her when all I want is to protect the kissing guys from her, from the whole world.

(PORTRAIT: Adam and Adam in the Garden)

When I reach her, I try to turn my mouth into a smile. It’s hard. I hear a hushed gruff laugh behind me, muffled words. Heather peers over my shoulder.

“Where is everyone?” I ask to get her attention back. I realize I’m still shaking. I bury my free hand deep in my pocket.

“You okay?” she asks, tilting her head. “You seem strange.” Her steady gray eyes are studying me. “More so than usual, I should say.” She smiles warmly and I relax a little. Heather and I have a secret but I have no idea what it is.

I wish I could tell her what just happened to me because even though I wasn’t technically part of that kiss, I feel like it happened to me, unlike the demon kiss downstairs, which technically happened to me but feels like it didn’t. But what would I tell her anyway? When I draw it, I’m going to make my skin see-through and what you’ll see is that all the animals in the zoo of me have broken out of their cages.

“Maybe it’s the beer,” I say.

She giggles, lifts a red plastic cup and taps mine. “Me too.”

Her giggling takes me aback. There’s nothing giggly about Heather usually. She’s the opposite; hanging out with her is like sitting in an empty church. That’s why I like her. She’s quiet and serious and a thousand years old and seems like she can talk to the wind. I always draw her with arms up like she’s about to take flight or with her hands together like she’s praying. She’s not a giggler.

“C’mon,” she says. “Everyone’s in here already.” She points toward the door. “We’ve been waiting for you. Well, I have.” She giggles again, then blushes like a geyser went off inside her. I have a supremely bad feeling.

We walk into some kind of den. I see Brian right away across the room talking to Courtney. All I want is to blink us into the bodies of the guys in the alcove. I try to, just in case. Then I think how many fingers I’d give up for one minute like that with him and decide seven. Or eight even. I could totally still draw with two fingers if one was a thumb.

I look around. It’s the same crew of hornets and surftards that hang out at The Spot, minus the older guys like Fry and Zephyr and Big Foot, who’re probably downstairs. I’m used to these people by now, and them me. There’s also a bunch of kids I don’t recognize that must go to Courtney’s private school. Everyone’s standing around in awkward shuffling bunches like they’re waiting for something. The air is full of breathing. The air’s full of Jude too. She’s leaning on a windowsill talking to like five hundred guys at once, wearing the tight red ruffly dress she made that Mom forbade her from ever wearing out of the house. I’m totally surprised to see her. She’s been giving me a wide angry berth all summer and knew I’d be here. I wonder what she told Mom. I just said I was going to say good-bye to Brian. We’re definitely not allowed to be at a party like this.

I catch her eye as Heather and I cross the room. She throws me a look that says: Nothing, not even a world where it rains light, where snow is purple, where frogs talk, where sunsets last a full year—could make up for the fact that you’re the worst mother-stealing, friend-pillaging twin brother on earth, and resumes her conversation with her harem.

My bad feeling is compounding.

I return my attention to Brian, who’s leaning against a bookcase, still talking to Courtney. About what? I try to hear as we approach them, then realize Heather’s speaking to me.

“It’s totally stupid. We haven’t played this kind of game since fifth grade, but whatever. We’re playing with a sense of irony, right?” Has she been talking this whole time?

“What game?” I ask.

Courtney turns around at the sound of our voices. “Oh, good.” She nudges Heather, who giggles again. Courtney turns to me. “It’s your lucky night, Picasso. You like games?”

“Not really,” I say. “Not at all, actually.”

“You’ll like this one. Promise. It’s a blast from the past. Heather and Jude and I were talking the other day about the parties we used to go to. Simple premise. Put two people of the opposite sex in a closet for seven minutes. See what happens.” Brian won’t meet my eyes. “Don’t worry, Picasso,” she says. “It’s fixed, of course.” Heather’s ears go red at this. They lock arms and then burst out laughing. My stomach goes watery. “Face it, dude,” Courtney says to me. “You could use a little help.”

I sure could.

I sure could because suddenly coils and coils of Jude’s hair are slithering in my direction like an army of serpents. Jude was there, Courtney said. Was this Jude’s idea, then? Because she knows I threw out that note she left for Mom? Because she knows how I feel about Brian?

(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Twins: Jude with Rattlesnake Hair, Noah with Rattlesnake Arms)

I’m getting a metal taste in my mouth. Brian’s reading the titles on the spines of books on the shelves like he’s going to be tested on it.

“I love you,” I say to him, only it comes out, “Hey.”

“So damn much,” he says back, only it comes out, “Dude.”

He still won’t meet my eyes.

Courtney picks up Brian’s hat, which has been resting on a small table. It’s full of folded-up pieces of paper. “All the guys’ names are already in, including yours,” she says to me. “Girls pick.”

She and Heather walk away. As soon as they’re out of earshot, I say to Brian, “Let’s go.” He doesn’t respond, so I say it again. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s climb out this window.” I’m checking the one beside us and there’s a landing that leads to a supremely climbable tree. We could totally make it. “C’mon,” I say. “Brian.”

“I don’t want to go, okay?” There’s irritation in his voice. “It’s just a stupid game. Whatever. No big deal.”

I study him. Does he want to play? He does. He must.

He wants to be with Courtney because if it’s fixed and Courtney’s doing the fixing, that’s what’s going to happen. That’s why he won’t meet my eyes. The realization drains the blood out of me. But why did he tell me not to worry? Why did he grab my hand? Why everything?

All the empty cages begin to rattle inside me.

I stumble over to an ugly beige chair in the middle of this ugly beige room. I fall onto it, only to discover it’s hard as stone and it breaks my spine in two. I sit there, broken in half, chugging the rest of my beer like it’s orange juice, remembering the English guy downing the gin that day. Then I grab another cup of beer that someone left and drink what’s in that one too. Purgatory, I think. If hell is downstairs and heaven is the hallway, then this must be purgatory—what happens in purgatory again? I’ve seen paintings of it but can’t remember. I feel supremely woozy. Am I drunk?

The lights start flashing on and off. Courtney’s at the switch, Heather by her side. “Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you’ve all been waiting for.”

Clementine reaches in first and chooses a guy named Dexter. Some tall kid I’ve never seen before with a cool haircut and clothes ten times too big for him. Everyone jeers and cheers and generally acts lame as they get up and walk into the closet with we-are-so-beyond-this looks on their faces. Courtney makes a display of setting the egg-timer. All I can think about is how much I hate her, how much I want her to get stampeded by a herd of pissed-off snapping turtles before she can get in that closet with Brian.

I stand with the help of the armrest, then bushwhack through an impossible thicket of Jude’s blond hair to a bathroom, where I splash cold water on my face. Beer sucks. I lift my head. It’s still me in the mirror. It’s still me in me, right? I’m not sure. And I’m certainly not hot, I can see that. I look like a skinny pathetic coward too afraid to jump off his dad’s shoulder into the water. It’s a sink-or-swim world, Noah.

The second I walk back into the room, I’m assaulted by, “You’ve been chosen, dude,” and “Heather picked you,” and “Your turn, Picasso.”

I swallow. Brian’s still studying those spines of books, his back to me as Heather takes my hand and leads me toward the closet, her arm pulled tight as if forcing an unwilling dog on a leash.

What I notice right away about the walk-in closet is that there are tons of dark suits hanging everywhere, looking like rows of men at a funeral.

Heather switches off the light, then says softly, shyly, “Help me find you, okay?” I think about escaping into the hanging suits, joining the men in mourning until the egg-timer goes off, but then Heather bumps into me and laughs. Her hands quickly find my arms. Her touch is so light, like two leaves have fallen on me.

“We don’t have to,” she whispers. Then, “Do you want to?”

I can feel her breath on my face. Her hair smells like sad flowers.

“Okay,” I say, but don’t move a muscle.

Time passes. It feels like lots and lots of it, so much that when we walk out of this closet, it’ll be time for us to go to college or die even. Except, because I’m counting in my head, I know that not even seven seconds of the seven minutes have passed. I’m calculating how many seconds are in seven minutes when I feel her small cool hands leave my arms and land on my cheeks, then feel her lips brush across mine, once, then again, the second time staying there. It’s like being kissed by a feather, no, smoother, a petal. So soft. Too soft. We’re petal people. I think about the earthquake kiss in the alcove and want to cry again. This time because I am sad. And scared. And because my skin has never fit this badly before.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy in a Blender)

I realize my arms are lying limp at my sides. I should do something with them, shouldn’t I? I rest a hand on her waist, which totally feels like the wrong place for it, so I move it to her back, which also feels entirely wrong, but before I can reposition it, her lips open, so I open my mine too—it’s not disgusting. She doesn’t taste like a rancid orange but like mint, like she had a mint right before. I’m wondering what I taste like as her tongue slips into my mouth. It shocks me how wet it is. And warm. And tongue-y. My tongue’s going nowhere. I’m telling it to move and enter her mouth, but it won’t listen to me. I figure it out: There’s 420 seconds in seven minutes. Maybe twenty seconds have passed, which means we still have 400 seconds left of this. Oh fucking fuck.

And then it happens. Brian rises out of the darkness of my mind and takes my hand like he did in the movie theater and pulls me to him. I can smell his sweat, can hear his voice. Noah, he says in that bone-melting way and my hands are in Heather’s hair, and I’m pressing my body against hers hard, drawing her closer to me, pushing my tongue deep inside her mouth . . .

We must not hear the ding of the timer, because all of a sudden the light switches on and the mourning men are all around us again, not to mention Courtney in the doorway tapping an invisible watch on her wrist. “C’mon, lovebirds. Time’s up.” I blink a few hundred times at the invasion of light. At the invasion of the truth. Heather looks dizzy, dreamy. Heather looks one hundred percent like Heather. I’ve done a bad thing. To her, to me. To Brian, even if he doesn’t care, it still feels that way. Maybe the girl downstairs turned me into a demon like her with that kiss.

“Wow,” Heather whispers. “I’ve never . . . No one’s ever . . . Wow. That was incredible.”

She can barely walk. I look down to make sure I don’t have a tent in my pants as she takes my hand and we emerge from the closet like two unsteady cubs from a hibernation den. Everyone starts whistling and saying lame things like, “Bedroom’s down the hall.”

I scan the room for Brian, expecting him to be examining the spines of books still, but he’s not. His face is like I’ve seen it only once before, all bricked up with fury, like he wants to hurl a meteorite at my head and he’s not going to miss.

But?

Heather runs off to join the hornets. The whole room’s been engulfed by Jude’s hair. The whole universe has. I fall into a recliner. Nothing makes sense. It’s just a stupid game, he said. No big deal. But then, he said it was No big deal when his mother’s friend (boyfriend?) came on to him too and that seemed like it was a big deal to him. Maybe No big deal is code for: This is Supernaturally Screwed Up. I’m sorry, I tell him in my mind. It was you, I tell him. I kissed you.

I drop my head in my hands, start involuntarily eavesdropping on a group of guys behind me, who must be having a contest to see how many times they can say how gay this or that is in one conversation, when someone touches my shoulder. It’s Heather.

I nod at her, then try to hide in my hair and mind-control her to go away, like to the Amazon . . . I feel her stiffening beside me, probably not understanding why I’ve sent her six thousand miles away to the jungle after a kiss like that. I hate being like this to her, but I don’t know what else to do. When I peek up through my hair moments later, she’s gone. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath. I’m mid-exhale when I see Brian being escorted into the closet, not by Courtney, but by my sister.

My sister.

How is this happening? This can’t be happening. I blink and blink, but it’s still happening. I look over at Courtney, who has her hand in Brian’s hat. She’s opening the folded pieces of paper wondering what went wrong. Jude is what went wrong. I can’t believe she’d go this far.

I have to do something.

“No!” I shout, jumping up from the chair. “No!”

Only I don’t do that.

I run to the egg-timer, grab it off the table, and ring it and ring it and ring it.

Only I don’t do that either.

I don’t do anything.

I can’t do anything.

I’ve been eviscerated.

(SELF-PORTRAIT: Gutted Fish)

Brian and Jude are going to kiss each other.

They’re probably kissing each other right this second.

Somehow I manage to get up from the chair, out of that room, down the stairs, and out the door of the house. I stagger across the porch, feeling like I’m falling off my feet with every step. Blurs of people are blurring around the yard. I stumble through them, through the black back-stabbing air toward the road. In my daze, I realize I’m scanning the crowd for the crazy-in-love, making-out guys from the alcove, but they’re nowhere. I bet I imagined them.

I bet they don’t exist.

I look toward the woods, watch all the trees crash down.

(GROUP PORTRAIT: All the Glass Boys Shatter)

From behind me, I hear someone with a slurring English accent say, “If it isn’t the clandestine artist.” I turn to see the naked English guy, except he’s dressed in a leather jacket and jeans and boots. He has the same mental smile on his same mental face. The same eyes that don’t match. I remember how Jude gave up the sun and stars and oceans for my drawing of him. I’m going to steal it back from her. I’m going to take everything from her.

If she were drowning, I’d hold her head under.

“I know you, mate,” he says, teetering on his feet, pointing at me with a bottle of some kind of alcohol.

“No you don’t,” I say. “No one does.”

His eyes clear for a second. “You’re right about that.”

We stare at each other for a moment without saying anything. I remember how he looked naked and don’t even care because I’m dead. I’m going to move underground with the moles and breathe dirt.

“What are you called anyway?” he asks.

What am I called? What a strange question. Bubble, I think. I’m called freaking Bubble.

“Picasso,” I say.

His eyebrows arch. “You taking the piss?”

What does that mean?

He slurs on, throwing words into the air all around us. “Well, that must keep the bar nice and low, no problem filling those shoes, like naming your kid Shakespeare. What were they thinking, your parents?” He takes a swig.

I pray to the forest of fallen trees that Brian looks out the window and sees me here with the naked English guy. Jude too.

“You’re like from a movie,” I think and say at the same time.

He laughs and his face kaleidoscopes. “A crap movie, then. Been sleeping in the park for weeks now. Except for the night I slept behind bars, of course.”

Jail? He’s an outlaw? He looks like one. “Why?” I ask.

“Drunk and disorderly. Disturbing the peace. Whoever heard of getting arrested for being disorderly?” I struggle to decipher his sloshed words. “Are you orderly, Picasso? Is anyone?” I shake my head and he nods. “That’s what I said. There’s no peace to disturb. I kept telling the cop: No. Peace. To. Disturb. Man.” Putting two cigarettes in his mouth, he lights one, the other, then sucks on them both. I’ve never seen someone smoke two at once. Gray plumes of smoke come out his nose and mouth at the same time. He hands me one of the cigarettes, which I take because what else am I going to do? “Got myself chucked from that posh art school you don’t go to.” He puts a hand on my shoulder to steady himself. “Doesn’t matter, would’ve gotten chucked anyway when they found out I wasn’t really eighteen.” I feel how wobbly he is and plant my feet into the ground. Then I remember the cigarette in my hand and bring it to my lips, only to suck in and immediately cough it out. He doesn’t notice. He might be as drunk as one of those guys who talks to lampposts and I’m the lamppost. I want to take the bottle from him and pour it out.

“I gotta go,” I say, because I’ve started imagining Brian and Jude touching each other in the dark. All over. Can’t stop imagining it.

“Right,” he says, not looking at me. “Right.”

“Maybe you should go home,” I say, then remember about the park, about jail.

He nods, despair stuck to every part of his face.

I start walking off, ditching the cigarette first thing. After a few steps, I hear, “Picasso,” and turn.

He points the bottle at me. “I modeled a couple times for this barking maniac of a sculptor called Guillermo Garcia. He has loads of students. I’m sure he wouldn’t even notice if you showed some afternoon. You could actually be in a room with a model, like that other Picasso bloke.”

“Where?” I ask, and when he tells me, I repeat the address a few times in my head so I’ll remember. Not that I’ll go, because I’ll be in prison myself for the murder of my twin sister.

Jude planned this. I’m sure of it. I know it was her idea. She’s been pissed at me for so long about Mom. About the hornets. And she must’ve found the note she wrote to Mom buried in the garbage. This is her revenge. She probably had a piece of paper with Brian’s name on it right in her hand.

Without any of the hornets realizing it, she triggered a nest attack on me.

I walk down the hill toward home, getting carpet-bombed with images of Brian and Jude, him all tangled up in her hair, in her light, in her normal. That’s what he wants. That’s why he erected the fence between us. Then electrified it for double protection against me, stupid weirdo me. I think how full-on I kissed Heather. Oh God. Is Brian kissing Jude like that? Is she him? A horrible flailing monster of a noise comes out of me and then the whole disgusting night wants to come out of me too. I run to the side of the road and throw up each grain of beer and that disgusting drag of a cigarette, every last lying, revolting kiss, until I’m just a bag of clattering bones.

When I get home, I see that there are lights on in the living room, so I climb through my window, always open a crack, in case Brian decided to break and enter one night, like I’d imagine before falling asleep, all summer long. I cringe at myself. At what I wanted.

(LANDSCAPE: The Collapsed World)

I turn on the lamp in my bedroom and beeline for Dad’s camera, but it’s not where I always leave it under my bed. I tear the room apart with my eyes, exhaling only when I spot it on my desk, sitting there like a live grenade. Who moved it? Who freaking moved it? Did I leave it there? Maybe I did. I don’t know. I lunge for it and call up the photos. The first one that comes up is from last year when Grandma died. A big round laughing sand lady with her arms open to the sky like she’s about to lift off. It’s freaking amazing. I put my finger on the delete button and press hard, press murderously. I call the rest up, each one more awesome and strange and cool than the next, and wipe them out, one by one, until every trace of my sister’s talent is gone from the world and only mine is left.

Then, after I sneak by the living room—Mom and Dad have fallen asleep in front of some war movie—I go into Jude’s room, take the portrait of the naked English guy off the wall, rip it to shreds and spread it like confetti all over the floor. Next, I return to my room and start on the drawings of Brian—it takes forever to tear them all to pieces, there are so many. When I’m done, I stuff his remains into three large black plastic bags and stow them under the bed. Tomorrow I’m going to throw him, every last bit of him, over Devil’s Drop.

Because he can’t swim.

Even after all that, Jude’s still not home! It’s an hour past our summer curfew now. I can only imagine. I have to stop imagining.

I have to stop holding this rock and praying he’s going to come to the window.

He doesn’t.