When the World Tips Over

by Jandy Nelson

Genres: Young Adult; YA Family; YA LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

"Jandy Nelson is a true virtuoso . . . I am fervently in love with this brave, funny, tender, exuberant beating heart of a book." —Becky Albertalli, author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda and Imogen, Obviously

An explosive new novel brimming with love, secrets, and enchantment by Jandy Nelson, Printz Award–winning and New York Times bestselling author of I’ll Give You the Sun
 
The Fall siblings live in hot Northern California wine country, where the sun pours out of the sky, and the devil winds blow so hard they whip the sense right out of your head.
 
Years ago, the Fall kids’ father mysteriously disappeared, cracking the family into pieces. Now Dizzy Fall, age twelve, bakes cakes, sees spirits, and wishes she were a heroine of a romance novel. Miles Fall, seventeen, brainiac, athlete, and dog-whisperer, is a raving beauty, but also lost, and desperate to meet the kind of guy he dreams of. And Wynton Fall, nineteen, who raises the temperature of a room just by entering it, is a virtuoso violinist set on a crash course for fame . . . or self-destruction.
 
Then an enigmatic rainbow-haired girl shows up, tipping the Falls’ world over. She might be an angel. Or a saint. Or an ordinary girl. Somehow, she is vital to each of them. But before anyone can figure out who she is, catastrophe strikes, leaving the Falls more broken than ever. And more desperate to be whole.
 
With road trips, rivalries, family curses, love stories within love stories within love stories, and sorrows and joys passed from generation to generation, this is the intricate, luminous tale of a family’s complicated past and present. And only in telling their stories can they hope to rewrite their futures.

"Transcendently beautiful.” —Nina LaCour, author of We Are Okay
“Sublime, intricate, and dazzling . . . I adored it.” —Helena Fox, author of How It Feels to Float
“Jandy Nelson is a rare, explosive talent.” —Tahereh Mafi, author of the Shatter Me series
"Intricately rendered . . . Profound and satisfying." —PW (starred review)
“A technicolor fever dream offering readers a sensory feast.” —Kirkus
"Splendid and complex . . . Satisfying and soul-thrilling . . . Well worth the wait." —SLJ (starred review)
"A complex, seductive YA heartbreaker.” —The Guardian
"Beautiful.” —Booklist

Release date: September 24, 2024

Publisher: Dial Books

Print pages: 528

Sample

DIZZY

Encounter #1 with the Rainbow-Haired Girl

The morning of the day twelve-year-old Dizzy Fall walked into the path of the speeding eighteen-wheeler and encountered the rainbow-haired girl, everything was going wrong. In the divorce with her best friend, Lizard, who now went by his real name, Tristan, Lizard-now-Tristan had been granted popularity, a cool haircut, and a girlfriend named Melinda.
Dizzy had been granted nothing.
They’d been a twosome since first grade, wandering around in each other’s innermost secrets, baking through the list of Pastry Magazine’s most ambitious desserts as well as their mutual favorite activity: surfing the internet for pertinent information regarding existence. Lizard’s area of expertise was weather and natural disasters while Dizzy’s was all cool things.
Lately those cool things had been stories about saints who rose into the air in fits of ecstasy, Himalayan yogis who could turn their bodies into stone, Buddha, who’d made duplicates of himself and shot fire from his fingers (yes!). Reading about these woo-woo things made Dizzy’s soul buzz and Dizzy wanted a buzzy soul. A buzzy everything.
Also, recently, pre-divorce, Dizzy and Lizard had kissed for three seconds to see if they’d feel the endorphins Lizard learned about online or the spontaneous internal explosions Dizzy read about in the romance novels her mother kept behind the literary ones on the shelf, particularly Live Forever Now starring Samantha Brooksweather, which was Dizzy’s favorite. Lizard thought romance novels were totally useless, but Dizzy learned so much from them. She wanted the door of her wild femininity to swing open already, her fiery furnace to ignite, her passion-moistened depths to awaken, and, although, unlike Samantha Brooksweather, she’d never seen a real live penis, from these books she knew an absolute ton about stiff members, turgid shafts, and throbbing spears. Unfortunately, however, during the three-second kiss with Lizard, neither of them had felt endorphins nor spontaneous internal explosions.
Anyway, all that morning of the telltale day of the first encounter, Dizzy sat in class and watched ex–best friend Lizard-now-Tristan stealthily texting with awful new girlfriend Melinda, probably about all the spontaneous internal explosions they experienced when they kissed each other at the dance three weeks before. Dizzy had watched it happen, her throat knotting up as Lizard’s hand reached behind Melinda’s neck right before their lips met. Since that moment, Dizzy, a renowned motormouth, hardly spoke at school and when she did, she felt like her voice was coming out of her feet.
But what was there for Dizzy to say anymore? Her mother had told her once that the great loves of one’s life weren’t necessarily romantic. Dizzy had thought she had three great loves already, then: her best friend, Lizard; her mom, Chef Mom; and her oldest brother Wynton who was so awesome he gave off sparks. But what now? She didn’t know people could stop loving you. She’d thought friendship was permanent, like matter.
After lunch—which Dizzy spent in the computer room learning about a group of people in Eastern Europe who believed someone or something was psychically stealing their tongues—she walked halfway across school to the bathroom no one used. She was trying to avoid passing Lizard-now-Tristan and Melinda, who were always camped out together lately by the water fountain outside the closer bathroom with their hands and souls glued together. Only when she swung open the door, there was Lizard at the sink of the school’s one all-gender bathroom.
He was alone at the mirror putting some kind of gel in his new hair, looking like all the other boys now, not like the Lizard of a month ago with cyclone hair like hers and geek-kid-at-the-science-fair personal style, also like hers. He’d even gotten contacts, so their black ten-ton Clark Kent eyeglasses no longer matched. She wanted the old Lizard back, the boy who’d told her about sun pillars, fog bows, and said, “So dope, Diz,” at least five hundred times a day.
The fluorescent lights in the slug-colored bathroom flickered. They hadn’t been alone in what felt like ages and Dizzy’s chest felt hollow. Lizard glanced at her in the mirror, his expression unreadable, then returned his attention to his hair, which was the color of butternut squash. He had pale skin with scattered freckles on his cheeks, not galaxies of them like Dizzy. Once in fifth grade when lifelong Dizzy tormentor Tony Spencer had called Dizzy an ugly freckle farm, Lizard had come to school the next day with galaxies of his own that he’d drawn onto his cheeks.
Dizzy glimpsed her reflection in the mirror and had the same sinking reaction she always did to her appearance because she looked exactly like a frog in a wig. She couldn’t believe this was what people had to see when they looked at her. She wished they got to see something better, like Samantha Brooksweather’s head, for instance. Samantha Brooksweather set men’s hearts on fire with her soft silken locks, pouty pillowy lips, and glittering sapphire eyes.
Dizzy settled her plain old unglittering brown eyes back on her ex–best friend, the real version, not the mirror one. She wanted to hold his hand, like they had secretly for years under tables. She wanted to remind him how she used to braid their hair into a single braid so they could pretend they were one person. She wanted to ask him why he wouldn’t return her texts or calls or come to his bedroom window even after she threw thirty-seven pebbles in a row at it. Instead, she went into the stall and held her breath for as long as she could and when she came out, he was gone.
On the mirror in black marker was written: Leave Me Alone.
Dizzy felt like she was going to blow away.
Then came gym. Dodgeball. Hour of terror and dread. She was sweating through her shirt on the broiling field, practicing invisibility, pretending not to notice Lizard huddled with Tony Spencer. Ack. Ick. Lizard the Traitor. Dizzy wanted to burrow into the ground. Why hadn’t she thought to make more than one friend in life? But she had no time to contemplate this because Tony Spencer had broken away from Lizard and was charging at her with the ball and a gleaming, cartoon-y knife of a smile. Plus homicidal intent. Her insides plunged. She tried to psychically steal his tongue then cancelled the order because: ew.
A weird embarrassing yip of a noise came from her lips as Tony lifted the ball into the air and then pummeled it into her gut, knocking the breath out of her, the dignity out of her. Then when she was lying on the ground like a gulping, gasping fish, holding her belly where he’d reamed her, he turned around, squatted over her, shoved his sweaty, gym-shorted butt in her face, and farted.
Dizzy’s mind froze. No, she begged, make it so this did not just happen to her. Let her hit delete. Hit escape. Power off.
“What color is it, Dizzy?” Tony said with glee because Lizard must’ve told him about her synesthesia, how she saw scents as colors.
Everyone laughed and laughed but Dizzy focused only on Lizard’s horse-neigh of a laugh, laughing like Dizzy wouldn’t have eaten a tub of spiders to spare him a second of sadness.
That was what had made Dizzy cry. That was what had made her command her bare, bony stick-legs to run across the athletic field, climb over the fence of Paradise Springs Middle School, and peel through vineyard after vineyard, so that now here she was in a deserted part of town in her gym clothes in the middle of the school day, in a heatwave, wanting to just jump out of her stupid sweaty body and leave it behind.
Because Tony Spencer had done that in her face! In front of everyone! And Lizard had laughed! At her! God! She’d need a disguise from here on out, a whole new identity. She could never go back to school, that was certain. She’d have to steal her mother’s credit card and book a flight to South America. Live in the savannah with the capybaras because Dizzy had learned in one of her online research marathons that capybaras were the nicest of all mammals.
Not hateful like seventh-grade people.
And hello? Synesthesia wasn’t even something Dizzy was embarrassed about, like she was her frog-in-a-wig looks, or her nuclear mushroom hair, or her freckles, which colonized every inch of her including her toes, including her fiery furnace. Or the everything. Like how small and concave she was and how she had no hair anywhere exciting yet and how she often felt like a dust particle. Not to mention how scared she was to die or to go to sleep or to lie there in the dark or to leave a room if her mom was in it or to be ugly forever. Or even how much time she really spent surfing the internet for pertinent information regarding existence or so many, many things that made Dizzy feel like life was hopping from one private or public humiliation to the next.
She careened down the empty sweltering sidewalk, lost in her mind, not registering the burnt amber scent of the air, nor the shops closed because of the infernal temperatures, nor the sun-scorched hills in the distance, nor the strange creaking quiet because all four streams that ran through Paradise Springs had run dry. She didn’t even register the sky, empty of birds who couldn’t be bothered to fly with The Devil Winds roving down the valley, causing the worst heatwave in recent memory.
She stepped blindly into the street.
Then, a screeching like the world was splitting in half.
The ground beneath her shook, the air rattled. Dizzy had no idea what was happening.
She turned around and saw the massive metal face of a truck barreling toward her. Oh no oh no oh no oh no. She couldn’t move or scream or think. She couldn’t do anything. Her feet were encased in concrete as time slowed, then seemed to suspend entirely with the revelation: This was it.
It it.
The End.
Oh, she hoped she’d get to be a ghost. A ghost who baked all day beside Chef Mom at her restaurant, The Blue Spoonful. “I want to come back immediately, please,” Dizzy said urgently, out loud, to God. “A ghost who can talk, sir,” she added. “Not one of the mute ones, please.”
She swallowed, flooding with sorrow, with so not-ready. She was going to die only having used up three seconds of the two weeks the average person spent kissing in their lifetime. She was going to die before she fell in love and merged souls like Samantha Brooksweather and Jericho Blane. Before she rose up to meet someone’s urgent thrust or was burnt to cinders from the frenzy of simultaneous eruptions or any of the other epic sex stuff inLive Forever Now. Worse, she was going to die before she ever even had an orgasm on her own—she couldn’t figure it out or was malformed; she wasn’t sure which.
And this was even worse than all of that: She was going to die before the father she never met—because she was in the womb the night he left—returned. She knew he wasn’t dead like some people said though, because she’d seen him once up on the ridge in his cowboy hat, looking like he did in all the photos, except no one believed her about this (except Wynton and Lizard) on account of how she regularly saw those mute ghosts in the vineyard, and no one (except Wynton and Lizard) believed her about that either. Oh Wynton. And her other brother Perfect Miles. Her mother! Panic seized her. How could she leave them? Leave the world? She didn’t even like leaving the breakfast table. How could she die before they—Wynton, Perfect Miles, Chef Mom, Un-disappeared Dad, Weird Drunk Uncle Clive—could squeeze together on the ancient red velvet couch in the living room, a happy people-pile with Dizzy smack in the middle, all of them watching Harold and Maude or Babette’s Feast (her mom’s favorite old movies and now hers too). Oh, she hoped everyone would watch those two movies in her memory, in lieu of flowers.
Not that her family had ever watched anything in a happy people-pile or been that happy, period. But now there was no chance of it.
She was going to die before all the chances.
And the really awful part wasn’t even that the last thing that happened to her before death was being face-farted by Tony Spencer and betrayed by Lizard. (Actually, forget the old movies—in lieu of flowers, please egg and toilet paper both their houses.) The worst part was she was going to die before anything truly miraculous happened to her in life.
And then something truly miraculous happened to her in life.
Two hands planted themselves hard and strong on her hips. She turned and saw a girl. A bright and shining, shooting star of a girl.
Dizzy lifted her hand to touch the face that was framed by rainbow curls tumbling to the girl’s waist, fairy-tale tresses of every color, but before Dizzy could touch the light-struck cheek, the girl spoke, bopped Dizzy’s nose with her finger, then shoved Dizzy mightily, and up Dizzy went. Up, up, up. The sky tipping as Dizzy hurled forward out of all thought, out of time and place, landing finally in a splatter of limbs and bewilderment on the hot pavement.
Holy holy holy.    
Dizzy didn’t move for a moment. Um. What had just happened? Her heart was a wild animal in her chest, her face pressed into burning gravel. Was she a ghost? She touched two fingers together. No, still flesh. She tried to lift her head and was met by blur—where were her glasses? She rolled onto her back and a figure, a man, she could tell even without her glasses, not the girl she expected to see, was towering over her, blocking the sun, offering her a hand, and talking a blue streak.
“Close call. Close call. Oh Jesus God. But look at you. Like new. Not a scratch. Thank the lord.” He helped Dizzy to shaky feet with shaky arms. Despite the gravel in her cheeks and palms, the pavement burns on her knees, the pounding in her chest, she was okay. Dizzy wasn’t so sure about this man, though, who she thought might be on the road to hyperventilation. He was sweating through his shirt in stained patches, his scent staggering, a pumpkin-orange smell, the color Dizzy associated with men, with men-sweat. Girls and women smelled mostly green. Except not all of them, she now knew. The rainbow-haired girl who’d just saved her life had smelled magenta, like flowers did. “Oh jeez. Oh lord. Oh God,” the man said. “What are you, nine, ten? I got a grandbaby your age. Built like a feather just like you.”
“I’m a twelve-year-old feather,” Dizzy said defensively. Because yes, it was annoying to still be asked to be an elf in the Paradise Springs summer parade, thank you very much. She bent down to feel for her glasses, only to realize they were stuck in her hair, which doubled as her personal lost and found. She disentangled them and put them on to see that the man, with his big sweaty friendly mustached face, was, for all intents and purposes, a talking walrus.
The girl, however, was nowhere in sight.
“Okay then, twelve. Stand corrected,” the man said. “Whew-y. So glad you’re all right. Thought you were a goner.”
“Me too,” said Dizzy, her mind revving. “I hoped I’d get to come back as a ghost, but I didn’t want to be one of the mute ones, you know?” She could feel words, words, words, a tidal wave of them, straining to break out of her like they used to in the good old pre-divorce days. Sure, some people who shall remain nameless thought Dizzy talked too much and should get her vocal cords removed, but those people weren’t here, so on she went. “That would be awful. There, watching everything and everyone but unable to talk, to tell people anything, even your name. Like the ones in our vineyard.”
“I think you’d be terrible as a mute ghost,” the walrus-man said.
“Yes. Exactly.” She looked around. “I have to thank the girl, sir. Where’d she go?”
The man made a face that caused his bushy eyebrows to bunch up. “Where’d who go? All I seen is sun, then you standing in it, frozen, looking up to the heavens like some religious statue. And then I’m slamming on the brakes, riding ’em for my life, but the next second you were flying outa the way. You must be some kind athlete, ’cause you really flew. It was a sight.”
“So not an athlete. That’s my brother Perfect Miles. I hate sports. All of them. I don’t even like being outside.” She took a breath to slow down her thoughts, which loved to avalanche. “I flew like that because a girl pushed me. Hard too, just shoved me into the air. You didn’t see her?” Dizzy looked up and down the street again. No one was anywhere. No tourists. No cars even. The Devil Winds had turned Paradise Springs into a dry, dusty ghost town. “She had all these colorful tattoos of words”—Dizzy touched her arm where the tattoo of the word destiny had been on the girl—“and she wasso beautiful, her face—”
“Just us here, honey. Must be the heat. No one’s thinking straight.”
Walking home through the vineyards under the burning sun, her sweat-soaked clothes stuck to her, Dizzy couldn’t get the girl out of her mind. That magenta smell. The way she’d looked right at Dizzy, eye to eye. “Don’t worry. You’re okay,” the girl had said in a strange husky voice before touching Dizzy’s nose with her finger—bop. All Dizzy’s panic about the oncoming truck had vanished. All Dizzy’s panic and uncertainty about everything had vanished. Light had been everywhere on the girl, streaming around her head, around those endless rainbow-colored curls, like a halo.
Like a halo.
And then she’d pushed Dizzy into the air.

DIZZY


The next morning, Dizzy was at the breakfast table—alive and breathing air and thinking thoughts and touched by an angel! She could barely contain her news, wanted to shout it at Perfect Miles sitting across from her but he had a Keep Out sign up, meaning he was huddled over some novel, like always, his raven ringlets ringletting ravenly around his princely face.
Dizzy and her oldest brother Wynton had no clue where Perfect Miles came from. He was on an athletic scholarship at a fancy prep school three towns away (Wynton, like Dizzy, regularly walked into walls). He was quiet, serious, and scary-beautiful (Wynton, like Dizzy, looked like a frog in a wig and engaged in unserious pillow fights and unquiet screaming contests). He loved to go for runs in nature (Wynton, like Dizzy, loved walls, roofs, snacks in front of the TV).
Also, Perfect Miles was good, spent his free time walking three-legged dogs and brushing blind horses at the animal refuge (Wynton was always bad, even got himself thrown in jail a couple weeks ago, and Dizzy specialized in ugly thoughts about her peers). And the cherry on the sundae Perfect Miles would never eat because he didn’t indulge in sweets (no comment): He was voted both Class Hottie and Most Likely to Succeed in the yearbook two years running.
Perfect Miles made Dizzy feel especially warty.
She poked his arm. “I saw an angel yesterday.”
He didn’t take his eyes off his book.
“She saved my life.”
Nothing.
“By bopping my nose, maybe.”
Nothing.
“Miles!”
“Reading,” he said, not lifting his head.
Because Dizzy was the youngest and so small and was now a friendless girl who’d been face-farted, certain family members like Perfect here thought it fine to act like she didn’t exist.
“An angel, like, for real, Miles. A super cool one who had tats and everything.”
He turned the page.
Dizzy studied his lashy eyes, his stupid Cupid’s-bow mouth, his loose, lazy curls that shined and never frizzed (like Samantha Brooksweather’s!). The rest of his Class Hottie features. Seriously, how was it she, the face-farted, and Perfect here were part of the same species, let alone the same family?
“The thing is, Miles,” she said. “You don’t know if today’s going to be your last day alive. You could get hit by a truck or an asteroid or a sinkhole could open up right under your feet. It’s so harrowing that you have absolutely no control over when you’ll die, don’t you think? Don’t you think it’s so hard being mortal?”
Miles started choking on his dry brown rice toast (no comment), then recovered, all without lifting his head from his book.
Argh.
We should all try to be more like Miles, her mother always said. He never wastes a minute. Dizzy wasted all the minutes. This was because time went faster for her than other people. How else to explain what happened when she went online? Or looked out a window? Or whatever. She often snoop-read the little note pads Perfect Miles kept in his back pocket and stored in the bottom drawer in his dresser. They used to be full of To-Do lists but recently they’d gone off the rails. A recent item said: Find someone to trade heads with.
“I don’t want to die at all,” Dizzy continued, undeterred. “I mean at all at all at all. I want to be immortal. Lots of people say they’d get bored living for millennia or too depressed seeing everyone they love die again and again. Not me. How about you?”
Dizzy looked at Miles expectantly.
He turned the page.
She watched his skin gleam.
She watched his lashes flutter.
She watched him get more perfect.
This sibling thing between them wasn’t working out. They were terrible breakfast companions. Really, she hadn’t spent much time alone with Miles until recently. He never used to come down for breakfast (or dinner, or movies, or spontaneous dance parties, or baking marathons, or screaming contests, or pillow wars) when Wynton was around, which was every day until a couple weeks ago when Mom kicked Wynton out and changed the locks. (Except right this minute Wynton was crashed in the attic because Dizzy had illegally left out keys for him.)
Dizzy knew she was annoying Perfect Miles, figured on a scale of one to ten she was at a seven, but hello? It was annoying to be ignored too. Very annoying. “So, guess what?” she said, giving it one last go. She did have a couple things in her arsenal that could start a conversation with a rock. “You won’t believe this, Miles, but there’s a woman in Pennsylvania who has orgasms from brushing her teeth.” This was from a site she found last night while trying to figure out what she was doing wrong with the whole masturbating thing. Dizzy pretended to brush her teeth with a nearby fork for dramatic effect, wishing it was Lizard she was telling this awesome tidbit. If only.
At a solid annoyance-level of ten, Miles stood—he was so tall now, like having a telephone pole in the family—grabbed his book, and headed out the front door to the porch to brave the heat. The toothbrush orgasmer hadn’t had the desired effect. Perfect’s fun thermometer was surely broken. Still, Dizzy rose to follow him because she couldn’t help herself, but then she heard the dog stampede and decided to stay in the air-​conditioned house.
Miles was a cross-species sensation. If they didn’t close the front door, his bedroom turned into a dog park. She suspected he talked to them like St. Francis did. Dizzy didn’t like dogs. Like why in the world did they put their noses in her fiery furnace? She preferred grazing cows and horses, reasonable animals in distant fields who weren’t perverts. She sat back down, sliced into the warm gingerbread she’d made last night and had now reheated. Steam rose out of it, along with a mingling of cloves and molasses—a cornflower blue that misted into Dizzy’s field of vision as she inhaled deeply and thought some more about Perfect Miles.
When she was little, she used to sleepwalk, even once into Mrs. Bell’s house next door, but Miles’s room was the favorite in-house destination. Night after night, she’d sleepwalk into his bedroom and curl up on the brown beanbag chair under the window. This was how she learned that Perfect Miles cried in his sleep. The sniffling would wake her, and then she’d walk over to him and touch his arm. Her touch always stopped it. But what was strange, stranger even than that, was no matter how dark it was in the room, she could always see him. He never woke up and she never said anything to anyone about it—neither about the crying nor that he kind of glowed in the dark—but often she felt like the real Miles was the boy weeping in darkness, giving off some kind of strange dream-light, not this perfect one who was more like a boarder than a brother.
Sometimes, honestly, Dizzy forgot Miles existed. For her, having a brother was all about her oldest brother Wynton. And Wynton said Perfect Miles was a snob or had a stick up his tight ass or thought he was better than them or was a fucking phony or a ton of other mean things that made Dizzy feel queasy.
She cut into the lavender butter (from Chef Mom’s restaurant) and started spreading it on her gingerbread, watching it melt into the crevices. “Are you here?” she asked the room, not sure if angels had the ability to go invisible, which would mean her angel could be in the next seat. “If you are, beautiful angel, thank you for finding me yesterday, for saving me. I’d really love to—”
“Dizzy!” she heard, and jumped out of her chair. It was a gruff voice, a man’s voice, but that didn’t mean anything, did it? Angels probably switched genders and ages at will. Or maybe a new one got sent down to her.
“Yes,” she said, putting down the gingerbread. “I can’t see you today.”
“Over here. It’s me.”
Dizzy turned around and saw Uncle Clive at the window motioning for her to come to him. Oh, for Pete’s sake. His head was sideways to better talk to her through the narrow opening of the window that they never could get to completely shut—the house was over a hundred years old—even when the air-con was blasting. “I thought you were an angel,” she said.
“That’s a first. Now listen, I had a dream about Wynton.”
Dizzy walked to the window, opened it wider, and her uncle straightened out. A blast of hot oven air infused with his smell—a cigarettes, sweat, and alcohol combo, the color of rust—assaulted her. His look was Sasquatch. He had a sagging face, and his blond hair and beard were long and straggly, his clothes mismatched and worn, his girth expanding hourly it seemed. He wore a flannel shirt and mud-caked jeans despite the heat. His flushed face glistened with perspiration. Rumor had it, a long time ago he’d been a playboy, but this was hard to imagine. Mom repeatedly warned them to steer clear of their uncle when he’d been drinking, which happened to be always. She said sometimes people break and can’t be put back together, but Dizzy didn’t agree with that. She thought all people could be put back together. Her uncle was lonely. Dizzy could feel it like an undertow when she was around him. And she never told her mother or anyone that she often spied him slipping into their house at night to sleep, curling up night after night on the red velvet sofa like a sad old mountain lion.
Uncle Clive leaned in and said, “In the dream, Wynton was playing violin, except no sound was coming out of it. Then he opened his mouth to sing and nothing. Then he started stomping his feet and no stomping sound. You see?”
Dizzy nodded. “There was no more music in him.”
“Exactly. Knew you’d get it, sweet-pie. It’s a portent. He needs to be careful.”
“I’ll tell him,” she said.
Uncle Clive stroked his beard, searching Dizzy’s face with bleary solemn eyes. “Okay. Good. Come visit soon so we can catch up.” He turned to go. Of course, Dizzy never told her mom that she visited her uncle in the brown house on the hill either. She loved to listen to him play piano and occasionally the trumpet, loved looking at his drawings and photos of cows, loved hearing about his dreams and David Bowie. But mostly she loved when he talked about her missing father, his big brother Theo, which he would do until he invariably got upset and made her leave. Dizzy knew Perfect Miles visited Uncle Clive too. But Wynton never did. Wynton said Uncle Clive had loser-mojo and loser-mojo was highly contagious.
Dizzy watched her uncle tromp across the now dried-up creek that divided the property between his and theirs, then up the hill, making his way willy-nilly through the scorched vineyards he long ago began renting o