The next morning, Jude calls my name from the hallway, meaning she’s a moment away from barging into my room. I flip the page of my sketchpad, not wanting her to see what I’ve been working on: the third version of the copper-eyed, rock-collecting, star-gazing, out-of-control-laughing new kid floating in the sky with his green hat and suitcase full of stars. I finally got the color so perfect, the squint just right, that looking at his eyes in the picture gives me the same hijacked feeling the real ones did. I got so excited when I nailed it I had to walk around my chair about fifty times before I could calm down.
I pick up a pastel and pretend to work on a portrait of the naked English guy that I finished last night. I did it cubist so his face looks even more like it’s in a smashed mirror. Jude teeters in wearing high heels and a tiny blue dress. Mom and she can’t stop fighting about what she wants to wear now, which is not much. Her hair’s snaky and swinging. When it’s wet like this, it usually takes the fluff and fairy tale off her, making her seem more ordinary, more like the rest of us, but not today. She has makeup all over her face. They fight about this too. And about her breaking curfew, talking back, slamming doors, texting boys not from school, surfing with the older surftards, jumping off Dead Man’s Dive—the highest, scariest jump on the hill—wanting to sleep at one of the hornet’s houses practically every night, spending her allowance on some lipstick called Boiling Point, sneaking out her bedroom window. Basically, everything. No one asks me, but I think she’s become BeelzeJude and wants every guy in Lost Cove to kiss her now because Mom forgot to look at her sketchbook that first day at the museum.
And because we left her. It was the Jackson Pollock exhibit. Mom and I had spent forever in front of the painting One: Number 31—because holy shit!—and when we walked out of the museum, Pollock’s bright spidery paint was still all over us, all over the people on the sidewalk, all over the buildings, all over our endless conversation in the car about his technique, and we didn’t realize Jude wasn’t with us until we were halfway over the bridge.
Mom said, “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod,” the whole speeding way back. All my organs were out of my body. When we screeched up to the museum, Jude was sitting on the sidewalk, her head tucked into her knees. She looked like a crumpled-up piece of paper.
Truth is: I think Mom and I had gotten used to not noticing her when the three of us were together.
She’s carrying a box, which she puts on the bed, then comes up behind me, where I’m sitting at my desk and peers over my shoulder. A damp rope of hair lands on my neck. I flick it off.
The naked English guy’s face stares up at us from the pad. I wanted to catch the unglued schizo way he looked before he got run over by misery, so I went way more abstract than usual. He probably wouldn’t recognize himself, but it came out all right.
“Who’s that?” she asks.
“No one.”
“Really, who is he?” she insists.
“Just someone I made up,” I say, pushing another wet squirrel tail of her hair off my neck.
“Nah-uh. He’s real. I can tell you’re lying.”
“I’m not, Jude. Swear.” I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want her to get any ideas. What if she starts sneaking down to stealth-take classes at CSA too?
She comes around to my side and leans in to better study the drawing.
“I wish he were real,” she says. “He’s so cool-looking. He’s so . . . I don’t know . . . There’s something . . .” This is weird. She never responds like this when she sees my stuff anymore. She usually looks like she has a turd in her mouth. She folds her arms across her chest, which is so full of boobs now, it’s like the clash of the titans. “Can I have it?”
This shocks me. She’s never asked for a drawing before. I’m horrible at giving them away. “For the sun, stars, oceans, and all the trees, I’ll consider it,” I say, knowing she’ll never agree. She knows how badly I want the sun and trees. We’ve been dividing up the world since we were five. I’m kicking butt at the moment—universe domination is within my grasp for the first time.
“Are you kidding?” she says, standing up straight. It annoys me how tall she’s getting. It’s like she’s being stretched at night. “That leaves me just the flowers, Noah.”
Fine, I think. She’ll never do it. It’s settled, but it isn’t. She reaches over and props up the pad, gazing at the portrait like she’s expecting the English guy to speak to her.
“Okay,” she says. “Trees, stars, oceans. Fine.”
“And the sun, Jude.”
“Oh, all right,” she says, totally surprising me. “I’ll give you the sun.”
“I practically have everything now!” I say. “You’re crazy!”
“But I have him.” She carefully rips the naked English guy out of my sketchbook, thankfully not noticing the drawing beneath it, and carries him with her over to the bed and sits down.
She says, “Have you seen the new kid? He’s such a freak.” I look down at my sketchpad, where the freak is exploding into the room in a burst of color. “He wears this green hat with a feather in it. So lame.” She laughs in her new awful buzzy way. “Yeah. He’s weirder than you even.” She pauses. I wait, hoping she’ll turn back into my sister, the way she used to be, not this new hornet version. “Well, probably not weirder than you.” I turn around. The antennae are waving back and forth on her forehead. She’s here to sting me to death. “No one’s weirder than you.”
I saw this show about these Malaysian ants that internally combust under threat. They wait until their enemies (like hornets) are close enough, then detonate themselves into a poison bomb.
“I don’t know, Noah. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.”
She’s on a roll. I begin countdown to detonation. Ten, nine, eight, seven—
“Do you have to be so, buzz, buzz, buzz, so you, all the time. It’s . . .” She doesn’t finish.
“It’s what?” I ask, breaking my pastel in two, snapping it, like a neck.
She throws her hands up. “It’s embarrassing, okay?”
“At least I’m still me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Then more defensively, she says, “There’s nothing wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with having other friends. Friends who aren’t you.”
“I have other friends too,” I say, glancing down at the sketchpad.
“Oh yeah, who? Who’s your friend? Imaginary ones don’t count. Neither do the ones you draw.”
Six, five, four—what I don’t know is if the Malaysian ants kill themselves in the process of annihilating their enemies.
“Well, the new kid for one,” I tell her. I reach into my pocket and wrap my fingers around the rock he gave me. “And he’s not weird.” Though he is! He has a suitcase of rocks!
“He’s your friend? Sure he is,” she says. “What’s his name, if you’re such good friends?”
Well, this is a problem.
“That’s what I thought,” she snips. I can’t stand her. I’m allergic to her. I look at the Chagall print on the wall in front of me and try to dive into the swirly dream of it. Real life blows. I’m allergic to it too. Laughing with the new kid didn’t feel like real life. Not one bit. Being with Jude didn’t used to feel like real life either. Now it feels like the very worst strangling, toilet-licking kind. When Jude speaks again a moment later, her voice is sharp and tight. “And what’d you expect? I had to make other friends. All you do is hole up making your lame drawings and obsessing about that stupid school with Mom.”
Lame drawings?
Here I go. Three, two, one: I detonate with the only thing I have. “You’re just jealous, Jude,” I say. “All the time now, you’re so jealous.”
I flip the pad to a blank page, pick up a pencil to start on (PORTRAIT: My Hornet Sister), no: (PORTRAIT: My Spider Sister), that’s better, full of poison and skittering around in the dark on her eight hairy legs.
When the silence between us has just about broken my ears, I turn around to look at her. Her big blue eyes are shining on me. All the hornet’s buzzed out of her. And there’s no spider to her at all.
I put the pencil down.
So quietly I can barely make out the words, she says, “She’s my mom too. Why can’t you share?”
The kick of guilt goes straight to my gut. I turn back to the Chagall, begging it to suck me in, please, just as Dad fills up the doorway. He has a towel around his neck, his suntanned chest is bare. His hair’s wet too—he and Jude must’ve swum together. They do everything together now.
He tilts his head in a questioning way, like he can see the body parts and bug guts all around the room. “Everything okay in here, guys?”
We both nod. Dad puts one hand on either side of the frame, filling the entire doorway, filling the Continental United States. How can I hate him and wish I were more like him at the same time?
I didn’t always want a building to land on him, though. When we were little, Jude and I used to sit on the beach like two ducklings, his ducklings, waiting and waiting for him to finish his swim, to rise out of the white spray like Poseidon. He’d stand in front of us, so colossal he eclipsed the sun, shaking his head so droplets would shower down on us like salty rain. He’d reach for me first, sit me up on one shoulder, then heave-ho Jude onto the other. He’d walk us up the bluff like that, making every other kid on the beach with their flimsy fathers out of their minds with jealousy.
But that was before he realized I was me. This happened the day he did a U-ey on the beach and instead of heading up the bluff, he took the two of us, perched there on his shoulders, back into the ocean. The water was rough and white-capped and waves were hitting us from all sides as we walked deeper and deeper in. I held on to his arm, which was belted securely around me, feeling safe because Dad was in charge and it was his hand that pulled the sun up each morning and down at night.
He told us to jump.
I thought I heard wrong until with an excited yelp, Jude flew off the shelf of his shoulder into the air, smiling crazily all the way down until the ocean swallowed her, still smiling like that when she broke through the surface of the water, where she bobbed like a happy apple, treading her legs, remembering everything we’d learned in our swimming class, while I, feeling Dad’s arm unfastening around me, grabbed at his head, his hair, his ear, the slippery slope of his back, but was unable to get a grip anywhere on him.
“It’s a sink-or-swim world, Noah,” he said very seriously, and then the secure belt of his arm became a sling that flung me into the water.
I sank.
All.
The.
Way.
Down.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Noah and the Sea Cucumbers)
The first Broken Umbrella Talk happened that night. You need to be brave even when you’re afraid, that’s what it means to be a man. More talks followed: You need to act tough, sit up, stand straight, fight hard, play ball, look me in the eye, think before you speak. If it weren’t for Jude being your twin, I’d think you came about by partheno-whatever. If it weren’t for Jude, you’d be mincemeat on that soccer field. If it weren’t for Jude. If it weren’t for Jude. Doesn’t it bother you to have a girl fight your battles for you? Doesn’t it bother you to be picked last for every team? Doesn’t it bother you to be alone all the time? Doesn’t it bother you, Noah? Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?
Okay already. Shut up! It does.
Do you have to be so you all the time, Noah?
They’re the team now, not Jude and me. So too bad. Why should I share Mom?
“This afternoon, for sure,” Jude’s saying to Dad. He smiles at her like she’s a rainbow, then fee-fi-fo-fums across the room, tapping me affectionately on the head and giving me a concussion.
Outside, Prophet squawks, “Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?”
Dad mimes strangling Prophet with his bare hands, then says to me, “How about that haircut? Looking pretty pre-Raphaelite there with all those long, dark locks.” Because of Mom’s contagiousness, even Dad, for all his asshatness, knows a lot about art, enough to insult me with anyway.
“I love pre-Raphaelite paintings,” I mumble.
“Loving them and looking like a model for one are two different things, huh, chief?” Another swipe to my head, another concussion.
After he’s gone, Jude says, “I like your hair long.” And it somehow vacuums up all the ick and yuck between us, all my mean cockroachy thoughts too. In a tentatively cheerful voice, she says, “Want to play?”
I turn around, remembering again that we got made together, cell for cell. We were keeping each other company when we didn’t have any eyes or hands. Before our soul even got delivered.
She’s taking some kind of board out of the box she brought in.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?” Prophet demands again, still in a tizzy. Jude leans out the window by the bed, hollers, “Sorry, Prophet, nobody knows!” I didn’t know she talks to Prophet too. I smile.
“A Ouija Board,” she says. “Found it in Grandma’s room. She and I did it once. We can ask it stuff and it gets the answers.”
“From who?” I ask, though I think I’ve seen one before in some movie.
“You know. The spirits.” She smiles and raises her eyebrows up and down and up and down in an exaggerated way. I feel my lips curving into a grin. I so want to be on a team with Jude again! I want things to be like they used to be with us.
“Okay,” I say, “sure.”
Her face lights up. “Come on.” And it’s like the whole horrible sticky stupid conversation didn’t even happen, like we weren’t just both in bits. How can everything change so quickly?
She teaches me how to do it, how to hold the pointer just barely so the hands of the spirits can push it through my hands to the letters or to the “yes” and “no” written on the board.
“I’m going to ask a question now,” she says, closing her eyes and putting her arms out like she’s being crucified.
I start to laugh. “And I’m the weirdo? Really?”
She opens one eye. “This is how you have to do it, I swear. Grandma taught me.” She closes the eye. “Okay, spirits. This is my question for you: Does M. love me?”
“Who’s M.?” I say.
“Just someone.”
“Michael Stein?”
“Uck, no way!”
“Not Max Fracker!”
“God no!”
“Then who?”
“Noah, the spirits aren’t going to come if you keep interrupting. I’m not going to say who.”
“Fine,” I say.
She spreads her arms and asks the spirits again, then puts her hands on the pointer.
I put mine on too. It beelines to No. I’m pretty sure I pushed it there.
“You’re cheating!” she cries.
The next time I don’t cheat and it still goes to No.
Jude’s supremely perturbed. “Let’s try again.”
This time I can tell she’s moving it to Yes. “Now you’re cheating,” I say.
“Okay, once more.”
It goes to No.
“Last try,” she says.
It goes to No.
She sighs. “Okay, you ask a question.”
I close my eyes and ask silently: Will I get into CSA next year?
“Out loud,” she says, exasperated.
“Why?”
“Because the spirits can’t hear inside your head.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. Now spill. And don’t forget the arms.”
“Fine.” I put my arms out like I’m on the cross and ask, “Will I get into CSA next year?”
“That’s a wasted question. Of course you’re getting in.”
“I need to know for sure.”
I make her do it over ten times. Each time it goes to No. Finally, she flips the board. “It’s just a stupid thing,” she says, but I know she doesn’t believe it. M. doesn’t love her and I’m not going to CSA.
“Let’s ask if you’re going,” I say.
“That’s dumb. No way I’m getting in. Who knows if I’m even going to apply? I want to go to Roosevelt like everyone else. They have a swim team.”
“C’mon,” I say.
It goes to Yes.
Again.
And again.
And again.