Authors: Jandy Nelson

Tags: #Performing Arts, #Love & Romance, #Family, #Juvenile Fiction, #General, #Music

The Sky Is Everywhere (6 page)

BOOK: The Sky Is Everywhere

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“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 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. 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, 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 gray 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 let 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.

In photographs of us together,

she is always looking at the camera,

and I am always looking at her.

(Found on a folded-up piece of paper half buried in pine needles on the trail to the Rain River)

chapter 8

I AM SITTING at Bailey’s desk with St. Anthony: Patron of Lost Things.

He doesn’t belong here. He belongs on the mantel in front of The Half Mom where I’ve always kept him, but Bailey must’ve moved him, and I don’t know why. I found him tucked behind the computer in front of an old drawing of hers that’s tacked to the wall—the one she made the day Gram told us our mother was an explorer (of the Christopher Columbus variety).

I’ve drawn the curtains, and though I want to, I won’t let myself peek out the window to see if Toby is under the plum tree. I won’t let myself imagine his lips lost and half wild on mine either. No. I let myself imagine igloos, nice frigid arctic igloos. I’ve promised Bailey nothing like what happened that night will ever happen again.

It’s the first day of summer vacation and everyone from school is at the river. I just got a drunken call from Sarah informing me that not one, not two, but three unfreakingbelievable Fontaines are supposed to be arriving momentarily at Flying Man’s, that they are going to play outside, that she just found out the two older Fontaines are in a seriously awesome band in L.A., where they go to college, and I better get my butt down there to witness the glory. I told her I was staying in and to revel in their Fontainely glory for me, which resurrected the bristle from yesterday: “You’re not with Toby, are you, Lennie?”

Ugh.

I look over at my clarinet abandoned in its case on my playing chair. It’s in a coffin, I think, then immediately try to unthink it. I walk over to it, unlatch the lid. There never was a question what instrument I’d play. When all the other girls ran to the flutes in fifth-grade music class, I beelined for a clarinet. It reminded me of me.

I reach in the pocket where I keep my cloth and reeds and feel around for the folded piece of paper. I don’t know why I’ve kept it (for over a year!), why I fished it out of the garbage later that afternoon, after Bailey had tossed it with a cavalier “Oh well, guess you guys are stuck with me,” before throwing herself into Toby’s arms like it meant nothing to her. But I knew it did. How could it not? It was Juilliard.

Without reading it a final time, I crumple Bailey’s rejection letter into a ball, toss it into the garbage can, and sit back down at her desk.

I’m in the exact spot where I was that night when the phone blasted through the house, through the whole unsuspecting world. I’d been doing chemistry, hating every minute of it like I always do. The thick oregano scent of Gram’s chicken fricassee was wafting into our room and all I wanted was Bailey to hurry home already so we could eat because I was starving and hated isotopes. How can that be? How could I have been thinking about fricassee and carbon molecules when across town my sister had just taken her very last breath? What kind of world is this? And what do you do about it? What do you do when the worst thing that can happen actually happens? When you get that phone call? When you miss your sister’s roller coaster of a voice so much that you want to take apart the whole house with your fingernails?

This is what I do: I take out my phone and punch in her number. In a blind fog of a moment the other day I called to see when she’d be home and discovered her account hadn’t yet been canceled.

Hey, this is Bailey, Juliet for the month, so dudes, what say’st thou? Hast thou not a word of joy? Some comfort...

I hang up at the tone, then call back, again and again, and again, and again, wanting to just pull her out of the phone. Then one time I don’t hang up.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were getting married?” I whisper, before snapping the phone shut and laying it on her desk. Because I don’t understand. Didn’t we tell each other everything ?
If this doesn’t change our lives, Len, I don’t know what will,
she’d said when we painted the walls. Is that the change she’d wanted then? I pick up the cheesy plastic St. Anthony. And what about him? Why bring him up here? I look more closely at the drawing he was leaning against. It’s been up so long that the paper has yellowed and the edges have curled, so long that I haven’t taken notice of it for years. Bailey drew it when she was around eleven, the time she started questioning Gram about Mom with an unrelenting ferocity.

She’d been at it for weeks.

“How do you know she’ll be back?” Bailey asked for the millionth time. We were in Gram’s art room, Bailey and I lay sprawled out on the floor drawing with pastels while Gram painted one of her ladies at a canvas in the corner, her back to us. She’d been skirting Bailey’s questions all day, artfully changing the subject, but it wasn’t working this time. I watched Gram’s arm drop to her side, the brush sending droplets of a hopeful green onto the bespattered floor. She sighed, a big lonely sigh, then turned around to face us.

“I guess you’re old enough, girls,” she said. We perked up, immediately put down our pastels, and gave her our undivided attention. “Your mother is ... well ... I guess the best way to describe it . . . hmmm ... let me think . . .” Bailey looked at me in shock—we’d never known Gram to be at a loss for words.

“What, Gram?” Bailey asked. “What is she?”

“Hmmm ...” Gram bit her lip, then finally, hesitantly, she said, “I guess the best way to say it is ... you know how some people have natural tendencies, how I paint and garden, how Big’s an arborist, how you, Bailey, want to grow up and be an actress—”

“I’m going to go to Juilliard,” she told us.

Gram smiled. “Yes, we know, Miss Hollywood. Or Miss Broadway, I should say.”

“Our mom?” I reminded them before we ended up talking some more about that dumb school. All I’d hoped was that it was in walking distance if Bailey was going there. Or at least close enough so I could ride my bike to see her every day. I’d been too scared to ask.

Gram pursed her lips for a moment. “Okay, well, your mother, she’s a little different, she’s more like a ... well, like an explorer.”

“Like Columbus, you mean?” Bailey asked.

“Yes, like that, except without the
Niña, Pinta,
and
Santa Maria.
Just a woman, a map, and the world. A solo artist.” Then she left the room, her favorite and most effective way of ending a conversation.

Bailey and I stared at each other. In all our persistent musings on where Mom was and why she left, we never ever imagined anything remotely this good. I followed after Gram to try and find out more, but Bailey stayed on the floor and drew this picture.

In it, there’s a woman at the top of a mountain looking off into the distance, her back to us. Gram, Big, and I—with our names beneath our feet—are waving up at the lone figure from the base of the mountain. Under the whole drawing, it says in green
Explorer.
For some reason, Bailey did not put herself in the picture.

I bring St. Anthony to my chest, hold him tight. I need him now, but why did Bailey? What had she lost?

What was it she needed to find?

I put on her clothes.

I button one of her frilly shirts

over my own T-shirt.

Or I wrap one, sometimes two,

sometimes all of her diva scarves around my neck.

Or I strip and slip one of her slinkier dresses over my head,

letting the fabric

fall over my skin like water.

I always feel better then,

like she’s holding me.