The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson Read Free Book Online Page B

see if Toby is under the plum tree. I won’t let myself imagine his lips lost and half wild on mine either. No. I let myself imagine igloos, nice frigid arctic igloos. I’ve promised Bailey nothing like what happened that night will ever happen again.
    It’s the first day of summer vacation and everyone from school is at the river. I just got a drunken call from Sarah informing me that not one, not two, but three unfreakingbelievable Fontaines are supposed to be arriving momentarily at Flying Man’s, that they are going to play outside, that she just found out the two older Fontaines are in a seriously awesome band in L.A., where they go to college, and I better get my butt down there to witness the glory. I told her I was staying in and to revel in their Fontainely glory for me, which resurrected the bristle from yesterday: “You’re not with Toby, are you, Lennie?”
    Ugh.
    I look over at my clarinet abandoned in its case on my playing chair. It’s in a coffin, I think, then immediately try to unthink it. I walk over to it, unlatch the lid. There never was a question what instrument I’d play. When all the other girls ran to the flutes in fifth-grade music class, I beelined for a clarinet. It reminded me of me.
    I reach in the pocket where I keep my cloth and reeds and feel around for the folded piece of paper. I don’t know why I’ve kept it (for over a year!), why I fished it out of the garbage later that afternoon, after Bailey had tossed it with a cavalier “Oh well, guess you guys are stuck with me,” before throwing herself into Toby’s arms like it meant nothing to her. But I knew it did. How could it not? It was Juilliard.
    Without reading it a final time, I crumple Bailey’s rejection letter into a ball, toss it into the garbage can, and sit back down at her desk.
    I’m in the exact spot where I was that night when the phone blasted through the house, through the whole unsuspecting world. I’d been doing chemistry, hating every minute of it like I always do. The thick oregano scent of Gram’s chicken fricassee was wafting into our room and all I wanted was Bailey to hurry home already so we could eat because I was starving and hated isotopes. How can that be? How could I have been thinking about fricassee and carbon molecules when across town my sister had just taken her very last breath? What kind of world is this? And what do you do about it? What do you do when the worst thing that can happen actually happens? When you get that phone call? When you miss your sister’s roller coaster of a voice so much that you want to take apart the whole house with your fingernails?
    This is what I do: I take out my phone and punch in her number. In a blind fog of a moment the other day I called to see when she’d be home and discovered her account hadn’t yet been canceled.
    Hey, this is Bailey, Juliet for the month, so dudes, what say’st thou? Hast thou not a word of joy? Some comfort...
    I hang up at the tone, then call back, again and again, and again, and again, wanting to just pull her out of the phone. Then one time I don’t hang up.
    “Why didn’t you tell me you were getting married?” I whisper, before snapping the phone shut and laying it on her desk. Because I don’t understand. Didn’t we tell each other everything ? If this doesn’t change our lives, Len, I don’t know what will, she’d said when we painted the walls. Is that the change she’d wanted then? I pick up the cheesy plastic St. Anthony. And what about him? Why bring him up here? I look more closely at the drawing he was leaning against. It’s been up so long that the paper has yellowed and the edges have curled, so long that I haven’t taken notice of it for years. Bailey drew it when she was around eleven, the time she started questioning Gram about Mom with an unrelenting ferocity.
    She’d been at it for weeks.
    “How do you know she’ll be back?” Bailey asked for the millionth time. We were in Gram’s art room,