I can’t lie awake in bed for another minute, so I put on some clothes and climb onto the roof to see if the new kid’s on his. He’s not, which isn’t totally surprising since it’s not even six in the morning and barely light yet, but I kept thinking while I was tossing around in bed like a caught fish, that he was awake too, that he was up on his roof shooting electric bolts out of his fingers through the ceiling and into me and that’s why I couldn’t sleep. But I was wrong. It’s just me up here with the fading fathead moon and every screaming seagull from far and wide visiting Lost Cove for a dawn concert. I’ve never been outside this early, didn’t realize it was so loud. And so dreary, I think, taking in all the gray huddled-up old men disguised as trees.
I sit down, open my pad to a blank page and try to draw, but I can’t concentrate, can’t even make a decent line. It’s the Ouija Board. What if it’s right and Jude gets into CSA and I don’t? What if I have to go to Roosevelt with 3,000 toilet-licking Franklyn Fry clones? If I suck at painting? If Mom and Mr. Grady just feel sorry for me? Because I’m so embarrassing, as Jude says. And Dad thinks. I drop my head in my hands, feel the heat of my cheeks on my palms, reliving what happened in the woods with Fry and Zephyr last winter.
(SELF-PORTRAIT, SERIES: Broken Umbrella No. 88)
I lift my head, look over at the new kid’s roof again. What if he realizes I’m me? A cold wind blows through me like I’m an empty room and I suddenly know everything’s going to be terrible and I’m doomed; not only me, but the whole gloomy grubby gray world too.
I lie down on my back, stretch out my arms as wide as I can, and whisper, “Help.”
Some time later, I wake to the sound of a garage opening. I get up on my elbows. The sky’s gone blue: azure, the ocean bluer: cerulean, the trees are swirls of every hella freaking green on earth and bright thick eggy yellow is spilling over everything. Awesome. Doomsday’s most definitely been cancelled.
(LANDSCAPE: When God Paints Outside the Lines)
I sit up, noticing then which garage it was that opened—his.
Several seconds that feel like several years later, he cruises down the driveway. Across his chest is a duffel-like black sack. The meteorite bag? He has a bag for meteorites. He carries pieces of the galaxy around in a bag. Oh man. I try to prick the balloon that’s lifting me into the air by telling myself I shouldn’t be this excited to see a guy I only met a day ago. Even if that guy carries the galaxy around in a bag!
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Last Sighting of Boy and Balloon Blowing West Over Pacific)
He crosses the street to the trailhead, then stops where we had our laughing fit, hesitating for a moment there before he turns around and looks right at me, like he’s known I’ve been here all along, like he knows I’ve been waiting for him since dawn. Our eyes lock and electricity rides up my spine. I’m pretty sure he’s telepathically telling me to follow him. After a minute of the kind of mind-meld I’ve only ever had with Jude, he turns and heads into the grove.
I’d like to follow him. A lot, very much, so much, except I can’t, because my feet are cemented to the roof. But why? What’s the big deal? He followed me all the way to CSA yesterday! People make friends. Everyone does it. I can too. I mean, we already are—we laughed together like hyenas. Okay. I’m going. I slide my sketchpad into my backpack, climb down the ladder, and take off for the trailhead.
He’s nowhere on the trail. I listen for footsteps, hear nothing but my pulse hammering in my ears. I continue down the path, clearing the first bend to find him on his knees, hunched over the ground. He’s examining something in his hand with a magnifying glass. What a toilet-licking idea this is. I won’t know what to say to him. I won’t know what to do with my hands. I need to get home. Immediately. I’m edging backward when he turns his head and looks up at me.
“Oh, hey,” he says casually, standing and dropping whatever was in his hand to the ground. Most of the time people look less like you remember when you see them again. Not him. He’s 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.
“Suppose I could guess,” he says. “I’ll go for Van, no got it, Miles, yeah, you totally look like a Miles.”
“Noah,” I blurt, sounding like the knowledge just flew into my head. “I’m Noah. Noah Sweetwine.” God. Lord. Dorkhead.
“Sure?”
“Yup, 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.
“Brian,” 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.
“How old are you?” I ask the tree.
“Fourteen. You?”
“Same,” I say. Uh-oh.
He nods, believing me, of course, because why would I lie? I have no idea!
“I 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.”
“I 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—
“I 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, throwing in the English accent.
“Tell me about it.”
Then our eyes meet and we both crack up like we’re made of the same air.
After that, the forest, which had stayed out of it, joins in. I take a deep breath of pine and eucalyptus, hear mockingbirds and seagulls and the rumbling surf in the distance. I spot three deer munching on leaves just yards from where Brian is now rummaging through the meteorite bag with both hands.
“There are mountain lions around here,” I say. “They sleep in trees.”
“Awesome,” he says, still searching. “Seen one?”
“No, a bobcat, though. Twice.”
“I’ve seen a bear,” he mumbles into the bag. What’s he looking for?
“A bear! Wow. I love bears! Brown or black?”
“Black,” he answers. “A mother with two cubs. At Yosemite.”
I want to know everything about this and I’m about to launch into a series of questions, wondering if he likes animal shows too, when it appears he’s found what he’s been looking for. He holds up an ordinary rock. The expression on his face is like he’s showing me a frill-necked lizard or a leafy seadragon, not a plain old hunk of nothing. “Here,” he says, putting it in my hand. It’s so heavy it bends my wrist back. I reinforce with my other hand so I don’t drop it. “This one’s for sure. Magnetized nickel—an exploded star.” He points to my backpack with the sketchpad sticking out. “You can draw it.” I look at the black lump in my hand—this is a star?—and think there’s nothing I can imagine less interesting to draw on earth, but say, “Okay. Sure.”
“Excellent,” he says, and turns around. I stand there with the star in my hand not sure what to do until he turns back around and says, “You coming or what? I brought an extra magnifying glass for you.”
This makes the ground tilt. He knew I was going to come even before he left his house. He knew. And I knew. We both knew.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: I’m Standing on My Own Head!)
He takes the extra magnifying glass out of his back pocket and holds it out to me.
“Cool,” I say, catching up with him and taking the glass by the handle.
“You can classify too in the pad,” he says. “Or draw what we find. Actually, that’d be totally stellar.”
“What are we looking for?” I ask.
“Space garbage,” he answers like it’s obvious. “The sky’s always falling. Always. You’ll see. People have no idea.”
No, people don’t, because they’re not revolutionaries like us.
Hours later, however, we haven’t found one meteorite, not one piece of sky litter, but I so don’t care. Instead of classifying, whatever that means, I’ve spent most of the morning in a belly flop, using the magnifying glass to look at slugs and beetles, all the time getting my head stuffed with intergalactic gobbledygook by Brian, who traipsed around me scouring the forest floor with his magnet rake—yes, a magnet rake, which he made. He’s the coolest person ever.
He’s a blow-in too, no question. Not from another realm like Mom, but probably from some exoplanet (I just learned this word) with six suns. It explains everything: the telescope, this mad search for pieces of his homeland, the Einstein talk about Red Giants and White and Yellow Dwarfs (!!!!), which I immediately started drawing, not to mention the hypnotizing eyes and the way he keeps cracking me up like I’m some skin-fitting someone who has tons of friends and knows the perfect place in every sentence to say dude or bro. Also: The Realm of Calm is real. Hummingbirds laze around him. Fruit falls out of trees right into his open palms. Not to mention the drooping redwoods, I think, looking up. And me. I’ve never felt this relaxed in my life. I keep forgetting my body and then have to go back and get it.
(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: The Boy Who Watched the Boy Hypnotize the World)
I share this blow-in theory with him while we’re sitting on a slate slide at the edge of the creek, water lulling slowly by us like we’re on a rock boat.
“They’ve done a really good job in preparing you to pass as an earthling,” I say.
He half smiles. I notice a dimple I hadn’t before, at the top of his cheek. “No doubt,” he says. “They’ve prepared me well. I even play baseball.” He throws a pebble into the water. I watch it drown. He raises an eyebrow at me. “You, on the other hand . . .”
I pick up a stone and toss it in the same spot where his disappeared. “Yeah, no preparation whatsoever. They just threw me in. That’s why I’m so clueless.” I mean it as a joke, but it comes out serious. It comes out true. Because it is. I so totally missed class the day all the required information was passed out. Brian licks his bottom lip and doesn’t respond.
The mood’s changed and I don’t know why.
From underneath my hair, I study him. I know from doing portraits that you have to look at someone a really long time to see what they’re covering up, to see their inside face, and when you do see it and get it down, that’s the thing that makes people freak out about how much a drawing looks like them.
Brian’s inside face is worried.
“So, that picture . . .” he says hesitantly. He pauses, then licks his bottom lip again. Is he nervous? He seems to be, suddenly, though until this moment I didn’t think it possible. It makes me nervous thinking he’s nervous. He does it again, the tongue sweep across the bottom lip. Is that what he does when he’s nervous? I swallow. Now I’m waiting for him to do it again, willing it. Is he staring at my mouth too? I can’t help it. I sweep my tongue across my bottom lip.
He turns away, throws a few pebbles rapid-fire with some kind of bionic wrist movement that causes the stones to skip effortlessly across the surface of the water. I watch the vein in his neck pulse. I watch him convert oxygen to carbon dioxide. I watch him existing and existing and existing. Is he going to finish his sentence? Ever? Several more centuries of silence pass where the air gets more and more jumpy and alive, like all the molecules he previously put to sleep are waking up. And then it occurs to me he means the naked pictures from yesterday. Is that what he means? The thought’s a bolt.
“Of the English guy?” I squeak. Argh, I sound like a mite. I wish my voice would stop cracking and change already.
He swallows and turns toward me. “No, I was wondering if you ever actually make the drawings you do in your head?”
“Sometimes,” I answer.
“Well, did you make it?” His eyes catch me off guard, capturing me completely in some kind of net. I want to say his name.
“Make what?” I ask, stalling. My heart’s kicking around in my chest. I know what picture he means now.
“The one”—he licks his bottom lip—“of me?”
I feel possessed as I lunge for the pad and flip the pages until I find him, that final version. I place it in his hands, watch his eyes dart up and down, down and up. I’m spiking a fever trying to tell if he likes it or not. I can’t tell. Then I try to see the picture through his eyes and an uh-oh-kill-me-now feeling overtakes me. The Brian I made is him colliding at top speed into a wall of magic. It’s nothing like the drawings of people I do at school. I realize with horror it’s not a drawing of a friend. I’m getting dizzy. Every line and angle and color screams just how much I like him. I feel like I’m wrapped and trapped in plastic. And he’s still not saying a thing. Not one thing!
I wish I were a horse.
“You don’t have to like it or anything,” I say finally, trying to get the pad back. My mind’s bursting. “It’s not a big deal. I draw everyone.” I can’t stop talking. “I draw everything. Even dung beetles and potatoes and driftwood and mounds of dirt and redwood stumps and—”
“Are you kidding?” he interrupts, not letting me take the pad away. It’s his turn to go red. “I totally like it.” He pauses. I watch him breathe. He’s breathing fast. “I look like the freaking aurora borealis.” I don’t know what this is, but I can tell from his voice it’s a very cool thing.
A circuit flips in my chest. One I didn’t know I had.
“I’m so happy I’m not a horse!” I realize I’ve said it aloud only when Brian says, “What?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing.” I try to calm down, try to stop smiling. Was the sky always this shade of magenta?
He’s laughing for real like yesterday. “Dude, you are the strangest person ever. Did you actually just say you’re so happy you’re not a horse?”
“No,” I say, trying not to laugh and failing. “I said—”
But before I can get another word out, a voice crashes into all this perfect. “Oh how romantic!” I freeze, knowing immediately whose hippo-head the sneering asshat words are coming out of. I swear the guy’s installed a tracking device on me—it’s the only explanation.
With him is a great ape: Big Foot. At least no Zephyr.
“Time for a dip, Bubble?” Fry says.
This is my cue to hightail it to the other side of the world.
WE NEED TO RUN, I tell Brian telepathically.
Except when I glance at him, I see that his face has bricked up and I can tell running away is not part of his modus operandi. Which really sucks. I swallow.
Then holler, “Fuck off, you toilet-licking sociopaths!” only it comes out as complete silence. So I heave a mountain range at them. They don’t budge.
My whole being focuses into one wish: Please don’t let me be humiliated in front of Brian.
Fry’s attention has shifted from me to Brian. He’s smirking. “Nice hat.”
“Thanks,” Brian replies coolly, like he owns the air in the Northern Hemisphere. He’s no broken umbrella, this is clear. He doesn’t seem one bit afraid of these garbage-headed scum-suckers.
Fry raises an eyebrow, which turns his gigantic greasy forehead into a relief map. Brian’s piqued his psychopathic interest. Great. I appraise Big Foot. He’s a slab of concrete in a Giants baseball cap. His hands are pushed deep into his sweatshirt pockets. They look like grenades through the fabric. I note the width of his right wrist, note that his fist is probably as large as my whole face. I’ve never actually been punched before, only shoved around. I imagine it, imagine all the paintings bursting out of my skull at impact.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Pow)
“So did you homos pack a picnic?” Fry says to Brian. My muscles tighten.
Brian slowly stands. “I’ll give you a chance to apologize,” he says to Fry, his voice icy and calm, his eyes the opposite. The rock-boat has given him a few extra feet, so he’s looking down on all of us. His meteorite bag hangs heavy on his side. I need to stand but have no legs.
“Apologize for what?” Fry says. “For calling you homos homos?”
Big Foot laughs. It shakes the ground. In Taipei.
I can see Fry’s exhilarated—no one challenges him around here, especially not any of us younger losers he’s been calling homos and pussies and whatevers since we got ears.
“You think that’s funny?” Brian says. “’Cuz I don’t.” He moves a step backward so he’s even higher on the rock now. He’s becoming someone else. Darth Vader, I think. The Realm of Calm’s been sucked back into his index finger and now he looks like he eats human livers. Sautéed with eyeballs and toe-tips.
Hatred’s rising off him in waves.
I want to run away with the circus but take a deep breath and stand, crossing my arms, which have grown skinnier in the past few moments, against my newly sunken chest. I do this as threateningly as I can, thinking of crocodiles, sharks, black piranhas for courage. Not working. Then I remember the honey badger—pound for pound the most powerful creature on earth! An unlikely furry little killer. I narrow my eyes, clamp my mouth shut.
Then the worst thing happens. Fry and Big Foot start to laugh at me.
“Ooooo, so scary, Bubble,” Fry coos. Big Foot crosses his arms in an imitation of me, which Fry finds so hilarious, he does it too.
I hold my breath so I don’t collapse into a heap.
“I really think it’s time you two apologized and were on your way,” I hear from behind me. “If not, I can’t be responsible for what happens next.”
I spin around. Is he freaking crazy? Does he not realize he’s half Fry’s size and a third of Big Foot’s? And I’m me? Is he packing an Uzi?
But above us, poised on the rock, he seems unconcerned. He’s tossing a stone from hand to hand, a stone like the one that’s still in my pocket. We all watch as it pops between his palms, his hands hardly moving, as if he’s making it jump with his mind. “I guess you’re not leaving?” he says to his hands, then looks up at Fry and Big Foot, somehow without breaking the rhythm of the skipping stone. It’s incredible. “I just want to know one thing then.” Brian smiles a slow careful smile, but the vein in his neck’s pulsing furiously and it seems likely that whatever’s about to come out of his mouth next is going to get us killed.
Fry glances at Big Foot and the two of them seem to come to a quick, silent understanding about what to do with our earthly remains.
I’m holding my breath again. All of us are waiting for Brian to speak, watching the dancing stone, mesmerized by it, as the air sizzles with coming violence. It’s the real kind too. The lying in a hospital bed with only a straw sticking out of your bandaged head kind. The sick pounding kind of violence that I have to mute the TV to get through, unless Dad’s around and then I have to endure it. I hope Mr. Grady gives the paintings I left in the art room to Mom. They can show my stuff at the memorial—my first and last art exhibit.
(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Brian and Noah Buried Side by Side)
I make a fist but can’t remember if you’re supposed to keep your thumb inside or outside of it when you punch. Why did Dad teach me to wrestle? Who on earth wrestles? He should’ve taught me how to make a freaking fist. And what about my fingers? Will I still be able to draw after this is over? Picasso must’ve gotten in fights. Van Gogh and Gauguin fought each other. It’ll be okay. Sure it will. And black eyes are cool, colorful.
Then all of a sudden Brian snatches the dancing stone into one of his fists, stopping time.
“What I want to know,” he says, drawling out each word. “Is who the hell let you out of your cages?”
“Do you believe this guy?” Fry says to Big Foot, who grunts out an incomprehensible something in Big Footese. They lunge—
I’m telling Grandma Sweetwine I will be joining her shortly when I catch the whipping movement of Brian’s arm a second before Fry cries out, his fingers flying to his ear, “What the hell?” Then Big Foot yelps and covers his head. I whirl around, see Brian’s hand in the bag. Now Fry’s ducking, and so is Big Foot, because meteorites are wailing at them, raining on them, hailing down on them, zooming past their skulls at the speed of sound, faster, at the speed of light, each time whooshing close enough to shave hairs, a millimeter away from ending their brain activity permanently. “Stop it!” Big Foot screams. Both of them are twisting and hopping and trying to shield their heads with their arms as more bits and pieces of fallen sky race through the air at warp speed. Brian’s a machine, a machine gun, two at a time, three, four, underhand, overhand, both hands. His arm’s a blur, he’s a blur—each rock—each star—just barely missing, barely sparing Fry and Big Foot until they’re both balled up on the ground, hands over their heads, saying, “Please, dude, stop.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that apology,” Brian says, whipping one so close to Fry’s head it makes me wince. Then another few for good measure. “Two apologies, actually. One to Noah. And one to me. Like you mean it.”
“Sorry,” Fry says, completely stunned. Maybe one did bean him in the head. “Now stop.”
“Not good enough.”
An additional series of meteorites rocket at their skulls at a billion miles per hour.
Fry cries out, “Sorry, Noah. Sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“Brian.”
“Sorry, Brian!”
“Do you accept their apology, Noah?”
I nod. God and his son have been demoted.
“Now, get the hell out of here,” Brian says to them. “Next time I won’t miss your thick skulls on purpose.”
And then they’re fleeing in a second rain of meteorites, their arms helmetting their heads, as they run away from us.
“The pitcher?” I ask him as I grab my pad.
He nods. I catch the half smile breaking through the wall of his face. He hops off the rock-slide and starts picking up the meteorites and loading them back into his bag. I grab the magnet rake, lying there like a sword. This guy’s so totally more magic-headed than anyone, even Picasso or Pollock or Mom. We jump the creek and then we’re tearing through the trees together in the opposite direction of home. He’s as fast as I am, fast like we could run down jumbo jets, comets.
“You know we’re dead, right?” I shout, thinking of the coming payback.
“Don’t count on it,” Brian shouts back.
Yeah, I think, we’re invincible.
We’re sprinting at the speed of light when the ground gives way and we rise into the air as if racing up stairs.