Free I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson Page A

with it and blacklisted from going to CSA.
    Peering through the window, I see that everyone’s there now. The teacher, who has a white beard and holds his balloon belly when he talks, is by the door with a student. The rest of the class is setting up their pads on their stands. I was right too. They don’t even need to turn on the overhead lights at the school. All the students have glowing blood. All revolutionaries. A room of Bubbles. There’s not an asshat or surftard or hornet among them.
    The curtain around the model’s dressing area opens and a tall guy in a blue robe walks out.
A guy.
He undoes the robe, hangs it on a hook, walks naked to the platform, jumps the step, almost falls, then makes some joke that causes everyone to laugh. I don’t hear it because of the heat storm roaring through my body. He’s
so
naked, way more naked than the girl model was. And unlike the girl, who sat and covered parts of herself with her bony arms, this guy’s standing on the platform, in a hand-on-hip pose, like a dare. God. I can’t breathe. Then someone says something I don’t catch, but it makes the model smile and when he does, it’s like all his features shift and scramble into the most disordered face I’ve ever seen. A face in a broken mirror. Whoa.
    I wedge my pad against the wall, holding it in place with my right hand and knee. When my left hand finally stops shaking, I start to draw. I keep my eyes clamped on him, not looking at what I’m doing. I work on his body, feeling the lines and curves, muscle and bone, feeling every last bit of him travel through my eyes to my fingers. The teacher’s voice sounds like waves on the shore. I hear nothing . . . until the model speaks. I don’t know if it’s ten minutes or an hour later. “How about a break, then?” he says. I catch an English accent. He shakes his arm out, then his legs. I do the same, realizing how cramped I’ve been, how my right arm has gone dead, how I’ve been balancing on one leg, how my knee is aching and numb from being jammed into the wall. I watch him cross to the dressing room, wobbling a little, and that’s when it occurs to me the brown bag is his.
    A minute later, he lazes across the classroom in his robe toward the door—he moves like glue. I wonder if he’s in college around here like the teacher said the girl model was. He looks younger than she did. I’m certain he’s coming for the bag even before I smell the cigarette smoke and hear the footsteps. I think about hightailing it into the woods, but I’m frozen.
    He rounds the corner and immediately lowers to the ground, his back sliding down the building, not noticing me standing just yards away. His blue robe glitters in the sun like a king’s. He stubs the cigarette out in the dirt, then drops his head into his hands—wait, what? And then I see it. This is the real pose, head in hands with sadness leaping off of him all the way to me.
    (P ORTRAIT:
Boy Blows into Dust
)
    He reaches for the bag, takes the bottle out and uncaps it, then starts chugging with his eyes closed. There’s no way you’re supposed to drink alcohol like this, like it’s orange juice. I know I shouldn’t be watching, know this is a no-trespassing zone. I don’t move a muscle, afraid he’ll sense me and realize he has a witness. Several seconds pass with him holding the bottle to his face like a compress, his eyes still closed, the sun streaming down on him like he’s being chosen. He takes another sip, then opens his eyes and turns his head my way.
    My arms fly up to block his gaze as he scoots back, startled. “Jesus!” he says. “Where the hell did you come from?”
    I can’t find any words anywhere.
    He composes himself quickly. “You scared the life out of me, mate,” he says. Then he laughs and hiccups at the same time. He looks from me to my pad resting