I’ll have to go in first. I’ll have to show them it’s okay.
I go inside and they follow. We keep the door open as we hang the fabric. Keep the door open while we glue and tape and pin and nail the construction-paper stars to the ceiling, walls, every inch of the closet. We are going to need a lot of stars.
“It’s only the sky,” I say before closing the door. I know they’re frightened, and I am too, but the sky and the stars aren’t anything to fear.
The shift happens the moment the door is closed. Fabric turns to sky, paper to stars, and we are inside the most chaotic, crowded night sky you’ve ever seen. The brightness of the stars almost hurts my eyes. The darkness is huge, too, unstoppable. Usually even in New Hampshire, which has, like, three people in it, I can see some lights when it’s dark out. Other houses. Neighbors’ bonfires. Headlights. Whatever. There’s more than the sky and the stars in the real world.
But in here there is only black and navy meeting up in strange patterns, and stars glinting in even stranger patterns, and me and Eleanor and Astrid taking it all in.
“What do we do?” Astrid says. “Do the stars, like, fall? Are they shooting stars or something?”
“We get them. We pull them out of the sky,” I say. I pretend, for my sisters, not to be nervous.
I stand on my tiptoes. They don’t hold me very well, and I sort of stumble, trying to keep my balance.
“You’ve got it,” Eleanor says.
I try again. Remember to breathe this time. Tense all my muscles, from my toes to my legs to my stomach and shoulders and everywhere in between. I reach my hands up high above my head and right away feel the warmth of dozens of little stars glowing at me. Some of them have pointy edges and jab my fingers when I wave my hands around trying to get ahold of one.
Astrid joins me. She doesn’t simply stand on her toes. She leaps into the air, both hands swinging. An animal-like oof comes out of her mouth, and she pulls a pile of stars out of the sky.
“Oh!” I say. It hadn’t occurred to me to do anything but pick them out one by one. But as soon as Eleanor sees how easy it is, she jumps too, bending her knees deep and making her own growl of effort as she leaps. Soon it is a shower of stars. Eleanor and Astrid bat them out of the sky, taking down five, ten at a time. I push them into a pile, like glowing rocks, but basically weightless. I want to bury myself in them.
“That must be enough,” I say.
“More,” Eleanor says. “We should have brought a ladder. Silly? Can you fix it?”
I don’t know what she means. I’m smaller than both my sisters. I’m smaller than most people my own age, even. I can’t reach. I look at her funny and wonder if she needs a reminder about my tininess.
“Make the room smaller. Do your Silly-thing,” Eleanor says.
I’d forgotten again. I’m special.
Maybe not in the shiny-haired, long-legged, super-athletic, pretty, talented way that Eleanor is. And not in the artsy, in-her-own-universe, creating-masterpieces-out-of-wire-hangers-and-cotton-balls way that Astrid is. But in some small way that right now is actually huge.
I get back on my tiptoes. Reach my hands over my head. And wish the stars closer.
The night shrinks to the size I’m picturing in my mind. I pick stars, one by one. It feels wrong to swat at them, to treat them like they are candies or beads that you can scoop into a plastic bag. They require more care than that.
I handle each star with the same gentleness I did my first star. Loving the warmth. Loving the way it helps me breathe more easily. Loving the strange, perfect color.
We don’t leave any stars in the sky. By the time we are done, we are gathered around a pile of glow.
“Wow,” I say.
“Wow,” Astrid says.
“Wow,” Eleanor says.
“How do we get them out?” Eleanor asks. She has stars in her pockets and her hands. We all do, but there’s not enough pockets or hands to fit them all.
“I only had one,” I say. Astrid plays with a star in one of her hands. Rolls it between her palms and even sniffs at it. “And I think I’m the only one who can take them out. I think it’s part of me being, um, special.”
“I bet I know how to get them out,” Astrid says.
I don’t ask. I don’t need to know. Whatever she says, we’ll do. Because Astrid is nothing if not strange and wonderful and chock-full of the best kind of impulses, the kind that gives her the ability to make her dioramas to begin with, and bring them to the closet, and explore the world around her without fear.
She shivers, and I’d bet there are goosebumps even on her fingertips, her neck.
Astrid puts a star on her tongue. Swallows. Then another. And another.
Astrid is eating the stars.
Forty-Two
“A strid!” Eleanor says, so loudly Astrid almost drops the stars in her hands.