Free The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson Page B

of skaters in town who regularly and spectacularly defy gravity. If he thinks he’s putting himself in danger he’s going full-on kamikaze.
    “She wouldn’t want that, Toby.” I can’t keep the pleading out of my voice.
    He sighs, frustrated. “I know that, I know.” He picks up his pace as if to leave behind what he just told me.
    “She’d kill me.” He says it so definitively and passionately that I wonder if he’s really talking about skating or what happened between us.
    “I won’t do it anymore,” he insists.
    “Good,” I say, still not totally sure what he’s referring to, but if it’s us, he doesn’t have to worry, right? I’ve kept the curtains drawn. I’ve promised Bailey nothing will ever happen again.
    Though even as I think this, I find my eyes drinking him in, his broad chest and strong arms, his freckles. I remember his mouth hungrily on mine, his big hands in my hair, the heat coursing through me, how it made me feel—
    “It’s just so reckless . . .” he says.
    “Yeah.” It comes out a little too breathy
    “Len?”
    I need smelling salts.
    He looks at me funny, but then I think he reads in my eyes what has been going on in my head, because his eyes kind of widen and spark, before he quickly looks away.
    GET A GRIP, LENNIE.
    We walk in silence then through the woods and it snaps me back into my senses. The stars and moon are mostly hidden over the thick tree cover, and I feel like I’m swimming through darkness, my body breaking the air as if it were water. I can hear the rush of the river getting louder with every step I take, and it reminds me of Bailey, day after day, year after year, the two of us on this path, lost in talk, the plunge into the pool, and then the endless splaying on the rocks in the sun—
    I whisper, “I’m left behind.”
    “Me too ...” His voice catches. He doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t look at me; he just takes my hand and holds it and doesn’t let it go as the cover above us gets thicker and we push together farther into the deepening dark.
    I say softly, “I feel so guilty,” almost hoping the night will suck my words away before Toby hears.
    “I do too,” he whispers back.
    “But about something else too, Toby . . .”
    “What?”
    With all the darkness around me, with my hand in Toby’s, I feel like I can say it. “I feel guilty that I’m still here . . .”
    “Don’t. Please, Len.”
    “But she was always so much ... more—”
    “No.” He doesn’t let me finish. “She’d hate for you to feel that way.”
    “I know.”
    And then I blurt out what I’ve forbidden myself to think, let alone say: “She’s in a coffin, Toby.” I say it so loud, practically shriek it—the words make me dizzy, claustrophobic, like I need to leap out of my body.
    I hear him suck in air. When he speaks, his voice is so weak I barely hear it over our footsteps. “No, she isn’t.”
    I know this too. I know both things at once.
    Toby tightens his grip around my hand.
    Once at Flying Man’s, the sky floods through the opening in the canopy. We sit on a flat rock and the full moon shines so brightly on the river, the water looks like pure rushing light.
    “How can the world continue to shimmer like this?” I say as I lie down under a sky drunk with stars.
    Toby doesn’t answer, just shakes his head and lies down next to me, close enough for him to put his arm around me, close enough for me to put my head on his chest if he did so. But he doesn’t, and I don’t.
    He starts talking then, his soft words dissipating into the night like smoke. He talks about how Bailey wanted to have the wedding ceremony here at Flying Man’s so they could jump into the pool after saying their vows. I lean up on my elbows and can see it as clearly in the moonlight as if I were watching a movie, can see Bailey in a drenched bright orange wedding dress laughing and leading the party down the path back to the house, her careless beauty so huge it had to walk a