Trace the Stars
by Aileen Sun
“What’s in your notebook?”
It was a question Lilia’s asked fifty times prior, but she knew I loved to explain the whole process to her. She was sweet like that, letting me talk her ear off.
At school, I was the weird kid whose head was always slumped over a table in a library at lunch, asleep in an ugly green pullover sweater. Made sense no classmate ever bothered to listen to my ramblings. It was partially my fault, too, since I never joined any club or sport, and I’ve always had trouble limiting my monologues to let the other person participate in the conversation.
“It’s 10:41. Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”
“It can be a bedtime story,” she said, worming herself under my blankets and curling herself with her head on my waist so that she’d fit snugly in the windowsill nook.
My back leaned against our bedroom window, which bulged outward from the wall and provided a view of both the snow-blanketed streets below and the expansive, twinkling night sky above. Sitting here felt almost magical to me, like a fairy looked down on this household and chose to bless us with this glass bubble in compensation for everything else in our lives. I expected to miss this crevice the most when I move out on my eighteenth birthday. Or when dad shatters it by accident.
“Alright, but if you’re not asleep by eleven and you miss your bus tomorrow, I’m not driving you to school again.”
I was obviously joking about the threat. But it’d make me late to class, and I didn’t want my teachers to think I wasn’t studious, so the grumpy feeling was genuine. Plus, being in school felt like bliss compared to home, sometimes.
She gave me a pleading look. “I’m hungry, but Dad’s in a bad mood. I can only sleep after my stomach stops being annoying.”
It wasn’t that our parents were abusive. I mean, our dad didn’t hit us intentionally, and we weren’t treated like Cinderella’s or Matilda’s family did. It was just that when Dad was overcome with his emotions, he could be terrifying, especially if money issues were on his mind, or he was drunk.
It wasn’t a problem as long as we didn’t make mistakes, but Lilia and I were too often incompetent. It became a lot easier for us to stay in our bedroom. Not that we were hiding from him. That would imply that he was abusive. Plus, I knew other parents who would be unwilling to let their kids isolate themselves, which shows that our parents were nice enough to respect our wish.
All that to say that my parents weren’t bad, although home could feel stifling to me, like a prison, so I preferred to be elsewhere. I settled myself more comfortably, my butt on the windowsill and my legs splayed out on my bed, to start my speech to Lilia.
“I’m recording the stories of the people in the streets,” I began, “so that every life on Earth gets remembered. There are a lot of people in the world, so this will take a long time, but that’s why I have done this daily for nearly a hundred days now.” I would continue as long as this notebook had pages left.
“And how do you know what somebody’s story is?”
“It’s easy,” I said. “You just look at them.”
I pointed towards a man in a black coat leaving my field of vision. He kept a blue scarf wrapped tightly around his mouth and nose and he bowed his head as he trudged through the light snowstorm.
“His name is Roger,” I said. “That blue scarf was handmade by his grandmother and is her most recent birthday gift to him. He just finished his shift as a programmer for Google and he’s annoyed that they kept him overtime again, because now he is going to be late to help his grandparents cook for tomorrow’s Christmas feast.”
“But Google doesn’t have any offices in Portville. Last week you were talking about how ‘this backwards middle-of-nowhere town can’t even keep a company in business long enough to keep my dreams alive.’”
Her mocking imitation of my voice was way too accurate. “Shush,” I replied. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Okay,” Lilia said, waving her hand as if physically shooing the plot hole away.
I checked the several-years old alarm clock by my bedside, which had been a dollar store purchase that staunchly continued ticking despite outliving the worth of the two bucks we bought it for. 10:53, it read.
“Okay. Next, after I have recorded their story, it’s time to immortalize it, ‘cause it wouldn’t be visible to the rest of the world if everything was only in this notebook. So, this is when I—”
“—trace it in the stars,” Lilia finished for me.
“Yeah,” I replied to Lilia, and turned my attention to the morsel of sky above Roger. “If you move these three stars along this curve,” I said, tracing my finger against the window’s glass, “then create jagged lines here, the stars form a scarf. And that’s how we give Roger his symbol.”
I flipped through the earliest pages of my notebook, reminiscing. “And here are the other stories I’ve made. A single mother helping her children fill a scholarship that would allow them to study at a private[1] [2] university. Twin brothers who just started preschool and made friends with the whole class cause their mom made them cupcakes to share with everyone. An overly patient dad teaching his son how to fix the family car…”
Lilia nodded sagely as I trailed off. “And what’s your story for me?”
She always asked with such hope, to see if I changed my mind. I felt bad telling her no each time. But the process just didn’t work for people I knew. Maybe it was because I had less creative freedom. Or that it felt too personal and way too close to me to make a fake story. Giving Lilia an honest tale was a no-go; I was unable to think up a happy ending for her. I didn’t know what the real reason was, and it made me uncomfortable to dwell on the matter.
“I can’t,” I said instead. “The stars don’t want to help me write about you, because they’re jealous that you’re already the most radiant light in my life. Besides, it’s too late to start a new story. Go to sleep.”
I stretched my arms apart in an exaggerated yawn to attempt to induce sleepiness in her. While bringing my arm down, my hand caught the alarm clock sitting on the edge of the dresser. It fell to the floor and crumbled to several pieces on the ground in a heart-stoppingly loud crash—a blunt boom accompanied with glass shattering. Its broken face seemed to glare at me, frozen on 11:05 forever.
I froze, my hands clenched in panic.
Dad’s in a bad mood, Lilia had said.
That couldn’t mean anything good. What could I do? There was no way to hide the debris on the floor, to make up a satisfactory cover story. I noticed with a delay that Lilia had already scrambled in a hurried fright to hide under the bed.
I was breathing way too fast. And too loud. That also wasn’t good. Dad would find the sounds obnoxious. It would annoy him further. I had to stop that. I had to calm down immediately; I could hear the increasing thumps signaling that Dad was climbing the stairs.
Resisting the panic only made it worse. There were black spots. Was it because I wasn’t breathing enough? Couldn’t. I was hyper-ventilating too much. Heart beating so fast. Like I was going to die. I pleaded to the stars at my back for help. I had been a dutiful scribe for them for a third of a year. Why weren’t they rewarding my efforts? How could they abandon me in my time of need?
Between blurry patches of vision, I saw Dad open the door. It was over. I hadn’t controlled myself in time. I was crying, before he even started lecturing about me being a failure. It didn’t matter for once. Not if I was dying right now. Because I knew I was dying. I couldn’t get a whole breath to my lungs; my heart would stop beating any time now from the lack of oxygen, I was already feeling all the symptoms of heart attack.
Vaguely, I was aware of Mom speaking softly to Dad, dragging him away. Something about “...not when he’s in this state… both need to calm…” A crisis averted when I least needed that. I wanted my parents to be with me in my final moments. The irony felt so funny I wanted to laugh, if only I could breathe enough to.
Gradually, I was able to break through with big gulps of air, and my muscles, unwittingly contracted the entire time, relaxed. I collapsed on my bed to wait it out. Lilia crawled back next to me soundlessly, and hugging one of my arms like a stuffed animal, went to sleep.
I sat with my legs dangling mid-air on the bridge railing, finding reassurance in the large and sturdy metal beam’s contact with my skin. It was somewhere near 3 AM and my eyes were following the rhythmic reflection of soft starlight on the quiet river waves, my mind engrossed in their soothing lapping. The ten-minute walk here was more exhausting than usual, owing to the soreness in my limbs from the panic attack. I pulled my arms closer to my chest, swore they were still slightly trembling, and let the wind shuffle my hair strands, carrying away the sweat beads in them.
I smiled faintly. I started speaking, my voice more juvenile than usual, addressed to the empty street to my right and a tableau of river critters busy skittering around to survive.
“When I felt like I was on the brink of death today, I was really scared. At the same time, I was relieved, because I realized it meant I wouldn’t have to confront my problems anymore. I know that I have a lot of uncomfortable truths that I’ve just been shoving in a box in a dusty old corner in my mind, and the prospect of never needing to open that box sounds so, so freeing.
“The main anchor that kept me here is this notebook, the knowledge that I would be leaving my project incomplete. Honestly, you guys kept me alive. I cursed you for your inaction at the time, but I apologize now. You do more than anyone else in my life by existing.”
I directed my speech to the stars, despite my stare being focused on the waving river grass and the watermelon-sized heavy rock it surrounded, rather than angled upwards.
“I know the stars aren’t real. That’s one of those uncomfortable truths. I thought of using them at first ‘cause I didn’t have the tools to draw, not because some angel tasked me with this endeavour. I can’t control the things near me, so I wanted control of the vast skies, of the position of the stars. I know that when I give people a story, it’s more a reflection of what I want in my life. That’s why they always have friends or family members that care about them more than anything, not only a young sister that feels like a child I have to be responsible for. No offense to Lilia. She’s the kindest person I can ask for.”
It lightened my heart to remember the first time she traced the stars for somebody.
“Here’s the notebook; you can try.”
An old tan-skinned woman was walking under our overhanging window. Her arms, laden with several bags of groceries, huddled within her white Canada Goose coat.
Lilia scrunched her nose. “But that’s the most boring grandma ever. How can I come up with ideas from that?”
“Want to hear a secret?” I lowered my voice.
Lilia squeezed closer under our blanket, hugging my waist so that she could hear me, and nodded vigorously.
“Sometimes,” I whispered, “I cheat, and I look at the stars first, and let them tell the story for me.”
“Okay,” she said, hushing her voice, too. “I see a U formed by the stars above her. And there’s a particularly shiny one near that, and they squeeze into a line… it’s a chick! I see a baby chick!”
The U shape clearly formed a vase of flowers to me, but she was happy, so I shut my mouth and let her tell her obviously wrong story.
“So, the grandmother has a chick… from a farm north of us in Ohio.”
“Ohio’s to our south.”
“Shush,” Lilia said, grinning. “Doesn’t matter. The chick’s name is Daisy, because right after it was born, it got a flower stuck on its back.”
“She proceeded to talk about all the ways Emma spoiled Daisy and all her chickens,” I recounted. “Yeah, when I leave this place, I want her to be able to follow me. I’ll keep drawing teacups and scarves and flower vases as I go, so she can trace my path through the trail of symbols. I’ll let her know our arrangement: that if she is ever in trouble on her way to me, she can reach to the sky and borrow the objects we’ve made. It’s a fair exchange to repay for my labour. In fact, I’ll go home right now and write her a note with instructions on how to find me.”
I hopped off the railing, ready to walk back.
“Thanks for letting me think.”
Out of habit, my gaze drifted to the sky and froze momentarily. I couldn’t be sure, but the stars looked brighter than usual. I narrowed my eyes, connecting the most luminous stars into the shape of an angel. It was waving at me, if the sharp jut-out at its upper right could be interpreted as such. It was telling me, don’t give up. I reached up, and could feel a hand return the handshake, squeezing once to provide comfort.
I smiled again, this time genuinely.
“Alright,” I whispered. “I’ll do as you say. For a while longer, I’ll turn the pages of this notebook, and see what the future’s got in store.”