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Sometimes, I wonder if all of my feelings are visible. If there’s such an abundance of them that they sink out of my pores and onto the floor, pooling beneath me. If that were the case I would be fucked, because Aster is staring at me and her eyes are so, so wide. Maybe she’s trying to pull all my breath from my body. Maybe she just likes to do that for fun.
When we’re floating this way- right next to each other- I can see the individual droplets of water that coat her eyelashes. If I really want to, I can count them. One, two, three, blink .
Hours pass by, or maybe seconds, before Aster speaks. “Can you see anything in the clouds?”
“Heaven.” I blurt it out before I really think, and I instantly want to take it back, snag it out of the air with my teeth. But when I turn my head, Aster isn’t laughing or doing anything I expected. She’s just squinting her eyes up at the sky, like she’s searching for something.
“Can I tell you a secret?” she asks.
“Uh, yeah. Of course.”
She bites her lip in a way that makes me want to kiss it before sighing heavily. “It’s hard for me to believe in Heaven. Like, if angels exist, why are they letting me make a mess of my life before it even has a chance to begin?”
“Hmm, maybe angels are sadists,” I say. Aster giggles and brushes her naked shoulder against mine. I jerk away from the touch, but then let myself relax against her, breathing her in like a flower desperate for the sun.
“But seriously,” I say, “they need to let you do the wrong things first. That’s how you learn. And then you’ll live the life you were actually meant to.”
I listen to Aster breathe beside me as I wait for her to say something to drown out the sound of my heartbeat.
“You know,” she says after a few moments of quiet. “Sometimes I forget that you’re, like, the smartest person in the whole school.”
My cheeks burn bright at the compliment- I’ve learned that praise from Aster Flores trumps anything ever. Like when she told me she likes my jacket, even though it’s the same one I wear everyday. Or when she said she liked my hair after english class last Tuesday. The thought that someone like her could possibly like anything about me, it’s a lot to handle sometimes.
When I don’t say anything after a while, she splashes me in the face, knocking my glasses into the water below us.
“Dude!” I yell. I try to sound mad, but I’m pretty sure I just sound lovestruck. Aster giggles, and this time I just let myself beam. For a second I forget about my glasses, but then she dives in to retrieve them with a splash.
I feel her hand touch my leg, and try not to imagine a world where Paul doesn’t love her, because everything inside of me is threatening to burst out in the form of something embarrassing like a love song or a soliloquy.
She resurfaces and hands me my glasses, but instead of pulling away, her pinky sort of interlocks with mine and before I know it she’s holding my hand.
“Thank you for being an awesome friend,” she says. Her words contrast the way her thumb strokes across my palm. I’ve never felt the touch of a lover before, but this- the gentle way she holds my hand in hers, like it’ll break if she applies more pressure- feels like something more than friendship.
But she kissed Paul. She kissed him and she thinks of him before she goes to bed every night. She thinks of him when she wakes up.
I’m not Paul. I’m a girl named Ellie Chu. I am her friend, and nothing more than that.
I plaster a smile on my face because if I don’t, she’ll see the tears in my corners of my eyes.
“You’re welcome,” I say. “I’m here for you, Aster.”
She lets go of my hand; I try not to miss the loss. We go back to floating, the clouds above our heads now covering the tiny slit of sun, the tiny slit of hope.
If my feelings really are palpable, I doubt she can see them now.