I'll Give You the Sun

by Jandy Nelson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I forget everything else and work on freeing NoahandJude.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I take the hammer and crush it into the chisel.

  I have to get him out of here.

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

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

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

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

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

  Opening it all up.

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

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

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

  I only mailed mine.

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

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

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

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

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

  The world has gone dark. Guillermo’s standing in front of me blocking the sun. He takes the hammer and chisel out of my hands, which have long ago stopped carving. He takes off his scarf, shakes it out, and wipes the stripe of brow between my hat and goggles. “I don’t think you are okay,” he says. “Sometimes you work the stone, sometimes the stone works you. I think today the rock win.”
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  I slip down my face mask, and say, “So this is what you meant when you said what slumbers in here”—I touch my chest—“slumbers in here.” I touch the rock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  To awaken your spirit, throw a stone into your

  reflection in still water

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

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

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

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

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

  I’m me.

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

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

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

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

  So that NoahandJude becomes Noah and Jude.

  “You kill them?” Guillermo says in disbelief.

  “No, I saved them.”

  Finally.

  • • •

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

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

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

  • • •

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

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

  I have a bad feeling.

  I acted too late.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Apologize? He’s got to be kidding.

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

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

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

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

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

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