(A/N): I wrote this immediately after devouring The Penderwicks in Spring, so forgive any mistakes. What a book. What a wonder. Let me know what you think.
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He discovers early on that he loves Skye Penderwick. Maybe even the very day they meet.
She barrels into him in the middle of a hedge dripping with thorns and shivering light, and shakes him up completely. The lump on his head grows in time with the lump in his throat and a carefully constructed barricade he did not know even existed falls like a cliff into the sea, cleansing erosion. When that wall comes down, he is vulnerable to everything. The grief. The chaos. The beauty. Her.
All the while she kneels over him flapping a funny camouflage hat and Jeffrey, stunned and dizzy, locks eyes with her and feels a desperate tingle lick the length of his spine and ignite in his belly. His heart does a 360 degree spin in his chest, pumps blood at a frenetic pace.
He thinks, this girl is fire.
…
This is only the beginning.
…
Then there is the rest of it. The adventures, the ketchup arrows, the rope ladders and soccer and euphoria.
And later, the goodbyes.
And later, the hello again's, the I missed you's, the slightly awkward and completely rapturous feel of her arms around him, the gruff affection.
Jeffrey's love doesn't frighten him, not yet. It takes years for that to happen. It takes running down the corridor of his new school in Boston with Skye's vibrancy all around him, and her hand closing over his wrist, yanking him into the dark safety beneath one of the beds, and the way her warmth steals into him like some soft and powerful poem; it takes moose at dawn and him falling apart over Alec and Skye following him out onto the grit of sand and driftwood to comfort him even when he swore he didn't want it; it takes them going to Skye's school dance ("As friends, of course—don't be stupid,") and dancing with her beneath lazy strobe lights and a pulsing remix of We Found Love and stepping back with a polite smile when a ginger-haired boy asks to take over and winking at her receding face and going outside to sit on an uncomfortable bench and swallowing until his throat stops feeling so tight, until he shakes off the inexplicable grief.
It takes time for love to scare, it always does. But when it happens, when he reaches the point of no return, it terrifies him.
Skye says something ridiculous one day, something altogether sharp and clumsy and very, deeply her.
She says, "You're absurd, but I feel I should thank you for standing with me when it felt like the world was clawing at my every cell. There's no one with whom I'd rather face the abyss." Then she plucks another tortilla chip from the bowl and crunches it with pleasure, turning back to the science documentary in front of them.
Jeffrey fumbles to grab onto something. He thinks, I love you, I love you, oh, and that's the tipping point [that's when he realizes].
…
Where do all the unsaid things in the world go? Do they end up in some metaphorical scrap-heap on the other side of the earth? Do they sink broken to the bottom of the sea? Do they swirl around our heads like nervous birds, filling the space between us with tingling anxiety? Jeffrey imagines that, like an exhale, these unspoken truths disperse into the atmosphere, quiet and unnoticed. Silky, mirror-fogging anguish. Everywhere; everywhere. He imagines everyone breathing in each other's unarticulated desire each day, each hour, without knowing it.
He imagines two best friends. He thinks of how maybe they love each other, or how one of them does at least. How perhaps he or she has been in love with the other for years, softly, without realizing it. He imagines them watching a film and suddenly the dialogue is spinning past without comprehension and the actors have become nothing more than a simple blur of color and anatomy. And one of them has rested their head on the other's shoulder, thinking to themselves of reaching for the other's hand. Maybe they almost do, flexing and unflexing their fingers as they try to work up the courage, but stop themselves at the last moment.
It's infuriating, he thinks. Someone should say something. Do something. Anything. But we never do, do we? We eat cereal after sunrise and lace our shoes and live our little lives and inhale a thousand others' heartache without knowing a thing, and we fill volumes with all the things we will never let see light.
Jeffrey, well, he doesn't want to be like that. He can't bear the thought of it. He isn't meant for burying or suppressing. He likes living aloud. He enjoys being bright with hunger and pain, and doesn't mind being in love, not really. If he and Skye part like passing vessels without ever intersecting, he believes he will crumble. He believes he will burn. If he allows her to slip away, he will be caught in a great tumbling mess of felt things that were never put to words, like rain or bodies or ash.
"Don't let it happen." This is what he says to himself, over and over, repeated suffering, hands on the bathroom counter while he leans over it and looks his reflection in the eye, petrified. Don't become another lost kiss, another deserted love, another pair of people that could have come together but didn't.
Be the truth that escapes the scrap-heap. Be the I love you that makes its way out of the mouth.
…
So he tells her.
Only it doesn't go according to plan.
…
They're fifteen and it's August and all the crickets have come out. And he is watching her and she is watching the stars. So he trembles and stutters and finally, finally speaks.
[It's sentimental nonsense, but what can you expect from a musician, an artist?]
"Skye."
"Hmm?"
"What I'm about to tell you may come as somewhat of a shock. You're not going to want to believe me at first. You'll find it unimaginable, impossible, but please, do your best to hear me out. This proclamation is anything but empty."
She laughs. "Fine, then. I'm listening. Go on."
"Someone is in love with you. No, seriously," Jeffrey says hurriedly, seeing her expression of amusement. "This person isn't a stranger you passed on the sidewalk the other day whose heart twitched when they saw your face. This is someone who knows your name, who's written it in the margins of their notebook, on the corner of a napkin they shoved deep into their coat pocket, in the dust on a windowsill. This is someone who knows you well, who can't stop thinking about you."
She's more serious now.
"You've woven yourself into the very fiber of their consciousness and now they cannot take a single step without thinking how empty their footfalls sound without yours. Their head is swimming with a billion details of you. That quick pat on the shoulder you gave them last Tuesday, the inadvertent brush of the back of your hand against the bare skin of their forearm, the open smile you wear when you see something you like….and Skye, while you've been worrying about slippery things like the future and why you can't get yourself together and how to get out of bed when everything is cracking to bits, this person has been falling steadily, thoroughly in love with you."
His heart is pounding so hard he fears it will knock him over. But he won't stop. "And god, they can't reverse it. They can't. They can't extricate you from themselves. You've all but engulfed them."
"Jef—"
"Don't look so stunned. You're far more valued than you could imagine. Don't disregard your intelligence and humor, you modesty and courage, your compassion and veracity. Don't. You've never understood just how beguiling you are, or how beautiful, so let me repeat myself: Right now, right now, there is someone so in love with you they can't breathe right. They've loved you for a long time, through a hell of a lot, and they are trying as hard as they can to hide their desire for you, but it's getting trickier every day. They are waiting for you to realize, to lift your eyes, finally, and see."
He finishes with a roaring in his ears, half wishing the earth would devour him whole, half wishing he could lean over and kiss her.
Skye swallows and looks down at her lap. "You're my best friend." She sounds injured, horrified. "That's what you—that's what you're supposed to be. Not—not this."
"I didn't me—"
"I'm sorry, Jeffrey. I'm don't—I'm not—please go away."
"Sk—"
She shoots to her feet as though she's been shot and marches toward the house. The screen door rattles ominously when she closes it, then all is quiet.
Jeffrey falls back on the grass. It's entirely inappropriate, of course, but he keeps imagining her mouth against his own, but god, he knows he can't have it.
There's great loneliness in that, and a strange, numbing beauty.
He sits in the darkness. Doesn't move for hours.
…
The thing is, Jeffrey would drown for her, bleed for her, die for her, but she doesn't want it.
She doesn't want it.
…
"It's a calculator watch! I love it!"
Skye's cheeks are rosy and her smile is blinding, but these are facts Jeffrey registers and buries with the same resignation with which one would accept a forecast of scattered showers on the day of a much-awaited picnic. He's not allowed to go there. He promised.
"It's just hard for me to be with you and not want—" He says several moments later, aching terribly. "You're so beautiful, you know."
"No, no, no, Jeffrey, no." She frowns at him sternly, her jaw going tight.
"And there's no one else? You're certain?"
"You just promised—"
"I know, but—"
"I hate this. It's like my best friend has been taken over by an alien." Her eyes are howling. "You have to go back to Boston now. I don't want you here anymore."
Jeffrey inhales and exhales, never mind the stab in his stomach, and it's the worst moment of his life, worse than Dexter and his mother and the troubles with his father and Hound's death and every other goddamn thing.
It occurs to him that he's never before been so intimate with death. This, what he's had with Skye, it's the corpse, and it takes no detective work to deduce the cause of expiry [him, always him. He messes things up, incessantly. It's an old dirty habit he can't get rid of].
"If I have to leave, I will." He will walk away with a mouth full of dried blood back to his scrap-heap, if that's what she needs. He will do anything.
…
Skye Magee Penderwick is fire. She is radiance and chaos, a universe unto herself.
But Jeffrey must give her up if he wants to keep her. He must let his love, his terrifying, powerful love, fall to dust.
"Loosen your grip, goddamn it," he commands himself, eyes full and hot.
Let go. Let go. Let go.