Free I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson

throwing and kicking and dribbling of any kind.
Noah is not a team player.
Well, duh. Revolutionaries aren’t team players.
    I examine the flat black rock in my hand. It’s about the size of a quarter and has cracks all over it. What am I supposed to do with it? I look back at him. He’s redirecting the telescope upward. I can’t tell what animal he is. Maybe a white Bengal tiger with that hair? And what’s he looking at? It’s never occurred to me that the stars are still up there shining even in the daytime when we can’t see them. He doesn’t turn my way again. I slip the rock into my pocket.
    â€œWhere the hell is Ralph?” I hear as I quickly climb down the ladder at the side of the house. Maybe
he’s
Ralph, I think. Finally. That would be
it
.
    I whip across the street to take the woods down the hill to CSA after all, because I’m too embarrassed to pass the new kid. Plus, now that color has refastened itself to everything, it’s supernaturally amazing to be in the trees.
    People think people are in charge, but they’re wrong; it’s the trees.
    I start to run, start to turn into air, the blue careening off the sky, careening after me, as I sink into green, shades and shades of it, blending and spinning into yellow, freaking yellow, then head-on colliding into the punk-hair purple of lupine: everywhere. I vacuum it in, all of it, in, in—(S ELF-PORTRAIT:
Boy Detonates Grenade of Awesome
)—getting happy now, the gulpy, out-of-breath kind that makes you feel you have a thousand lives crammed inside your measly one, and then before I know it, I’m at CSA.
    When school got out two weeks ago, I started doing recon down here, peering in the studio windows when no one was around. I had to see the student artwork, had to find out if it was better than mine, had to know if I really had a shot. For the last six months, I’ve stayed after school almost every day oil painting with Mr. Grady. I think he wants me to get into CSA as much as Mom and I do.
    The artwork must be stowed away, though, because in all my spying I didn’t see one painting. I did, however, stumble onto a life drawing class being taught in one of the studio buildings off the main campus—a building with one whole side of it tucked into thick old-growth trees. A freaking miracle. Because what could stop me from taking this class? Covertly, you know, from outside the open window?
    So here I am. Both classes so far, there’s been a real live naked girl with missile boobs sitting on a platform. We do speed drawings of her every three minutes. Totally cool, even if I have to stand on tiptoe to see in and then bend down to draw, but so what. The most important part is that I can hear the teacher and I already learned this totally new way to hold the charcoal so it’s like drawing with a motor.
    Today I’m the first to arrive, so I wait for class to start, my back against the warm building, the sun smothering me through a hole in the trees. I take the black stone out of my pocket. Why did the kid on the roof give me this? Why was he smiling at me like that? It didn’t seem mean, it really didn’t, it seemed—a sound breaks into my thoughts, a very human sound, branches cracking: footsteps.
    I’m about to bolt back into the woods, when, in my periphery, I catch some kind of movement on the other side of the building, then hear the same crunching noises as the footsteps retreat. Where there was nothing, a brown bag’s lying on the ground. Weird. I wait a bit, then sneak to the other side of the building and peek around the corner: no one. I go back to the bag wishing I had X-ray eyes, then crouch down and with one hand, shake it open. There’s a bottle inside. I take it out: Sapphire gin, half full. Someone’s stash. I quickly stuff it back in the bag, place it on the ground, and return to my side of the building. Hello? I’m not getting busted