Free The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson Page A

were, and so neither did we—until they wear themselves out and return home. Gram told us her aunt Sylvie and a distant cousin Virginia also had the affliction, and after many years adventuring across the globe, they, like all the others before them, found their way back. It’s their destiny to leave, she told us, and their destiny to return, as well.
    “Don’t boys get it?” I asked Gram when I was ten years old and “the condition” was becoming more understandable to me. We were walking to the river for a swim.
    “Of course they do, sweet pea.” But then she stopped in her tracks, took my hands in hers, and spoke in a rare solemn tone. “I don’t know if at your mature age you can understand this, Len, but this is the way it is: When men have it, no one seems to notice, they become astronauts or pilots or cartographers or criminals or poets. They don’t stay around long enough to know if they’ve fathered children or not. When women get it, well, it’s complicated, it’s just different.”
    “How?” I asked. “How is it different?”
    “Well, for instance, it’s not customary for a mother to not see her own girls for this many years, is it?”
    She had a point there.
    “Your mom was born like this, practically flew out of my womb and into the world. From day one, she was running, running, running.”
    “Running away?”
    “Nope, sweet pea, never away, know that.” She squeezed my hand. “She was always running toward.”
    Toward what? I think, getting up from Bailey’s desk. What was my mother running toward then? What is she running toward now? What was Bailey? What am I?
    I walk over to the window, open the curtain a crack and see Toby, sitting under the plum tree, under the bright stars, on the green grass, in the world. Lucy and Ethel are draped over his legs—it’s amazing how those dogs only come around when he does.
    I know I should turn off the light, get into bed, and moon about Joe Fontaine, but that is not what I do.
    I meet Toby under the tree and we duck into the woods to the river, wordlessly, as if we’ve had a plan to do this for days. Lucy and Ethel follow on our heels a few paces, then turn back around and go home after Toby has an indecipherable talk with them.
    I’m leading a double life: Lennie Walker by day, Hester Prynne by night.
    I tell myself, I will not kiss him, no matter what.
    It’s a warm, windless night and the forest is still and lonely. We walk side by side in the quiet, listening to the fluted song of the thrush. Even in the moonlit stillness, Toby looks sun-drenched and windswept, like he’s on a sailboat.
    “I know I shouldn’t have come, Len.”
    “Probably not.”
    “Was worried about you,” he says quietly.
    “Thanks,” I say, and the cloak of being fine that I wear with everyone else slips right off my shoulders.
    Sadness pulses out of us as we walk. I almost expect the trees to lower their branches when we pass, the stars to hand down some light. I breathe in the horsy scent of eucalyptus, the thick sugary pine, aware of each breath I take, how each one keeps me in the world a few seconds longer. I taste the sweetness of the summer air on my tongue and want to just gulp and gulp and gulp it into my body—this living, breathing, heart-beating body of mine.
    “Toby?”
    “Hmm?”
    “Do you feel more alive since . . .” I’m afraid to ask this, like I’m revealing something shameful, but I want to know if he feels it too.
    He doesn’t hesitate. “I feel more everything since.”
    Yeah, I think, more everything. Like someone flipped on the switch of the world and everything is just on now, including me, and everything in me, bad and good, all cranking up to the max.
    He grabs a twig off a branch, snaps it between his fingers. “I keep doing this stupid stuff at night on my board,” he says, “gnarly-ass tricks only show-off dip-shits do, and I’ve been doing it alone ... and a couple times totally wasted.”
    Toby is one of a handful