I'll Give You the Sun Read Online Free

Jude, but she always makes me feel like I’m her little brother. I hate it. “Who would you be kissing? Did you kiss someone?”
    â€œI’ll tell you if you tell me what happened yesterday. I know something did and that’s why we couldn’t walk to school the normal way this morning.” I didn’t want to see Zephyr or Fry. The high school is next to the middle school. I don’t ever want to see them again. Jude touches my arm. “If someone did something to you or said something, tell me.”
    She’s trying to get in my mind, so I close the shutters. Fast, slam them right down with me on one side, her on the other. This isn’t like the other horror shows: The time she punched the boulder-come-to-life Michael Stein in the face last year during a soccer game for calling me a retard just because I got distracted by a supremely cool anthill. Or the time I got caught in a rip and she and Dad had to drag me out of the ocean in front of a whole beach of surftards. This is different. This secret is like having hot burning coals under my bare feet all the time. I rise up from the couch to get away from any potential telepathy—when the yelling reaches us.
    It’s loud, like the house might break in two. Same as the other times lately.
    I sink back down. Jude looks at me. Her eyes are the lightest glacier blue; I use mostly white when I draw them. Normally they make you feel floaty and think of puffy clouds and hear harps, but right now they look just plain scared. Everything else has been forgotten.
    (P ORTRAIT:
Mom and Dad with Screeching Tea Kettles for Heads
)
    When Jude speaks, she sounds like she did when she was little, her voice made of tinsel. “Do you really think that’s why Grandma wants us to go to that school? Because she saw my flying sand women?”
    â€œI do,” I say, lying. I think she was right the first time. I think it’s because of me.
    She scoots over so we’re shoulder to shoulder. This is us. Our pose. The smush. It’s even how we are in the ultrasound photo they took of us inside Mom and how I had us in the picture Fry ripped up yesterday. Unlike most everyone else on earth, from the very first cells of us, we were together, we came here together. This is why no one hardly notices that Jude does most of the talking for both of us, why we can only play piano with all four of our hands on the keyboard and not at all alone, why we can never do Rochambeau because not once in thirteen years have we chosen differently. It’s always: two rocks, two papers, two scissors. When I don’t draw us like this, I draw us as half-people.
    The calm of the smush floods me. She breathes in and I join her. Maybe we’re too old to still do this, but whatever. I can see her smiling even though I’m looking straight ahead. We exhale together, then inhale together, exhale, inhale, in and out, out and in, until not even the trees remember what happened in the woods yesterday, until Mom’s and Dad’s voices turn from mad to music, until we’re not only one age, but one complete and whole person.
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    A week later, everything changes.
    It’s Saturday, and Mom, Jude, and I are in the city at the museum’s rooftop café because Mom won the argument and we’re both going to apply to CSA in a year.
    Across the table, Jude’s talking to Mom and at the same time sending me secret silent death threats because she thinks my drawings came out better than hers and we’re having a contest. Mom’s the judge. And fine, maybe I shouldn’t have tried to fix Jude’s for her. She’s sure I was trying to ruin them. No comment.
    She eye-rolls at me on the sly. It’s a 6.3 on the Richter scale. I think about giving her a dead leg under the table but resist. Instead, I drink some hot chocolate and covertly spy on a group of older guys to my left. As far as my eight-foot concrete dork