Every Soul a Star

by Wendy Mass

  His eyes light up as he tells how the coach specifically asked him to try out, and how he’s working out really hard. My mind starts to drift, and I’m sort of sorry I asked. I think I’d rather hear about the vampires and werewolves again. I’m saved by Ally and Jack running up to us.

  “They’re out of the meeting!” Ally says, breathlessly. “They were standing on your parents’ porch when we left. Let’s go. See you guys later!” She grabs at my sleeve and pulls me away from Ryan. I just have time for a backward wave before we’re out of sight.

  “Hold up, Ally. Why’d you ditch Jack back there? I thought you guys were getting all hot and heavy.”

  She stops running. “Hot and heavy?” She asks this like she has no idea what the words mean.

  I sigh. “You know, like you guys liked each other.”

  “Oh. He’s nice.”

  “Nice? And . . . ?”

  “And what?”

  This girl is hopeless. “Never mind. Let’s just go.”

  We keep going and run right into both sets of parents in front of the sign that says labyrinth, this way with an arrow underneath.

  “Well?” I ask my parents. Ally shifts her weight from one foot to the other in obvious anticipation.

  “What’s up, girls?” asks my father. “Having fun exploring?”

  I open my mouth to say no, but before I do, they look at each other and laugh. It takes a few seconds to realize they’re laughing at us. I feel my face darken. Ally stops shifting. “What’s so funny?”

  Her mother puts her arm around Ally’s shoulders. “Honey, we understand what you’re trying to do, but you’ve got to trust us.”

  Mom says, “We should thank you both, actually. You’ve raised some very good points. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.”

  Ally’s eyes fill with tears and mine follow. Ally puts her hands on her hips. “So you don’t mind having a tattooed druggie gang member for a daughter?”

  “We’ll take our chances,” says her father. “You’re a smart girl, Ally. You’ll do just fine at school.”

  “Don’t count on it!” Ally says. I haven’t heard her talk like this to her parents before. Maybe I’m rubbing off on her.

  Her mom reaches out to hug her, but Ally pulls away and runs back toward their house.

  “That didn’t go very well,” Ally’s father says. They all turn to look at me.

  I back up. “Don’t look at me.My opinion obviously doesn’t count for anything.”

  I turn on my heel and walk to the cabin. Dad calls after me, but I pretend not to hear. I feel a strange roaring inside my head. I think it’s my soul screaming. This is really happening. This place is going to be my home.

  The cabin is hot, and I don’t feel like waiting till the overhead fan kicks in. I grab my iPod off the dresser and start to leave when I see one of my boxes sitting on my bed. I want to hug it! I tear it open eagerly, and the first thing I see is my Book. I hug it to my chest. Claire’s Book is in here too, along with my curling iron, all my accessories, a pair of flip-flops with jeweled daisies on them, and one V-necked orange shirt. That’s it. My eyes sweep the room, but there are no more boxes. I quickly throw off Ally’s brown shirt and put on my orange one. I kick off my (her) sneakers and slip on the flip-flops. I yank open the accessories bag and put on every piece of plastic jewelry I own. I clip back my hair with barrettes and put on a new coat of peach-colored lip gloss to match the shirt. I have no choice but to keep on the faded tan shorts with the side pockets. Doesn’t Ally know side pockets just make your hips look bigger? No, of course she doesn’t.

  I clip the iPod to my shorts and stick in the earphones. I love the sound the flip-flops make across the wood floor. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend I’m walking across the stone tiles at Claire’s pool. I grab my Book and head out the door. I don’t know where I’m going. Just away. I turn on my iPod and set it to random. I turn the volume so high that it blots out the bird calls and shouts of kids and slams of car trunks as more and more people arrive. I have to jump out of the way of a guy lugging a huge telescope across the field. It’s not easy to jump in flip-flops. It’s actually a little tricky to walk on the dirt road too, but there’s no way I’m putting those sneakers back on. Plus I like how my red toenail polish shines against the dull dirt.

  I find myself back at the labyrinth sign and figure I might as well check it out. I carefully make my way down the narrow path and am happy to find no one else there. All I see at first is a big circle of stones in some kind of random pattern. When I get closer I can see the stones form circles spiraling inside each other. In the middle sits a tree stump with what looks like a stuffed purple dinosaur on it. A small wooden sign off to the side has a little diagram with the words how to walk the labyrinth. I wouldn’t have thought it needed instructions. Might as well give it a try. Ally said you feel different after you go through it. I don’t know what she meant, but I can’t feel any worse than I do right now.

  I stand at the entrance, but instead of taking that first step, I turn around and sit on the little bench next to the diagram. I flip open the cover of my Book, and my eyes instantly fill with tears. I remember this first photo. I clipped it out of Teen when I was just nine years old. The girl is probably a little older than I am now. At the time she seemed so old to me. She’s wearing a green prom dress and a tiara and looks like she’s about to go to the party of her life. The next page is of me and Claire in our dance recital outfits. She has a heart-shaped sticker on her cheek, and I have a star-shaped one on mine. I reach out and run my finger over the little stickers.

  I feel a touch on my arm and almost jump out of my skin. I whip my head around to find a little old lady in a pink sweat suit and a red scarf. She’s saying something to me, but I can’t hear a word. I yank out my earphones.

  “Sorry to startle you, young lady.” She points to the open page. “How adorable! Your little sisters?”

  I shake my head. I really don’t want to talk to anyone, but how can I be rude to a little old lady? Even if she IS wearing red with pink. “It’s me and my best friend. When we were nine.”

  She nods and waits for me to turn the page. So I do. The next page is a collage of heads. The woman looks at me quizzically.

  “It’s for the hairstyles,” I explain, quickly turning the page. This one is all of feet. Feet in high heels, strappy sandals, flip-flops, sneakers, pumps.

  “Let me guess,” she says, “you like shoes?”

  I’ve never showed anyone my Book before, besides Claire of course, and I’m starting to feel very exposed, like she’s looking inside me. “I’m planning on being a model one day,” I explain, closing the Book and placing my hand on top. “This is my inspiration, that’s all.” I brace for the words that will follow—how it’s such a shallow career choice, how I’ll always have to worry about my looks. But that lecture doesn’t come.

  “Ah,” the lady says, getting to her feet. “How wonderful to have a goal already. When I was your age I knew nothing about the world or my place in it. I figured I’d be someone’s wife, then someone’s mother. It never occurred to me to be someone myself. I didn’t figure that out till much later. But you’ve got a head start. Of course, you might still change your mind.”

  I shake my head. She heads slowly toward the entrance of the labyrinth. “You never know,” she says. “Life is short, but it’s wide.”

  With that, she steps easily into the labyrinth. I watch her move through the circles, and it looks almost like a dance. When she gets in the middle she actually does start doing a little dance. She must not care at all what people think of her. If I’m dancing alone in the middle of a labyrinth sixty years from now, something in my life will have gone horribly, horribly wrong.

  JACK

  5

  The sharp smell of bug spray floats through the night air. It’s almost too dark to see, but I want to finish my book. I haven’t done much reading since I’ve been here. There’s so much to see, so much to do. This log isn�
�t very comfortable, but that’s mostly due to how sore my legs are. Ryan warned me not to push myself with the weights, but I wanted to keep up with him. The little red-haired twins are circling around Pete, asking him to play with them. All three kids are in their feety pajamas and sneakers.

  It seems like the whole campground has come out to hear Ally talk. It’s after nine, so it should be starting any minute. On my way here I passed the Star Garden and heard Ally’s voice. I was about to go and say hi, but it sounded like she was having a really intense conversation. She was peering through one, then another telescope, talking to someone. Only I didn’t see anyone else with her. I crept away so she wouldn’t see me. Maybe living out here does something funny to your brain. Not like in a bad way though, because I think Ally’s really interesting.

  I shiver a little and wonder why they don’t start a fire in the fire pit that we’re all gathered around. Mr. Silver joins me on the log, along with two of the guys from the trip who are camping in the tents. I close my book, two pages away from the end. Tonight the guys are wearing t-shirts that read my eclipse is better than yours. One of them turns to Mr. Silver and says, “Why don’t they light that fire? It’s cold out here, dude.”

  Mr. Silver looks at him like he’s insane. “You can’t light a fire when you’re stargazing! It would ruin everyone’s night vision. It takes at least a half hour till you can see all the stars. You take one look into a light like that, and you’re done for. Think, man, think!”

  The guy shrinks back a bit. I’m VERY glad I wasn’t the one who asked. I notice a lot of people have flashlights with red plastic over them and remember one of Mike’s articles talking about how red light doesn’t affect night vision. I tilt my head back. Mr. Silver is right. I can already see a lot more stars than I could when I first got here, just twenty minutes ago. I pat my regular ol’ flashlight in my pocket, glad I didn’t use it to read with.

  “Hey, everyone,” Ally says, stepping into the circle. I know she was upset with her parents earlier because her brother told me. Something about a plan not working out the way she’d hoped. But with everyone’s eyes on her, she seems totally together and confident. Really grown up. I hope Mr. Silver lets me include her in the experiment or else I’ve gotten her hopes up for nothing. I probably shouldn’t have even told her about it before I asked him. I don’t have much experience in this sort of thing. I guess this is what I get for not being more social. Somewhere Mom is saying I told you so.

  “Welcome to the Moon Shadow!” she shouts to the crowd. “One more week till the big day!”

  Everyone cheers and whoops. When they quiet down she says, “This is going to be a review for most of you, but for the newbies, after tonight, you’re gonna know how to easily navigate the night sky.”

  I look around the group. She has everyone’s full attention. Well, maybe not Bree’s. She’s sitting in the back row with her earphones in. I watch as her mom reaches over and yanks them out. Bree shoots her a look but tucks them away.

  “Has everyone visited our Star Garden?”

  Whoops and shouts go up from the audience.

  “Well, when you get home, if you don’t have access to a telescope, does anyone know what you can use instead?”

  “Binoculars?” a brave soul calls out.

  Ally nods. “Yes, but that’s not what I was thinking of.” She gestures to Kenny, who jumps up from his log. He’s holding a small object up over his head. It’s too dark to see it clearly. It looks like, well, it almost looks like an empty toilet paper roll!

  “You can use this!” Ally says, taking the object from Kenny. “An empty toilet paper roll!”

  Everyone laughs.

  “I’m serious,” she insists, smiling. “It won’t make the stars look closer, but it will make them clearer by helping you isolate them. It also helps bring out the colors of the individual stars.”

  The younger kids are still laughing. Clearly they think it’s the funniest thing they ever heard. It is pretty funny. Whoever thought of a toilet paper roll as a telescope? Kenny takes his roll back and sits down. He makes a big show of tucking it carefully into his shirt pocket.

  Ally waits patiently until the audience quiets. “There are eighty-eight constellations in the sky,” she says, “and everything we can see is contained inside them. Once you know how to find the constellations, you can find anything—the planets of our solar system, distant stars, whole galaxies.”

  I look up at the sky while she talks and am startled to see how many more stars there are, just a few minutes after I last looked. I’ve never in my life imagined there were so many. How can anyone make patterns out of zillions of tiny white dots?

  I tune back in to hear Ally say, “Space is so incredibly vast. I guess that’s why they call it space!”

  The audience laughs.

  “Everything is so far away, it’s easier to measure distance in how fast it takes light to reach us, rather than miles. Light travels six trillion miles over the course of a year. Our own personal star—the sun—is ninety-three million miles away, practically right next door in the scheme of things. Light leaving the sun only takes eight minutes to reach Earth. The next closest star, Proxima Centauri, is four light-years away, which translates to twenty-four trillion miles. The farthest you can see with the naked eye is the Andromeda Galaxy, a whopping two-point-seven million light-years away. Anyone out there good with math who wants to figure out how far that is in miles?”

  I watch as Ally’s brother’s hand shoots up, with Bree’s sister Melanie right behind him. “You two can do that on your own time.” Everyone laughs as the kids lower their hands. “Trust me,” she says, “it’s really far. And with a telescope you can see much farther than that. Soon there will be a telescope in space that can see back to the beginning of time, somewhere around fourteen billion years ago.”

  A hush falls over the crowd as that sinks in. I admit, the stars are more interesting than I’d thought. Or maybe Ally’s just a really good teacher. I bet I wouldn’t have failed science if she had been my teacher.

  “Just like Earth,” she says, slowly turning around in the center of the circle, “the other planets go around the sun in fixed orbits. That means we can see them easily, in a band of the sky called the Zodiac. Jupiter and Saturn will be out tonight, and anyone who wants to go to the Star Garden afterward can check them out. They might look tiny through a telescope, but Jupiter would fill the distance between the earth and the moon. And Saturn is actually fluffy, like cotton candy. If there was a bathtub big enough, it would float!”

  I glance over at Bree. She actually seems to be paying attention. Melanie is rapt.

  “But keep in mind that if our solar system was the size of an apple, our galaxy, the Milky Way, would be the size of North America. And tonight we’re going to learn a very basic way to navigate it. If you’re ever lost and not sure where you are”—her voice breaks for a second, but then she takes a breath and continues—“if you’re lost, all you have to do is find the North Star.”

  I can’t imagine finding one star out of all that mess. There’s no way.

  “Now you might be thinking there’s no way you can find one star out of all the thousands you can see with the naked eye.”

  Okay, that was weird.

  “But trust me, you can. The first thing you need to do is find the Big Dipper, which is part of a constellation called The Big Bear, and one of the most recognizable patterns in the sky. It looks like a ladle. Three stars form the handle, and four stars make up the bowl at the end.” She holds up a poster and shines a red flashlight on it. It’s a diagram of the Big Dipper. “Try to find it on your own, and then I’ll show you.”

  Murmurs arise as people point and twist their heads around. I’ve seen it before at home, on Boy Scout camping trips and stuff. But it was easier then since there weren’t so many stars. I search all over, but I can’t find it. Mr. Silver nudges me and points. I follow his finger but still don’t see anything.

  “Okay,�
� Ally says, “let’s find it together.” She whips out a small pen and points it up at the sky. Suddenly a beam of green light shoots into the sky. That’s no normal pen! She uses it as a pointer to clearly outline the seven stars that make up the Big Dipper. Once I see it, it seems obvious. It’s about halfway up the sky, to our right.

  “Can I have a volunteer to help me find which way is north?”

  From behind me a small voice starts chanting, “Jack! Jack!” Others join in. It takes a minute for me to realize they’re talking about me! I whirl around and see that it was Pete who called out my name. Before I know it, Ally’s in front of me, smiling. Mr. Silver nudges me again, and I have no choice but stand up. Great, now I’m going to look like an idiot in front of everyone. I feel like I was just called to the board at school and don’t know the answer.

  She has me stand in the center of the group, looking up. “First we find the Big Dipper.” Thankfully she uses the pointer again because I’m too nervous to find it on my own. Then she points to the two stars that make up the front part of the bowl. “Now, if you look at these two stars and then extend your eye out about five times the distance between the two of them, you’ll wind up at the North Star, otherwise known as Polaris.” But instead of doing it with her laser pen, she hands the pen to me. “Don’t shine it in anyone’s eyes,” she whispers. “We can’t afford a lawsuit.” Hand shaking a bit, I take the pen.

  “Okay, first go back to where we were.” It takes me a few seconds to get it steady, but then I can easily run it along the seven stars. It’s such a weird feeling. Almost like I’m touching the stars themselves.

  “Now extend it in a straight line and you’ll hit the North Star.”

  I do as she says, moving the laser across the sky. But I’ve jostled it too much and am no longer in the right place.

  “Try again,” she says.