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We are lying together on the roof, and I am naming the stars. The sky is making a poor showing tonight: we are in the middle of Bangkok and the light pollution leeches the constellations from the sky. Nonetheless: here we are. Bereft of material after ten minutes but reluctant to leave, I start naming absences. That, there, that stretch of darkness—that is where Andromeda would be. Right beside it: Cassiopeia. Your gaze follows my finger, bright and unreadable; there is a trace of a smile that lingers on your lips. I know this because while you stare at the stars that I point out one by one, I am looking at you. The Bangkok sky might be nearly empty, but there are whole galaxies reflected in your eyes. I ache.
“Which would you visit?” you ask.
I jerk my face back upwards, but you haven’t turned towards me. You have not seen me, whatever was written in my gaze; you have not found me out. “What are you talking about?”
Your voice is dreamlike, too soft to break the velvet of the night. “You want to be an astronaut, right?”
I cannot help myself: I let out a snort. “It would take thousands upon thousands of years to reach any of those constellations. Even the nearest.” I pause. “And my face would be burned off before I even got close. If the stars hadn’t died by the time I got there.”
Your lips twitch in amusement. “I know that. I’m not an idiot. I asked which one you would visit. If you could. Which one is your favourite.”
I want to lie, to say I haven’t thought about it, but—”Pisces.”
“That was fast.”
“Mmm.”
We lie there, each one of us in silence—yours anticipatory, mine teasing. After a few minutes, you give up and turn onto your side to face me. “You’re not going to tell me why?”
Despite my best efforts, my lips curl upward. “Nope.”
You reach out to grab the cloth of my sleeve and shake it. “Non, c’mon.”
There’s no suppressing the smile now. “I didn’t think you were interested.”
You prop yourself up onto one elbow and glare at me. “Just because we’re not all space nerds like some people—” you dodge my hand and fall back down, a grin breaking out on your face to match mine. “Yeah, Non. I’m interested.” Quieter. “I like hearing you talk about the stars.”
And oh, that wipes the smile off my face. Because—
Do you know that you can be a real idiot, sometimes, Pom? Do you know how you can wreck me with a few careless words? You do not even need to touch me to control my thoughts. You throw these sentiments around like they are nothing and do not wait to see my response. I am left in your wake, reeling. Sometimes I feel like my whole world rests on a casual touch from you, an absentminded greeting, a smile. Can you not see the way my world changes colour when we are together? Do you really not know?
These are questions I am afraid to ask myself; and even more ask you. Yet I cannot banish them. They haunt me on nights like this, when I sneak to the rooftop to stare at the stars and hope without hoping, wish—
A breath to compose myself. You are still waiting for my answer; you can be patient, sometimes. Without looking at you, I dredge up the voice that has caught in my throat, and I speak. “Pisces is one of the largest constellations. The fourteenth largest. It’s theoretically visible from anywhere on earth, but in reality it’s hard to see, especially from cities, because it doesn’t have any particularly bright stars. It’s not visible to us now. But you don’t need a telescope to see it; just somewhere that humans haven’t touched.
“The name comes from the Latin word for fish, because that’s what it’s supposed to look like—two fish, tied together by a cord. It comes from a story from Greek mythology, in which the two gods of love—Aphrodite and Eros—were being chased by a fire-breathing monster, so they transformed themselves into fish and jumped into a river to escape. They… tied a cord around themselves so they would not be separated.”
You wait a few seconds, then prompt me: “What happens after that?”
“I don’t know,” I say. Our roles are inverted: I can feel your gaze hot on my cheek, while I stare into the sky. “They escape, together. And that’s where the myth ends.”
You make an unimpressed noise. “That’s all? So they don’t get eaten?”
I jerk my chin upwards. “They’re still there, aren’t they?”
“And… that’s it.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
You shrug your shoulders against the concrete. “It just seems a strange thing to name a constellation after. So many great deeds—so many brilliant people and minds—and that’s what they chose? Isn’t it a little—underwhelming?”
Something inside me withdraws into itself, slightly. But it makes sense. We are not the same person, after all; you have always been more ambitious than I have. Perhaps it shouldn’t hurt me that you do not understand why I feel the way I do. Perhaps I should give up all hope of you ever understanding. Do you know, Pom? I am a fool. For you, there is only forward motion. Inaction, or retreat, or escape, or even simple survival—for you, they can be nothing but a failure. You ache to make change, to improve yourself. Master the minds of others with your own; shape the future by teaching new generations. You see what you want and you will reach out to grasp it. You would not dream of stars unless you were sure you could attain them.
That is how I know that you do not feel about me as I do about you. Because if you did, you would not hesitate. Of the two of us, you would be brave.
But you are still waiting for an answer. So I clear my throat and say quietly, “I think escaping can be an exceptional thing.”
You do not argue, but wait for me to go on.
“Maybe Pisces isn’t the brightest constellation in the sky. Or the most exciting. But—”
“But?”
“If you travelled halfway around the world—if you crossed the equator and set up your telescope in the deeps of the Australian outback or the southern end of the Andes—you’d still be able to see it. No matter how far you travel, Pisces—those two fish—would remain. They’d look different. The constellation would be inverted; the fish would be travelling in a different direction, down instead of up. But fundamentally unchanged.” The two of them, tied together. Swimming through the darkness for eternity. I rest my cheek on the concrete and look at you. “It’s one of the only constant things.”
You are quiet, and then: “Show me.”
“I literally just said it’s not visible from here.”
You grasp my wrist—I can feel your warmth through the fabric of my sleeve—and guide my hand upwards until it’s pointing at the sky. “Show me anyway.”
I stare at you, and you stare back. Then, slowly, I twist my wrist out of your grasp and brush my fingers against the back of your hand to nudge it in the right direction. Obedient, your hand follows mine downwards in an arc. When your outstretched fingers reach the spot where Pisces hides behind a veil of darkness, I loop my fingers around your wrist to bring you to a stop.
You breathe out. “There?”
“There.”
My arm has started to feel heavy. I let it drop to my side; you follow suit.
“...I can’t see it.”
I roll my eyes. “I said you wouldn’t be able to, didn’t I?”
“I know, I just thought—” You scrunch your nose. “I just thought that maybe we’d. Get lucky or something. It would’ve been nice, that’s all—don’t laugh at me!”
I school my features into a mask of seriousness. “I can’t bring the stars out on command, you know.”
“I thought you were supposed to be Gifted. What’s the use of you then?”
“Same for you,” I retort. “Why don’t you command the heavens to throw themselves open themselves to you with a single word?”
“You’re a bastard, Non,” you say without heat.
“I seem to recall that you started it.”
After a few more seconds, your exaggerated glare collapses into that grin—that grin. The one that makes my heart skip a beat. I throw caution to the wind and just melt into the warmth of it, and we both lie there, smiling at the night sky like idiots, until you say, “I just wanted to see your favourite constellation.”
Sometimes I think I will break apart from this feeling.
But no. I may be a fool, but even I know better than to let myself linger on the implications of that sentence. Instead, I lift my hand above my face and examine its outline against the sky while I try to push my thoughts in any direction other than you. My thoughts, cheated of their usual subject, wander down a new path. “Do you ever feel… like we have forgotten how to want without having?”
“Hmmm?”
The thought is resolving itself into something whole and coherent. I clench my fingers into a fist in the air above me. “Think about it. You and I—we’ve always been talented. But then the Director came and told us that we were not merely talented but exceptional. That nothing could stop us. That we could have anything we want.” Your eyes are fixed on my fist, still poised above us. I stare at you, drink in the silhouette of your face. “Since we became Gifted, wanting and having are two sides of the same coin. We have only to ask for something and it is given to us.”
“What are you saying?” you ask, after a pause.
“I’m saying that Director Supot can’t give us the stars,” I say. “Whatever he’s promised us.”
You are silent for a minute as you work through my words. Several times you open your mouth, only to close it again. Finally, you turn to look at me. “Have we been talking in metaphors this whole time without me realising?”
I huff a laugh. “No. No, I just—wanted to come back down to earth. Well, not wanted. Thought I should. Thought it might be important to talk about this. Him. Us.” Or not us. There is not, will never be, an us. “It’s… it’s easy to forget about real life when you’re looking at the stars.”
“Isn’t that good sometimes?”
“Sometimes,” I allow. “But it can also be dangerous. We can be so focused on what’s up there that we forget to be careful of what’s happening around us. We can forget what is real. We can lose ourselves.” I drop my hand to rest it across my eyes. “Sometimes when I do maths in my head or think about space,”—or lie on the rooftop with you—“I feel—I feel so small.”
“Small,” you echo. “Even with your Potential?”
“My Potential lets me work with numbers bigger than you could possibly imagine, but it doesn’t make me feel powerful. It makes me realise how easy it would be to disappear—for everything that makes me me to be wiped away. Sometimes… it makes me wonder if I exist at all.”
At some point during my speech you have sat up, and now you stare down at me with a fixed intensity. I am pinned beneath your gaze. You look at me and I look at you, and I barely register the words you say, until, seconds later, they sink in: “Non… you exist.”
I look and I look and I look at you, and I feel like crying. “…Do I?”
And then—slowly, tentatively, you reach out your hand to touch my face. Your fingers stop a breath away from my cheek. I am shaking. I am frozen. I am trying to remember how to breathe.
“See?” you say. “Look. I can feel your warmth.”
We stay like that for short eternities. We could be Andromeda and Cassiopeia: seemingly right next to each other in the sky but separated by unfathomable distances. There are some things the human brain, Gifted or not, cannot fully grasp.
We are just two sixteen-year-olds in a vast universe. And your hand has still not touched my face.
You let it drop. Slowly, reluctantly. Then all at once you jerk your gaze away to stare up at the sky—at the spot where I told you that Pisces is.
Neither of us speak. I am afraid to look at you. Instead, I close my eyes and picture it in my mind: the two fish of Pisces, linked together by a vast but broken bridge of stars. Humans look at it and call it a constellation, but in reality it is just eighteen balls of fire, unconnected, hurtling alone through the vast reaches of space.
We lie there in silence until, by some unspoken accord, we both peel ourselves off the rooftop and climb to our feet. Your hair is sticking up at the back where your head was resting against the concrete. If I were braver, I would reach across and flatten it down.
But I am not brave, and you do not love me, so we just stand there, two meters (lightyears) apart.
You look at me and swallow, hard. For a moment it seems like you are going to say something. Your lips shape my name—my name as only you say it, short and soft, a gentle Non. But nothing emerges. You jerk your head away to stare out into the night, and take a step back. Then another.
And then we part, you to your dormitory and me to mine, and I would be lying if I said I did not lie awake, tormented by thoughts of whatever it is you did not say. Remembering the phantom brush of warmth against my cheek. Wishing you had finished reaching across the void between us.
Wishing I had been brave.
***
Something has changed.
One step back, and then another, and another. After that night, slowly, you begin to withdraw from me. It’s subtle, but eventually I notice that you no longer meet my eyes. Stargazing is replaced with long sessions shut in with the Director, while I sit alone in our spot in the library and wish that I could follow you.
And because I am stupid and desperate and in love—(because it’s no use pretending to myself anymore, is it?)—I do. I follow you. Pom, I follow you because what else could I possibly do? Where else could I possibly go?
I watch what you are doing, what he is making you do. I remember what you said to me once: a teacher. You spoke of it like I spoke of the stars in the sky: with hope and longing. The stars are cold and distant, but you—your smile, the warmth of your hand—are real. Blazingly, painfully real. Brilliantly, beautifully real.
Really, it is no choice at all.
When they catch me, I keep you in my mind. Memories of you are my shield against the fear. They grab me by the shoulders and force me to my knees, and I think of that smile, and the imagined warmth of your fingers on my cheek.
(You are not smiling as they lead you before me and command you to wipe me clean.)
I am brave. For you, I am brave. And once again, your hand reaches across the space between us; and this time—the first time, the last time—your skin touches mine.