Starlight
Page 14
After I read my poem, I have no reason to stay. Saiph wasn’t there, he didn’t hear me confess to him through the poem what I wish I could say to him in person. I walk outside, on the opposite side of the building from where my car’s parked. The winter air is cold on my bare shoulders and my exposed legs. I wrap my arms around myself and stare up at the sky. All the stars are out. I recognize Orion’s belt right away, and I wonder if Saiph is up there.
My eyes start to water. It stings extra from the cold. I need to get home.
This is what a broken heart feels like. It feels numb, like it’s too much in shock to feel the real pain. The numbness spreads through my whole body, so that I’m hardly aware of myself. And then, as I make my way to my car, it hits me. All the loss, all the things I’m missing out on with him not being here. I’ll never hear his voice again. He’ll never call me dirt princess or look at me with those super blue eyes of his. We’ll never stay up late watching the stars together, or get in each other’s way, or argue, or laugh, or anything.
If this was a fairy tale, I would have learned my lesson, that I’m not worthless, and then Saiph would have to leave to show that I could make it without him. That I didn’t need to rely on him, that he’d been a good teacher, but I had to make it on my own now.
But this isn’t a fairy tale—this is real life. And I don’t care if I can make it on my own or if I still need him to push me into being myself. I’d take back all three of my wishes if he could just stay with me. Maybe having the person you care about most ripped away from you is realistic, maybe that’s life, and the me-wanting-him-to-stay part is the fairy tale. But it’s hard to care about that when your heart is aching, and all you can think about is that you’re never going to see him again.
I reach the parking lot. Saiph is sitting on the hood of my car. When I get close to him, I see that he looks sort of pale, and his skin has a blue tinge to it.
“Hey, princess,” he says. “Long time no see.”
“You’re going home?” He didn’t say anything, and my wish didn’t quite get fulfilled, but I can tell something isn’t right, like I’m about to lose him. Tears slip down my cheeks, hot against the cold, and I let them fall. I don’t care who sees me.
He shakes his head. I don’t get the feeling that means he’s staying, either. “I failed,” he says. He holds out his hands, almost shrugging. He nods at me. “You look good.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t want to leave.”
“No, the other one. You failed.”
He gets up. His skin, even his clothes, sparkle, like he’s covered in sand. There’s something strange about him. He examines his arm. It looks almost like it’s… dissolving. “I guess the dance is over.”
He didn’t fail. I did. I had a date for the dance, and I gave it up. I swallow back tears. “Don’t go.”
He doesn’t speak for a moment, and then when he does, his throat sounds tight. “I don’t have a choice.”
“What’s going to happen to you?” I ask, but I can already see that he’s fading away, the wind whirling little bits of him into the air, his whole body turning into stardust. He doesn’t answer me. I take out the poem. “I wrote this for you. I wanted you to be there tonight to hear it.” Tears blur my vision, so that it’s hard to see the words on the page, but I already know it by heart. “It’s the only way I know how to say goodbye.”
Saiph looks like a ghost, faded and wispy and not completely there. Another gust of wind could blow him away. If I’d taken just a little longer to get to the parking lot, I might have missed him altogether. I read fast. Maybe it’s pointless, since once he’s stardust he probably won’t even remember me, but he has to hear this poem. He has to know how I feel.
“I hate you because you’re wonderful,
and I won’t get to see it.
I hate you because you’re braver than me,
and I won’t get to know.
“I hate you because you’re funny,
and now I’ll never laugh.
I hate you because you’re burning,
and I’m forever cold.”
I pause and look up at Saiph. He’s hardly there at all. I almost don’t see him, just scattered sparkles, little connect-the-dots that make up an outline of him. I feel like I’ve already lost him. My heart wrenches, and it’s hard to breathe, it’s hard to keep going, because all I want to do is sink to the ground and cry until I don’t feel empty anymore, and that’ll never happen.
“I hate you because you’re a jerk,
and we’ll never get to argue.
I hate you because you were my friend,
and now I’ll be alone.
“But most of all
I hate you
because I love you.”
I think if I just stand here forever, my eyes on the paper, if I never look up and see that he’s not there, it’ll be like he hasn’t left. I can stay here, frozen in time. Eventually I’ll turn into a rock or a statue or something, like in a myth, and people will walk by and say that’s the stone that used to be a girl who fell in love with a star, but she couldn’t keep him and died of heartbreak.
I cover my face with the poem and sink to my knees. They’re bare, and the grit of the frozen parking lot grinds into them. I smell oil and tires and other car smells. My shoulders shake, and I’m wracked by sobs. My whole body convulses with each one. I don’t know when the last time I cried this hard was.
I feel hollow, like in my first poem. But it’s not the kind of lonely emptiness that creeps up on you. It’s the emptiness that comes from having what you care most about suddenly ripped away. It leaves holes for cold air to get in. It leaves me feeling broken and bleeding and not in one piece.
Then I feel a warm hand on my shoulder. “Geez, princess. It’s a good thing you didn’t get that other dress if you were just going to wallow in the muck with it.”
I’m sure I’m hallucinating, like I thought I was the first time I met him. Saiph isn’t actually standing here, real and solid again. I just want him to be so badly that I’m imagining it.
He takes my hand and pulls me to my feet. I drop the poem, letting it glide under my car. I wrap my arms around him.
“I love you, too,” he says. Then he kisses me. And it’s not like the first time we kissed, back when I made my three wishes. Where it was quick and over with before I even knew what was happening. This time, it’s warm and passionate, and I don’t have any intentions of letting go of him. Ever.
Epilogue
Saiph later explained all the things he couldn’t when he was still an official star. You can probably already guess the details, like that when a star fails to grant someone their wishes, they turn into stardust. And that there’s pretty much nothing that can keep them on Earth, except someone telling them they love them. But he couldn’t tell me any of that, or how he felt, while he was a star.
I could have never said it and lost him to stardust. I could have said it the whole time and kept him here with me, and I didn’t even know it.
Now that he’s not a star, you’d think he’d have lost his powers, too, but no. Saiph still has magic, and he still smells like warm sugar, and he’s still… well, let’s just say he’s making life interesting.
And that’s the end of my story. I went from being the laughingstock of the whole school to getting my butt chewed on by a dragon, standing up to Nichole, and finding out that being a Speck doesn’t suck so much after all.
Hello, Loserville? This is me, Adrienne. I’m canceling my reservations.
About the Author
Chelsea M. Campbell grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where it rains a lot. And then rains some more. She finished her first novel when she was twelve, sent it out, and promptly got rejected. Since then she’s written many more novels, earned a degree in Latin and Ancient Greek, become an obsessive knitter and fiber artist, and started a collection of glass grapes. Besides writing, studying ancient languages, and collecting usele
ss objects, Chelsea is a pop-culture fangirl at heart and can often be found rewatching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Parks and Recreation, or dying a lot in Dark Souls.