I'll Give You the Sun Read Online Free Page A

goes, still no fallout except in my mind: (S ELF-PORTRAIT:
Boy Gets Fed Piece by Piece to a Swarm of Fire Ants
). But maybe Zephyr’s really not going to tell anyone.
    The guys at the next table all have rubber plugs in their earlobes and studs in their eyebrows and are joking around with each other like otters. They probably go to CSA, I think, and the thought makes my whole body thrum. One of them has a moon face with blue saucer eyes and a bursting red mouth, the kind Renoir paints. I
love
those mouths. I’m doing a quick sketch of his face with my finger on my pants under the table when he catches me staring and instead of glaring at me so I’ll mind my beeswax, he winks at me, slowly, so there’s no mistaking it, then returns his attention to his friends as I go from solid to liquid mass.
    He winked at me. Like he
knows
. But it doesn’t feel bad. Not at all. In fact, I wish I could stop smiling, and now, oh wow—he’s looking this way again and smiling too. My face is starting to boil.
    I try to focus in on Mom and Jude. They’re talking about Grandma’s batshit bible. Again. How it’s like an encyclopedia of odd beliefs, Mom’s saying. How Grandma collected ideas from everywhere, everyone, even left the bible open on the counter next to the cash register in her dress shop so all her customers could write in their batshit hogwash too.
    â€œOn the very last page,” Mom tells Jude, “it says in case of her untimely death, it becomes yours.”
    â€œMine?” She throws me her smuggest look. “
Just
mine?” She’s all gift-wrapped now. Whatever. Like I even want some bible.
    Mom says, “I quote, ‘This good book is bequeathed to my granddaughter, Jude Sweetwine, the last remaining bearer of The Sweetwine Gift.’”
    I barf bright green barf all over the table.
    Grandma Sweetwine decided Jude had The Sweetwine Gift of Intuition when she discovered Jude could do the flower tongue. We were four years old. After, Jude spent days with me in front of a mirror, pressing her finger into my tongue, again and again, trying to teach me so I could have The Sweetwine Gift too. But it was useless. My tongue could flip and curl, but it couldn’t blossom.
    I look back over at the table of otters. They’re packing up to leave. Winking Moon Face swings a backpack over his shoulder and then mouths
bye
to me.
    I swallow and look down and burst into flames.
    Then start mind-drawing him from memory.
    When I tune back in minutes later, Mom’s telling Jude that unlike Grandma Sweetwine, she’d haunt us flamboyantly and persistently, no quick visits in the car for her. “I’d be the kind of ghost that interferes with everything.” She’s laughing her rumbly laugh and her hands are twirling around in the air. “I’m too controlling. You’d never be rid of me! Never!” She bwah-ha-ha’s at us.
    What’s weird is that she looks like she’s in a windstorm all of a sudden. Her hair’s blowing and her dress is slightly billowing. I check under the table to see if there’s a vent or something, but there isn’t. See? Other mothers don’t have their own private weather. She’s smiling at us so warmly, like we’re puppies, and something catches in my chest.
    I shutter myself in while they talk more specifically about what kind of ghost Mom would make. If Mom died, the sun would go out. Period.
    Instead, I think about today.
    How I went around from painting to painting asking each to eat me and each did.
    How my skin fit the whole time, didn’t once bunch up at my ankles or squeeze my head into a pin.
    Mom’s drum roll on the table brings me back. “So, let’s see those sketchbooks,” she says, excited. I did four pastel drawings from the permanent collection—a Chagall, a Franz Marc, and two Picassos. I picked those because I could tell the paintings were looking at