I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson Page B

shimmering in the air exactly like he’s been in my mind. He’s a light show. He starts walking toward me. “I don’t know the woods. Was hoping . . .” He doesn’t finish, half smiles. This guy is just not an asshat. “What’s your name, anyway?” He’s close enough to touch, close enough to count his freckles. I’m having a hand problem. How come everyone else seems to know what to do with them? Pockets, I remember with relief, pockets, I love pockets! I slip the hands to safety, avoiding his eyes. There’s that thing about them. I’ll look at his mouth if I have to look somewhere.
    His eyes are lingering on me. I can tell this even with my undivided attention on his mouth. Did he ask me something? I think he did. The IQ’s plummeting.
    â€œSuppose I could guess,” he says. “I’ll go for Van, no got it, Miles, yeah, you totally look like a Miles.”
    â€œNoah,” I blurt, sounding like the knowledge just flew into my head. “I’m Noah. Noah Sweetwine.” God. Lord. Dorkhead.
    â€œSure?”
    â€œYup, definitely,” I say, sounding chirpy and weird. My hands are totally and completely trapped now. Pockets are hand jails. I free them, only to clap them together like they’re cymbals. Jesus. “Oh, what’s yours?” I ask his mouth, remembering, despite the fact that my IQ is approaching the vegetal range, that he too must have a name.
    â€œBrian,” he says, and that’s all he says because he functions.
    Looking at his mouth is a bad idea too, especially when he speaks. Again and again his tongue returns to that space between his front teeth. I’ll look at this tree instead.
    â€œHow old are you?” I ask the tree.
    â€œFourteen. You?”
    â€œSame,” I say. Uh-oh.
    He nods, believing me, of course, because why would I lie? I have no idea!
    â€œI go to boarding school back east,” he says. “I’ll be a sophomore next year.” He must see the confused look I’m giving the tree, because he adds, “Skipped kindergarten.”
    â€œI go to California School of the Arts.” The words blasting out of my mouth without my consent.
    I sneak a look at him. His brow’s creasing up and then I remember: It says California School of the Arts on practically every freaking wall of that freaking place. He saw me outside the building, not in it. He probably heard me tell the naked English guy I don’t go there.
    I have two choices: Run home and then don’t come out of the house for the next two months until he leaves for boarding school, or—
    â€œI don’t really go there,” I spill to the tree, really afraid to look at him now. “Not yet, anyway. I just want to. Like badly. It’s all I think about, and I’m thirteen still. Almost fourteen. Well, in five months. November twenty-first. It’s the painter Magritte’s birthday too, that day. He did that one with the green apple smack in front of that guy’s face. You’ve probably seen it. And the one where another guy has a birdcage instead of a body. Supremely cool and twisted. Oh, and there’s this one of a bird flying but the clouds are inside the bird, not outside of it. Really awesome—” I stop myself because, whoa—and I could go on too. There isn’t a painting I suddenly don’t want to tell this oak tree about in great detail.
    I slowly turn to Brian, who’s staring at me with his squinting eyes, not saying anything. Why isn’t he saying anything? Maybe I used up all the words? Maybe he’s too freaked out that I lied, then unlied, then started a psychotic art history lesson? Why didn’t I stay on the roof? I need to sit down. Making friends is supremely stressful. I swallow a few hundred times.
    Finally, he just shrugs. “Cool.” His lips curve into a half smile. “You are
a bloody mess,
dude,” he says,