I'll Give You the Sun

THE HISTORY OF LUCK

Jude

Age 16

I’m going to wish with my hands, like Sandy said.

I’m going to use The Oracle.

I’m going to sit here at my desk and use it—in the traditional way—to find out everything I can about Guillermo Garcia aka Drunken Igor aka The Rock Star of the Sculpture World. I have to make this sculpture and it has to be in stone and he’s the only one who can help me do that. This is the way to get through to Mom. I feel it.

However, before I do all this, I’m going to suck the living hell out of this lemon—the mortal enemy of the aphrodisiacal orange:

Because I have to nip this in the bud.

Grandma pipes in. “Ah yes, Him with a capital H and I don’t mean Mr. Gable. A certain big . . . bad . . . British . . . wolf?” She milks the last bit for all its worth.

“I don’t know what it was about him,” I tell her in my head. “Oh man. Besides everything,” I tell her outside my head.

And then I can’t help it. Giving it my best English accent, I say, “Such a chatterbox, a guy can’t get a word in.” The smile I denied him in church overtakes my face until I’m beaming at the wall.

Oh Clark Gable, stop.

I shove the half-lemon in, shove Grandma out, tell myself the English bloke has glandular fever, cold sores, and tooth decay, the trifecta of unkissability, like every other hot male in Lost Cove.

Cooties. Major cooties. English cooties.

With sour making my whole head pucker, with the boy boycott back in full swing, I boot up my laptop and type into The Oracle: Guillermo Garcia and Art Tomorrow, hoping to find Mom’s interview. But no luck. The magazine doesn’t archive online. I input his name again and do an image search.

And it’s Invasion of the Granite Giants.

Massive rock-beings. Walking mountains. Expression explosions. I love them instantly. Igor told me he wasn’t okay. Well, neither is his art. I start bookmarking reviews and pieces, choose a work that makes my heart sink and swell at the same time as a new screensaver, then grab my sculpture textbook off the shelf, certain he’s in it. His work is too amazing for him not to be.

He is, and I’m on the second read of his bona fide bonkers biography, one that belongs in Grandma’s bible, not a textbook, so I’ve ripped it out and clipped it into the over-stuffed leather-bound book, when I hear the front door open, followed by a flurry of voices and a stampede of footsteps coming down the hall.

Noah.

I wish I’d shut my door. Dive under the bed? Before I can make the move, they’re barreling by, peering in at me like I’m The Bearded Lady. And somewhere in that happy humming hive of athletic, preternaturally normal teenagers is my brother.

Best sit down for it:

Noah’s joined a sports team at Roosevelt High.

Granted, it’s cross-country, not football, and Heather’s on the team, but still. He’s a member of a gang.

To my surprise, a moment later, he doubles back and enters my room, and it’s as if Mom’s standing before me. It’s always been the case, me fair like Dad, him dark like Mom, but his resemblance to her has become uncanny, therefore: heart-snatching. Whereas there’s not a hint of Mom on me, never was. When people used to see us alone, I’m sure they assumed I was adopted.

It’s unusual, Noah in my room, and my stomach’s clenching up. I hate how nervous it makes me to be near him now. Also—what Sandy said today. How, unbeknownst to me, someone took pictures of my flying sand women and sent them in to CSA. It had to have been Noah, which means: He got me in only to end up having to go to Roosevelt himself.

I taste guilt right through the citrus.

“So, hey,” he says, shuffling back and forth on a pair of running mud-cakes, driving dirt deeper and deeper into my plush white carpet. I say nothing about it. He could chop off my ear and I’d say nothing about it. His face is the opposite of how it looked in the sky earlier today. It’s padlocked. “You know how Dad’s going away for the week? We—” He nods at his room, where music and laughter and uniformity resounds. “We thought it’d be cool to have a party here. You okay with that?”

I stare at him, beseeching the aliens or Clark Gable or whoever’s in charge of soul abductions to bring back my brother. Because in addition to joining dangerous gangs and having parties, this Noah also goes out with girls, keeps his hair buzzed and tidy, hangs at The Spot, watches sports with Dad. For all other sixteen-year-old boys: fine. For Noah, it signifies one thing: death of the spirit. A book with the wrong story in it. My brother, the revolutionary weirdo, has covered himself in flame retardant, to use his terminology. Dad’s thrilled, of course, thinks Noah and Heather are a couple—they’re not. I’m the only one who seems to know how dire the situation is.

“Um, Jude, do you know there’s a lemon wrapped around your teeth?”

“Of course I know,” I say, though it sounds like garble for obvious reasons. Ah, lightbulb! Taking advantage of the sudden language barrier, I look right at him and add, “What have you done with my brother? If you see him, tell him I miss him. Tell him I’m—”

“Hello? Can’t understand you with the voodoo lemon in your mouth.” He shakes his head in a dismissive Dad kind of way and I can tell he’s about to get on my case. My interests disturb him, which I guess makes us even. “You know, I borrowed your laptop the other day to do a paper when Heather was using mine. I saw your search history.” Uh-oh. “Jesus, Jude. How many diseases can you think you have in one night? And all those freaking obituaries you read—like from every county in California.” Now seems like a good time to imagine the meadow. He points to the bible outspread on my lap. “And maybe you could give that totally lame book a rest for a while, and, I don’t know, get out. Talk to someone besides our dead grandmother. Think about things besides dying. It’s so—”

I take out the lemon. “What? Embarrassing?” I remember saying this to him once—how embarrassing he was—and cringe at the former me. Is it possible our personalities have swapped bodies? In third grade, Mrs. Michaels, the art teacher, told us we were to do self-portraits. We were across the room from each other and without so much as sharing a glance, I drew him, and he me. Sometimes, now, it feels like that.

“I wasn’t going to say embarrassing,” he says, brushing a hand through his bushel of hair, only to find that it’s no longer there. He touches the back of his neck instead.

“Yes you were.”

“Okay I was, because, it is totally embarrassing. I go to pay for my lunch today and pull out these.” He reaches in his pocket and shows me the assortment of extremely protective beans and seeds I stowed there.

“I’m just looking out for you, Noah, even if you’re a card-carrying artichoke.”

“Totally freaking mental, Jude.”

“You know what I think is mental? Having a party on the second anniversary of your mother’s death.”

His face cracks for a second, then just as quickly seals up. “I know you’re in there!” I want to scream. It’s true; I do know it. This is how:

1) His weird obsession with jumping Devil’s Drop and the sublime way he looked in the sky today.

2) There are times when he’s slumped in a chair, lying on his bed, curled up on the couch, and I wave my hand across his face and he doesn’t even blink. It’s as if he’s gone blind. Where is he during those times? What’s he doing in there? Because I suspect he’s painting. I suspect that inside the impenetrable fortress of conventionality he’s become, there’s one crazy-ass museum.

And most significantly: 3) I’ve discovered (search-history snooping is a two-way street) that Noah, who hardly ever goes online, who’s probably the only teenager in America indifferent to virtual reality and all social media, posts a message on a site called LostConnections.com, always the same one and pretty much every week.

I check—he’s never gotten a response. I’m certain the message is for Brian, who I haven’t seen since Mom’s funeral, and who, as far as I know, hasn’t been back to Lost Cove since his mother moved away.

For the record, I knew what was going on between Brian and Noah even if no one else did. All that summer when Noah came home at night from hanging out with him, he’d draw pictures of NoahandBrian until his fingers were so raw and swollen he’d have to take trips from his room to the freezer, where he’d bury his hand in the ice tray. He didn’t know I was watching him from the hallway, how he’d collapse against the refrigerator, his forehead pressed against the cold door, his eyes closed, his dreams outside of his body.

He didn’t know the moment he left in the morning, I’d go through the secret sketchpads he hid under his bed. It was like he’d discovered a whole new color spectrum. It was like he’d found another galaxy of imagery. It was like he’d replaced me.

To be clear: More than anything, I wish I hadn’t gone into that closet with Brian. But their story wasn’t over that night.

I wish I hadn’t done a lot of things I did back then.

I wish going into that closet with Brian was the worst of it.

He’s looking down at his feet. Intently. I don’t know what he’s thinking and it makes my bones feel hollow. He lifts his head. “We’re not going to have the party on the anniversary. It’ll be the day before,” he says quietly, his dark eyes soft, just like Mom’s.

Even though the last thing I want is a bunch of Hideaway Hill surfers like Zephyr Ravens anywhere near me, I say, “Have it.” I say this instead of what I’d say to him if I still had the voodoo lemon in: I’m sorry. For everything.

“Come for once?” He gestures toward the wall. “Wear one of those?” Unlike me, my room is one big blast of girl, with all the dresses I make—floating and not—hanging all over the walls. It’s like having friends.

I shrug. “Don’t do social events. Don’t wear the dresses.”

“You used to.”

I don’t say, “And you used to make art and like boys and talk to horses and pull the moon through the window for my birthday present.”

If Mom came back, she wouldn’t be able to pick either of us out of a police lineup.

Or Dad, for that matter, who’s just materialized in the doorway. Benjamin Sweetwine: The Sequel has skin the color and texture of gray earthenware clay. His pants are always too big and belted awkwardly so he looks like a scarecrow, like if someone pulled the belt he’d turn into a pile of straw. This might be my fault. Grandma and I have largely taken over the kitchen, using the bible as cookbook:

Dad seems to always appear like this now too, without the foreshadowing of say, footsteps? My eyes migrate to his shoes, which are indeed on his feet, which are indeed on the ground and pointing in the right direction—good. Well, you start to wonder who’s the specter in the family. You start to wonder why your dead parent is more present and accounted for than the living one. Most of the time, I only know Dad’s home because I hear a toilet flush or the TV turn on. He never listens to jazz or swims anymore. He mostly just stares off with a faraway perplexed look on his face, like he’s trying to work through an impenetrable mathematical equation.

And he goes for walks.

The walking started a day after the funeral when all Mom’s friends and colleagues still filled the house. “Going for a walk,” he’d said to me, bowing out the back door, leaving me (Noah was nowhere to be found), and not returning home until after everyone had left. The next day was the same: “Going for a walk,” and so were the days and weeks and months and years that followed, with everyone always telling me they saw my dad up on Old Mine Road, which is fifteen miles from here, or at Bandit Beach, which is even farther. I imagine him getting hit by cars, washed away by rogue waves, attacked by mountain lions. I imagine him not coming back. I used to ambush him on his way out, asking if I could walk with him, to which he’d reply, “Just need some time to think, honey.”

While he’s thinking, I wait for the phone to ring with the news that there’s been an accident.

That’s what they tell you: There’s been an accident.

Mom was on her way to see Dad when it happened. They’d been separated for about a month and he was staying at a hotel. She told Noah before she left that afternoon that she was going to ask Dad to come home so we could be a family again.

But she died instead.

To lighten the mood in my head, I ask, “Dad, isn’t there a disease where the flesh calcifies until the poor afflicted person is trapped within their own body like it’s a stone prison? I’m pretty sure I read about it in one of your journals.”

He and Noah share one of their “glances” at my expense. Oh Clark Gable, groan.

Dad says, “It’s called FOP and it’s extremely rare, Jude. Extremely, extremely rare.”

“Oh, I don’t think I have it or anything.” Not literally, anyway. I don’t share that I think the three of us all might have it metaphorically. Our real selves buried so deep in these imposter ones. Dad’s medical journals can be just as illuminating as Grandma’s bible.

“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?” And a moment of family bonding ensues! We all roll the eyes in unison with dramatic Grandma Sweetwine flair. But then Dad’s forehead creases. “Honey, is there a reason why there’s a very large onion in your pocket?”

I look down at my illness deflector yawning open my sweatshirt pocket. I’d forgotten about it. Did the English guy see it too? Oh dear.

Dad says, “Jude, you really—” But what I’m certain is to be another artichoke lecture about my bible-thumping tendencies or my long-distance relationship with Grandma (he doesn’t know about Mom) is cut short because he’s been shot with a stun gun.

“Dad?” His face has gone pale—well, paler. “Dad?” I repeat, following his distraught gaze to the computer screen. Is it Family of Mourners? It was my favorite of the Guillermo Garcia works I saw, very upsetting, though. Three massive grief-stricken rock-giants who reminded me of us, the way Dad, Noah, and I must’ve looked standing over Mom’s grave as if we might topple in after her. It must remind Dad too.

I look at Noah and find him in the same condition, also staring intently at the screen. The padlock is gone. A red glow of emotion has taken over his face and neck, even his hands. This is promising. He’s actually reacting to art.

“I know,” I say to both of them. “Incredible work, right?”

Neither of them responds. I’m not sure if either of them even heard me.

Then Dad says brusquely, “Going for a walk,” and Noah says equally brusquely, “My friends,” and they’re gone.

And I’m the only bat in this belfry?

The thing is: I know I’ve slipped. I see my buttons popping off and flying in all directions on a daily basis. What worries me about Dad and Noah is that they seem to think they’re okay.

I go to the window, open it, and in come the eerie moans and caws of the loons, the thunder of the winter waves, stellar waves, I see. For a moment I’m back on my board, busting through the break zone, cold briny air in my lungs—except then, I’m dragging Noah in to shore and it’s again that day two years ago when he almost drowned and the weight of him is pulling us both under with each stroke—no.

No.

I close the window, yank down the shade.

Later that night when I get on the computer to learn more about Guillermo Garcia, I find that the bookmarks I saved have been deleted.

The Family of Mourners screensaver has been changed to a single purple tulip.

When I question Noah about it, he says he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but I don’t believe him.

Noah’s party’s raging all around me. Dad’s off at his parasite conference for the week. Christmas was a bust. And I just made an early New Year’s resolution, no, it’s a New Year’s revolution, and this is it: to return to Guillermo Garcia’s studio tonight and ask him to mentor me. So far since winter break began, I’ve chickened out. Because what if he says no? What if he says yes? What if he bludgeons me with a chisel? What if the English guy is there? What if he isn’t? What if he bludgeons me with a chisel? What if my mother breaks stone as easily as clay? What if this rash on my arm is leprosy?

Etc.

I put all such questions into The Oracle a moment ago and the results were conclusive. No time like the present, it was decided, egged on by the fact that people from Noah’s party—Zephyr included—kept knocking on my door, which was locked with a dresser in front of it. So out the window I went, sweeping the twelve sand-dollar birds I keep on the sill into my sweatshirt pocket. They’re not as lucky as four-leaf clovers or even red sea glass, but they’ll have to do.

I follow the yellow reflectors in the middle of the road down the hill, listening for cars and serial killers. It’s another white-out. It’s way spooky. And this is a really bad idea. But I’m committed to it now, so I start to run through the cold wet nothingness and pray to Clark Gable that Guillermo Garcia is just a regular sort of maniac and not a girl-murdering one and try not to wonder if the English guy will be there. Try not to think about his different-colored eyes and the intensity that crackled off him and how familiar he looked and how he called me a fallen angel and said, “You’re her,” and before too long all that not-thinking has gotten me to the studio door and light is pouring out from beneath it.

Drunken Igor must be inside. An image of him with his greasy hair and wiry black beard and blue calloused fingers fills my head. A very itchy image. He probably has lice. I mean, if I were a louse I’d choose him to colonize. All that hair. No offense, but ick.

I take a few steps back, see a bank of windows on the side of the building, all lit up—the studio space must be back there. An idea begins to take shape. A great idea. Because maybe there’s a way to spy inside his studio undetected . . . yes, like from that fire escape in back, I think, spotting it. I want to see the giants. I want to see Drunken Igor too, and from behind glass seems perfect. Brilliant, really. Before I know it, I’m over the fence, and hustling down a pitch-dark alley, one in which girls get bludgeoned with chisels.

(This is an honest-to-goodness entry. The wisdom of Grandma’s bible knows no bounds.)

I reach the fire escape—alive—and start climbing, mouse-quiet, toward the light blaring from the landing.

What am I doing?

Well, I’m doing it. At the top of the stairs, I squat down and scoot like a crab under the windows. Once I’ve cleared them, I stand back up, hugging the wall as I peer into a huge brightly lit space—

And there they are. Giants. Giant giants. But different from the ones in the photographs. These are all couples. Across the room, enormous rock-beings are embracing as if on a dance floor, as if they’ve all frozen mid-move. No, not embracing, actually. Not yet. It’s like each “man” and “woman” were hurling themselves at each other passionately, desperately, and then time stopped before they could make it into each other’s arms.

Adrenaline courses through me. No wonder Interview had him taking a baseball bat to Rodin’s The Kiss. It’s so polite and, well, boring, in comparison—

My train of thought’s interrupted because bounding into the large space as if his skin can’t contain the uproar of blood within is Drunken Igor, but utterly transformed. He’s shaved, washed his hair, and put on a smock, which is spattered with clay, as is the water bottle he’s holding to his lips. There was no mention in his bio that he worked in clay. He guzzles from the bottle like he’s been wandering the desert with Moses, drains it, then tosses it into a trash can.

Someone’s plugged him in.

To a nuclear reactor.

Ladies and gentlemen: The Rock Star of the Sculpture World.

He moves toward a clay work-in-progress in the center of the room and when he’s within a few feet of it, he begins circling it slowly, like predator on prey, speaking in a deep rumble of a voice I can hear through the window. I look at the door, assuming someone’s about to follow him in, someone immersed in this conversation with him, like the English guy, I think with a flutter, but no one joins him. I can’t make out a word of what he’s saying. It sounds like Spanish.

Maybe he has ghosts too. Good. Something in common then.

All at once, he seizes on the sculpture and the suddenness of the action makes my breath catch. He’s a downed power line, the way he moves. Except now the power’s been cut and he’s pressing his forehead into the belly of the sculpture. No offense (again), but what a freak. He has his large open hands on each side of the work, and he’s just staying like that, unmoving, as if he’s praying or listening for a pulse or totally out of his gourd. Then I see his hands begin to move slowly up and down and across the surface of the piece, dragging clay off, bit by bit, throwing fistfuls onto the floor, but as he does this, he never once lifts his head to look at what he’s doing. He’s sculpting blind. Oh wow.

I wish Noah could see this. And Mom.

Eventually, he steps back in a stumbling kind of way as if pulling himself out of a trance, takes a cigarette pack out of a pocket in his smock, lights up, and, leaning against a nearby table, he smokes and stares at the sculpture, tilting his head from left to right. I’m recalling his bonkers biography. How he came from a long line of gravestone cutters in Colombia and began carving at the age of five. How no one had ever seen angels as magnificent as his, and people who lived near the cemeteries where his statues watched over the dead swore they heard them singing at night, swore that their heavenly voices carried into their homes, their sleep, their dreams. How it was rumored that the boy carver was enchanted or possibly possessed.

I’m going with the latter.

He’s the kind of man who walks into a room and all the walls fall down. Agreed, Mom, which puts me back at square one. How am I going to ask him to mentor me? This him is far more frightening than Igor.

He flicks his cigarette on the floor, takes a long sip of water from a glass on the table, then spits it from his mouth onto the clay—ah, gross!—then he works the moistened section furiously with his fingers, his eyes now glued to what he’s doing. He’s lost in it, drinking and spitting and molding, drinking and spitting and molding, sculpting like he’s trying to pull something he needs out of the clay, needs badly. As time passes and passes, I begin to see a man and a woman take shape—two bodies tangled up like branches.

This is wishing with your hands.

I don’t know how much time goes by as I and a handful of enormous stone couples watch him work, watch him rake his hands, dripping with wet clay, through his hair, over and over again, until it’s not clear if he’s making the sculpture or if the sculpture is making him.

It’s dawn and I’m sneaking back up Guillermo Garcia’s fire escape.

Once on the landing, I again crawl along under the sill until I’m at the same vantage point as last night, then rise just enough to see into the studio . . . He’s still there. I somehow knew he would be. He’s sitting on the platform, his back to me, head hung down, his whole body limp. He hasn’t changed his clothes. Has he slept at all? The clay sculpture beside him appears to be finished now—he must’ve worked all night—but it’s nothing like it was when I left. No longer are the lovers entwined in each other’s arms. The male figure’s on his back now and it looks like the female figure’s wrenching herself out of him, climbing right out of his chest.

It’s awful.

I notice then that Guillermo Garcia’s shoulders are rising and falling. Because he’s crying? As if by osmosis, a dark swell of emotion rises in me. I swallow hard, accordion my shoulders tight. Not that I ever cry.

I can hear the sculptor through the window—a deep dark moaning that’s sucking the air out of the air. I have to get out of here. Tucking down to leave, I remember the lucky sand-dollar birds still in my pocket from last night. He needs them. I’m lining them up on the windowsill, when out of the corner of my eye, I catch a quick flash of motion. His arm’s whipped back and is starting to reel forward—

“No!” I shout, not thinking and slamming my own hand into the window to stop his from making contact and sending the anguished lovers tumbling to their death.

Before I fly down the fire escape, I see him staring up at me, the expression on his face turning from shock to rage.

I’m halfway over the fence when I hear the door horror-movie-squeak open like it did the other day and see in my periphery his immense frame emerge from it. I have two choices. I retreat back into the alley and get ambushed or I jump onto the sidewalk and make a run for it. Not much of a choice really, I think, as I land feet first—whew—but then stumble forward into what would’ve been an extremely unlucky face-flop had a very large hand not reached out and iron-gripped my arm, restoring my balance.

“Thank you,” I hear myself say. Thank you? “That would’ve been a bad fall,” I explain to his feet, quickly adding, “You can’t imagine how many brain injuries happen from falling and if it’s frontal lobe, well, forget it, you can just kiss your personality good-bye, which really makes you wonder what a person is if they can just become someone else if they bonk their heads, you know?” Whew—on a roll, off to the races, put on this earth solely to soliloquize to his ginormous clay-covered shoes. “If it were up to me,” I go on, kicked into some heretofore unknown gear, “which of course nothing is, and if it didn’t present such a total fashion conundrum, I’d have us all in titanium helmets from womb to grave. I mean, anything can fall on your head at any time. Have you ever thought about that? An air conditioner for instance, one could just drop out of a second-story window and crush you while you’re minding your own business shopping for bagels on Main Street.” I take a breath. “Or a brick. Of course there’s the flying brick to worry about.”

“The flying brick?” The timbre of his voice has a lot in common with thunder.

“Yes, the flying brick.”

“A flying brick?”

What, is he dense? “Sure. Or a coconut, I suppose, if you live in the tropics.”

“You are off the rocker.”

“Your rocker,” I say quietly. I still haven’t raised my head, think that’s best.

A lot of Spanish is coming out of his mouth now. I recognize the word loca quite a few times. On the exasperation scale, I’d say he’s at a ten. His smell’s very strong, no offense, but we’re talking total sweaty ape. Not a whiff of alcohol on him, though. Igor’s not here, this maniac’s all Rock Star.

I remain committed to my eyes-on-the-shoes strategy, so I’m not sure but believe he’s released his grip on my arm so he can accompany the ranting in Spanish with flailing hand gestures. That or birds are swooping around above my head. When the movement stills and the irate Spanish peters out, I gather my nerve and raise my head to take a gander at what I’m up against here. Not good. He’s a skyscraper, impossibly imposing with his arms crossed now against his chest in a battle stance, studying me like I’m a new life form. Which really is pot meet kettle, because, wow, up close he looks like he just emerged from a pit of quicksand—a total swamp thing. He’s completely covered in clay except for the streaks on his cheeks from crying and the hellfire green eyes that are drilling into me.

“Well?” he says with impatience, like he’s already asked me a question I didn’t answer.

I swallow. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to . . .” Um, what comes next? I didn’t mean to jump a fence, climb a fire escape, and watch you have a nervous breakdown.

I try again. “I came last night—”

“You’ve been up there watching me all night?” he roars. “I tell you go away the other day and you come back and watch me all night?”

Not only puppies, this man eats adorable bouncing babies.

“No. Not all night . . .” I say, and then before I know it, I’m at it again. “I wanted to ask you to mentor me, you know, I’d work as an intern, do whatever, clean up, anything, because I have to make this sculpture.” I meet his eyes. “Just have to make it and it has to be in stone for many reasons, ones you wouldn’t even believe, and my teacher Sandy said you’re the only one who carves anymore, like practically in the world”—did he just smile ever so faintly?—“but when I came you seemed so . . . I don’t know what, and of course, you told me to go away, which I did, but then I came back last night thinking I’d try to ask again, but chickened out, because, okay, you’re a little scary, I mean frankly, whoa—you are like totally scary . . .” His eyebrows rise at that, cracking the clay on his forehead. “But last night, the way you sculpted that piece blind, it was . . .” I try to think of what it was, but can’t come up with anything to do it justice. “I just couldn’t believe it, could not believe it, and then I’ve been thinking that you might be, I don’t know, maybe a little magical or something because in my sculpture textbook it talked all about those angels you used to carve as a kid, and it said you were believed to be enchanted, or possessed even, no offense, and this sculpture, the one I have to make, well, I need help, that kind of help, because I have this idea that I can make things right, like if I make it, maybe someone will understand something finally and that is very important to me, very, very important, because she never understood me, not really, and she’s very mad about something I did . . .” I take a breath, add, “And I’m sad too.” I sigh. “I’m not okay either. Not at all. I wanted to tell you that the last time I came. Sandy even made me go to the school counselor, but she just told me to imagine a meadow . . .” I realize I’m done, so I close my mouth and stand there waiting for the paramedics, or whoever comes with the straightjacket.

It’s more than I’ve talked in the last two years combined.

He brings his hand to his mouth and begins examining me less like I’m a space alien and more like he did that sculpture last night. When he finally speaks, to my great surprise and relief, he doesn’t say, “I’m calling the authorities,” but, “We will have a cup of coffee. Yes? I could use a break.”

I follow Guillermo Garcia down a dark dusty hallway with many closed doors leading to rooms where all the other sixteen-year-old art students are kept chained up. It occurs to me that no one knows I’m here. Suddenly the whole gravestone-cutter thing doesn’t seem like such a plus.

I say my name three times into my closed hand. Six times. Nine times and counting . . .

He turns around, smiles, points with his finger into the air. “No one makes coffee as good as Guillermo Garcia.”

I smile back. So that didn’t seem particularly homicidal, but maybe he’s trying to relax me, ease me into his lair, like the witch in Hansel and Gretel.

Health Alert: A respirator is in order. Whole civilizations of motes are caught in the thick stripes of light beaming down from two high windows. I look at the floor, jeez, it’s so dusty I’m making footprints. I wish I could hover like Grandma S. so as not to stir it all up. And this dankness—there’s got to be toxic black mold spores creeping all over these cement walls.

We enter a bigger area.

“The mailroom,” Guillermo says.

He’s not kidding. There are tables, chairs, couches, land-sliding with months, maybe years of mail, all unopened, falling to the floor in piles. There’s a kitchen area to my right teeming with botulism, another closed door, surely where some bound and gagged hostages are, a staircase leading to a loft area—I can see an unmade bed—and on my left, oh Clark Gable yes, to my great happiness, there is: a life-size stone angel that looks like it lived outside long before it moved in here.

It’s one of them. It has to be. Jackpot! In his biography, it said that to this day, in Colombia, people come from far and wide to whisper their wishes into the cold stone ears of a Guillermo Garcia angel. This one is spectacular, as tall as me, with hair that falls down her back in long loose locks that appear to be made of silk, not stone. Her wide oval face is cast downward like she’s gazing lovingly over a child, and her wings rise from her back like freedom. She looks like David did in Sandy’s office, one breath away from life. I want to hug her or start squealing but instead ask calmly, “Does she sing to you at night?”

“I am afraid, the angels, they do not sing to me,” he says.

“Yeah, me neither,” I say, which for some reason makes him turn around and smile at me.

When his back is to me again, I make a hard left and tiptoe across the room. I can’t help it. I have to get my wish in that angel’s ear immediately.

He waves an arm in the air. “Yes, yes, everyone does that. If only it work.”

I ignore his skepticism and wish my heart out into the perfect shell-like ear of the angel—Best to bet on all the horses, dear—noticing, when I’ve finished, that the wall behind the angel is covered in sketches, mostly of bodies, lovers, blank-faced men and women embracing or rather exploding in each other’s arms. Studies, I suppose, for the giants in the other room? I survey the mailroom again, see that most of the walls are similarly covered. The only break in the cave art is where a large painting hangs without a frame. It’s of a woman and a man kissing on a cliff by the sea while the whole world around them spins into a tornado of color—the palette is bold and bright like Kandinsky’s or my Mom’s favorite Franz Marc’s.

I didn’t know he painted too.

I walk over to the canvas, or maybe it’s the other way around. Some paintings stay on a wall; not this one. It’s color-flooding out of two dimensions, so I’m smack in the middle of it, smack in the middle of a kiss that could make a girl, one not on a boycott, wonder where a certain English guy might be . . .

“It saves paper,” Guillermo Garcia says. I didn’t realize I’d started tracing my hand over one of the wall-sketches by the painting. He’s leaning against a large industrial sink watching me. “I like the trees very much.”

“Trees are cool,” I say absently, a bit overwhelmed by all the naked bodies, all the love, the lust everywhere around me. “But they’re my brother’s, not mine,” I add without thinking. I glance at his hand for a wedding ring. None. And no feeling that a woman’s been here for ages. But what about the giant couples? And the woman wrenching out of the male form in the sculpture he made last night? And this painting of a kiss? And all these lusty cave drawings? And Drunken Igor? And the sobbing I witnessed? Sandy said something happened to him—what was it? What is it? There’s definitely the feeling here that something’s gone terribly wrong.

The clay on Guillermo’s forehead has crinkled up with his confusion. I realize what I just said about the trees. “Oh, my brother and I divvied up the world when we were younger,” I tell him. “I had to give him the trees and the sun and some other stuff for an incredible cubist portrait he made that I wanted.”

The remains of the portrait are still in a plastic bag under my bed. When I got home from Brian’s going away party that night, I saw that Noah had ripped it up and scattered it all over my bedroom. I thought: That’s right, I don’t deserve a love story. Not anymore. Love stories aren’t written for girls who could do what I just did to my brother, for girls with black hearts.

Still, I gathered up every last piece of the guy. I’ve tried to put him back together so many times, but it’s impossible. I can’t even remember what he looked like now, but I’ll never forget the reaction I had when I first saw him in Noah’s drawing pad. I had to have him. I would’ve given up the real sun, so giving him an imaginary one was nothing.

“I see,” Guillermo Garcia says. “So how long did these negotiations last? To divide the world?”

“They were ongoing.”

He crosses his arms, again in that battle stance. It seems to be his preferred pose. “You are very powerful, you and your brother. Like gods,” he says. “But honestly, I do not think you make a good trade.” He shakes his head. “You say you are so sad, maybe this is why. No sun. No trees.”

“I lost the stars and the oceans too,” I tell him.

“This is terrible,” he says, his eyes widening inside the clay mask of his face. “You are a terrible negotiator. You need a lawyer next time.” There’s amusement in his voice.

I smile at him. “I got to keep the flowers.”

“Thank God,” he says.

Something strange is going on, something so strange I can’t quite believe it. I feel at ease. Of all places, here, with him.

Alas, that’s what I’m thinking when I notice the cat, the black cat. Guillermo leans down, takes the black bundle of bad luck into his arms. He nuzzles his head into its neck, cooing to it in Spanish. Most serial killers are animal lovers, I read that once.

“This is Frida Kahlo.” He turns around. “You know Kahlo?”

“Of course.” Mom’s book on her and Diego Rivera is called Count the Ways. I’ve read it cover to cover.

“Wonderful artist . . . so tormented.” He holds up the cat so she’s facing him. “Like you,” he says to the cat, then lowers her to the floor. She slinks right back to him, rubbing herself against his legs, oblivious to the years of rotten luck she’s filling our lives with.

“Did you know that toxoplasmosis and campylobacteriosis are transmitted to humans from the fecal matter of cats?” I ask Guillermo.

He knits his brow, making the clay on his forehead break into fissures. “No, I did not know. And I do not want to know that.” He’s spinning a pot in the air with his hands. “I’ve erased it from my mind already. Gone. Poof. You should too. Flying bricks and now this. I never even hear of those things.”

“You could go blind or worse. It happens. People have no idea how dangerous having pets is.”

“This is what you think? That it is dangerous to have a little kitty cat?”

“Most definitely. Especially a black one, but that’s a whole other bunch of bananas.”

“Okay,” he says. “That is what you think. You know what I think? I think you are crazy.” He throws his head back and laughs. It warms up the entire world. “Totally loca.” He turns around and starts talking in Spanish, saying Clark Gable knows what as he takes off his smock, hangs it on a hook. Underneath he’s wearing jeans and a black T-shirt like a normal guy. He pulls a notepad out of the front pocket of the smock and slips it into the back pocket of his jeans. I wonder if it’s an idea pad. At CSA, we’re encouraged to keep an idea pad on our person at all times. Mine’s empty. He turns both faucets on full blast, puts one arm underneath, then the other, scrubbing both with industrial soap. Brown water runs off him in muddy streams. Next he puts his whole head under the faucet. This is going to take a while.

I bend down to make friends with bad-luck Frida, who’s still circling Guillermo’s feet. Keep your enemies close, as they say. What’s so odd is that even with Frida and the toxoplasmosis and this man who should terrify me for so many reasons, I feel more at home than I have anywhere for so long. I scratch my fingers on the floor, trying to get the cat’s attention. “Frida,” I say softly.

The title of Mom’s book Count the Ways on Kahlo and Rivera is a line taken from her favorite poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Do you know it by heart?” I’d asked her one day when we were walking in the woods together, just us, a rarity.

“Of course I do.” She did a joyful little skip and pulled me close to her so that every inch of me felt happy and leaping. “‘How do I love thee?’” she said, her big dark eyes shining on me, our hair whipping around our heads, blending and twisting together in the wind. I knew it was a romantic poem, but that day, it felt about us, our private mother-daughter thing. “‘Let me count the ways,’” she sang out . . . wait, she is singing out! “‘I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach—’”

It’s her, here, now—her deep gravelly voice is reciting the poem to me!

“‘I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.’”

“Mom?” I whisper. “I hear you.”

Every single night before I go to bed, I read this poem aloud to her, wishing for this.

“Okay down there?” I peer up into the unmasked face of Guillermo Garcia, who now looks like he just got out of the ocean, his black hair slicked back and dripping, a towel thrown over his shoulder.

“I’m fine,” I say to him, but I’m far from it. My mother’s ghost spoke to me. She recited the poem back to me. She told me she loves me. Still.

I get to my feet. What must’ve I looked like? Squatting there on the floor, no cat in sight, totally lost, whispering to my dead mother.

Guillermo’s face now resembles the photos I saw online. Any one of his features would be dramatic, but all of them together, it’s a turf war, a rumble for territory, nose against mouth against flashing eyes. I can’t tell if he’s grotesque or gorgeous.

He’s examining me too.

“Your bones”—he touches his own cheek—“are very delicate. You have the bird bones.” His eyes drop, sweeping past my breasts, landing with confusion somewhere in the middle of me. I look down, expecting the onion to be in plain view or something else I forgot I was carrying for luck today, but it’s not that. My T-shirt has risen up under my unzipped sweatshirt and he’s staring at my exposed midriff, my tattoo. He takes a step toward me, and without asking, lifts my shirt so he can see the whole image. Oh boy. Ohboyohboy. His hand’s holding up the fabric. I can feel the heat of his fingertips on my belly. My heart speeds up. This is inappropriate, right? I mean, he’s old. A dad’s age. Except he sure doesn’t seem like a dad.

Then I see in his face that my stomach’s about as interesting to him as stretched canvas. He’s mesmerized by my tattoo, not me. Not sure if I’m relieved or insulted.

He meets my eyes, nods approval. “Raphael on the belly,” he says. “Very nice.” I can’t help but smile. He does too. A week before Mom died, I spent every penny I’d ever saved on it. Zephyr knew this guy who’d tattoo underage kids. I chose Raphael’s cherubs because they reminded me of NoahandJude—more one than two. Plus they can fly. Mostly now I think I did it to piss off Mom, but I never even got to show it to her . . . How can people die when you’re in a fight with them? When you’re smack in the middle of hating them? When absolutely nothing between you has been worked out?

Guillermo motions for me to follow him, then stops at the entrance to the grand studio space, which unlike the rest of the place is sunny and fairly tidy. He holds his hand up to the room of giants. “My rocks, though I suppose you’ve already met.”

I suppose I have met them, but not like this, towering above us like titans.

“I feel so puny,” I say.

“Me too,” he says. “Like an ant.”

“But you’re their creator.”

“Perhaps,” he says. “I don’t know. Who knows . . .” He’s muttering something I can’t hear and conducting a symphony with his hands as he walks away from me toward a counter that has a hot plate with a kettle on it.

“Hey maybe you have Alice in Wonderland Syndrome!” I call after him, the idea taking hold of me. He turns. “That’s this totally cool neurological condition where the scale of things gets distorted in the mind. Usually people who have it see everything teeny-tiny—miniature people driving around in Matchbox cars, that sort of thing—but it can happen like this too.” I hold my hands out to the room as proof of my diagnosis.

He does not seem to think he has Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. I can tell because the loca tirade in Spanish has begun again as he bangs around the cabinets. While he makes coffee and rants, good-naturedly, I believe, this time—it’s possible I’m amusing him—I circle the pair of lovers closest to me, brushing my fingers over their gritty granular flesh, then step between them and reach my hands up, wanting to climb up their giant lovelorn bodies.

Maybe he’s suffering from a different kind of syndrome after all. Lovesickness, it would seem, if the repeating motif around this place is any indication.

I keep my new diagnosis to myself as I join him at the counter. He’s pouring water from the kettle through two filters poised over mugs and has begun singing to himself in Spanish. It occurs to me what the unfamiliar feeling is that’s overtaking me: well-being. At ease has graduated to a full-on sense of well-being. And maybe he’s experiencing it too, what with the singing and all.

Perhaps I could move in? I’d bring my sewing machine and that’s it. I’d just have to dodge the English guy . . . who maybe is Guillermo’s son . . . a love child he didn’t know about until recently, who grew up in England. Yes!

And . . . looking around for a lemon.

“As promised, nectar of the gods,” he says, placing the two steaming mugs on a table. I sit down on the red sofa beside it. “Now, we talk, yes?” He joins me on the couch, as does his ape-man smell. But I don’t even care. I don’t even care that the sun’s going to burn out in a matter of years, ending all life on Earth, well, five billion years, but still, guess what? I don’t care. Well-being is a wonderful thing.

He picks up a box of sugar on the table and proceeds to pour a ton into his mug, spilling as much.

“That’s lucky,” I say.

“What is?”

“Spilling sugar. Spilling salt is bad luck, but sugar . . .”

“I’ve heard that one before.” He smiles, then whacks the box with the back of his hand so that it falls over and its contents spill onto the floor. “There.”

I feel a surge of delight. “I don’t know if it counts if you do it on purpose.”

“Of course it counts,” he says, tapping a cigarette out of a crumpled pack left on the table, next to another one of those notepads. He leans back, lights up, inhales deeply. The smoke curls in the air between us. He’s examining me again. “I want you to know I hear what you say outside. About this.” He places his hand on his chest. “You were honest with me, so I be honest with you.” He’s looking into my eyes. It’s dizzying. “When you came the other day, I was not in good shape. I am not in good shape sometimes . . . I know I told you go away. I don’t know what else I say to you. I don’t remember much . . . that whole week.” He waves the cigarette in the air. “But I tell you, I am not teaching anymore for a reason. I don’t have it, the thing you need. I just don’t have.” He takes a drag, exhales a long gray stream of smoke, then gestures at the giants. “I am like them. Every day I think to myself, it happen, finally I become the rock I carve.”

“Me too,” I blurt out. “I’m made of stone too. I thought that exact thing the other day. I think my whole family is. There’s this disease called FOP—”

“No, no, no, you are not made of the stone,” he interrupts. “You do not have this disease called FOP. Or any disease called anything.” He touches my cheek tenderly with his calloused fingers, leaves them there. “Trust me,” he says. “If anyone knows this, it is me.”

His eyes have become gentle. I’m swimming in them.

It’s suddenly so quiet inside me.

I nod and he smiles and takes his hand away. I place mine where his was, not understanding what’s going on. Why all I want is his hand back on my face. All I want is for him to touch my cheek like that and tell me I’m fine again and again until I am.

He stamps out the cigarette. “I, however, am a different story. I have not taught in years. I will not. Probably not ever again. So . . .”

Oh. I wrap my arms around myself. I’ve been terribly mistaken. I thought when he invited me in for coffee he was saying yes. I thought he was going to help me. My lungs feel like they’re closing up.

“I only want to work now.” A shadow has darkened his face. “It is all I have. It is all I can do to . . .” He doesn’t finish, just stares off at the giants. “They are the only ones I want to think about or care about, understand? That’s it.” His voice has grown solemn, leaden.

I stare down at my hands, disappointment pooling inside me, black and thick and hopeless.

“So,” he continues. “I think about this, assume you are at CSA because you mention Sandy, yes?” I nod. “There is someone there, no? Ivan something, he is in that department, he can surely help you with this piece?”

“He’s in Italy,” I say, my voice cracking. Oh no. How can this be? Now? Oh not now, please. But it is now. For the first time in two years, tears are streaming down my cheeks. I wipe them away quickly, again and again. “I understand,” I say, getting up. “Really. It’s fine. It was a dumb idea. Thank you for the coffee.” I have to get out of here. I have to stop crying. There’s a sob building inside me so immense and powerful it’s going to break all my bird bones. It’s Judemageddon. I keep my arms tightly fastened around my ribs as I make my trembling legs move across the bright sunny studio, through the mailroom, and down the dark musty hallway, completely blinded from the contrast, when his baritone voice stops me.

“This sculpture needs to be made so much you cry like this?”

I turn around. He’s leaning against the wall by the painting of the kiss, his arms crossed.

“Yes,” I gasp out, then say more calmly, “Yes.” Is he changing his mind? The sob begins to retreat.

He’s stroking his chin. His expression softens. “You need to make this sculpture so badly, you will risk your young life by sharing space with a disease-carrying cat?”

“Yes. Totally, yes. Please.”

“You are sure you want to forsake the warm, moist breath of clay for the cold, unforgiving eternity of stone.”

“I am sure.” Whatever that means.

“Come back tomorrow afternoon. Bring your portfolio and a sketchpad. And tell your brother to give you back the sun, trees, stars, all of it already. I think you need.”

“You’re saying yes?”

“I am. I do not know why but I am.”

I’m about to leap across the room and hug him.

“Oh no.” He wags a finger at me. “Do not look so happy. I tell you ahead of time. All my students despise me.”

I click Guillermo’s front door shut, lean against it, not sure what happened to me in there. I feel disoriented like I’ve been watching a movie or like I’ve just woken up from a dream. I thank and rethank the beautiful stone angel inside who granted my wish. There is the problem of my portfolio being full of broken bowls and blobs. There is also the problem that he said to bring a sketchpad and I can’t sketch. I got a C in life drawing last year. Drawing is Noah’s thing.

Doesn’t matter. He said yes.

I look around, taking in Day Street, wide and tree-lined, with a combination of dilapidated Victorians where college students live, warehouses, the occasional business, and the church. I’m letting the first sun we’ve seen this winter soak into my bones, when I hear the screech of a motorcycle. I watch the adrenaline-happy driver, who thinks he’s at the Indy 500, boomerang a turn at such an extreme angle the side of the bike scrapes the street. Jeez, no offense, but what a stupid reckless idiot.

Evel Knievel screeches once again, but to a halt this time, not fifteen feet from me, and takes off his helmet.

Oh.

Of course.

And in sunglasses. Someone call medevac.

“Well, hello there,” he says. “The fallen angel has returned.”

He doesn’t talk, he lilts, his words taking to the air like birds. And why do English people sound smarter than the rest of us? Like they should be awarded the Nobel Prize for a simple greeting?

I zip up my sweatshirt to my neck.

But can’t seem to get the boy blinders on.

Still a reckless idiot, yes, but damn, he looks fine, sitting on that bike on this sunny winter day. Guys like him really shouldn’t be allowed on motorcycles. They should have to bounce around on pogo sticks, or better: Hippity Hops. And no hot guy should be allowed to have an English accent and drive a motorcycle.

Not to mention wear the leather jacket or sport the cool shades. Hot guys should be forced into footie pajamas.

Yes, yes, the boycott, the boycott.

Still, I’d like to say something this time so he doesn’t think I’m a mute.

“Well, hello there,” I offer, mimicking him exactly, English accent and all! Oh no. I feel my face flushing. Losing the accent, I quickly add, “Nice turn back there.”

“Ah yes,” he says, dismounting. “I have a problem with impulse control. Or so I’m quite frequently told.”

Great. Six feet of bad luck and impulse-control issues. I cross my arms like Guillermo. “You probably have an underdeveloped frontal lobe. That’s where self-control comes from.”

This cracks him up. It makes his face go everywhere at once. “Well, thank you for the medical opinion. Much appreciated.”

I like that I made him laugh. A nice laugh, easy and friendly, lovely really, not that I notice. Frankly, I also believe I have impulse-control issues, well, used to. Now I’m very much in control of things. “So what kind of impulses can’t you control?”

“Not a one, I’m afraid,” he says. “That’s the problem.”

That is the problem. He’s tailor-made to torture. I’m betting he’s at least eighteen, betting he stands alone at parties leaning against walls, knocking back shots while long-legged girls in fire-engine red mini-dresses slink up to him. Granted, I haven’t been to a lot of parties lately, but I have seen a lot of movies and he’s that guy: the lawless, solitary, hurricane-hearted one who wreaks havoc, blowing through towns, through girls, through his own tragic misunderstood life. A real bad boy, not like the fake ones at my art school, with their ink and piercings and trust funds and cigarettes from France.

I bet he just got out of jail.

I decide to pursue his “condition” as it falls under medical research, not because I’m fascinated by him or flirting with him or anything like that. I say, “Meaning if you were in the room with The Button, you know, the end of the world nuclear bomb button, just you and it, man and button, you’d press it? Just like that.”

He laughs that wonderful easy laugh again. “Kapow,” he says, illustrating the explosion with his hands.

Kapow is right.

I watch as he locks his helmet on the back of his bike, then detaches a camera bag from the handlebars. The camera. I have an instant Pavlovian response to it, remembering how I’d felt sitting in church with him looking at me through it. I drop my gaze to the ground, wishing my pale skin didn’t blush so easily.

“So what’s your business with The Rock Star?” he asks. “Let me guess. You want him to mentor you like every other female art student from The Institute.”

Okay, that was snide. And does he think I go to The Institute in the city? That I’m in college?

“He’s agreed to mentor me,” I reply triumphantly, not appreciating the innuendo. No other art student, female or not, needs his help like I do, to make things right with their dead mother. This is a very unique situation.

“Is that right?” He’s out of his head pleased. “Well done.” I’m back in the spotlight of his gaze and having the same sense of vertigo I did in church. “I just can’t believe it. Well done, you. It’s been a very, very long time since he’s taken on a student.” This makes me nervous. As does he. Kapow, kaboom, kaput. Time to go. Which involves moving the legs. Move the legs, Jude.

“Got lucky,” I say, trying not to trip over my own feet as I pass him, my hands deep in my sweatshirt pockets, one wrapped around the onion, the other around a bag of herbs that promise protection. I say, “You should really trade in that thing for a Hippity Hop. Much safer.” For the female gender, I don’t add.

“What’s a Hippity Hop?” he says to my retreating back. I don’t notice how incredibly cute the words Hippity Hop sound coming out of his mouth with that accent.

Without turning around, I reply, “A large, round rubber animal you bounce around on. You hold on to the ears.”

“Oh, of course, a Space Hopper, then.” He laughs. “We call them Space Hoppers in England. I had a green one,” he yells after me. “A dinosaur I named Godzilla. I was a very original thinker.” Mine was a purple horse I named Pony. I was also an original thinker. “Well, nice seeing you again, whoever you are. The photos of you are brilliant. I stopped by the church a few times looking for you. Thought you might want to see them.”

He was looking for me?

I don’t turn around; my cheeks are burning up. A few times? Be cool. Keep cool. I take a breath and with my back still to him, I raise my hand and wave bye exactly like he did that day in church. He laughs again. Oh Clark Gable. Then I hear, “Hey, wait a minute.”

I consider ignoring this, but can’t resist the impulse (you see?) and turn around.

“Just realized I have an extra,” he says, pulling an orange out of the pocket of his leather jacket. He tosses it to me.

He’s got to be kidding. Is this really happening? The orange! As in, the anti-lemon:

I catch it in my open palm.

“Oh no you don’t,” I say, tossing it right back to him.

“Odd response,” he says, catching it. “Definitely an odd response. Think I’ll try again. Would you like an orange? I have an extra.”

“I’d like to give you the orange, actually.”

One of his eyebrows arches. “Well, yes, that’s fine and good, but it’s not yours to bloody give.” He holds it up, smiling. “This is my orange.”

Is it possible I’ve found the only two people in Lost Cove I amuse rather than disturb?

“How about this,” I say. “You give it to me and I’ll give it back to you. Sound acceptable?”

And yes, I’m flirting, but this is necessary. And wow, it’s like riding a bicycle.

“All right then.” He walks up to me, close, so close I could reach up and trace his scars with my finger if I wanted to. They’re like two hastily sewn seams. And I see that his brown eye has a splash of green in it and the green one a splash of brown. Like Cezanne painted them. Impressionist eyes. And his lashes are black as soot, exquisite. He’s so close I could run my fingers through his shiny, tangly brown hair, run them across the faint spidery wrinkles that fan out at his temples, across the dark worrying shadows beneath. Across his red satiny lips. I don’t think other guys’ lips are this red. And I know their faces aren’t this colorful, this vivid, this lived-in, this superbly off-kilter, this brimming with dark, unpredictable music.

NOT THAT I EFFING NOTICE.

Nor that he’s regarding my face with the same intensity I am his. We’re two paintings staring at each other across a room. A painting I’ve seen before, I’m sure of it. But where and when? If I’d met this guy, I’d remember. Maybe he looks like an actor I’ve seen in a movie? Or some musician? He definitely has that sexy musician hair. Bass player hair.

For the record, breathing is overrated. The brain can go six whole minutes without oxygen. I’m at three airless minutes when he says, “Well, then. The matter at hand.” He holds up the orange. “Would you like an orange, whoever you are?”

“Yes, thank you,” I reply, taking it, then say, “And now I’d like to give you an orange, whoever you are.”

“No thank you,” he says, slipping his hands in his pockets. “I have another.” All holy hell breaks loose on his face as it erupts into a smile and then in a flash he’s up the path, the steps, and in the studio.

Not so fast, buddy.

I walk over to his motorcycle, slip the orange into the helmet.

Then I use all my self-control not to burst into song—he went to the church looking for me! A few times! Probably to tell me what he meant that day when he said, “You’re her.” I head home, kicking myself because I got so flustered I didn’t even think to ask what his relationship to The Rock Star is. Or his name. Or how old he is. Or who his favorite photographer is. Or—

Snap.

Out.

Of.

It.

I stop walking. Remembering. The boycott is no lark. It’s a necessity. I can’t forget that. I can’t. Especially not today on the anniversary of the accident.

Not any day.

What I need to do is make this sculpture and try to make things right with my mother.

What I need to do is wish with my hands.

What I must do is eat every last lemon in Lost Cove by morning.

It’s the next afternoon and I’m hurrying down the grimy fungal hallway in Guillermo Garcia’s studio because no one came to the door when I knocked. I’m sweating and nervous and reconsidering the last sixteen years. Under my arm is my CSA portfolio of broken blobs and bowls. The only reason I even have a portfolio is because we’re required to take a progression of pictures of every piece we make. My progressions are insane, certainly not an advertisement of ability—more like an accounting of a ceramic shop after an earthquake.

Right before I enter the mailroom, I hear the English-accented voice and a whole percussion section bursts to life in my chest. I back against the wall, try to silence the pounding. I was hoping he wouldn’t be here. And hoping he would be. And hoping I’d stop hoping he would be. However, I’ve come prepared.

Alas, perhaps I’m not prepared for this: sex noises. Unmistakable sex noises. Moaning and groaning and obscene murmurings. Is this why nobody answered the door? In an English accent, I hear: “Holy Christ, so good. God, soooooo damn good. Better than any drug, I mean any. Better than anything.” Followed by a long drawl of a moan.

Then a deeper groan, which must be Guillermo’s. Because they’re lovers! Of course. How stupid could I be? The English guy is Guillermo’s boyfriend, not his long-lost son. But he sure seemed straight when he was taking pictures of me in church and when he was talking to me outside the studio yesterday too. So attentive. Did I misread him? Or maybe he’s bi? And what about all Guillermo’s hyper-heterosexual artwork?

And not to judge, but cradle-rob much? There’s probably a quarter century between them.

Should I leave? They seem to have settled down and are now just bantering back and forth. I listen closely. The English guy is trying to convince Guillermo to go to some type of sauna with him later this afternoon. Definitely gay. Good. This is great news, actually. The boycott will be a snap to maintain, oranges or no oranges.

I make a bunch of noise, stamping on the floor, clearing my throat several times, a few more stomps, then step around the corner.

In front of me is a fully clothed Guillermo and a fully clothed English guy on opposite sides of a chessboard. There’s no indication they were just in the throes of passion. Each has a half-eaten donut in his hand.

“Very clever, aren’t we?” the English guy says to me at once. “Never would’ve suspected you of such subterfuge, whoever you are.” With his free hand, he reaches into the messenger bag resting beside him and pulls out the orange. In a flash it’s airborne, then in my hand, and his face has broken into five million pieces of happiness. “Nice catch,” he says.

Victorious, he takes a bite of donut, then moans theatrically.

Okay. Not gay. Not lovers, they both just appear to like donuts more than your average bear. And what am I going to do now? Because my invisibility uniform doesn’t seem to work with this guy. And ditto the vinegar-soaked mirror and extinguished candle stub.

I stuff the orange in with the onion and pull my cap down.

Guillermo gives me a curious look. “So you’ve already met the resident guru? Oscar is trying to enlighten me as usual.” Oscar. He has a name and it’s Oscar, not that I care, though I do like the way Guillermo says it: Oscore! Guillermo continues. “Every day, something else. Today it is Bikram yoga.” Ah, the sauna. “You know this yoga?” he asks me.

“I know that’s a real lot of bacteria in one hot sweaty room,” I tell Guillermo.

He drops his head back and laughs heartily. “She is so crazy with the germs, Oscore! She think Frida Kahlo is going to kill me.” This relaxes me. He relaxes me. Who would’ve thought Guillermo Garcia, The Rock Star of the Sculpture World, would have this soothing effect on me? Maybe he’s the meadow!

A surprised look has crossed Oscar’s face as he studies Guillermo, then me. “So how did the two of you meet?” he asks.

I rest my portfolio and bag against an easy chair that’s smothered in unopened mail. “He caught me on the fire escape spying on him.”

Oscar’s eyes widen but his attention’s back on the chessboard. He moves a piece. “And you’re still sentient? Impressive.” He pops the remaining piece of donut in his mouth and closes his eyes as he slowly chews. I can see the rapture taking him over. Jesus. That must be some donut. I tear my eyes off him, hard to do.

“She win me over,” Guillermo says while studying Oscar’s move. “Like you win me over, Oscore. Long time ago.” His face darkens. “Ay, cabrón.” He starts muttering in Spanish as he nudges a piece forward.

“G. saved my life,” Oscar says with affection. “And checkmate, mate.” He leans back on his chair, balancing on the rear legs, says, “I hear they’re giving lessons down at the senior center.”

Guillermo groans, for the first time not donut-related, and flips the board so pieces go flying in every direction. “I kill you in your sleep,” he says, which makes Oscar laugh, then Guillermo picks up a white bakery bag and holds it out to me.

I decline, way too nervous to eat.

“‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,’” Oscar says to me, still balancing on the back legs of his chair. “William Blake.”

Guillermo says to him, “Yes, very good, one of your twelve steps, Oscore?” I look at Oscore. Is he in AA? I didn’t know you could be an alcoholic if you weren’t old. Or maybe he’s in NA? Didn’t he just say something about no drug being as good as that donut. Is he a drug addict? He did say he has impulse-control issues.

“Indeed,” Oscar says with a smile. “The step known only to the in crowd.”

“How did you save his life?” I ask Guillermo, dying to know.

But it’s Oscar who answers. “He found me half dead from pills and booze in the park and somehow recognized me. According to him: ‘I hoist Oscore over my shoulders like a deer’”—he’s slipped into a perfect Guillermo Garcia impersonation that includes hand gestures—“‘and I carry him across town like Superman and deposit him in the loft.’” He turns back into himself. “All I know is I woke up with G.’s monstrous face in mine”—he laughs his god-awful laugh—“and had no idea how it had gotten there. It was mad. He started barking orders at me right away. Told me I could stay here if I got clean. Ordered me to go to ‘two meetings a day, understand, Oscore? The NA in the morning, the AA in the evening.’ Then, maybe because I’m English, I don’t know, he quoted Winston Churchill: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’ Understand, Oscore? Morning, noon, and night he said this to me: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going,’ so I did. I kept going and going and now I’m at university and not dead in a ditch somewhere and that is how he saved my life. Highly abridged and sanitized. It was hell.”

And that is why there are several lifetimes in Oscar’s face.

And he is in college.

I glance down at my sneakers, thinking about that Churchill quote. What if there was a time when I was going through hell too, but I didn’t have the courage to keep going? So I just stopped. Pressed pause. What if I’m still on pause?

Guillermo says, “And to thank me for saving his life, he beat me at chess every single day since.”

I look at the two of them mirroring each other across the table and realize: They are father and son, just not by blood. I didn’t know that family members could just find each other, choose each other like they have. I love the idea. And I’d like to trade in Dad and Noah for these two.

Guillermo shakes the bag at me. “Your first lesson: My studio is not a democracy. Have a donut.”

I walk over and peek into the bag. The smell almost makes my knees give out—they weren’t exaggerating. “Wow,” I hear myself say. They both smile. I choose one. It’s not covered in chocolate but drowned in it. And it’s still warm.

“Ten dollars says you can’t eat that donut without moaning,” Oscar says. “Or closing your eyes.” He looks at me in a way that causes a minor cerebral hemorrhage. “Actually, let’s say twenty. I remember how you got in front of the camera.” He knew how I’d felt that day in church?

He holds out his hand to seal the bet.

I shake it—and quite sure I experience close to a lethal dose of electricity. I’m in trouble.

No time to dwell, though. Guillermo and Oscar are giving the show before them—me—their undivided attention. How did I get into this? Tentatively, I lift the donut to my mouth. I take a small bite and despite the fact that all I want to do is close my eyes and moan a porn soundtrack, I resist.

Oh . . . It’s harder than I thought! The second bite is bigger and brings joy to each cell in my body. This is the kind of thing you should only do in private, not with a Guillermo and an Oscore staring you down, both of them with arms crossed and very superior expressions on their faces.

I’m going to have to up the ante. I mean, I have a bevy of horrific diseases to choose from, don’t I? Diseases to imagine in vivid moan-repressing detail. Skin conditions are the worst.

“So there’s this disease,” I tell them, taking a bite, “called tungiasis where fleas burrow and lay eggs beneath your skin and you can see them hatching and moving around under there, all over your body.”

I take in their appalled expressions. Ha! Three bites down.

“Remarkable, even with the fleas,” Guillermo says to Oscar.

“She doesn’t have a prayer,” he replies.

I bring out the heavy artillery.

“There was this Indonesian fisherman,” I tell them. “He’s called The Tree Man because he had such a severe case of human papiloma virus of the skin that thirteen pounds of horn-like warts had to be removed from his body.” I make eye contact with one, then the other, repeat, “Thirteen pounds of warts.”

I relate the way the poor Tree Man’s extremities hung from him like gnarled trunks, and with that disturbing image firmly planted in my head, I’m pumped, confident, and take a bigger bite. But it’s the wrong move. The rich warm chocolate overtakes my mouth, erases my mind, spinning me into a state of transcendence. Tree Man or not, I’m defenseless and the next thing I know, my eyes are closed and out of my mouth explodes, “Oh my fucking God! What’s in this?” I take another bite and then unleash a moan so obscene I can’t believe it came out of me.

Oscar laughs. Guillermo, equally pleased, says, “There it is. The government should use Dwyer’s donuts to control our minds.”

I dredge a crumpled twenty-dollar bill from my jeans pocket, but Oscar holds up a hand. “First loss on the house.”

Guillermo pulls up a chair for me—it feels like being admitted into a club—then holds the bag out. We each take another donut, and then the three of us proceed to visit with Clark Gable.

After, Guillermo slaps his thighs with his hands and says, “Okay, CJ, now we get to it. I leave a message for Sandy this morning on his voicemail. I tell him I agree to do a studio credit for your winter term.” He stands.

“Thank you. This is so amazing.” I stand too, feeling jittery, wishing we could just sit around and eat donuts all afternoon. “But how . . .” I realized last night I hadn’t yet told him my name.

He registers my surprise. “Oh. Sandy leave a message on the machine, a garbled message—I kick that old machine one too many times—said a CJ wanted to work in stone. That is all I understand. Days ago, he call. I did not check until today.”

“CJ,” Oscar says like it’s a revelation.

I’m about to tell them my real name, then decide not to. Maybe for once I don’t have to be Dianna Sweetwine’s poor motherless daughter.

Frida Kahlo slinks into the room and pads over to Oscar, curling around his leg. He picks her up and she nuzzles her nose into his neck, purring like a turbine. “I have a way with the ladies,” he says to me, stroking Frida under her chin with his index finger.

“I wouldn’t notice,” I say. “I’m on a boycott.”

He lifts his green and brown Cezanne eyes. His eyelashes are so black they look wet. “A boycott?” he asks.

“A boy boycott.”

“Really?” he says with a grin. “I’ll take that as a challenge.”

Help.

“Behave, Oscore,” Guillermo berates. “Okay,” he says to me. “Now we find out what you are made of. Ready?” My legs go weak. I’m made of fraud. And Guillermo’s about to realize.

He puts a hand on Oscar’s shoulder.

“I have to meet Sophia in two hours,” Oscar says. “That work?”

Sophia? Who’s Sophia?

Not that I care. In the slightest.

But who is she?

And work for what?

Oscar starts taking off his clothes.

I repeat: Oscar is taking off his clothes!

My mind’s racing and my hands are swampy and Oscar’s cool violet bowling shirt is now strewn across the back of a chair and his chest is sinewy and beautiful, his muscles long and taut and defined, his skin smooth and tanned, not that I notice! There’s a tattoo of Sagittarius on his left bicep and what looks like a Franz Marc blue horse on his right shoulder that twists all the way up his neck.

Now he’s unfastening the button of his jeans.

“What are you doing?” I ask, panicking. Imagining the meadow. Imagining the relaxing effing meadow!

“Getting ready,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Getting ready for what?” I ask his bare butt as he struts in that slow summer way of his across the room and grabs a blue robe from a hook on the wall next to the smocks. He swings it over his shoulder and heads down the hall to the studio.

Oh, duh. Got it.

Guillermo tries to hold back a smile, fails. He shrugs. “All models, they are the exhibitionists,” he says lightly. I nod, flushing. “We have to put up with them. Oscore is very good. Very graceful. Much expression.” He frames his own face with his hand. “We are going to draw together, but first I see the portfolio.”

When Guillermo said to bring my sketchpad, I thought he’d have me work on the studies of the sculpture I want to make, not sketch with him. And in front of Oscar. Sketching Oscore!

“Drawing is critical,” Guillermo says. “Many sculptors do not know this.”

Terrific. I follow him down the hall, portfolio in hand, stomach in turmoil.

I spot Oscar’s leather jacket hanging on a hook—yes. I slip the orange into the pocket without Guillermo noticing.

Guillermo opens one of the doors that line the hallway, flicks on the light. It’s a jail cell of a room with a table and a couple chairs. In one corner are bags of clay stacked on shelves. In the other, hunks of stone, all different colors and sizes. There’s a shelf full of tools, only some familiar to me. He takes the portfolio case from me, unzips it, and opens it on the table.

The thought of his eyes on my work is making my toes curl.

He flips through quickly at first. Photos of bowls in every size in various stages of development, then the final photo of the piece broken and glued together. His forehead creases in confusion more and more with each passing page. Then he comes to the blobs. It’s the same. Each blob whole and then all broken and glued together in the final photo.

“Why?” he asks.

I go with the truth.

“It’s my mother. She breaks everything I make.”

He’s horrified. “Your mother breaks your artwork?”

“Oh no,” I say, understanding what he’s thinking. “She’s not mean or crazy or anything. She’s dead.”

I see the earthquake in his expression, the concern for my safety turn into concern for my sanity. Well, whatever. There’s no other explanation.

“Okay,” he says, adjusting. “Why would your dead mother want to do this?”

“She’s mad at me.”

“She’s mad at you,” he repeats. “This is what you think?”

“This is what I know,” I say.

“Everyone in your family is very powerful. Your brother and you divide the world between you. Your mother come back to life to break your bowls.”

I shrug.

“This sculpture you have to make, it is for your mother then?” he asks. “She is the one you mention yesterday? You think if you make this sculpture she will not be mad at you anymore and she will stop breaking your bowls? This is why you cry when you think I do not help you?”

“Yes,” I say.

He strokes an imaginary beard, studying me for a very long time, then returns his attention to Broken Me-Blob No. 6. “Okay. But that is not the problem here. Your mother is not the problem. The best part, the most interesting part of this work is the breaks.” He touches the final photo with his index finger. “The problem here is that you are not here. Some other girl make it all maybe, I don’t know.” He looks at several more blobs. “Well?” he says. I glance up at him. I didn’t realize he was waiting for a response.

I don’t know what to say.

I resist the impulse to step back so I don’t get swatted by his hands. “I do not see the girl who climbed up my fire escape, who thinks spilled sugar will change her life, who believe she is in mortal danger because of a cat, who cries because I will not help her. I do not see the girl who told me she was as sad as me, who says her angry dead mother break her bowls. Where is that girl?” That girl? His eyes are blazing into mine. Does he expect an answer? “She is not making this work. She is not in this work, so why do you waste your time and everyone else’s?” He sure doesn’t mince words.

I take a deep breath. “I don’t know.”

“That is obvious.” He closes the portfolio. “You will put that girl in the sculpture you make with me, understand?”

“I understand,” I say, except I have no clue how to do that. Have I ever done it? Certainly I haven’t at CSA. I think about my sand sculptures. How hard I used to work to get them to look like they did in my head. Never getting it. But maybe then. Maybe that’s why I was so afraid Mom wouldn’t like them.

He smiles at me. “Good. We will have fun then. I am Colombian. I cannot resist a good ghost story.”

He taps his hand on the case. “I am not sure you are ready for stone. Clay is kind—it can do anything, though you do not know this yet. Stone can be stingy, ungenerous, like the unrequited lover.”

“It will be more difficult for my mother to break it if it’s in stone.”

Understanding crosses his face. “She will not break this sculpture no matter what it is made of. You will have to trust me on that. You will learn to carve first on a practice rock. Then together we will figure out the best material for this sculpture after I see the studies. Will it be of your mother?”

“Yes. I don’t usually do realistic, but . . .” Then, before I know I’m going to, I’m telling him. “Sandy asked me if there was something I needed in the world that only my two hands could create.” I swallow, meet his eyes. “My mom, she was really beautiful. My dad used to say she could make trees bloom just by looking at them.” Guillermo smiles. I go on.“Every morning she used to stand on the deck staring out at the water. The wind would stream through her hair, her robe would billow behind her. It was like she was at the helm of a ship, you know? It was like she was steering us across the sky. Every day it was like that. Every day I thought that. The image is always somewhere in my mind. Always.” Guillermo’s listening so intently and I’m thinking maybe he’s the kind of man who makes all the walls in people fall down too, not just rooms, because like yesterday, I want to tell him more. “I’ve tried everything to get through to her, Guillermo. Absolutely everything. I have this weird book and I scour it for ideas nonstop. I’ve done it all. I’ve slept with her jewelry under my pillow. I’ve stood on the beach at midnight, holding up a picture of the two of us to a blue moon. I’ve written letters to her and put them in her coat pockets, in red mailboxes. I’ve thrown messages into storms. I recite her favorite poem to her every night before I go bed. And all she does is break what I make. That’s how angry she is.” I’ve started to sweat. “It would kill me if she broke this.” My lips are trembling. Covering my mouth, I add, “It’s the one thing I have.”

He puts a hand on my shoulder. I can’t believe how much I want him to hug me. “She will not break,” he says gently. “I promise you. You will make it. You will have this. I will help you. And CJ, this is the girl you need to let into your artwork.”

I nod.

Then he walks over to the shelf, grabs some charcoal. “Now we draw.”

Unbelievably, I’d forgotten about Oscar naked in the next room.

We walk over to a corner of the studio where there’s a platform with one chair pulled up to it. I’m feeling unsteady—I didn’t even tell the counselor at CSA the things I just told Guillermo. And so much for not being a poor motherless girl in his eyes.

Oscar, wearing the blue robe, is sitting reading, his feet propped up on the platform. It looks like a textbook, but he closes it too fast for me to catch what sort.

Guillermo pulls another chair over, then gestures for me to sit.

“Oscore is my favorite model,” he says. “He has a very strange face. I don’t know if you notice. God was very drunk when he made him. A little bit of this. A little bit of that. Brown eye. Green eye. Crooked nose, crooked mouth. Lunatic smile. Chipped tooth. Scar here, scar there. It is a puzzle.”

Oscar shakes his head at the ribbing. “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” he says.

For the record, I’m in the midst of a penis panic attack.

At CSA, I’m fairly penis-neutral in life class, but not at the moment, no siree.

“You misunderstand,” Guillermo says. “I believe in everything.”

Oscar slips off the robe.

“Me too. You wouldn’t believe the things I believe in,” I interject, sounding frantic, wanting to join in their repartee so I don’t stare at it. Too late. Oh my effing Clark Gable—what was that again about a dinosaur he named Godzilla?

“Do tell,” Oscar says to me. Ha! Not telling what I’m thinking! “Tell us one thing you believe in, CJ, that we wouldn’t believe.”

“Okay,” I say, trying to regain some semblance of composure and maturity. “I believe that if a guy gives a girl an orange, her love for him will multiply.” I couldn’t resist.

He cracks up, falling out of the pose Guillermo just positioned him in. “Oh, I absolutely believe you believe that. I have evidence to support you believe it quite fervently.”

Guillermo taps his foot impatiently. Oscar winks at me, sending my stomach on an elevator ride. “To be continued,” he says.

To be continued . . .

Wait. Who’s Sophia? His little sister? His great-aunt? The plumber?

“Quick sketches, CJ,” Guillermo says to me, and a brand-new set of nerves kicks in. Then to Oscar, “Change position every three minutes.” He sits down in the chair next to me and starts to draw. I’m aware of his hand flying across the page. It’s stirring the air. I take a breath and begin, telling myself it’s going to be okay. Five minutes or so pass. Oscar’s new pose is stunning. His spine’s arched and his head’s hanging backward.

“You go too slow,” Guillermo says quietly.

I try to sketch more quickly.

Guillermo gets up and stands behind me, looking over my shoulder at my work, which, I see through his eyes, is dreadful.

I hear:

“Faster.”

Then:

“Pay attention to where the light source is.”

Then, touching a spot on my drawing:

“That is not a shadow, that is a cave.”

Then:

“You hold the charcoal too tight.”

Then:

“Do not take the charcoal off the paper so much.

Then:

“Eyes off the page, on the model.”

Then:

“Oscore is in your eyes, in your hands, your eyes, your hands, he travels through you, do you understand that?”

Then:

“No, all wrong, everything. What are they teaching you at that school? Nothing, I think!”

He squats by my side and his smell overwhelms me, a sign at least that I haven’t died of mortification. “Listen, it is not the charcoal that draws the picture. It is you. It is your hand, which is attached to your body, and in that body is a beating heart, okay. You are not ready for this.” He takes the stick of charcoal out of my hand and throws it onto the floor. “Draw him without it. Use only your hand. See it, feel it, draw it. All one thing, not three things. Don’t take your eyes off of him. See, feel, draw. One verb, go now. Do not think. Above all else: Do not think so much. Picasso, he say, ‘If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.’ Pull out your brain, CJ, use only your eyes!”

I’m embarrassed. I want an eject button. At least, mercifully, Oscar’s eyes are fixed to the opposite corner of the room. He hasn’t looked over at us once.

Guillermo is back in his chair. “Do not worry about Oscore. Do not be self-conscious because of him,” he says. Is he telepathic? “Now draw like you mean it. Like it means something. Because it does, you understand this, CJ? It has to mean something. You hop a fence and climb up on my fire escape in the middle of the night. It means something to you!”

He begins to sketch again next to me. I watch how ferociously he’s attacking the paper, the lines so bold and certain, how quickly he flips the page, like every ten seconds. We do thirty-second drawings at school. But he’s lightning.

“Go,” he says. “Go!”

And then I’m paddling through the break, watching a big wave swelling, coming toward me, knowing that in a moment it will sweep me up into something enormous and powerful. I would count down like I’m doing now for some reason:

Three, two, one:

I go. With no charcoal in my hand, I go.

“Faster,” he says. “Faster.”

I am flipping the pages like him every ten seconds, drawing absolutely nothing and not caring, feeling Oscar come alive in my hand.

“Better,” he says.

Then again:

“Better.”

See feel draw: one verb.

“Good. That is it. You will see with your hands, I promise you. Now I contradict myself. Picasso he do too. He say pull out your brain, yes, he also say, ‘Painting is a blind man’s profession’ and ‘To draw you must close your eyes and sing.’ And Michelangelo, he say he sculpts with his brains, not his eyes. Yes. Everything is true at once. Life is contradiction. We take in every lesson. We find what works. Okay, now pick up the charcoal and draw.”

After a few minutes, he takes the scarf from around his neck, wraps it around my eyes, and blinds me.

“Understand?”

I do.

Later, I’m in the jail cell room, fetching my portfolio, waiting for Guillermo, who needed to run an errand, when Oscar, once again buttoned and zipped, with camera at the ready, sticks his head in.

He leans against the doorframe. Some guys are born to lean. He’s definitely one of them. James Dean was another. “Bravo,” he says.

“Be serious,” I say, but in truth, I feel electrified, jangly, awake. I’ve never felt this way at CSA.

“I’m quite serious.” He’s fiddling with the camera and his dark hair’s fallen into his face. I want to push it back.

I zip up my portfolio to busy my hands. “Have we met before, Oscar?” I ask at long last. “I’m pretty sure we have. You look so familiar.”

He lifts his eyes. “She says after she’s seen me naked.”

“Oh God . . . No, I didn’t mean . . . You know what I mean . . .” Heat’s radiating off of every inch of me.

“Whatever you say.” He’s amused. “But not a chance. Never forget a face, especially not one like yours—” I hear the click before I realize I’ve even been shot. It’s weird how he maneuvers the camera without even looking through the viewfinder. “Did you ever go back to the church after we met?”

I shake my head. “No, why?”

“I left something for you. A photo.” Did a flash of shyness cross his face? “With a note on the back.” Not breathing. “It’s gone. I went back to check. Someone else must’ve taken it. Probably for the best. Too Much Information, as you lot say.”

“What kind of Information?” It’s amazing one can speak and be stone-cold passed out at the same time.

He doesn’t answer, lifts the camera instead. “Can you tilt your head like you just did. Yes, that’s it.” He moves away from the wall, bends his knees, angles the camera. “Yes, perfect, God, so damn perfect.” What happened to me in church is happening again. When glaciers break up due to rising world temperatures, it’s called calving. I’m calving. “Your eyes are so ethereal, your whole face is. I stared at pictures of you for hours last night. You give me chills.”

And you give me global warming!

But there’s something else, something beyond chills and calving and global warming, something I felt from that first moment in church. This guy makes me feel like I’m actually here, unhidden, seen. And this is not just because of his camera. I do not know what this is because of.

Plus, he’s different than the boys I know. He’s exciting. If I made a sculpture of him, I’d want it to look like an explosion. Like kapow.

I take a long deep breath, remembering what happened the last time I liked a guy.

That done, WHAT KIND OF INFORMATION WAS IN THE NOTE AND WHAT PHOTO?

“So can I take pictures of you sometime?” he asks.

“You are taking pictures of me, Oscore!” I say it like Guillermo, packed with exasperation.

He laughs. “Not here. Not like this. At this abandoned building I just discovered by the beach. At sunset. I have an idea.” He peeks around the side of the camera. “And not with your clothes on. Only fair.” His eyes are bright as the devil’s. “Say yes.”

“No!” I cry. “Are you kidding? So creepy. Ax-murderer Avoidance Rule Number One: Don’t go to the abandoned building with the total stranger and take off your clothes under any circumstance. Jeez. Does that line usually work for you?”

“Yes,” he says. “It always works.”

I laugh, can’t help it. “You’re such bad news.”

“You have no idea.”

“I think I do. I think they should arrest you and lock you up as a community service.”

“Yes, they tried that once.” I feel my mouth drop. He really has been in jail. He reads my shock, says, “It’s true. You’ve definitely fallen in with the wrong crowd.”

Except I feel the opposite. I feel like Goldilocks. Everything is just right here as it is wrong at home.

“What did they arrest you for?” I ask.

“I’ll tell you if you say yes to my invitation.”

“To be ax-murdered?”

“To live a little dangerously.”

I practically choke on his words. “Ha! Wrong girl,” I say.

“Beg to differ.”

“You have no idea.” Our rapport is so easy. Why is it so easy?

Grandma answers, sing-songing in my head, “Because love is in the air, my blind little bat. Now get a strand of your hair into his pocket. Immediately.”

I pretend she’s a normal dead person: silent.

There’s a tap-tapping of heels on the cement floor. Oscar glances out the door. “Sophia! In here.” Definitely not the plumber, unless the plumber wears stilettos. He turns to me. I can tell he wants to say something before we’re interrupted. “Look, bad news I may be, but I’m not a stranger. You said so yourself. ‘I’m so familiar to you,’” he mimics me with perfect beach girl inflection, then snaps the cover on his lens. “I’m certain I’ve never met you until that day in the church, but I’m also certain I was meant to meet you. Don’t think me a nutter, but it’s been prophesized.”

“Prophesized?” I say. Is this the Information? It must be. “By whom?”

“My mum. On her deathbed. Her very last words were about you.”

Sophia—definitely not his little sister nor his great-aunt—and her comet of red hair streaks into the room. She has on a fuchsia fifties swing dress with a neckline that plunges to the equator. Green-and-gold sparkling sweeps wing her pale blue eyes.

She glitters like she walked out of a Klimt painting.

“Hello my darling,” she says to Oscar in a thick accent, I swear, identical to Count Dracula’s.

She kisses his left cheek, right cheek, then presses her lips to his in a long, lingering finale. Very long and lingering. My chest caves in.

Still lingering . . .

Friends do not greet each other like this. Under any circumstances.

“Hello there,” Oscar says warmly. Her magenta lipstick is smudged all over his lips. I have to put my hand in my sweatshirt pocket so I don’t reach over and wipe it off.

I take back all that Goldilocks garbage.

“Sophia, this is CJ, Garcia’s new disciple from The Institute.” So he does think I go there. He thinks I’m their age. And a good enough artist to get into The Institute.

I don’t clear up any of it.

Sophia reaches out a hand to me. “I’ve come to suck your blood,” she says in her Transylvanian accent, but perhaps I misheard, perhaps she said, “You must be a very good sculptor.”

I mumble some gibberish in reply, feeling like a sixteen-year-old darkness-eating troll with leprosy.

And she, with her flaming hair and bright pink dress, is an exotic orchid. Of course he loves her. They’re two exotic orchids together. It’s perfect. They’re perfect. Her sweater’s fallen off her shoulder and a magnificent tattoo is twisting out of her dress and around her entire arm, a red-and-orange fire-breathing dragon. Oscar notices the sweater and adjusts it like he’s done it a hundred times. A dark surge of jealousy rises in my chest.

What about the prophecy, whatever it is?

“We should go,” she says, taking his hand, and a moment later, they’re gone.

When I’m certain they’ve left the building, I run at a full sprint—thankfully Guillermo’s still not back—down the hallway to the front window.

They’re already on the motorcycle. I watch her wrap her arms around his waist and I know just how it feels, how he feels, from sketching him today. I imagine it: gliding my hands up his long oblique muscles, lingering over the grooves of his abdomen, feeling the heat of his skin in my hands.

I press my hand against the cold glass. I actually do this.

He kick-starts the bike, revs the throttle, and then they’re ripping down the street, her red hair crackling like a wildfire behind them. When he kamikazis the corner at 500 mph, at an absolutely fatal angle, she raises both hands in the air and whoops in delight.

Because she’s fearless. She lives dangerously. Which is the worst part of all.

Walking back through the mailroom feeling dismal, I notice that a door I could’ve sworn was closed when I ran past a moment ago is now ajar. Did the wind open it? A ghost? Peering in, I find it hard to imagine one of mine would want to lure me in here, but who knows? Opening doors is not Grandma’s thing.

“Mom?” I whisper. I say a few lines of the poem, hoping she might recite them back to me again. Not this time.

I open the door wider, then step into a room that was once an office. Before a cyclone hit it. I quickly close the door behind me. There are overturned bookcases and books toppled everywhere. There are drifts of paper and sketchbooks and notepads that have been swept off the desk and other surfaces. There are ashtrays full of cigarette butts, an empty bottle of tequila on its side, another one smashed in a corner. There are punch marks in the walls, a shattered window. And in the center of the floor, there’s a large stone angel facedown on the ground, her back broken.

The room has been taken apart in a rage. I’m thinking maybe the one that was going on the first time I came here, the one that sounded like a furniture-throwing contest. I look around at the physical manifestation of Guillermo’s trouble, whatever it is, and a mixture of excitement and fear weaves through me. I know I shouldn’t snoop, but curiosity quickly overrides my conscience as it often does—snoop-control issues—and I’m bending down and randomly perusing some of the papers on the floor: mostly old letters. There’s one from an art student in Detroit wanting to work with him. Another handwritten from a woman in New York promising him anything (underlined three times) if only he’d mentor her—jeez. There are consignment forms from galleries, a proposal from a museum about a commission. Press releases from past shows. I pick up a notepad like the one he keeps in his pocket and leaf through it, wondering if there might be some clue in it, in this room, as to what happened to him. The small pad is full of sketches, some lists and notes too, all in Spanish. Maybe material lists? Notes on sculptures? Ideas? Feeling guilty, I toss it back onto the heap, but then I can’t help myself and pick up another one, flip through it, find more of the same, until I come to a page where there are some words in English:

I turn to the next page, but it doesn’t continue. I must—what? I whip through the rest of the pad, but the remaining pages are blank. I search through a few more notepads scattered around, but find no more words in English, no more words for Dearest. The skin on my arms is prickling. Dearest is her. It has to be. The woman in the painting. The clay woman climbing out of the clay man’s chest. The female giant. All the female giants.

I read the note again. It’s so steamy, so desperate, so romantic.

That’s what happened to him then: love. Tragic, impossible love. And Guillermo’s so perfectly cast. No woman can resist a man who has tidal waves and earthquakes beneath the skin.

Oscar seems like he has natural disasters under the skin too. But give me a break. Male leads in love stories need to be devoted, need to chase trains, cross continents, give up fortunes and thrones, defy convention, face persecution, take apart rooms and break the backs of angels, sketch the beloved all over the cement walls of their studios, build sculptures of giants as homages.

They don’t flirt shamelessly with the likes of me when they have Transylvanian girlfriends. What an effing jerk.

I separate the page with the love note from the rest of the notepad, and as I’m pressing it into the safety of my jeans pocket, I hear the front door to the studio do its horror-creak. Oh no. My pulse speeds as I tiptoe over to the door and tuck behind it so I’ll be hidden should Guillermo decide to come in. I’m definitely not supposed to be in here. This is a most private kind of chaos, like the contents of his mind all spilled out. I hear a chair scrape across the floor, then smell smoke. Great. He’s having a cigarette right outside the door.

I wait. And stare down at all the art books piled everywhere, recognizing a lot of them from school, recognizing my mother. Half of her face is staring back at me from one of the stacks. It’s the author photo on the back of her Michelangelo biography, Angel in the Marble. It gives me a start. But of course it’s here. He has every art book in here. I squat down and reach for it, careful not to make a sound as I pull it out of the stack. I open to the title page, wondering if she signed it when they met. She did.

Mom. I close the book quickly, quickly, keeping it shut with my hands so it doesn’t fly open, so I don’t. My knuckles are white with the effort. She always signed with that Michelangelo quote. It was her favorite. I hug the book to my chest tight, so tight, wanting to jump inside it.

Then I secure it inside the waistband of my jeans and cover it with my sweatshirt.

“CJ,” Guillermo calls. I hear his retreating footsteps. When I’m certain he’s gone, I slip soundlessly out of the room, shutting the door behind me. I cross the mailroom swiftly, quietly, and enter the jail cell room, where I hide Mom’s book in my portfolio case, aware, oh, yes, I am, that I’m acting like a super-kook, buttons flying everywhere today. Though it’s not my first bout of larceny. I’ve stolen quite a few copies of Mom’s books from the school library too—every time they replace them, in fact. And the town library. And several bookstores. I do not know why I do it. I do not know why I stole the love note. I do not know why I do much of anything.

I find Guillermo in the studio, squatting, petting a blissed-out Frida Kahlo’s belly. His note to Dearest is burning up my pocket. I want to know more. What happened to them?

He nods at me. “Are you ready?” He rises. “Are you ready for your life to change?”

“And how,” I say.

The rest of the afternoon consists of my choosing a practice rock—I fall in love with an amber-colored alabaster one that looks like a fire’s burning inside it—and listening to Guillermo, who has become Moses, recite commandments about carving:

Thou shalt be bold and courageous.

Thou shalt take chances.

Thou shalt wear protective gear.

(BECAUSE THERE’S ASBESTOS IN THE DUST!)

Thou shalt have no preconceptions about what is inside the practice rock but shall wait for the rock to tell thee directly.

After this one, he touches my solar plexus with his outspread hand, adding, “What slumbers in the heart is what slumbers in the stone, understand?”

Then he bestows the final commandment onto me:

Thou shalt remake the world.

This is something I would very much like to do, though no clue how carving a rock will achieve it.

When I get home after hours and hours of practice carving—I’m spectacularly horrible at it—with my wrist muscles aching, thumbs bruised from hundreds of hammer mishaps, asbestosis disease already spreading through my lung tissue despite the face mask, I open my bag and find three big round oranges looking up at me. I’m stupid-struck with love for Oscar for a moment, then remember Sophia.

What duplicity! Seriously, what a major asshat, as Noah used to say when he was Noah.

I bet he told Sophia his mother prophesized about her too.

I bet his mother’s not even dead.

I take the oranges to the kitchen and make juice.

On returning to my bedroom after The Great Orange Massacre hoping to sew for a bit, I find Noah squatting over the bag I left on the floor, flipping through a sketchpad that had been tucked safely inside the bag only moments before. Instant payback from the universe for going through Guillermo’s papers?

“Noah? What’re you doing?”

He jumps up, exclaims, “Oh! Hey! Nothing!” Then proceeds to put his hands on his waist only to move them to his pockets, then back to his waist. “I was just . . . nothing. Sorry.” He laughs too loud, then claps his hands together.

“Why are you going through my stuff?”

“Wasn’t . . .” He laughs again, well, more like whinnies. “I mean, I guess I was.” He looks at the window like he wants to jump out of it.

“But why?” I ask, giggling a little myself—he hasn’t acted like such a certifiable weirdo in forever.

He smiles at me as if he heard me thinking. It does something wonderful inside my chest. “Guess I just wanted to see what you were working on.”

“Really?” I ask, surprised.

“Yup,” he says, shifting back and forth on his feet. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” I hear the eagerness in my voice.

He gestures toward the pad. “I saw the sketches of Mom. Are you doing some kind of sculpture of her?”

“Yes,” I say, excited by his curiosity, not caring at all about the sketchpad spying—how often did I used to do the same to him? “But those studies in there aren’t even close to being finished. I just started them last night.”

“Clay?” he asks.

A sudden powerful how-dare-I-talk-to-him-about-my-artwork feeling is overtaking me, but it’s been so long since we’ve connected about anything, so I go on. “Not clay, stone,” I tell him. “Marble, granite, don’t know yet. I’m working with this totally cool sculptor now. He’s amazing, Noah.” I walk over and pick the pad up off the floor. Holding it in front of both of us, I point to the most completed sketch, a frontal view. “I was thinking of doing it realistic. Not at all bulbous-y like usual. I want it to be elegant, a little willowy, but wild somehow too, you know, like her. I want people to see the wind in her hair, in her clothes—oh, it’ll be a Floating Dress for sure, but only we’ll get that. I hope, well, you know how she used to stand on the deck every—” I stop because he’s taken a phone out of his pocket. It must’ve vibrated. “Hey dude,” he says, and then starts talking about some trail-run and mileage and other cross-country mumbo jumbo. He makes an apologetic face at me like it’s going to be a while and leaves the room.

I tiptoe to the door, wanting to hear him talk to his friend. Sometimes I stand outside his room when he and Heather are hanging out and listen to them gossip, laugh, be goofy. A few times on weekends, I’ve sat reading by the front door, thinking they might ask me to go with them on one of their zoo trips or after-running pancake extravaganzas, but they never do.

Halfway down the hallway, Noah abruptly stops talking mid-sentence and puts the phone back into his pocket. Wait. So he faked the call and was pretend-talking to no one just to get away from me? Just to stop me blathering on like that? My throat constricts.

We’re never going to be okay. We’re never going to be us again.

I walk over to the window, flip the shade so I can see the ocean.

I stare it down.

There are times when surfing where you’ll take on a wave only to realize the bottom’s dropped out of it and so suddenly without warning you’re free-falling down the entire face.

It feels like this.

When I arrive at Guillermo’s studio the next afternoon at the scheduled time—he doesn’t seem to care it’s winter break and there’s nowhere I’d rather be, so—I find a piece of paper thumbtacked to the door that says: Be back soon—GG.

All morning, while sucking on anti-Oscar lemons, I listened from across town, hoping my practice rock would tell me what was inside it. So far, not a peep. Not a peep between Noah and me since yesterday either, and this morning he was gone before I woke up. As was all of the cash Dad left us for emergencies. Effing whatever.

Back to the clear and present danger: Oscar. I’m ready. In addition to the lemons, in preparation for a possible encounter, I did some catch-up reading on a myriad of particularly raunchy venereal diseases. Followed by some bible study:

The Oscar case is closed.

I slip quickly down the hallway, thrilled to find Grandma and no one else in the mailroom. She’s in a splendid outfit. A striped straight skirt. Vintage floral sweater. Red leather belt. Paisley scarf championed with attitude around her neck. All topped off with black felt beret and John Lennon sunglasses. Exactly what I’d wear to the studio if I weren’t bound to the root vegetable look.

“Perfect,” I tell her. “Very shabby chic.”

“Chic would suffice. Shabby as a label offends my sensibilities. I was going for Summer of Love with more than a smidgeon of Beatnik. All this art, the mess and disorder, these mysterious foreign men are making me feel very free-spirited, very throw caution to the wind, very daring, very—”

I laugh. “I get it.”

“No, I don’t think you do. I was going to say very Jude Sweetwine. Remember that intrepid girl?” She points to my pocket. I pull out the extinguished candle. She tsk tsks at me. “Don’t use my bible to forward your dreary agenda.”

“He has a girlfriend.”

“You don’t know that for sure. He’s European. They have different mores.”

“Haven’t you read Jane Austen? English people are more uptight than us, not less.”

“One thing that boy doesn’t seem is uptight.” Her whole face contorts with the effort of a wink. She’s not a subtle winker, not a subtle anything.

“He has trichomoniasis,” I grumble at her.

“Nobody has that. Nobody but you even knows what it is.”

“He’s too old.”

“Only I’m too old.”

“Well, he’s too hot. Way too hot. And he knows it. Did you see the way he leans?”

“The way he what?”

“Leans against a wall like James Dean, leans.” I do a quick demonstration against a pillar. “And he drives that motorcycle. And has that accent and those different-color eyes—”

“David Bowie has different-color eyes!” She throws up her arms, exasperated. Grandma has a great passion for David Bowie. “It’s good luck when a boy’s mother prophesizes about you.” Her face goes soft. “And he said you give him chills, honey.”

“I have a feeling his girlfriend gives him chills too.”

“How can you judge a fella until you picnic with him?” She opens her arms as if to embrace the whole world. “Pack a basket, pick a spot, and go. Simple as that.”

“So corny,” I say, spotting one of Guillermo’s notepads on a stack of mail. I quickly leaf through it for notes to Dearest. None.

“Who with a beating heart in her chest scoffs at a picnic?” she exclaims. “You have to see the miracles for there to be miracles, Jude.” She used to say this a lot. It’s the very first passage she wrote in the bible. I’m not a miracle-seer. The very last passage she wrote in the bible was: A broken heart is an open heart. I somehow know she wrote it for me, to help me after she died, but it didn’t help.

A knot’s forming in my throat. I walk over to the angel and when I’m finished wishing my second wish—you always get three wishes, right?—I join Grandma in front of the painting. Not Grandma. Grandma’s ghost. There’s a difference. Grandma’s ghost only knows things about her life that I know. Questions about Grandpa Sweetwine—he left when Grandma was pregnant with Dad and never came back—go unanswered like they did when she was alive. Lots of questions go unanswered. Mom used to say when you look at art, it’s half seeing, half dreaming. Same with ghosts, maybe.

“Meanwhile, this is one hell of a kiss,” she says.

“Sure is.”

We both sigh into our own thoughts, mine, much to my distress, becoming R-rated, Oscar-rated. I really don’t want to be thinking about him, but I am . . .

“What’s it like to be kissed like that?” I ask her. Even though I’ve kissed a bunch of boys, it never ever felt like this painting looks.

Before she can answer me, I hear, “I’d be more than happy to show you. If you’d break the boycott, that is. Give it a go, anyway. Even if you are barking mad.” I pull my hand away from my mouth—when had it crept up to my lips as a substitute for his?—and inch around to see that Oscar has jumped out of my mind and is standing in full flesh form on the landing of the loft. He’s leaning (a sexy lanky front forward one this time) on the railing with his camera focused on me. “Thought it only fair I pipe in before things went any further with that hand of yours.”

No.

I flail in place, suddenly finding my skin extremely confining. “I didn’t know anyone was here!”

“Quite apparent,” he says, trying not to laugh. “Quite, quite apparent.”

Oh no. How crazy must I have looked chattering away with the air? Heat pours into my face. How much of that conversation did he hear? Well, conversation, so to speak. Oh oh oh. And how long had I been making out with the hand? Does he know I was thinking about him? Kissing him? He continues. “Very fortunate for me. These zoom lenses. They miss nothing. Hell, oranges—who knew? Could’ve saved a bundle on cologne, candlelit dinners, et cetera, et cetera.”

He knows.

“You’re assuming I was thinking about you,” I say.

“Indeed.”

I roll my eyes at the absurdity.

He puts both hands on the rail. “Who were you bloody talking to, CJ?”

“Oh that,” I say. How to respond? I don’t know why, but like with Guillermo yesterday, I go with the truth. “Just Grandma popping in for a spell.”

He makes a weird choking-coughing sound.

I have no idea what’s happening on his face because I don’t dare look his way. “Twenty-two percent of the world’s population sees ghosts,” I tell him via the wall. “It’s not unusual. About one in four. And it’s not like I’m some ghost-whisperer. I don’t see ghosts per se. Just my grandmother and my mother, but my mom, she doesn’t talk or appear to me, she just breaks things. Except for the other day when she recited a poem to me.” I exhale. My cheeks are on fire. Probably less was more.

“What poem?” I hear. Not the response I expected.

“Just a poem,” I answer. Telling him which poem somehow feels too personal to share even after the admission that I converse with dead relatives.

There’s a moment of silence during which I listen intently for beeps indicating a 911 call. “I’m very sorry they’re both gone, CJ,” he says, his voice sincere and serious. I peer up at him, expecting to see The Poor Motherless Girl Look, but that’s not what I see on his face.

I think his mom’s dead after all. I turn away.

The good news is that he seems to have forgotten I was hooking up with my hand. The bad news is that now I’m running through the conversation that he might’ve overheard. Writing a love letter to him would’ve been less revealing. Nothing to do but cover the eyes with the hands. Desperate times call for ostrich measures. “How much did you hear, Oscar?”

“Hey, no worries about that,” he says. “I couldn’t make out much. I was sleeping when your voice started trickling into my dream.”

Is he telling the truth? Or just being kind? I do speak quietly. I fan my fingers. In time for his languid descent down the steps. Why does he move so slowly? Seriously. It’s impossible not to watch him, to hang on his every move, to wait for him to arrive . . .

He slinks in behind me, close as a shadow.

Not sure the Oscar case is entirely closed, actually. I didn’t account for proximity. And didn’t he just say he’d be more than happy to kiss me like in the painting? I’m remembering specifically how he said he’d: Give it a go, anyway.

“So what’d you wish for, then?” he asks. “I saw you communing with the angel as well as your grandmother.” His voice is low and silken and intimate and I don’t trust myself to answer this question.

He’s looking at me in that way of his that should be illegal or patented, and it’s affecting my ability to remember things like my name and species and all the reasons a girl might go on a boy strike. Why don’t I care one iota about the bad luck that might befall me? All I want is to comb my fingers through his tousled brown hair, to cup my hand around the blue horse on his neck, to press my lips against his like Sophia did.

Sophia.

I completely forgot about Sophia. It seems he did too, from the way he’s still looking at me. What a louse. A lousy louse. Such a scalawag rake bounder miscreant scamp playboy player guyslut!

“I made orange juice out of the oranges you planted in my bag,” I tell him, coming to my senses. “Pulverized them to pulp.”

“Ouch.”

“How come you’re doing this?”

“What?”

“I don’t know, this thing, this act. That voice. Looking at me like I’m this . . . this . . . donut. Standing so close. I mean, you don’t even know me. Not to mention your girlfriend, remember her?” I’m talking too loud. I’m barking. What’s gotten into me?

“But I’m not doing anything.” He holds up his hands like he’s surrendering. “Not acting. This is my voice—just woke up. I don’t think you’re in any way, shape, or form a donut, trust me on that. I’m not chatting you up. I respect the boycott.”

“Good, because I’m not interested.”

“Good, because my intentions are honorable.” He pauses, then says, “Haven’t you read Jane Austen? We English are more uptight than you lot, isn’t that so?”

I gasp. “I thought you didn’t hear anything!”

“I was being polite. We English are very polite, you know.” He’s grinning crazily, kind of like he’s brainless. “Heard every word, I believe.”

“It wasn’t about you—”

“No? About the other bloke who rides a motorcycle and has two different-colored eyes and leans like James Dean. Thank you, by the way. No one’s ever commented on the lean.”

I have no idea how else to navigate this moment except to make a run for it. I turn and head toward the jail cell room.

“What’s more,” he says, laughing his breezy laugh. “You think I’m hot. Too hot, in fact. Way too hot, I believe were the exact words.” I close the door, hear through it, “And I don’t have a girlfriend, CJ.”

Is he effing kidding me? “Does Sophia know that?” I’m shouting like a maniac.

“As a matter of fact, she does!” he replies, equally maniacally. “We broke up.”

“When?” We’re yelling on either side of the door.

“Oh. Over two years ago.” Two years ago? But that kiss. Was it not as long and lingering as I thought? Anxiety can alter perception; I know that. “Met at a party and I believe we lasted five days.”

“Was that a record for you?”

“The record is nine days, actually. And I didn’t realize you were on the Morality Police Force!”

I lie on the cold cement floor and let all the contaminated dust and microbes and toxic black mold spores do with me what they will. I’m racing inside. If I’m not mistaken, Oscar and I just got into a fight. I haven’t fought with anyone since Mom. It doesn’t feel entirely bad.

Nine days is his record. OMFCG. He’s that guy.

I’m trying to get a grip, wondering when Guillermo’s going to return, trying to focus on the reason I’m here, the sculpture I need to make, trying to make myself think about what could possibly be hiding inside my practice rock and not the revelation that Sophia and Oscar are not a couple!—when the door opens and in comes Oscar, waving a clay-covered towel.

He raises an eyebrow when he sees I’m lying on the floor like a corpse but doesn’t comment. “White flag,” he says, holding the mostly unwhite towel up. “I come in peace.” I hoist myself onto my elbows. “Look, you were right,” he says. “Well, partially. It is an act. I am an act. Totally full of it. About ninety-eight percent of the time anyway. My intentions are rarely honorable. It’s not terrible to be called out for once.” He walks over to the wall. “Watching? Ladies and gents: The Lean.” He presses one shoulder into the wall, crosses his arms, cocks his head, squints his eyes, mugging James Dean better than James Dean. I can’t help but laugh, which was the point. He smiles. “All right then. Moving on.” He breaks the pose and begins pacing the small room, trial lawyer style. “I need to talk to you about those oranges and the red ribbon around your wrist and that unbelievably large onion you’ve been carrying around for days now . . .” He gives me a gotcha look, then reaches into his front jeans pocket and pulls out a chipped conch-shaped shell. “I wanted to let you know I don’t go anywhere without my mum’s magic seashell because if I do I will die, probably within minutes.” This makes me laugh again. It’s alarming how charming he can be. He tosses it to me. “Furthermore, I have conversations in my dreams with my mother, who passed away three years ago. Sometimes,” he says, “I go to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, like I did today, just to see if she’ll talk to me. You’re the only person I’ve ever told this, but I owe you for eavesdropping before.” He walks over, snatches the seashell out of my hands, grinning boyishly, adorably. “I knew you’d want to pinch my shell. Not happening. It’s my most beloved possession.” He slips it back into his pocket, stands over me, his eyes glinting, his smile headlong, anarchic, utterly irresistible.

Lord. Have. Mercy. On. My. Boycotting. Soul.

The next thing I know, he’s at eye level and then lying down on the filthy floor next to me. Yes. A sound comes out of me that could only be described as a squeal of delight. He’s crossed his arms over his chest and shut his eyes as mine were when he walked through the door. “Not bad,” he says. “It’s like we’re at the beach.”

I resume the position beside him. “Or in our coffins.”

“What I like about you is how you always look on the bright side.”

Laughing, again. “I do like that you came down on the floor with me,” I say, looking on the bright side, feeling on the bright side, knowing there’s no one in my life who’d lie on the floor with me like this. Or who carries a shell in their pocket so they don’t die. Or who goes to sleep so they can talk to their dead mother.

A comfortable quiet falls over us. Really comfortable, like we’ve lain on filthy floors corpselike together for several lifetimes now.

“The poem was by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” I tell him.

“‘How do I love thee?’” he croons. “‘Let me count the ways.’”

“That’s the one,” I say, thinking: He’s the one. And some thoughts once thought are very hard to unthink. “It is kind of like being on the beach,” I say, growing more and more elated. I roll onto my side, cradle my head in my hand, and secretly stare at Oscar’s madhouse face. Until he pops open an eye and catches me admiring him—you are so busted, his smile says. He closes the eye. “Shame you’re not interested.”

“I’m not!” I cry, falling back down on the sandy beach. “Artistic curiosity is all. You have an unusual face.”

“And you have a mind-blowingly beautiful one.”

“You’re such a flirt,” I say, effervescing.

“It’s been said.”

“What else has been said?”

“Hmm. Well, unfortunately, it’s been said very recently I stay away from you or I get castrated.” He sits up and spins his hands in the air like Guillermo. “Castration, Oscore! Understand? You have seen me use the circular saw, yes?” He relaxes into being himself again. “Which is actually why I’ve come in here waving the white flag. I have this way of ruining things and I don’t want to ruin this. You’re the first person besides me who’s made G. laugh in years. That he’s teaching again is a miracle. We’re talking loaves and fishes, CJ. You’ve no idea.” A miracle? “It’s like you’ve cast this spell on him. Around you . . . I don’t know . . . he’s okay again. The guy’s been bloody ferocious for a very long time.” Is it possible I’m Guillermo’s meadow like he’s mine? “Plus we now know you both converse with invisible mates.” He winks. “So”—he presses his hands together—“per your request and his, this is how it’s going to be from now on. When I want to ask you to abandoned buildings or kiss those lips of yours or stare into your otherworldly eyes or imagine what you look like under all those baggy drab clothes you’re always hiding in or ravish you on some grimy floor like I’m desperate to this very minute, I’ll just bugger off on my Hippity Hop. Deal?” He holds out his hand. “Friends. Just friends.”

Talk about mixed signals; he’s like a roller coaster that talks.

No deal, no way. “Deal,” I say, and take his hand but only because I want to touch him.

Moments tick by, our hands clasped, electricity jolting wildly through me. And then he’s pulling me slowly toward him, looking into my eyes even as he just swore he wouldn’t and heat’s bursting in my belly, radiating everywhere. I feel my body opening. Is he going to kiss me? Is he?

“Oh man,” he says, letting go of my hand. “I should probably go.”

“No, don’t. Please don’t go.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.

“How about I sit over here, then, where it’s safer,” he says, scooting a few feet away from me. “Did I mention I have impulse-control issues?” He smiles. “I’m having a particularly strong impulse, CJ.”

“Let’s just talk,” I say, my heart rate off the charts. “Remember the circular saw?” His laugh cartwheels across the room. “You have this great laugh,” I blurt out. “It’s like wow, it’s—”

“You’re not helping things. Please keep all compliments to yourself. Oh!” He’s coming toward me again. “I know! An idea.” He pulls my hat down so it covers my entire face and half my neck. “There,” he says. “Perfect. Let’s talk.”

Except I’m laughing now inside my hat and he’s laughing outside of it and we’re getting carried away, far away, and I don’t think I’ve been this happy maybe ever.

It’s very hot and steamy to laugh out of control inside a wool hat, so after a time I lift it up and see him there, his face splotchy and eyes watering from truly losing it, and I’m filled with something I can only describe as recognition. Not because he looks familiar on the outside this time, but because he feels familiar on the inside.

“So if you’re full of it ninety-eight percent of the time,” I say, collecting myself. “What about the other two percent?”

The question seems to suck all the residual laughter out of his face and I’m immediately sorry I asked. “Yeah, no one meets that guy,” he says.

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Perhaps you’re not the only one in hiding.”

“How come you think I’m in hiding?”

“Just do.” He pauses, then says, “Maybe it’s because I’ve spent a fair bit of time with your photos now. They speak volumes.” He looks curiously at me. “But you could tell me why you’re in hiding.”

I consider it, consider him. “Now that we’re friends, just friends. Are you the friend I call if I find myself in possession of a dead body and a bloody knife in my hand?”

He smiles. “Yes. I would not turn you in. No matter what.”

“I trust you,” I say, surprising myself, and from the expression on his face, him as well. Why I trust someone who’s just told me he’s full of it ninety-eight percent of the time I don’t know. “I wouldn’t turn you in either,” I tell him. “No matter what.”

“You might,” he says. “I’ve done some pretty terrible things.”

“Me too,” I say, and suddenly I want more than anything to confide in him.

“Well,” he says, staring at his hands steepled in front of him. “If it’s any comfort, I’m pretty sure the things I’ve done are far worse than whatever it is you’ve done.”

I’m about to speak, to refute this, but the uneasy look in his eyes silences me. “When my mum was sick,” he says slowly. “We could only afford this day nurse. My mother wouldn’t go to hospital anymore and NHS wouldn’t cover it. So at night, I watched after her. Except I started gobbling down her pain meds by the handful. I was off my face all the time, I mean, all the time.” His voice has grown strange, tight, lilt-less. “It was just me and her, always, no other family.” He pauses, takes a deep breath. “One night, she took a tumble out of bed, probably she needed the bedpan, but then after she fell, she couldn’t get herself up. She was too weak, too sick.” He swallows. There’s perspiration on his forehead. “She spent fifteen hours on the floor, shivering, hungry, in excruciating pain, calling for me, while I was passed out cold in the next room.” He breathes out slowly. “And that’s just a starter anecdote. I have enough for a book.”

The starter anecdote has practically strangled him. And me too. We’re both breathing too fast and I can feel his desperation taking me over like it’s my own. “I’m so sorry, Oscar.”

That prison of guilt the counselor at school talked about, he’s in one too.

“Jesus.” He’s pressing his palms to his forehead. “I can’t believe I told you that. I never talk about that. Not with anyone, not even G., not even at meetings.” His face is in a whole different kind of turmoil than usual. “You see? Better when I’m full of it, isn’t it?”

“No,” I say. “I want to know all of you. One hundred percent.”

This unsettles him further. He does not want to be known one hundred percent by me, if his face is any indication. Why did I say that? I look down, embarrassed, and when I look back up I see that he’s rising to his feet. He won’t make eye contact.

“I need to do some work upstairs before my shift at La Lune,” he says, already at the door. He can’t get away from me fast enough.

“You work at that café?” I ask, when what I want to say is: I understand. Not the circumstances, but the shame. I understand the quicksand of shame.

He nods and then unable to help myself, I ask, “You said I was her, that first day in church. Who did you mean? And how could your mother have prophesized about me?”

But he just shakes his head and ducks out of the room.

I remember then I still have Guillermo’s note to Dearest on me. I scrolled it up and tied it in a lucky red ribbon. No idea why, until now.

“Hey one sec, Oscar.” I catch him outside the door and brush a layer of dust off the back of his jacket. “That’s one dirty floor,” I say as I slip the hot burning words into his pocket. As I press play on my life.

Then I pace around the small room waiting for Guillermo to return so I can start carving, waiting for Oscar to get the love note and run to me or away from me. A valve has loosened inside me and some kind of something is escaping, making me feel entirely different from the boycotting girl who walked into this studio with a burnt candle in her pocket to extinguish feelings of love. I think of that counselor telling me I was the house in the woods with no doors or windows. No way to get in or out, she said. But she was wrong, because: Walls fall down.

And then at once, from across the studio, it’s as if my practice rock has gotten on a loudspeaker to inform me what’s inside it.

There is a sculpture I need to make first, and it’s not of my mother.

I’m surrounded by giants.

In the center of the outdoor work area is one of Guillermo’s massive couples but unfinished, and against the far fence is another mammoth work called Three Brothers. I’m trying not to make eye contact with them as Guillermo demonstrates different techniques on my practice rock. Let’s just say, they’re not the jolliest of giants, those three stone brothers. I’m wearing every piece of protective gear I could find: a plastic suit, goggles, and face mask, because I did some research on the health risks of carving stone last night and I’m surprised any stone sculptor lives past thirty. While Guillermo instructs me on how not to bruise the surface of the rock, how to use the rasp, how to do something called cross-hatch, how to choose the right chisel for each task and what angles are best suited for what kind of carving, I try unsuccessfully not to dwell on Oscar and the stolen love note I gave him. Probably not my best idea, both the stealing of the note and the giving of it. Impulse-control issues, clearly.

Trying to be subtle, I manage a few questions about Oscar in between others on chisel position and model building. I find out the following: He’s nineteen. He dropped out of high school in England and took the GED here and now is a freshman at Lost Cove U. studying mostly literature, art history, and photography. He has a dorm room but still sometimes stays in the loft.

However, I realize I’m not being as subtle as I think with my questions when Guillermo puts his hand under my chin, lifts my face so our eyes meet, and says, “Oscore? He is like my—” He brings his fist to his chest to finish the sentence. Like his heart? His son? “He fall in my nest when he was very young, very troubled. He have no one.” His face is full of warmth. “It is very strange with Oscore. When I get sick of every last person, I am not sick of him. I do not know why this is. And he is so good at chess.” He holds his head like he has a headache. “I mean so so good. It make me crazy.” He looks at me. “But listen carefully. If I have a daughter, I keep her in another state from him. Understand?” Um? Loud and clear. “When Oscore breathe in, the girls come rushing to him from everywhere, and when he exhale—” He makes a gesture with his hand to indicate all the girls being literally blown away, blown off, in other words: blown to bits. “He is too young, too dumb, too careless. I was the same once. I have no idea about women, about love, until much later. Understand?”

“Understood,” I tell him, trying to hide the sinking disappointment in my gut. “I will bathe in vinegar, down some raw eggs, and start looking for a wasp nest ASAP to put on my head.”

“I do not understand this,” he says.

“To reverse the leanings of the heart. Ancient family wisdom.”

He laughs. “Ah. Very good. In my family, we just suffer.”

Then he drops a bag of earthenware clay on my table and commands me to make the model, first thing, now that I know what hides inside the practice rock.

The sculpture I’m seeing is two round bubble bodies, shoulder to shoulder, every part of the figures, spherical and full, curved bulging chests pregnant with the same breath, heads tilting upward, gazes sky-bound. The whole thing about a foot across and high. As soon as Guillermo leaves, I start building, and before long, I forget Oscar the Girl-Exhaler and the heartbreaking story he told me and the way I’d felt in that jail cell room with him and the note I put in his pocket, until finally, it’s just me and NoahandJude.

This is the sculpture I need to make first.

When I finish the model, hours later, Guillermo inspects it and then uses it to pencil different reference points on my practice rock that mark where I’ll cut in for “shoulders” and “heads.” We decide the boy’s outer shoulder is the first point of entry and then he leaves me to it.

It happens right away.

The very moment I put hammer to chisel with the intention of finding NoahandJude, my mind goes to the day Noah almost drowned.

Mom had just died. I was at the sewing machine with Grandma Sweetwine, one of her very first visits. I was working on the seam of a dress, when it’s like the room shook me, that’s the only way I can describe it. Grandma said: Go, only it was more like a tornado blowing the word at me. I flew out of my chair, out of the window, slid all the way down the bluff, my feet touching the sand as Noah hit the water. He didn’t come up. I knew he wasn’t going to. I’ve never been scared like that before, not even when Mom died. There was boiling liquid in my veins.

I ram the chisel with the hammer, watch a corner of the stone break off, watching myself rush into the surf that winter day. I swam fast as a shark despite my clothes, then started diving down where he sank, gripping armful after armful of water, trying to think about currents and riptides and maelstroms and everything Dad had ever taught me. I let the rip take me, dove down again, up and down, until there was Noah floating faceup, alive, but not conscious. I dragged him to shore, swimming one-armed, sinking more every stroke with the weight of him, both our lives pounding inside me, and then on the beach, I beat his sternum with shaking hands, blew breath after terrified breath into his cold clammy mouth, and when he revived, the second I knew he was okay, I slapped him as hard as I could across the face.

Because how could he have done this?

How could he have chosen to leave me here all alone?

He told me he hadn’t been trying to kill himself, but I didn’t believe him. That first jump was different than all the others that followed. That time he was trying to fling himself off the earth for good. I know he was. He wanted out. He’d chosen to leave. To leave me. And he would have had I not dragged him back.

I think the valve inside me that loosened during the conversation with Oscar has popped its gasket. I’m whacking the chisel with such force now my whole body’s vibrating, the whole world is.

Noah had stopped breathing. So there were these moments when I was in life without him.

For the first time. Not even in the womb were we apart. Terror doesn’t come close to describing it. Fury doesn’t come close. Heartbreak, no. There is no way to describe it.

He wasn’t there. He wasn’t with me anymore.

I’m starting to sweat in the plastic jumpsuit as I slam the hammer into the chisel with all the power in me, forgetting proper angles now, not caring about anything Guillermo just taught me, remembering only how my anger toward Noah wouldn’t go away after that. I couldn’t get rid of it and everything he did seemed to compound it. I went to Grandma’s bible, desperate, but it didn’t matter how many rosehips I put in my tea, how much lapis lazuli I hid under my pillow, I couldn’t get rid of the rage.

And I’m feeling it again, as I cut into the rock, as I drag Noah out of the ocean, as I rip into the stone, wanting us out, out of the treacherous water, out of this suffocating rock, wanting us free, when I hear, “So that’s why you did it?” It’s Mom and Grandma in unison. When did they become a team? A chorus? They say it again, their voices a duet of accusation in my head. “So is that why? Because it was right after that. We watched you do it. You didn’t think anyone saw. But we did.” I position the chisel on the other side of the stone and try to hammer away their voices but I can’t. “Leave me alone,” I hiss under my breath, peeling off the plastic suit, ripping off the face mask and goggles. “You’re not real,” I tell them.

I stumble into the studio, feeling rudderless, hoping their voices won’t follow me, not sure if I make them up or not, not sure of anything.

Inside, Guillermo is absorbed in another clay piece—so far, a man, all huddled up.

But something’s wrong in here too.

Guillermo’s bent over the bent-over clay man. His hands are working the face from behind and he’s talking in Spanish, his words growing more and more hostile. I watch in disbelief as he raises a fist and heaves it into the back of the clay man, leaving a hollow that I feel on my own spine. The blows come fast after that. The guy’s bloody ferocious, Oscar had said. I think of the punched-in walls of the cyclone room, the smashed window, the broken angel. He steps aside to inspect the damage he just inflicted, and as he does, he catches a glimpse of me and the violence in his fists is now in his eyes and directed at me. He puts his hand up and motions me out.

I back into the mailroom, my heart slamming inside my chest.

No, it’s not like this at CSA.

If this is what he meant about putting yourself into your art, if this is what it takes, I don’t know, I really don’t know if I’m up to it.

There’s no way I’m going back into the studio where bloody ferocious Guillermo is beating up on an innocent clay man or out on the patio where bloody ferocious Grandma and Mom are wanting to beat up on me, so I head upstairs. I know Oscar’s gone because I heard his motorcycle peel away over an hour ago.

The loft’s smaller than I’d imagined. Just a guy’s bedroom really. There are nails and thumbtack holes all over the walls where pictures and posters have been removed. The bookshelves have been ransacked. Only a few shirts hang in the closet. There’s a table with a computer and some kind of printer, maybe for photos. A desk. I walk over to the unmade bed, where he was hoping to dream about his mother earlier today.

It’s a tangle of brown sheets, one lone swirl of a Mexican blanket, a sad flat pillow in a faded pillowcase. A lonely-looking boy bed. I can’t help it; despite warnings and ghosts and shaky boycotts and cataclysmic girl-destroying exhalations, I lie down, rest my head on Oscar’s pillow, and breathe in the faint scent of him: peppery, sunny, wonderful.

Oscar does not smell like death.

I cover myself to the shoulders with his blanket and close my eyes, seeing his face, the desperate way it looked today when he told me what happened with his mother. He was so alone in that story. I breathe him in, all cocooned up in the place he dreams, tenderness crushing into me. And I understand why he shut down like that. Of course I do.

Opening my eyes, I see that on the bedside table, there’s a framed picture of a woman with long gray hair in a floppy white hat. She’s seated in a chair in a garden, a drink in her hand. There’s sweat on the glass. Her face is leathery from the sun and jam-packed with Oscar. She’s laughing and I somehow know she had the same breezy laugh he does.

“Forgive him,” I say to his mother, sitting up. I touch her face with my finger. “He needs you to forgive him already.”

She doesn’t answer. Unlike my dead relatives. Speaking of which, what happened to me outside? Like taking a chisel to my own psyche. That counselor said ghosts—she used finger quotes around the word—are often manifestations of a guilty conscience. Check. Or sometimes of a deep inner longing. Check. She said the heart overcomes the mind. Hope or fear overcomes reason.

I don’t know if I make up the ghosts or not, I only know I don’t want to think about what they just said to me, so I start perusing the titles of books stacked by Oscar’s bed. Mostly art history, some religion, novels. There’s an essay sticking out of one of the books. I remove it. It’s titled “The Ecstatic Impulse of the Artist,” and in the corner of the page it says:

I hug the paper to my chest. My mother used to teach AH 105. It’s the introductory art history course for freshmen. Had she not died, she would’ve met Oscar, read this paper, graded it, talked to him during her office hours. She would’ve loved his topic: “The Ecstatic Impulse of the Artist.” It makes me think of Noah. He sure had an ecstatic impulse. It didn’t used to feel safe how much he could love a color or a squirrel or brushing his teeth even. I turn to the last page of the paper, where a big fat A is circled in red with the line: Entirely compelling argument, Mr. Ralph! It’s then that Oscar’s last name crashes into my consciousness. Oscar Ralph. Last name, first name, who cares? Oscar is Ralph! I found Ralph. I start to laugh. This is a sign. This is destiny. This is a miracle, Grandma! This is Clark Gable being very funny.

I get up, feeling worlds better—I found Ralph!—and peek over the railing of the loft to make sure Guillermo isn’t in the mailroom listening to me giggling up here all alone. Then I walk over to the desk because hanging on the chair is Oscar’s leather jacket. I reach in the pocket and . . . no note. Which means he got it. Which makes my stomach whirl.

I put on the jacket; it’s like climbing right into his arms and I’m luxuriating in its heavy embrace, its scent, when I glance down at the desk and see me. All over it. Photograph after photograph arranged in a row, some with yellow sticky notes on them, some not. The air starts to vibrate.

Above the whole thing on a yellow sticky note, it says: The Prophecy.

The first photo is of an empty pew in the church where we met. A sticky note on it says: She said I’d meet you in church. Granted, she probably said this so I’d go to church. I kept coming back to this one to photograph the empty pews.

The second photo is of me sitting in the same pew as the previous shot. The note says: Then one day they weren’t empty. Except I hardly recognize myself. I look, I don’t know, hopeful. And I don’t remember smiling at him like that at all. I don’t remember smiling at anyone like that in my whole life.

The next photo is also from that day. The sticky says: She said I’d know you right away because you’d glow like an angel. Yes, she was high as hell on pain meds, as was I—like I told you—but you glow. Look at you. I look at the me he saw through his camera and again I hardly recognize her. I see a girl looking very swoony. I don’t understand. I’d only met him moments before.

The third photo is of me, taken the same day but before I said he could take photos of me. He must’ve been stealth shooting. It’s the moment when I put my finger to my lips to shush him and my grin’s as law-breaking as his. The sticky says: She said you’d be a bit odd. He made a smiley face. Forgive me, don’t mean to offend, but you are bizarre.

Ha! He no offense, but–ed me, English-style.

It’s like his camera has found this other girl, one I wish I could be.

The next photo is of me taken today in the mailroom talking to Grandma Sweetwine, talking to no one. There’s no denying how completely empty the room is, how alone I am, how marooned. I swallow.

But the sticky note says: She said you would feel like family.

So he came up here to print photos and write these messages after he left me downstairs? He must’ve wanted to tell me these things even as he fled like his feet were on fire.

I sit down, not quite believing any of this, that he might really like me too.

I pick up the last photo in the series. It’s of us kissing. Yes, kissing. He blurred out the background and added wild swirling color to everything around us so that we’re . . . exactly like the couple in the painting! How’d he do it? He must’ve used a photo he took of me kissing my hand and then manipulated one of himself into the image.

The sticky on this one reads: You asked what it would be like. This is what it would will be like. I don’t want to be just friends.

I don’t either.

Meeting your soul mate is like walking into a familiar house. I do recognize everything. I could find my way around in the dark. The bible rules.

I pick up the photograph of the kiss. I’m going to take it to La Lune and tell him I don’t want to be just friends either—

Then footsteps clomping up the steps, loud and hurried, mixed with laughter. I hear Oscar say, “Love when they overstaff. The extra helmet is right up here. And you can wear my jacket. It’s going to be cold on the bike.”

“So glad we finally get to hang out.” It’s a girl’s voice. Not Sophia’s from Transylvania either. Oh no, please. Something in my chest is collapsing. And I have about one second to make a decision. I choose the bad movie option, diving for the closet and shutting myself in before Oscar’s boots are stomping across the room. I do not like the way this girl said hang out. Not one bit. It was definitely code for hook up. Definitely code for kissing his lips, his closed eyelids, his scars, the tattoo of the beautiful blue horse.

Oscar: I could’ve sworn I left my jacket here.

Girl: Who’s she? She’s pretty.

Shuffling, shuffling. Is he sweeping the photos of me from sight?

Girl (voice tight): Is she your girlfriend?

Oscar: No, no. She’s nobody. It’s just a project for school.

Knife stab, center chest.

Girl: You sure? That’s a lot of pictures of one girl.

Oscar: Really, she’s nobody at all. Hey, come here. Sit on my lap.

Come here, sit on my lap?

Did I say knife? It’s an ice pick.

This time I’m certain no donuts are involved in the intimate sounds I’m hearing. This time I’m also certain I’m not misconstruing friendship for romance like I did with Sophia. I don’t understand. I don’t. How can the same guy who took those photos of me and wrote those notes to me be making out with another girl on the other side of this door? I hear him say the name Brooke in between heavy breaths. This is hell. This has to be karmic retribution for the last time I was in a closet I shouldn’t have been in.

I can’t stay in here.

Nobody-at-all pushes open the closet door. The girl springs out of Oscar’s lap like a crazed cat. She has long tumbling brown hair and almond-shaped eyes that are popping out of her head at the sight of me. She’s buttoning her shirt with frenzied fingers.

“CJ?” Oscar exclaims. There’s lipstick all over the bottom of his face. Again. “What’re you doing up here? In there?” Definitely a valid question. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the capacity for speech. And, I believe, for movement as well. I feel pinned to this awful moment like a dead insect. His eyes have landed on my chest. I realize I’m hugging the photograph of the kiss to me. “You saw,” he says.

“Nobody at all, huh?” the girl named Brooke says, picking up her bag from the floor and slinging it over her shoulder in preparation, it seems, for a quick, angry exit.

“Wait,” he says to her, but then his eyes dart back to me. “G.’s note?” he says, something dawning in his face. “You put it in my jacket?”

It hadn’t occurred to me he’d recognize Guillermo’s handwriting, but of course.

“What note?” I squeak out. Then I tell the girl, “I’m sorry. Really. I was just, oh I don’t know what I was doing in there, but there’s nothing between us. Nothing at all.” I find my legs are working enough to get me down the stairs.

I’m halfway across the mailroom when I hear Oscar from the stairs. “Check the other pockets.” I don’t turn around, just push down the hallway, through the door, then down the path, landing on the sidewalk, panting, sick to my stomach. I forge up the street on legs so weak and wobbly I can’t believe they’re carrying me. Then when I’m about a block away, throwing all dignity to the wind, I start checking the pockets of the jacket, finding nothing but a film canister, candy wrappers, a pen. Unless . . . I run my hands over the inside lining and there’s a zipper. I unzip it, reach in and pull out a piece of paper, carefully folded up. It looks like it’s been there a while. I open it. It’s a color copy of one of the photos of me in the church. The one with the law-breaking grin. He keeps me with him?

But wait. How can it matter? It can’t. It can’t matter if he chose to be with someone else anyway, to be with her right after writing those amazing notes to me, right after what happened between us on the floor of the jail cell room—not that I know what happened, but something did, something real, the laughing as well as the very intense rest of it when I had this sense there might be a key somewhere somehow that could set us both free. I really did.

And then: Nobody at all. And: Come here, sit on my lap.

I imagine him inhaling Brooke, inhaling girl after girl, like Guillermo said, like he’s done to me, so now he can exhale and blow me to smithereens.

I am so stupid.

They do make love stories for girls with black hearts after all. They go like this.

I’m not even a block away—the picture balled up in my hand—when I hear someone behind me. I turn around, certain that it’s Oscar, hating the fountaining of hope in my chest, only to find Noah: wild-eyed, unhinged, no padlocks anywhere on him, looking petrified, looking like he has something to tell me.