I'll Give You the Sun

At thirteen, my world is a museum of invisible paintings, and my twin sister, Jude, is my other half. We share a soul, a tree with its leaves on fire. But the world outside our secret one is full of sociopaths like Zephyr and Fry, who chase me through the woods to throw me off Devil's Drop. When they corner me, it's Jude's name that saves me, Jude's reputation as a fearless cliff-jumper and surfer that makes them pause. (PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Twins: Noah Looking in a Mirror, Jude out of It). She is all light and sunshine, her hair miles of yellow I can never capture. I am the boy who hides inside the boy, drawing constantly to keep the world at bay, to make sense of the feelings that get me called “Bubble” and “pussy.”

Everything changes when Mom comes home with a message from our dead grandmother. We're to apply to the California School of the Arts, a high school for revolutionaries and freaks. I feel a window fly open in my chest. This is it - a place where my blood might finally glow like everyone else's. But Jude balks, calling it the California School of the Aliens. A chasm opens between us that first day we visit a museum to prepare. Mom, an art historian, holds my sketchbook, her face swarmed with happiness. “It's extraordinary, Noah,” she says, the words a lake of light I dive into. She never even asks to see Jude's. For thirteen years, we've been inseparable, but now we both know who our mother would save first if we were drowning.

Three years later, I am Calamity Jane, a student at that very same School of the Aliens. I live by Grandma Sweetwine's bible, a leather-bound book of superstitions that is my only true guide. A four-leaf clover in my pocket to thwart sinister influences, an onion to ward off illness. It's not enough. Everything I make in the kiln breaks. My classmates whisper about my bad luck, but I know the truth: my mother's ghost is angry, rising from the grave to shatter every bowl and blob I create. I'm on a boy boycott, hiding my hair under a skullcap and my body in oversized clothes. I know what you're thinking. It's Noah who belongs here, not me.

My advisor, Sandy, tells me I'm on the verge of being expelled. He asks if there isn't something I need to make, something only my hands can create. There is - a sculpture of my mother - but I can't bear the thought of her ghost breaking that, too. The answer comes to me in a flash: stone. It has to be stone. Sandy knows a master carver, a recluse named Guillermo Garcia. “He was the kind of man,” my mother once wrote, “who walks into a room and all the walls fall down.” Before I can find him, I take refuge from the fog in a small church, where a boy with a crooked smile and an English accent startles me. “Guess I'm damned,” he says, his energy a whirlwind. He aims a camera at me. “Hope you don't mind me saying, but you look like an angel sitting there.” He photographs me until it feels like more than kissing, until he puts the lens cap on and says, “You're her. I'm sure of it.”

Then a boy appears on a neighboring roof, a boy with white-hot hair and a telescope, a boy who throws a meteorite into my hand and follows me into the woods. His name is Brian. He collects space garbage and believes the sky is always falling. He's a blow-in, I can tell, from some exoplanet with six suns, and around him, I feel supernaturally relaxed, like left-out butter. We spend our days in the forest, him searching for fallen stars, me mind-painting him. (PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Two Boys Jump and Stay Up). We laugh until we can't breathe. On his roof at night, under a sky full of stars, he tells me the story of the Gemini twins, Castor and Pollux, who shared immortality so they could be together forever. “I'd do that,” I say, and I mean for him. He stands so close I can feel his breath on my neck. It's like we're two lit candles melting into one.

But the world intrudes. The popular girls find him, and he changes, becomes one of them. My jealousy for Jude - who is now one of them too - becomes a poison. The night of a party, I see them go into a closet together for seven minutes, and I am gutted. It's all been a lie. I run home, find the photographs I took of Jude's magnificent sand sculptures - the ones that prove she's the real artist - and I delete them all. One by one, I wipe every trace of her talent from the world so only mine is left. The next day, I follow my mother to The Wooden Bird, a sculpture on a cliff overlooking the sea, and watch as she falls into the arms of a strange man. They kiss like the world is ending. The man is the sculptor from Day Street. All the pieces of my mother's recent strange behavior click into place. She's in love. She's leaving Dad. When I confront her, she tells me she's asking for a divorce that very day. “You can't help who you love, can you?” she asks, and I see Brian's face, feel the lie of our friendship. I tell her I hate her, the last words I ever say to her before she gets in her car and drives away.

Now, at sixteen, I find myself standing in that sculptor's studio. The man who was my mother's lover is my mentor. I've discovered he is “Dearest,” the recipient of her secret love notes. I've discovered that Oscar, the English boy from the church, is the boy from Noah's long-lost portrait, the one I gave up the sun and stars for. He is the boy my mother prophesized I would love. And he is here, telling me he's terrified of me, that he thinks I could devastate him. I can. I will. I pull him out my bedroom window and into the moonlight, and for the first time, I kiss him like I mean it, like all the walls are falling down around us.

Then, one afternoon, Noah appears at the studio. He looks at Guillermo. “He killed her,” he says, his voice trembling. “If it wasn't for him, we'd still have her.” The studio begins to rock. The giant stone couples Guillermo carved in my mother's memory begin to spin. I turn to my brother. “You lied,” I say, the words barely escaping. For two years, he let me and Dad believe Mom was on her way to reconcile with him when her car sailed off the cliff. “I'm sorry, Jude,” he cries. “She was on her way to ask Dad for a divorce so she could marry… you.” He looks at Guillermo, and I see the truth finally land, a terrible, beautiful, two-years-too-late truth. Her answer had been yes.

In the woods, we unbury everything. Noah confesses his lie was born of a desperate wish for things to be different, a wish to protect us. He tells me Mom caught him with Brian, and her last words to him were an encouragement to be true to his heart. Then it's my turn. “You didn't not get into CSA,” I tell him. “I never mailed your application.” He stares, his face blank, and then a wild joy breaks across it. “I thought I sucked!” he shouts, laughing. He hadn't been rejected; he'd been silenced. He takes me to a crumbling wall on an abandoned construction site, and there, in a blaze of spray paint, is his story. Our story. There is Brian opening a suitcase of stars, there is Mom's car bursting into flames, there are two shirtless boys kissing under buckets of light. There is the world, remade.

We find Dad in the forest, and Noah tells him the truth. And Dad, a man of science, simply says, “Okay, yes. That makes more sense.” The unsolvable problem is finally solved. He suggests we buy a houseboat, an ark called *The Mystery*. We are a family again, adrift but together. A few days later, I'm standing on the stoop when Noah and Brian walk out of the woods, hand in hand. Noah doesn't let go. Brian's face cracks open in a heart-crushing smile. A ladybug lands on my hand. I make a wish. For them. For us. For second chances, and fourths, and for all the time we have left to remake the world.