Excerpt from I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I watch myself blow away.

I watch him getting closer and closer to the drawings that are going to get me murdered.

My pulse is thundering in my ears.

Then Zephyr says, "Don't rip 'em up, Fry. His sister says he's good." Because he likes Jude? They mostly all do now because she can surf harder than any of them, likes to jump off cliffs, and isn't afraid of anything, not even great white sharks or Dad. And because of her hair—I use up all my yellows drawing it. It's hundreds of miles long and everyone in Northern California has to worry about getting tangled up in it, especially little kids and poodles and now asshat surfers.

There's also the boobs, which arrived overnight delivery, I swear. Unbelievably, Fry listens to Zephyr and drops the pad.

Jude peers up at me from it, sunny, knowing. Thank you, I tell her in my mind. She's always rescuing me, which usually is embarrassing, but not now. That was righteous.

(Portrait, Self-Portrait: Twins: Noah Looking in a Mirror, Jude out of It)

"You know what we're going to do to you, don't you?" Zephyr rasps in my ear, back to the regularly scheduled homicidal programming. There's too much of him on his breath. There's too much of him on me.

"Please, you guys," I beg.

"Please, you guys," Fry mimics in a squeaky girly voice.

My stomach rolls. Devil's Drop, the second-highest jump on the hill, which they aim to throw me over, has the name for a reason. Beneath it is a jagged gang of rocks and a wicked whirlpool that pulls your dead bones down to the underworld. I try to break Zephyr's hold again. And again. "Get his legs, Fry!" All six-thousand hippopotamus pounds of Fry dive for my ankles. Sorry, this is not happening. It just isn't. I hate the water, prone as I am to drowning and drifting to Asia. I need my skull in one piece. Crushing it would be like taking a wrecking ball to some secret museum before anyone ever got to see what's inside it.

So I grow. And grow, and grow, until I head-butt the sky. Then I count to three and go freaking berserk, thanking Dad in my mind for all the wrestling he's forced me to do on the deck, to-the-death matches where he could only use one arm and I could use everything and he'd still pin me because he's thirty feet tall and made of truck parts.

But I'm his son, his gargantuan son. I'm a whirling, ass-kicking Goliath, a typhoon wrapped in skin, and then I'm writhing and thrashing and trying to break free and they're wrestling me back down, laughing and saying things like "what a crazy mother." And I think I hear respect even in Zephyr's voice as he says, "I can't pin him, he's like a frickin' eel," and that makes me fight harder—I love eels, they're electric - imagining myself a live wire now, fully loaded with my own private voltage, as I whip this way and that, feeling their bodies twisting around mine, warm and slick, both of them pinning me again and again, and me breaking their holds, all our limbs entwined and now Zephyr's head's pressed into my chest and Fry's behind me with a hundred hands it feels like and it's just motion and confusion and I am lost in it, lost, lost, lost, when I begin to suspect ... when I realize—I have a hard-on, a super- naturally hard hard-on, and it's jammed into Zephyr's stomach. High-octane dread courses through me. I call up the bloodiest most hella gross machete massacre—my most effective boner-buster— but it's too late. Zephyr goes momentarily still, then jumps off me. "What the—?"

Fry rolls up onto his knees. "What happened?" he wheezes out in Zephyr's direction.

I've reeled away, landed in a sitting position, my knees to my chest. I can't stand up yet for fear of a tent, so I put all my effort in trying not to cry. A sickly ferret feeling is burrowing itself into every corner of my body as I pant my last breaths. And even if they don't kill me here and now, by tonight everyone on the hill will know what just happened. I might as well swallow a lit stick of dynamite and hurl my own self off Devil's Drop. This is worse, so much worse, than them seeing some stupid drawings.

Excerpted from I'll Give You the Sun by Liza Nelson. Copyright © 2014 by Liza Nelson. Excerpted by permission of Dial Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.