The Sun Is Also a Star

by Nicola Yoon

  Miguel doesn’t say a word. He’s had his heart broken before. He knows what damage looks like.

  Daniel speaks first. “Question thirty-four. What would you save from a fire?”

  Natasha considers. It does feel to her like her entire world is being razed. And the one thing that she wants to save, she can’t.

  To Daniel she says: “I don’t have anything yet, but I’ll figure it out.”

  “Good enough,” he says. “Mine’s easy. My notebook.”

  He touches his jacket pocket to reassure himself it’s still there.

  “Last question,” he says. “Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find the most disturbing, and why?”

  “My dad.”

  Daniel notes that it’s the first time Natasha’s called him dad instead of father.

  “Why?” he asks.

  “Because he’s not done yet. What about you?”

  “Yours,” he says.

  “I’m not your family, though.”

  “Yes you are,” he says, thinking about what Natasha said earlier about multiverses. In some other universe they are married, maybe with two children, or maybe with none. “You don’t have to say it back. I just want you to know.”

  There are things to say to him, and Natasha doesn’t know where, doesn’t know how to begin. Maybe that’s why Daniel wants to be a poet, so he can find the right words.

  “I love you, Daniel,” she says at last.

  He grins at her. “I guess the questionnaire worked.”

  She smiles. “Yay, science.”

  A moment passes.

  “I know,” Daniel says, finally. “I already know.”

  DANIEL SETS HIS PHONE TIMER for four minutes and takes both Natasha’s hands in his. Are they supposed to hold hands during this part of the experiment? He’s not sure. According to the study, this is the final step for falling in love. What happens if you’re already in love?

  At first they both feel pretty silly. Natasha wants to say aloud that this is too goofy. Helpless, almost embarrassed smiles overtake their faces. Natasha looks away, but Daniel squeezes her hands. Stay with me is what he means.

  By the second minute, they’re less self-conscious. Their smiles drift away and they catalog each other’s face.

  Natasha thinks of her AP Biology class and what she knows of eyes and how they work. An optical image of his face is being sent to her retina. Her retina is converting those images to electronic signals. Her optic nerve is transmitting those signals to her visual cortex. She knows now that she’ll never forget this image of his face. She’ll know exactly when clear brown eyes became her favorite kind.

  For his part, Daniel is trying to find the right words to describe her eyes. They’re light and dark at the same time. Like someone draped a heavy black cloth over a bright star.

  By the third minute, Natasha’s reliving the day and all the moments that led them here. She sees the USCIS building, that strange security guard caressing her phone case, Lester Barnes’s kindness, Rob and Kelly shoplifting, meeting Daniel, Daniel saving her life, meeting Daniel’s dad and brother, norebang, kissing, the museum, the rooftop, more kissing, Daniel’s face when he told her she couldn’t stay, her dad’s crying face filled with regret, this moment right now in the cab.

  Daniel is thinking not about past events, but future ones. Is there something else that could lead them back to each other?

  During the final minute, hurt settles into their bones. It colonizes their bodies, spreads to their tissue and muscles and blood and cells.

  The phone timer buzzes. They whisper promises they suspect they won’t be able to keep—phone calls, emails, text messages, and even international flights, expenses be damned.

  “This day can’t be all there is,” Daniel says once, and then twice.

  Natasha doesn’t say what she suspects. That meant to be doesn’t have to mean forever.

  They kiss, and kiss again. When they do finally pull apart, it’s with a new knowledge. They have a sense that the length of a day is mutable, and you can never see the end from the beginning. They have a sense that love changes all things all the time.

  That’s what love is for.

  MY MOM HOLDS MY HAND as I stare out the window. Everything will be all right, Tasha, she says. We both know that’s more a hope than a guarantee, but I’ll take it nevertheless.

  The plane ascends, and the world I’ve known fades. The city lights recede to pinpricks, until they look like earthbound stars. One of those stars is Daniel. I remind myself that stars are more than just poetic.

  If you need to, you can navigate your way by them.

  MY PHONE RINGS. It’s my parents calling for the millionth time. They’ll be pissed when I get home, and that’s fine.

  This time next year, I’ll be someplace else. I don’t know where, but not here. I’m not sure college is for me. At least not Yale. At least not yet.

  Am I making a mistake? Maybe. But it’s mine to make.

  I look up to the sky and imagine I can see Natasha’s plane there.

  New York City has too much light pollution. It blinds us to the stars, the satellites, the asteroids. Sometimes when we look up, we don’t see anything at all.

  But here is a true thing: Almost everything in the night sky gives off light. Even if we can’t see it, the light is still there.

  NATASHA AND DANIEL try to stay in touch, and for a time they do. There are emails and phone calls and text messages.

  But time and distance are love’s natural enemies.

  And the days get full.

  Natasha enrolls in school in Kingston. Her class is called Sixth Form instead of senior year. In order to attend university, she has to study for the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exams and her A-level exams. Money is scarce, so she waitresses to help her family. She fakes a Jamaican accent until it becomes real. She finds a family of friends. She learns to like and then to love the country of her birth.

  It’s not that Natasha wants to let Daniel go; it’s that she has to. It isn’t possible for her to live in two worlds simultaneously, heart in one place, body in another. She lets go of Daniel to avoid being ripped apart.

  For his part, Daniel finishes high school but declines Yale. He moves out of his parents’ house, works two jobs, and attends Hunter College part-time. He majors in English and writes small, sad poems. And even the ones that are not about her are still about her.

  It’s not that Daniel wants to let Natasha go. He holds on for as long as he can. But he hears the strain in her voice across the distance. In her new accent, he hears the cadence of her slipping away from him.

  More years pass. Natasha and Daniel enter the adult world of practicalities and responsibilities.

  Natasha’s mother gets sick five years after their move. She dies before the sixth. A few months after the funeral, Natasha thinks about calling Daniel, but it has been far too long. She doesn’t trust her memory of him.

  Peter, her brother, thrives in Jamaica. He makes friends and finally finds a place where he fits. Sometime in the future, long after his mom has died, he’ll fall in love with a Jamaican woman and marry her. They’ll have one daughter and he’ll name her Patricia Marley Kingsley.

  Samuel Kingsley moves from Kingston to Montego Bay. He acts in a local community theater. After Patricia’s death, he finally understands that he chose correctly that day in the store.

  Daniel’s mom and dad sell the store to an African American couple. They buy an apartment in South Korea and spend half the year there and the other half in New York City. Eventually they stop expecting their sons to be solely Korean. After all, they were born in America.

  Charlie pulls his grades up and graduates summa cum laude from Harvard. After graduation, he barely ever speaks to any member of his family again. Daniel fills the void in his parents’ hearts in the ways that he’s able. He doesn’t miss Charlie very much at all.

  Still more years pass, and Natasha no longer knows what that day in N
ew York City means. She comes to believe that she imagined the magic of being with Daniel. When she thinks of that day, she’s certain she has romanticized it in the way of first loves.

  One good thing did come from her time with Daniel. She looks for a passion and finds it in the study of physics. Some nights, in the soft, helpless moments before sleep comes, she recalls their conversation on the roof about love and dark matter. He said that love and dark matter were the same—the only thing that kept the universe from flying apart. Her heart speeds up every time she thinks of it. Then she smiles in the darkness and puts the memory up on a shelf in the place for old, sentimental, impossible things.

  And even Daniel no longer knows what that day means, that day that once meant everything. He remembers all the little coincidences it took to get them to meet and fall in love. The religious conductor. Natasha communing with her music. The DEUS EX MACHINA jacket. The shoplifting ex-boyfriend. The errant BMW driver. The security guard smoking on the roof.

  Of course, if Natasha could hear his memories, she would point out the fact that they didn’t end up together, and that the same things that went right also went wrong.

  He remembers another moment: They’d just found each other again after their fight. She’d talked about the number of events that had to go exactly right to form their universe. She’d said falling in love couldn’t compete.

  He’s always thought she was wrong about that.

  Because everything looks like chaos up close. Daniel thinks it’s a matter of scale. If you pull back far enough and wait for long enough, then order emerges.

  Maybe their universe is just taking longer to form.

  IT’S BEEN TEN YEARS, but Irene’s never forgotten the moment—or the girl—that saved her life. She was working as a security guard at the USCIS building in New York City. One of the case officers—Lester Barnes—stopped by her station. He told her that a girl left a message on his voice mail for her. The girl had said thank you. Irene never knew what she was being thanked for, but the thank-you came just in time. Because at the end of the day, Irene had planned to commit suicide.

  She’d written her suicide note at lunch. She’d mentally charted her route to the roof of her apartment building.

  But for that thank-you.

  The fact that someone saw her was the beginning.

  That night she listened to the Nirvana album again. In Kurt Cobain’s voice, Irene heard a perfect and beautiful misery, a voice stretched so thin with loneliness and wanting that it should break. But his voice didn’t break, and there was a kind of joy in it too.

  She thought about that girl making the effort to call and leave a message just for her. It shifted something inside Irene. Not enough to heal her, but enough to make her call a suicide prevention hotline. The hotline led to therapy. Therapy led to medication that saves her life every day.

  Two years after that night, Irene quit her job at USCIS. She remembered that as a child she dreamt of being a flight attendant. Now her life is simple and happy, and she lives it on planes. And because she knows airplanes can be lonely places and because she knows how desperate loneliness can be, she pays extra attention to her passengers. She takes care of them with an earnestness that no other attendant does. She comforts those flying home alone for funerals, sadness seeping from every pore. She holds hands with the acrophobic and the agoraphobic. Irene thinks of herself as a guardian angel with metallic wings.

  And so it is now that she’s making her final checks before takeoff, looking for passengers who are going to need a little extra help. The young man in 7A is writing in a little black notebook. He’s Asian, with short black hair and kind but serious eyes. He chews the top of his pen, thinks, writes, and then chews some more. Irene admires his unselfconsciousness. He acts like he’s alone in the world.

  Her eyes travel on and flit across the young black woman in 8C. She’s wearing earbuds and has a big, curly Afro that’s been dyed pink at the ends. Irene freezes. She knows that face. The warmth of the woman’s skin. The long eyelashes. The full pink lips. The intensity. Surely this can’t be the same girl. The one who saved her life? The one she’s wanted to thank for ten years now?

  The captain announces takeoff, and Irene’s forced to sit. From her jumpseat, she stares at the woman until there’s no doubt in her mind.

  As soon as the plane reaches cruising altitude, she goes over to the woman and kneels in the aisle next to her.

  “Miss,” she says, and can’t prevent her voice from shaking.

  The woman takes out her earbuds and gives her a hesitant smile.

  “This is going to sound so strange,” Irene begins. She tells the woman about that day in New York—the gray bin, the Nirvana phone case, how she’d seen her every day.

  The woman watches her warily, not saying anything. Something like pain flits across her face. There’s a history there.

  Nevertheless, Irene carries on. “You saved my life.”

  “But I don’t understand,” the woman says. She has an accent, Caribbean and something else.

  Irene takes the woman’s hand. The woman tenses but lets her take it. Curious eyes watch them from all around.

  “You left a message for me saying thank you. I don’t even know what you were thanking me for.”

  The young man in 7A peers between the seats. Irene catches his eye and frowns. He pulls away. She turns her attention back to the woman.

  “Do you remember me?” Irene asks. Suddenly it’s very important to her that this girl, now woman, remember her. The question leaves her mouth and she becomes the old Irene—alone and afraid. Affected but not affecting.

  Time hiccups and Irene feels herself torn between two universes. She imagines that the plane disintegrates, first the floor and then the seats and then the metallic shell. She and the passengers are suspended in midair with nothing to hold them except possibility. Next, the passengers themselves shimmer and dematerialize. One by one they flicker and vanish, phantoms of a different history.

  All that remains now is Irene and this woman.

  “I remember you,” the woman says. “My name is Natasha, and I remember you.”

  The young man in 7A peers over the top of the seat.

  “Natasha,” he says. His face is wide open and his world is full of love.

  Natasha looks up.

  Time stumbles back into place. The plane and the seats re-form. The passengers solidify into flesh. And blood. And bone. And heart.

  “Daniel,” she says. And again, “Daniel.”

  THE END

  Immigrating to a new country is an act of hope, bravery, and, sometimes, desperation. I’d like to say a big thank-you to all the people who’ve made long journeys to distant shores for whatever reason. May you find what you’re looking for. Always know that the country of your destination is better for having you in it.

  Next, I need to thank my own immigrant parents. They are, both of them, dreamers. Everything I’ve achieved is because of them.

  To the teams at Alloy Entertainment and Random House Children’s Books: Thank you for believing in this impossible book. Thank you for taking chances with me. Wendy Loggia, Joelle Hobeika, Sara Shandler, Josh Bank, and Jillian Vandall, you are my dream team. I am the luckiest writer in the world to have you in my corner. Enormous thanks also to John Adamo, Elaine Damasco, Felicia Frazier, Romy Golan, Beverly Horowitz, Alison Impey, Kim Lauber, Barbara Marcus, Les Morgenstein, Tamar Schwartz, Tim Terhune, Krista Vitola, and Adrienne Waintraub. Nothing happens without you.

  One of the best things about being a writer is getting to meet your readers. To every single person who has read my books, come to a signing, sent me an email, or reached out via social media; to every librarian, teacher, bookstore owner/worker, and blogger: THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU. You are the reason I get to have my dream job. Thank you for all your love and support.

  Over the last couple of years I’ve met some wonderful writers who’ve also become wonderful friends: David Arnold, Anna Carey, Char
lotte Huang, Caroline Kepnes, Kerry Kletter, Adam Silvera, and Sabaa Tahir, thank you for your generous support and friendship. I wouldn’t have survived this crazy journey without you guys. Thanks also to the LA writer crew and the Fearless Fifteeners debut group. What a crazy year 2015 was! It’s been great getting to know you all. Here’s to many more years of writing books.

  Special and very heartfelt thanks to Yoon Ho Bai, Jung Kim, Ellen Oh, and David Yoon for answering my endless questions about Korean and Korean American culture. Your thoughts and guidance were invaluable.

  And then there are my super sweeties, David and Penny. You guys are my small universe. You’re my reason for everything. I love you most of all.

  NICOLA YOON is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything. She grew up in Jamaica and Brooklyn and lives in Los Angeles with her family. She’s also a hopeless romantic who firmly believes that you can fall in love in an instant and that it can last forever.

  FOLLOW NICOLAYOON ON

  @NICOLAYOON ON

  NICOLAYOON.COM

  Read the book that everyone, everyone fell in love with.

  Excerpt copyright © 2015 by Nicola Yoon with interior illustrations by David Yoon. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  I’VE READ MANY more books than you. It doesn’t matter how many you’ve read. I’ve read more. Believe me. I’ve had the time.

  In my white room, against my white walls, on my glistening white bookshelves, book spines provide the only color. The books are all brand-new hardcovers—no germy secondhand softcovers for me. They come to me from Outside, decontaminated and vacuum-sealed in plastic wrap. I would like to see the machine that does this. I imagine each book traveling on a white conveyor belt toward rectangular white stations where robotic white arms dust, scrape, spray, and otherwise sterilize it until it’s finally deemed clean enough to come to me. When a new book arrives, my first task is to remove the wrapping, a process that involves scissors and more than one broken nail. My second task is to write my name on the inside front cover.