still visible, layers and layers of drips and splatters and spots.
Sukey.
I shift onto my hands and knees to get a closer look, ignoring the roughness of the rooftop on my grazed skin. Rubbing away the grime, I make out raspberry, purple, sea-foam green, like droppings from a psychedelic pigeon. Sukey must have stood over this place with her easel while she painted. These drips of paint must have flown off her brush as she lifted it to the canvas, splashing onto the hot roof. Sukey made art here, my brain keeps thinking, sounding it over and over like a bell—my Sukey, the one I remember, not the strung-out stranger that was starting to replace her in my mind. Even if she was screwing up and getting lost and making all the wrong decisions, at least she was still searching. At least she was still trying to get to that place her soul was from. And maybe, in spite of everything, she found it.
As I climb back down the fire escape, I tell myself there’s no reason to be sad anymore—no reason to crash bicycles or fight with Danny or have stupid, fretful worries about the people on the bus. The world is good and I am good and love is good and if I’d only stop freaking out long enough to realize that, I wouldn’t have any problems at all.
chapter thirty
All day long, I carry Sukey’s rooftop around with me like a pocketful of gumballs, an ecstatic secret I can hardly keep contained. I want to be good for the world—pure and true and wise and somehow saintly, somehow illuminated. I want to have experienced something that has changed me, and so I act changed.
I take my synth to Skunk’s house, and we fix it in the shed using bike tools. The pieces of the exploded synth fit back together perfectly. You can’t even tell it exploded in the first place, and when I plug it into the extension cord, the power light glows bright blue. I play for Skunk for a little while, saying things like, “This is where Lukas goes ba-ka-ka-ta-ba-ka-ta on the drums,” until Skunk picks me up, moves the synth out of the way, sets me down on the workbench, and kisses me with his hands in my hair. “Love-bison,” I say, but he can’t hear because my mouth is smothered in kisses.
When I leave, Skunk gives me a little black book with yellowing pages. I read it on the bus ride home. It starts, “The Way that can be experienced is not true; the world that can be constructed is not real.” I flip it over. The cover says Tao te Ching. By the time I get home, I’ve read the whole thing twice. I send Skunk a text I THINK MY BRAIN IS ON FIRE, and he texts back IT PROBABLY IS, and I text back THE WAY IS A LIMITLESS VESSEL, and he texts back USED BY THE SELF, IT IS NOT FILLED BY THE WORLD, and I text back IT CANNOT BE CUT, KNOTTED, DIMMED OR STILLED, and he texts back ITS DEPTHS ARE HIDDEN, UBIQUITOUS AND ETERNAL. we keep texting lines back and forth until we’ve texted practically the whole Tao te Ching, then Skunk calls and says, “I miss you already, Crazy Girl,” and I get off the bus, cross the street, catch a bus in the opposite direction, go right back to his house, and kidnap him for an expedition to the Chinese bakery before his aunt and uncle get home from work.
That night, Lukas finally texts back after I’ve already sent him a million texts asking when we’re going to practice now that I’ve fixed my synth. I go over there for dinner, and Petra’s made potato-and-cheese pierogi. She comments on my outfit, which is somewhat more daring than what I usually wear, and I tell her now that our band is famous, I need to look the part. Lukas still looks the same, but that’s because he’s the drummer and drummers are never fully in the spotlight, it’s kind of a rule of drumming. He doesn’t say much during dinner, just picks at his pierogi. Lukas’s parents and I do most of the talking.
“Where are your parents now?” says Petra.
“Paraguay,” I tell her, “taking care of sea tortoises.”
“I thought Paraguay was landlocked,” says Lukas.
I lean forward confidentially.
“Not anymore.”
We go downstairs to jam, and Lukas goes straight to his drum kit and sits. I look at him expectantly.