Really, if someone told me I could hang out in da Vinci’s studio while he painted the Mona Lisa or go up on Brian’s roof with him at night—I’m on the roof. The other day he mentioned us going to some movie about an alien invasion and I almost blacked out thinking of it. I’d rather sit next to Brian for two hours in a dark theater than have a wall-painting party with Jackson Pollock. The only problem with spending time with him in the woods all day is that there’s so much space in there. The trunk of a car would be better, or a thimble.
Despite my efforts at hogging the window, I feel myself getting shoved aside as Jude squeezes her head and then her shoulders out beside mine until we’re a two-headed hydra. I watch Brian’s face light up at the sight of her and get seasick.
(PORTRAIT: Jude: Drawn and Quartered)
“Hi, Brian Connelly,” she says in a flirty bouncy way that makes my body temperature drop several degrees. When did she learn to talk like that?
“Wow, you guys look nothing alike,” Brian exclaims. “I thought you’d look like Noah except—”
“With boobs?” Jude interjects. She said boobs to him!
And why was he thinking about what she’d look like anyway?
Brian cracks the half smile. I need to throw a bag over his head before Jude comes under the spell of his strange, squinting eyes. Do they have those burka things for guys? At least he hasn’t licked his lips, I think. “Well, yeah. Exactly,” he says to her, and licks his lips. “Though I’m pretty sure I would’ve phrased it differently.”
It’s over. His eyes are squinting. My sister’s a lollipop—everyone loves lollipops. And my head’s been replaced by a cabbage.
“You should come up too,” he says to her. “I was going to show your brother Gemini—the Twins, you know, so it’s perfect.” Your brother? I’m her brother now?
(PORTRAIT: Jude in Her New Home in Timbuktu)
She’s about to speak, to say, “Cool!” or “Awesome!” or “I love you!” so I ram her with my elbow. It’s the only practical solution. She returns the ram with a ream to my ribs. We’re used to concealing battles under tables at restaurants or at home, so keeping Brian out of this particular scuffle is a piece of cake until I blurt out, “She can’t come. She has to go to ubudowasow for sodojiokoa—” I’m just making sounds, throwing syllables together, hoping they’ll collide and find a meaning in Brian’s head, as I, in one spectacularly spastic motion, hoist myself up and then frog-leap out the window, only narrowly landing on my feet and not tumbling headfirst into Brian. I right myself, brush the hair out of my eyes, noting the dampness of my forehead, then turn around and place my hand on the bottom of the window and start pulling down, only at the last minute deciding not to decapitate my sister, even though it really seems like a good idea. Instead, I push on her shoulder to get her and her yellow strangling sweep of hair and purple nails and shimmery blue eyes and bouncing bobbling boobs back inside—
“Jesus, Noah. Got the hint. Nice to meet you,” she manages before I slam down the window.
“You too,” he says, rapping on the glass with his knuckles. She raps back two confident knowing raps that match the confident knowing smile on her face. It’s like they’ve been rapping back and forth like this their whole lives and have their own special Bengal Tiger to Lollipop Morse code.
Brian and I walk down the road in silence. I’ve broken into a full body sweat. I feel exactly the way I do when I wake up from the dream where I’m naked in the school cafeteria and only have those flimsy pathetic napkin squares to cover myself up.
Brian speaks to what just happened succinctly. “Dude,” he says. “Mental.”
I sigh, mumble, “Thanks, Einstein.”
And then to my surprise and relief, he starts to laugh. Fountainous, mountainous laughter. “So mental.” He karate-chops the air. “I mean, I thought you were going to slice her in half with the window!” This sends him on a rollicking ride of hysterics that I soon find myself on too. Further fueled when Prophet starts in, “Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?”
“Oh my God. That freaking bird.” Brian holds his head with both his hands. “We have to find Ralph, man. We have to. It’s a national emergency.”
He doesn’t seem to care a bit that Jude didn’t come with us. Maybe I imagined it all? Maybe his face didn’t light up at the sight of her? Maybe he didn’t blush at her words? Maybe he doesn’t even like lollipops?
“The Ax?” I say, feeling loads better.
“Oh man.” He groans. “That was fast.” There’s both embarrassment and pride in his voice. He holds up his right arm. “No one messes with The Ax.” The Ax comes down on my shoulder and jostles me. We’re under a streetlamp and I pray my face isn’t revealing what’s happened inside me at this contact. It’s the first time he’s touched me.
I follow him up the ladder to the roof, my shoulder still tingling, wishing the ladder went for miles and miles. (PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: The Two Boys Breaking Out of the Two Boys) As we climb, I can hear plants growing in the dark, can feel the blood speeding around inside me.
And then the scent of jasmine engulfs us.
Grandma Sweetwine used to tell us to hold our breath around the scent of night-blooming jasmine if we didn’t want to give away all our secrets. She’d say the police would do much better handing out vines of the white trumpet flowers to the accused than hooking them up to a lie detector. I really hope this one bit of hogwash is true. I want to know Brian’s secrets.
Once up, he takes a flashlight from his sweatshirt pocket and shines our way to the telescope. The light from it is red, not white, he explains, so we don’t lose our night vision. Our night vision!
While he’s crouched over a bag at the foot of the telescope, I listen to the crashing sea, imagining all the fish swimming through the endless freezing darkness.
“I could never be a fish,” I say.
“Me neither,” he replies, his words obstructed by the end of the flashlight, which he’s holding in his mouth so he can use both hands to rifle through the bag.
“Maybe an eel, though,” I say, still amazed how I say aloud so many things I’d normally just say to myself. “It’d be cool to have electric body parts, you know? Like your hair.”
I hear his muffled laugh through the flashlight and it shoots me dead with happiness. I’m thinking the reason I’ve been so quiet all these years is only because Brian wasn’t around yet for me to tell everything to. He takes a book out of the bag, then standing, flips through it until he finds what he’s looking for. He passes the open book to me, then steps real close so he can shine the flashlight—back in his hand now—on the page. “Here,” he says. “The Twins.”
I feel his hair on my cheek, on my neck.
I have the same feeling I get right before I start crying.
“That star,” he says, pointing, “is Castor, that one Pollux. They’re the heads of the Twins.” He takes a pen out of his pocket and starts drawing—it’s a glow-in-the-dark pen. Cool. He makes light-lines between stars until two stick figures appear.
I can smell his shampoo, his sweat. I breathe in deeply, silently.
“They’re both dudes,” he says. “Castor was mortal. Pollux, immortal.”
Do guys normally stand so close to other guys? I wish I’d paid more attention to these kinds of things before. I notice my fingers are trembling and I can’t be one hundred percent sure they won’t reach across the air and touch his bare wrist or neck, so I slip them in the hand jails to be safe. I close my fingers around the rock he gave me.
“When Castor died,” he says, “Pollux missed him too much, so he made a deal to share his immortality with him and that’s how they both ended up in the sky.”
“I’d do that,” I say. “Totally.”
“Yeah? Must be a twin thing,” he says, misunderstanding. “Though you’d never know it from that Death by Window Man
euver.” I feel my face flush because I’d meant him, duh, I’d share my immortality with him. I meant you, I want to holler.
Brian’s bent over the telescope adjusting something. “The Twins are thought to be responsible for shipwrecks, said to appear to sailors as St. Elmo’s Fire. Know what that is?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, just plows on in his Einstein mode. “It’s an electrical weather phenomenon where a luminous plasma’s created because charged particles separate and create electric fields that in turn create this corona discharge—”
“Whoa,” I say.
He laughs, but continues on just as incomprehensibly. I get the gist: The Twins cause things to burst into flames. He turns around, shines the flashlight in my face. “It’s crazy that it happens,” he says. “But it does, all the time too.”
He’s like a bag of selves. This Einstein one. The fearless meteor-hurling god. The crazy laughing guy. The Ax! There’s more too, I know it. Hidden ones. Truer ones. Because why is his inside face so worried?
I grab the flashlight out of his hand and shine it on him. The wind’s billowing his shirt against his chest. I want to flatten the ripples with my hand, want to so bad my mouth goes dry.
It’s not just me that’s staring this time.
“The smell of jasmine makes people tell their secrets,” I say to him, my voice low.
“Is that jasmine?” he asks, swirling the air with his hand.
I nod. The flashlight’s bright on his face. It’s an inquisition.
“Why do you think I have secrets?” He crosses his arms.
“Who doesn’t?”
“Tell me one of yours, then?”
I pull out a fairly harmless one, though juicy enough to get him to reveal something good. “I spy on people.”
“Who?”
“Well, basically, everyone. Usually I’m drawing, but sometimes not. I hide in trees, bushes, on my roof with the binoculars, wherever.”
“Ever get caught?”
“Yeah, twice. Both times by you.”
He laughs a little. “So . . . ever spy on me?” The question makes my breath catch in my throat. The truth is, after an in-depth investigation, I’ve determined his room spy-proof.
“No. Your go.”
“Okay.” He motions toward the ocean. “I can’t swim.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Hate the water. Don’t even like hearing it. Baths freak me out. Sharks freak me out. Living here freaks me out. You go.”
“I hate sports.”
“But you’re fast.”
I shrug. “Go.”
“Okay.” He licks his lip, then exhales slowly. “I’m claustrophobic.” He frowns. “I can’t be an astronaut now. It blows.”
“You weren’t always?”
“No.” He looks away and for a split second I see his inside face again. “Your turn.”
I flick off the flashlight.
My turn. My turn. My turn. I want to put my hands on your chest. I want to be in a thimble with you.
“I keyed my father’s car once,” I say.
“I stole a telescope from school.”
It’s easier with the flashlight off. The words falling in the dark, like apples from trees.
“Rascal, the horse across the street, talks to me.”
I can tell he’s smiling, then not. “My dad left.”
I pause. “I wish my dad would.”
“No, you don’t,” he says, his voice serious. “It sucks. My mom spends all her time on this website LostConnections writing him notes he’s never even going to see. Totally pathetic.” There’s a silence. “Oh, still my go? I do math problems in my head, like all the time. Even on the pitcher’s mound.”
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
“Like I mind-paint.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“I’m scared I suck,” I say.
He laughs. “Me too.”
“I mean suck bad.”
“Me too,” he insists.
We’re quiet for a second. The ocean rumbles beneath us.
I close my eyes, take a breath. “I’ve never kissed anyone.”
“No one?” he says. “No one meaning no one?” Does this mean something?
“No one.”
The moment stretches and stretches and stretches—
Then snaps. He says, “A friend of my mom’s came on to me.”
Whoa. I turn the flashlight back on his face. He’s blinking, looking uneasy, embarrassed. I watch his Adam’s apple as he swallows once, then again.
“How old? How much on?” I ask, instead of what I want to ask, wishing he’d used a pronoun. Was it a boyfriend?
“Not that old. On enough. Just one time. No big deal.” He takes the flashlight out of my hand and goes back to the telescope, ending the conversation. Clearly it was a big deal. I have a googleplex of questions about on enough, which I keep to myself.
I wait in the cold air where his body was.
“Okay,” he says a little while later. “All set up.”
I go behind the telescope, peer into the eyepiece, and all the stars crash down on my head. It’s like taking a shower in the cosmos. I gasp.
“Knew you’d freak,” he says.
“Oh man. Poor van Gogh,” I say. “Starry Night could’ve been so much cooler.”
“I totally knew it!” he exclaims. “If I were an artist, I’d go crazy.” I need something to hold on to, besides him. I grab one of the legs of the telescope with my hand. No one has ever been this excited to show me something, not even Mom. And he kind of just called me an artist.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Throwing Armfuls of Air into the Air)
He comes up behind me. “Okay, now check this out. You’re going to lose your mind.” He leans over my shoulder and pulls down some lever and the stars rush even closer and he’s right, I am losing my mind, but not because of the stars this time. “Can you see the Twins?” he asks. “They’re in the upper right quadrant.” I can’t see a thing because my eyes are closed. All I care about the cosmos is happening here on this roof. I think how to respond so his hand stays on that lever, so he remains this close to me, so close I can feel his breathing on the back of my neck. If I say yes, he’ll probably step backward. If I say no, maybe he’ll adjust the telescope again and we can stay like this a minute longer. “I don’t think I see them,” I say, my voice rough, unsteady. This was the right answer, because he says, “Okay, here,” and he does something that brings not only the stars but him a breath closer.
My heart stops beating.
My back is to his front and if I move an inch backward I’d fall into him and then if it were a movie, not one I’ve ever seen, mind you, he’d put his hands all over me, I know he would, and then I’d twist around and we’d melt together like hot wax. I can see it happening in my head. I don’t move.
“Well?” He breathes the word more than says it, and that’s when I know he feels it too. I think about those two guys in the sky causing shipwrecks, causing things to burst into flames, just like that with no warning. “It’s crazy that it happens,” he’d said about them. “But it just does.”
It just does.
It’s happening to us.
“I have to go,” I say, helpless.
What makes you say the opposite of what every cell in your body wants you to say?
“Yeah,” he replies. “Okay.”
• • •
The Hornet Girls: Courtney Barrett, Clementine Cohen, Lulu Mendes, and Heather somebody are propped on the big rock beside the trailhead when Brian and I come out of the woods the next afternoon. At the sight of us, Courtney leaps from her perch, lands with hands on hips, creating a pink-bikini-clad human roadblock in our path, thereby cutting short my diatribe about the genius of the blobfish, the world??
?s most underrated waste-of-space animal, forever in the shadow of the three-toed sloth. This followed Brian’s breaking news about a boy in Croatia he read about on the web who’s magnetic. His family and friends throw coins at him, which stick. As do frying pans. He says this is indeed possible for a gobbledygook reason I didn’t follow.
“Hey,” Courtney says. She’s a year older than the other hornets, going to high school next year, so the same age as Brian. Her smile’s all scarlet lips, sparkling white teeth, and menace. The antennae on her head are pointing right at him. “Wow!” she exclaims. “Who knew you were hiding those eyes under that silly hat?” Her bikini top, two pink strips and a string, covers very little of her. She plucks the string, revealing a secret line of white skin that wraps around her neck. She’s plucking it like a guitar string.
I watch Brian watch this. Then I watch Brian being watched by her, knowing Courtney’s registering the way his T-shirt falls like water over his broad chest, registering his tanned strong baseball arms, registering the totally cool space between the teeth, the squint, the freckles, registering that there’s no word in her hornet head to describe the particular color of his eyes.
“Think I take offense on behalf of my lucky hat,” Brian replies with a smoothness and coolness that drive spikes into my eardrums. Another Brian’s emerging, I can tell. One I’m certain I’m not going to like at all.
It occurs to me that Jude does this too, changes who she is depending on who she’s with. They’re like toads changing their skin color. How come I’m always just me?
Courtney fake pouts. “No offense intended.” She lets go of the bikini string and flicks the rim of his hat with two long fingers. Her nails are the same purple color as Jude’s. “Why lucky?” she says, tilting her head, tilting the whole world so everything flows in her direction. Without a doubt, this is the girl who’s been giving Jude flirting lessons. Hey, where is Jude? How come she skipped this ambush?
“It’s lucky,” he says, “because good things happen when I wear it.” It’s possible Brian glances at me for a nanosecond when he says this, but lots of things are possible and extremely unlikely, like world peace and summer snowstorms and blue dandelions and what I think happened on the roof last night. Did I imagine it? Each time I think of it, every ten seconds or so all day long, I faint inside.