by Jandy Nelson
and so the younger girl did it
and her whole world filled with light.
(Found on a piece of notebook paper caught in a fence up on the ridge)
Judas, Brutus, Benedict Arnold and me.
And the worst part is every time I close my eyes I see Toby’s lion face again, his lips a breath away from mine, and it makes me shudder head to toe, not with guilt, like it should, but with desire – and then, just as soon as I allow myself the image of us kissing, I see Bailey’s face twisting in shock and betrayal as she watches us from above: her boyfriend, her fiancé kissing her traitorous little sister on her own bed. Ugh. Shame watches me like a dog.
I’m in self-imposed exile, cradled between split branches, in my favorite tree in the woods behind school. I’ve been coming here every day at lunch, hiding out until the bell rings, whittling words into the branches with my pen, allowing my heart to break in private. I can’t hide a thing – everyone in school sees clear to my bones.
I’m reaching into the brown bag Gram packed for me, when I hear twigs crack underneath me. Uh-oh. I look down and see Joe Fontaine. I freeze. I don’t want him to see me: Lennie Walker: Mental Patient Eating Lunch in a Tree (it being decidedly out of your tree to hide out in one!). He walks in confused circles under me like he’s looking for someone. I’m hardly breathing but he isn’t moving on, has settled just to the right of my tree. Then I inadvertently crinkle the bag and he looks up, sees me.
“Hi,” I say, like it’s the most normal place to be eating lunch.
“Hey, there you are—” He stops, tries to cover. “I was wondering what was back here…” He looks around. “Perfect spot for a gingerbread house or maybe an opium den.”
“You already gave yourself away,” I say, surprised at my own boldness.
“Okay, guilty as charged. I followed you.” He smiles at me – that same smile – wow, no wonder I’d thought—
He continues, “And I’m guessing you want to be alone. Probably don’t come all the way out here and then climb a tree because you’re starving for conversation.” He gives me a hopeful look. He’s charming me, even in my pitiful emotional state, my Toby turmoil, even though he’s accounted for by Cruella de Vil.
“Want to come up?” I present him a branch and he bounds up the tree in about three seconds, finds a suitable seat right next to me, then bats his eyelashes at me. I’d forgotten about the eyelash endowment. Wow squared.
“What’s to eat?” He points to the brown bag.
“You kidding? First you crash my solitude, now you want to scavenge. Where were you raised?”
“Paris,” he says. “So I’m a scavenger raffiné.”
Oh so glad j’étudie le français. And jeez, no wonder the school’s abuzz about him, no wonder I’d wanted to kiss him. I even momentarily forgive Rachel the idiotic baguette she had sticking out of her backpack today. He goes on, “But I was born in California, lived in San Francisco until I was nine. We moved back there about a year ago and now we’re here. Still want to know what’s in the bag though.”
“You’ll never guess,” I tell him. “I won’t either, actually. My grandmother thinks it’s really funny to put all sorts of things in our – my lunch. I never know what’ll be inside: e. e. cummings, flower petals, a handful of buttons. She seems to have lost sight of the original purpose of the brown bag.”
“Or maybe she thinks other forms of nourishment are more important.”
“That’s exactly what she thinks,” I say, surprised. “Okay, you want to do the honors?” I hold up the bag.
“I’m suddenly afraid, is there ever anything alive in it?” Bat. Bat. Bat. Okay, it might take me a little time to build immunity to the eyelash bat.
“Never know…” I say, trying not to sound as swoony as I feel. And I’m going to just pretend that sitting-in-a-tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g rhyme did not just pop into my head.
He takes the bag, then reaches in with a grand gesture, and pulls out – an apple.
“An apple? How anti-climactic!” He throws it at me. “Everyone gets apples.”
I urge him to continue. He reaches in, pulls out a copy of Wuthering Heights.
“That’s my favorite book,” I say. “It’s like a pacifier. I’ve read it twenty-three times. She’s always putting it in.”
“Wuthering Heights – twenty-three times! Saddest book ever, how do you even function?”
“Do I have to remind you? I’m sitting in a tree at lunch.”
“True.” He reaches in again, pulls out a stemless purple peony. Its rich scent overtakes us immediately. “Wow,” he says, breathing it in. “Makes me feel like I might levitate.” He holds it under my nose. I close my eyes, imagine the fragrance lifting me off my feet too. I can’t. But something occurs to me.
“My favorite saint of all time is a Joe,” I tell him. “Joseph of Cupertino, he levitated. Whenever he thought of God, he would float into the air in a fit of ecstasy.”
He tilts his head, looks at me skeptically, eyebrows raised. “Don’t buy it.”
I nod. “Tons of witnesses. Happened all the time. Right during Mass.”
“Okay, I’m totally jealous. Guess I’m just a wannabe levitator.”
“Too bad,” I say. “I’d like to see you drifting over Clover playing your horn.”
“Hell yeah,” he exclaims. “You could come with, grab my foot or something.”
We exchange a quick searching glance, both of us wondering about the other, surprised at the easy rapport – it’s just a moment, barely perceptible, like a lady bug landing on your arm.
He rests the flower on my leg and I feel the brush of his fingers through my jeans. The brown bag is empty now. He hands it to me, and then we’re quiet, just listening to the wind rustle around us and watching the sun filter through the redwoods in impossibly thick foggy rays just like in children’s drawings.
Who is this guy? I’ve talked more to him in this tree than I have to anyone at school since I’ve been back. But how could he have read Wuthering Heights and still fall for Rachel Bitchzilla? Maybe it’s because she’s been to Fronce. Or because she pretends to like music that no one else has heard of, like the wildly popular Throat Singers of Tuva.
“I saw you the other day,” he says, picking up the apple. He tosses it with one hand, catches it with the other. “By The Great Meadow. I was playing my guitar in the field. You were across the way. It looked like you were writing a note or something against a car, but then you just dropped the piece of paper—”
“Are you stalking me?” I ask, trying to keep my sudden delight at that notion out of my voice.
“Maybe a little.” He stops tossing the apple. “And maybe I’m curious about something.”
“Curious?” I ask. “About what?”
He doesn’t answer, starts picking at moss on a branch. I notice his hands, his long fingers full of calluses from guitar strings.
“What?” I say again, dying to know what made him curious enough to follow me up a tree.
“It’s the way you play the clarinet…”
The delight drains out of me. “Yeah?”
“Or the way you don’t play it, actually.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, knowing exactly what he means.
“I mean you’ve got loads of technique. Your fingering’s quick, your tonguing fast, your range of tones, man … but it’s like it all stops there. I don’t get it.” He laughs, seemingly unaware of the bomb he just detonated. “It’s like you’re sleep-playing or something.”
Blood rushes to my cheeks. Sleep-playing! I feel caught, a fish in a net. I wish I’d quit band altogether like I’d wanted to. I look off at the redwoods, each one rising to the sky surrounded only by its loneliness. He’s staring at me, I can feel it, waiting for a response, but one is not forthcoming – this is a no trespassing zone.
“Look,” he says cautiously, finally getting a clue that his charms have worn off. “I followed you out here because I wanted to see if we could play together.”
“I want to hear John Lennon play for real, I mean, who wouldn’t, right?”
His joke crashes and burns between us.
“I don’t think so,” I say as the bell rings.
“Look—” he starts, but I don’t let him finish.
“I don’t want to play with you, okay?”
“Fine.” He hurls the apple into the air. Before it hits the ground and before he jumps out of the tree, he says, “It wasn’t my idea anyway.”
I wake to Ennui, Sarah’s Jeep, honking down the road – it’s an ambush. I roll over, look out the window, see her jump out in her favorite black vintage gown and platform combat boots, back-to-blond hair tweaked into a nest, cigarette hanging from blood red lips in a pancake of ghoulish white. I look at the clock: 7.05 a.m. She looks up at me in the window, waves like a windmill in a hurricane.
I pull the covers over my head, wait for the inevitable.
“I’ve come to suck your blood,” she says a few moments later.
I peek out of the covers. “You really do make a stunning vampire.”
“I know.” She leans into the mirror over my dresser, wiping some lipstick off her teeth with her black-nail-polished finger. “It’s a good look for me … Heidi goes goth.” Without the accoutrements, Sarah could play Goldilocks. She’s a sun-kissed beach girl who goes gothgrungepunkhippierockeremocoremetalfreakfashionista-
braingeekboycrazyhiphoprastagirl
istabraingeekboycrazyhiphoprastagirl to keep it under wraps. She crosses the room, stands over me, then pulls a corner of the covers down and hops into bed with me, boots and all.
“I miss you, Len.” Her enormous blue eyes are shining down on me, so sincere and incongruous with her get-up. “Let’s go to breakfast before school. Last day of junior year and all. It’s tradition.”
“Okay,” I say, then add, “I’m sorry I’ve been so awful.”
“Don’t say that, I just don’t know what to do for you. I can’t imagine…” She doesn’t finish, looks around The Sanctum. I see the dread overtake her. “It’s so unbearable…” She stares at Bailey’s bed. “Everything is just as she left it. God, Len.”
“Yeah.” My life catches in my throat. “I’ll get dressed.”
She bites her bottom lip, trying not to cry. “I’ll wait downstairs. I promised Gram I’d talk with her.” She gets out of bed and walks to the door, the leap in her from moments before now a shuffle. I pull the covers back over my head. I know the bedroom is a mausoleum. I know it upsets everyone (except Toby, who didn’t even seem to notice), but I want it like this. It makes me feel like Bailey’s still here or like she might come back.
On the way to town, Sarah tells me about her latest scheme to bag a babe who can talk to her about her favorite existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre. The problem is her insane attraction to lumphead surfers who (not to be prejudicial) are not customarily the most well-versed in French literature and philosophy, and therefore must constantly be exempted from Sarah’s Must-Know-Who-Sartre-Is-or-at-Least-Have-Read-Some-of-D.H.Lawrence-or-at-the-Minimum-One-of-the-Brontës-Preferably-Emily criteria of going out with her.
“There’s an afternoon symposium this summer at the college in French Feminism,” she tells me. “I’m going to go. Want to come?”
I laugh. “That sounds like the perfect place to meet guys.”
“You’ll see,” she says. “The coolest guys aren’t afraid to be feminists, Lennie.”
I look over at her. She’s trying to blow smoke rings, but blowing smoke blobs instead.
I’m dreading telling her about Toby, but I have to, don’t I? Except I’m too chicken, so I go with less damning news.
“I hung out with Joe Fontaine the other day at lunch.”
“You didn’t!”
“I did.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.”
“Nah-uh.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not possible.
“So possible.”
We have an incredibly high tolerance for yes-no.
“You duck! You flying yellow duck! And you took this long to tell me?!” When Sarah gets excited, random animals pop into her speech like she has an Old MacDonald Had a Farm kind of Tourette’s syndrome. “Well, what’s he like?”
“He’s okay,” I say distractedly, looking out the window. I can’t figure out whose idea it could’ve been that we play together. Mr James, maybe? But why? And argh, how freaking mortifying.
“Earth to Lennie. Did you just say Joe Fontaine is okay? The guy’s holy horses unfreakingbelievable! And I heard he has two older brothers: holy horses to the third power, don’t you think?”
“Holy horses, Batgirl,” I say, which makes Sarah giggle, a sound that doesn’t seem quite right coming out of her Batgoth face. She takes a last drag off her cigarette and drops it into a can of soda. I add, “He likes Rachel. What does that say about him?”
“That he has one of those Y chromosomes,” Sarah says, shoving a piece of gum into her orally fixated mouth. “But really, I don’t see it. I heard all he cares about is music and she plays like a screeching cat. Maybe it’s those stupid Throat Singers she’s always going on about and he thinks she’s in the musical know or something.” Great minds … then suddenly Sarah’s jumping in her seat like she’s on a pogo stick. “Oh Lennie, do it! Challenge her for first chair. Today! C’mon. It’ll be so exciting – probably never happened in the history of honor band, a chair challenged on the last day of school!”
I shake my head. “Not going to happen.”
“But why?”
I don’t answer her, don’t know how to.
An afternoon from last summer pops into my head. I’d just quit my lessons with Marguerite and was hanging out with Bailey and Toby at Flying Man’s Gulch. He was telling us that Thoroughbred racing horses have these companion ponies that always stay by their sides, and I remember thinking, That’s me. I’m a companion pony, and companion ponies don’t solo. They don’t play first chair or audition for All-State or compete nationally or seriously consider a certain performing arts conservatory in New York City like Marguerite had begun insisting.
They just don’t.
Sarah sighs as she swerves into a parking spot. “Oh well, guess I’ll have to entertain myself another way on the last day of school.”
“Guess so.”
We jump out of Ennui, head into Cecilia’s Bakery, and order up an obscene amount of pastries that Cecilia gives us for free with that same sorrowful look that follows me everywhere I go now. I think she would give me every last pastry in the store if I asked.
We land on our bench of choice by Maria’s Italian Deli, where I’ve been chief lasagna maker every summer since I was fourteen. I start up again tomorrow. The sun has burst into millions of pieces, which have landed all over Main Street. It’s a gorgeous day. Everything shines except my guilty heart.
“Sarah, I have to tell you something.”
A worried look comes over her. “Sure.”
“Something happened with Toby the other night.” Her worry has turned into something else, which is what I was afraid of. Sarah has an ironclad girlfriend code of conduct regarding guys. The policy is sisterhood before all else.
“Something like something? Or something like something?” Her eyebrow has landed on Mars.
My stomach churns. “Like something … we kissed.” Her eyes go wide and her face twists in disbelief, or perhaps it’s horror. This is the face of my shame, I think, looking at her. How could I have kissed Toby? I ask myself for the thousandth time.
“Wow,” she says, the word falling like a rock to the ground. She’s making no attempt to hold back her disdain. I bury my head in my hands, assume the crash position – I shouldn’t have told her.
“It felt right in the moment, we both miss Bails so much, he just gets it, gets me, he’s like the only one who does
… and I was drunk.” I say all this to my jeans.
“Drunk?” She can’t contain her surprise. I hardly ever even have a beer at the parties she drags me to. Then in a softer voice, I hear, “Toby’s the only one who gets you?”
Uh-oh.
“I didn’t mean that,” I say, lifting my head to meet her eyes, but it’s not true, I did mean it, and I can tell from her expression she knows it. “Sarah.”
She swallows, looks away from me, then quickly changes the topic back to my disgrace. “I guess it does happen. Grief sex is kind of a thing. It was in one of those books I read.” I still hear the judgment in her voice, and something more now too.
“We didn’t have sex,” I say. “I’m still the last virgin standing.”
She sighs, then puts her arm around me, awkwardly, as if she has to. I feel like I’m in a headlock. Neither of us has a clue how to deal with what’s not being said, or what is.
“It’s okay, Len. Bailey would understand.” She sounds totally unconvincing. “And it’s not like it’s ever going to happen again, right?”
“Of course not,” I say, and hope I’m not lying.
And hope I am.
Everyone has always said I look like Bailey,
but I don't.
I have grey eyes to her green,
an oval face to her heart-shaped one,
I'm shorter, scrawnier, paler,
flatter, plainer, tamer.
All we shared is a madhouse of curls
that I imprison in a ponytail
while she lets hers rave
like madness
around her head.
I don't sing in my sleep
or eat the petals off flowers
or run into the rain instead of out of it.
I'm the unplugged-in one,
the side-kick sister,
tucked into a corner of her shadow.
Boys followed her everywhere;
they filled the booths at the restaurant
where she waitressed,
herded around her at the river.
One day, I saw a boy come up behind her
and pull a strand of her long hair.
I understood this—
I felt the same way.