How is this happening? This can’t be happening. I blink and blink, but it’s still happening. I look over at Courtney, who has her hand in Brian’s hat. She’s opening the folded pieces of paper wondering what went wrong. Jude is what went wrong. I can’t believe she’d go this far.
I have to do something.
“No!” I shout, jumping up from the chair. “No!”
Only I don’t do that.
I run to the egg-timer, grab it off the table, and ring it and ring it and ring it.
Only I don’t do that either.
I don’t do anything.
I can’t do anything.
I’ve been eviscerated.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Gutted Fish)
Brian and Jude are going to kiss each other.
They’re probably kissing each other right this second.
Somehow I manage to get up from the chair, out of that room, down the stairs, and out the door of the house. I stagger across the porch, feeling like I’m falling off my feet with every step. Blurs of people are blurring around the yard. I stumble through them, through the black back-stabbing air toward the road. In my daze, I realize I’m scanning the crowd for the crazy-in-love, making-out guys from the alcove, but they’re nowhere. I bet I imagined them.
I bet they don’t exist.
I look toward the woods, watch all the trees crash down.
(GROUP PORTRAIT: All the Glass Boys Shatter)
From behind me, I hear someone with a slurring English accent say, “If it isn’t the clandestine artist.” I turn to see the naked English guy, except he’s dressed in a leather jacket and jeans and boots. He has the same mental smile on his same mental face. The same eyes that don’t match. I remember how Jude gave up the sun and stars and oceans for my drawing of him. I’m going to steal it back from her. I’m going to take everything from her.
If she were drowning, I’d hold her head under.
“I know you, mate,” he says, teetering on his feet, pointing at me with a bottle of some kind of alcohol.
“No you don’t,” I say. “No one does.”
His eyes clear for a second. “You’re right about that.”
We stare at each other for a moment without saying anything. I remember how he looked naked and don’t even care because I’m dead. I’m going to move underground with the moles and breathe dirt.
“What are you called anyway?” he asks.
What am I called? What a strange question. Bubble, I think. I’m called freaking Bubble.
“Picasso,” I say.
His eyebrows arch. “You taking the piss?”
What does that mean?
He slurs on, throwing words into the air all around us. “Well, that must keep the bar nice and low, no problem filling those shoes, like naming your kid Shakespeare. What were they thinking, your parents?” He takes a swig.
I pray to the forest of fallen trees that Brian looks out the window and sees me here with the naked English guy. Jude too.
“You’re like from a movie,” I think and say at the same time.
He laughs and his face kaleidoscopes. “A crap movie, then. Been sleeping in the park for weeks now. Except for the night I slept behind bars, of course.”
Jail? He’s an outlaw? He looks like one. “Why?” I ask.
“Drunk and disorderly. Disturbing the peace. Whoever heard of getting arrested for being disorderly?” I struggle to decipher his sloshed words. “Are you orderly, Picasso? Is anyone?” I shake my head and he nods. “That’s what I said. There’s no peace to disturb. I kept telling the cop: No. Peace. To. Disturb. Man.” Putting two cigarettes in his mouth, he lights one, the other, then sucks on them both. I’ve never seen someone smoke two at once. Gray plumes of smoke come out his nose and mouth at the same time. He hands me one of the cigarettes, which I take because what else am I going to do? “Got myself chucked from that posh art school you don’t go to.” He puts a hand on my shoulder to steady himself. “Doesn’t matter, would’ve gotten chucked anyway when they found out I wasn’t really eighteen.” I feel how wobbly he is and plant my feet into the ground. Then I remember the cigarette in my hand and bring it to my lips, only to suck in and immediately cough it out. He doesn’t notice. He might be as drunk as one of those guys who talks to lampposts and I’m the lamppost. I want to take the bottle from him and pour it out.
“I gotta go,” I say, because I’ve started imagining Brian and Jude touching each other in the dark. All over. Can’t stop imagining it.
“Right,” he says, not looking at me. “Right.”
“Maybe you should go home,” I say, then remember about the park, about jail.
He nods, despair stuck to every part of his face.
I start walking off, ditching the cigarette first thing. After a few steps, I hear, “Picasso,” and turn.
He points the bottle at me. “I modeled a couple times for this barking maniac of a sculptor called Guillermo Garcia. He has loads of students. I’m sure he wouldn’t even notice if you showed some afternoon. You could actually be in a room with a model, like that other Picasso bloke.”
“Where?” I ask, and when he tells me, I repeat the address a few times in my head so I’ll remember. Not that I’ll go, because I’ll be in prison myself for the murder of my twin sister.
Jude planned this. I’m sure of it. I know it was her idea. She’s been pissed at me for so long about Mom. About the hornets. And she must’ve found the note she wrote to Mom buried in the garbage. This is her revenge. She probably had a piece of paper with Brian’s name on it right in her hand.
Without any of the hornets realizing it, she triggered a nest attack on me.
I walk down the hill toward home, getting carpet-bombed with images of Brian and Jude, him all tangled up in her hair, in her light, in her normal. That’s what he wants. That’s why he erected the fence between us. Then electrified it for double protection against me, stupid weirdo me. I think how full-on I kissed Heather. Oh God. Is Brian kissing Jude like that? Is she him? A horrible flailing monster of a noise comes out of me and then the whole disgusting night wants to come out of me too. I run to the side of the road and throw up each grain of beer and that disgusting drag of a cigarette, every last lying, revolting kiss, until I’m just a bag of clattering bones.
When I get home, I see that there are lights on in the living room, so I climb through my window, always open a crack, in case Brian decided to break and enter one night, like I’d imagine before falling asleep, all summer long. I cringe at myself. At what I wanted.
(LANDSCAPE: The Collapsed World)
I turn on the lamp in my bedroom and beeline for Dad’s camera, but it’s not where I always leave it under my bed. I tear the room apart with my eyes, exhaling only when I spot it on my desk, sitting there like a live grenade. Who moved it? Who freaking moved it? Did I leave it there? Maybe I did. I don’t know. I lunge for it and call up the photos. The first one that comes up is from last year when Grandma died. A big round laughing sand lady with her arms open to the sky like she’s about to lift off. It’s freaking amazing. I put my finger on the delete button and press hard, press murderously. I call the rest up, each one more awesome and strange and cool than the next, and wipe them out, one by one, until every trace of my sister’s talent is gone from the world and only mine is left.
Then, after I sneak by the living room—Mom and Dad have fallen asleep in front of some war movie—I go into Jude’s room, take the portrait of the naked English guy off the wall, rip it to shreds and spread it like confetti all over the floor. Next, I return to my room and start on the drawings of Brian—it takes forever to tear them all to pieces, there are so many. When I’m done, I stuff his remains into three large black plastic bags and stow them under the bed. Tomorrow I’m going to throw him, every last bit of him, over Devil’s Drop.
Because he can’t swim.
Even after all that, Jude’s still not home! It’s an hour past our summer curfew now. I can only imagine. I have to stop imagining.
I have to stop holding this rock and praying he’s going to come to the window.
He doesn’t.
THE HISTORY OF LUCK
Jude
Age 16
I’m going to wish with my hands, like Sandy said.
I’m going to use The Oracle.
I’m going to sit here at my desk and use it—in the traditional way—to find out everything I can about Guillermo Garcia aka Drunken Igor aka The Rock Star of the Sculpture World. I have to make this sculpture and it has to be in stone and he’s the only one who can help me do that. This is the way to get through to Mom. I feel it.
However, before I do all this, I’m going to suck the living hell out of this lemon—the mortal enemy of the aphrodisiacal orange:
Nothing curdles love in the heart like lemon
on the tongue
Because I have to nip this in the bud.
Grandma pipes in. “Ah yes, Him with a capital H and I don’t mean Mr. Gable. A certain big . . . bad . . . British . . . wolf?” She milks the last bit for all its worth.
“I don’t know what it was about him,” I tell her in my head. “Oh man. Besides everything,” I tell her outside my head.
And then I can’t help it. Giving it my best English accent, I say, “Such a chatterbox, a guy can’t get a word in.” The smile I denied him in church overtakes my face until I’m beaming at the wall.
Oh Clark Gable, stop.
I shove the half-lemon in, shove Grandma out, tell myself the English bloke has glandular fever, cold sores, and tooth decay, the trifecta of unkissability, like every other hot male in Lost Cove.
Cooties. Major cooties. English cooties.
With sour making my whole head pucker, with the boy boycott back in full swing, I boot up my laptop and type into The Oracle: Guillermo Garcia and Art Tomorrow, hoping to find Mom’s interview. But no luck. The magazine doesn’t archive online. I input his name again and do an image search.
And it’s Invasion of the Granite Giants.
Massive rock-beings. Walking mountains. Expression explosions. I love them instantly. Igor told me he wasn’t okay. Well, neither is his art. I start bookmarking reviews and pieces, choose a work that makes my heart sink and swell at the same time as a new screensaver, then grab my sculpture textbook off the shelf, certain he’s in it. His work is too amazing for him not to be.
He is, and I’m on the second read of his bona fide bonkers biography, one that belongs in Grandma’s bible, not a textbook, so I’ve ripped it out and clipped it into the over-stuffed leather-bound book, when I hear the front door open, followed by a flurry of voices and a stampede of footsteps coming down the hall.
Noah.
I wish I’d shut my door. Dive under the bed? Before I can make the move, they’re barreling by, peering in at me like I’m The Bearded Lady. And somewhere in that happy humming hive of athletic, preternaturally normal teenagers is my brother.
Best sit down for it:
Noah’s joined a sports team at Roosevelt High.
Granted, it’s cross-country, not football, and Heather’s on the team, but still. He’s a member of a gang.
To my surprise, a moment later, he doubles back and enters my room, and it’s as if Mom’s standing before me. It’s always been the case, me fair like Dad, him dark like Mom, but his resemblance to her has become uncanny, therefore: heart-snatching. Whereas there’s not a hint of Mom on me, never was. When people used to see us alone, I’m sure they assumed I was adopted.
It’s unusual, Noah in my room, and my stomach’s clenching up. I hate how nervous it makes me to be near him now. Also—what Sandy said today. How, unbeknownst to me, someone took pictures of my flying sand women and sent them in to CSA. It had to have been Noah, which means: He got me in only to end up having to go to Roosevelt himself.
I taste guilt right through the citrus.
“So, hey,” he says, shuffling back and forth on a pair of running mud-cakes, driving dirt deeper and deeper into my plush white carpet. I say nothing about it. He could chop off my ear and I’d say nothing about it. His face is the opposite of how it looked in the sky earlier today. It’s padlocked. “You know how Dad’s going away for the week? We—” He nods at his room, where music and laughter and uniformity resounds. “We thought it’d be cool to have a party here. You okay with that?”
I stare at him, beseeching the aliens or Clark Gable or whoever’s in charge of soul abductions to bring back my brother. Because in addition to joining dangerous gangs and having parties, this Noah also goes out with girls, keeps his hair buzzed and tidy, hangs at The Spot, watches sports with Dad. For all other sixteen-year-old boys: fine. For Noah, it signifies one thing: death of the spirit. A book with the wrong story in it. My brother, the revolutionary weirdo, has covered himself in flame retardant, to use his terminology. Dad’s thrilled, of course, thinks Noah and Heather are a couple—they’re not. I’m the only one who seems to know how dire the situation is.
“Um, Jude, do you know there’s a lemon wrapped around your teeth?”
“Of course I know,” I say, though it sounds like garble for obvious reasons. Ah, lightbulb! Taking advantage of the sudden language barrier, I look right at him and add, “What have you done with my brother? If you see him, tell him I miss him. Tell him I’m—”
“Hello? Can’t understand you with the voodoo lemon in your mouth.” He shakes his head in a dismissive Dad kind of way and I can tell he’s about to get on my case. My interests disturb him, which I guess makes us even. “You know, I borrowed your laptop the other day to do a paper when Heather was using mine. I saw your search history.” Uh-oh. “Jesus, Jude. How many diseases can you think you have in one night? And all those freaking obituaries you read—like from every county in California.” Now seems like a good time to imagine the meadow. He points to the bible outspread on my lap. “And maybe you could give that totally lame book a rest for a while, and, I don’t know, get out. Talk to someone besides our dead grandmother. Think about things besides dying. It’s so—”
I take out the lemon. “What? Embarrassing?” I remember saying this to him once—how embarrassing he was—and cringe at the former me. Is it possible our personalities have swapped bodies? In third grade, Mrs. Michaels, the art teacher, told us we were to do self-portraits. We were across the room from each other and without so much as sharing a glance, I drew him, and he me. Sometimes, now, it feels like that.
“I wasn’t going to say embarrassing,” he says, brushing a hand through his bushel of hair, only to find that it’s no longer there. He touches the back of his neck instead.
“Yes you were.”
“Okay I was, because, it is totally embarrassing. I go to pay for my lunch today and pull out these.” He reaches in his pocket and shows me the assortment of extremely protective beans and seeds I stowed there.
“I’m just looking out for you, Noah, even if you’re a card-carrying artichoke.”
“Totally freaking mental, Jude.”
“You know what I think is mental? Having a party on the second anniversary of your mother’s death.”
His face cracks for a second, then just as quickly seals up. “I know you’re in there!” I want to scream. It’s true; I do know it. This is how:
1) His weird obsession with jumping Devil’s Drop and the sublime way he looked in the sky today.
2) There are times when he’s slumped in a chair, lying on his bed, curled up on the couch, and I wave my hand across his face and he doesn’t even blink. It’s as if he’s gone blind. Where is he during those times? What’s he doing in there? Because I suspect he’s painting. I suspect that inside the impenetrable fortress of conventionality he’s become, there’s one crazy-ass museum.
And most significantly: 3) I’ve discovered (search-history snooping is a two-way street) that Noah, who hardly ever goes online, who’s probably the only teenager in America indifferent to virtual reality and all social media, posts a message on a site called LostConnections.com, always the same one and pretty much every week.
I check—he’s never gotten a response. I’m certain the message is for Brian, who I haven’t seen since Mom’s funeral, and who, as far as I know, hasn’t been back to Lost Cove since his mother moved away.
For the record, I knew what was going on between Brian and Noah even if no one else did. All that summer when Noah came home at night from hanging out with him, he’d draw pictures of NoahandBrian until his fingers were so raw and swollen he’d have to take trips from his room to the freezer, where he’d bury his hand in the ice tray. He didn’t know I was watching him from the hallway, how he’d collapse against the refrigerator, his forehead pressed against the cold door, his eyes closed, his dreams outside of his body.
He didn’t know the moment he left in the morning, I’d go through the secret sketchpads he hid under his bed. It was like he’d discovered a whole new color spectrum. It was like he’d found another galaxy of imagery. It was like he’d replaced me.
To be clear: More than anything, I wish I hadn’t gone into that closet with Brian. But their story wasn’t over that night.
I wish I hadn’t done a lot of things I did back then.
I wish going into that closet with Brian was the worst of it.
The right-handed twin tells the truth, the left-handed twin tells lies
(Noah and I are both left-handed.)
He’s looking down at his feet. Intently. I don’t know what he’s thinking and it makes my bones feel hollow. He lifts his head. “We’re not going to have the party on the anniversary. It’ll be the day before,” he says quietly, his dark eyes soft, just like Mom’s.
Even though the last thing I want is a bunch of Hideaway Hill surfers like Zephyr Ravens anywhere near me, I say, “Have it.” I say this instead of what I’d say to him if I still had the voodoo lemon in: I’m sorry. For everything.
“Come for once?” He gestures toward the wall. “Wear one of those?” Unlike me, my room is one big blast of girl, with all the dresses I make—floating and not—hanging all over the walls. It’s like having friends.
I shrug. “Don’t do social events. Don’t wear the dresses.”
“You used to.”
I don’t say, “And you used to make art and like boys and talk to horses and pull the moon through the window for my birthday present.”
If Mom came back, she wouldn’t be able to pick either of us out of a police lineup.
Or Dad, for that matter, who’s just materialized in the doorway. Benjamin Sweetwine: The Sequel has skin the color and texture of gray earthenware clay. His pants are always too big and belted awkwardly so he looks like a scarecrow, like if someone pulled the belt he’d turn into a pile of straw. This might be my fault. Grandma and I have largely taken over the kitchen, using the bible as cookbook:
To bring joy back to a grieving family, sprinkle three
tablespoons of crushed eggshells over every meal
Dad seems to always appear like this now too, without the foreshadowing of say, footsteps? My eyes migrate to his shoes, which are indeed on his feet, which are indeed on the ground and pointing in the right direction—good. Well, you start to wonder who’s the specter in the family. You start to wonder why your dead parent is more present and accounted for than the living one. Most of the time, I only know Dad’s home because I hear a toilet flush or the TV turn on. He never listens to jazz or swims anymore. He mostly just stares off with a faraway perplexed look on his face, like he’s trying to work through an impenetrable mathematical equation.
And he goes for walks.
The walking started a day after the funeral when all Mom’s friends and colleagues still filled the house. “Going for a walk,” he’d said to me, bowing out the back door, leaving me (Noah was nowhere to be found), and not returning home until after everyone had left. The next day was the same: “Going for a walk,” and so were the days and weeks and months and years that followed, with everyone always telling me they saw my dad up on Old Mine Road, which is fifteen miles from here, or at Bandit Beach, which is even farther. I imagine him getting hit by cars, washed away by rogue waves, attacked by mountain lions. I imagine him not coming back. I used to ambush him on his way out, asking if I could walk with him, to which he’d reply, “Just need some time to think, honey.”
While he’s thinking, I wait for the phone to ring with the news that there’s been an accident.
That’s what they tell you: There’s been an accident.
Mom was on her way to see Dad when it happened. They’d been separated for about a month and he was staying at a hotel. She told Noah before she left that afternoon that she was going to ask Dad to come home so we could be a family again.
But she died instead.
To lighten the mood in my head, I ask, “Dad, isn’t there a disease where the flesh calcifies until the poor afflicted person is trapped within their own body like it’s a stone prison? I’m pretty sure I read about it in one of your journals.”
He and Noah share one of their “glances” at my expense. Oh Clark Gable, groan.
Dad says, “It’s called FOP and it’s extremely rare, Jude. Extremely, extremely rare.”
“Oh, I don’t think I have it or anything.” Not literally, anyway. I don’t share that I think the three of us all might have it metaphorically. Our real selves buried so deep in these imposter ones. Dad’s medical journals can be just as illuminating as Grandma’s bible.
“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?” And a moment of family bonding ensues! We all roll the eyes in unison with dramatic Grandma Sweetwine flair. But then Dad’s forehead creases. “Honey, is there a reason why there’s a very large onion in your pocket?”
I look down at my illness deflector yawning open my sweatshirt pocket. I’d forgotten about it. Did the English guy see it too? Oh dear.
Dad says, “Jude, you really—” But what I’m certain is to be another artichoke lecture about my bible-thumping tendencies or my long-distance relationship with Grandma (he doesn’t know about Mom) is cut short because he’s been shot with a stun gun.
“Dad?” His face has gone pale—well, paler. “Dad?” I repeat, following his distraught gaze to the computer screen. Is it Family of Mourners? It was my favorite of the Guillermo Garcia works I saw, very upsetting, though. Three massive grief-stricken rock-giants who reminded me of us, the way Dad, Noah, and I must’ve looked standing over Mom’s grave as if we might topple in after her. It must remind Dad too.
I look at Noah and find him in the same condition, also staring intently at the screen. The padlock is gone. A red glow of emotion has taken over his face and neck, even his hands. This is promising. He’s actually reacting to art.
“I know,” I say to both of them. “Incredible work, right?”
Neither of them responds. I’m not sure if either of them even heard me.
Then Dad says brusquely, “Going for a walk,” and Noah says equally brusquely, “My friends,” and they’re gone.
And I’m the only bat in this belfry?
The thing is: I know I’ve slipped. I see my buttons popping off and flying in all directions on a daily basis. What worries me about Dad and Noah is that they seem to think they’re okay.
I go to the window, open it, and in come the eerie moans and caws of the loons, the thunder of the winter waves, stellar waves, I see. For a moment I’m back on my board, busting through the break zone, cold briny air in my lungs—except then, I’m dragging Noah in to shore and it’s again that day two years ago when he almost drowned and the weight of him is pulling us both under with each stroke—no.
No.
I close the window, yank down the shade.
If one twin is cut, the other will bleed
Later that night when I get on the computer to learn more about Guillermo Garcia, I find that the bookmarks I saved have been deleted.
The Family of Mourners screensaver has been changed to a single purple tulip.
When I question Noah about it, he says he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but I don’t believe him.