Chapter Text
Amy realized with a jolt that she had really been wanting to come to the art room. Her feet had brought her there by themselves—she hadn’t even noticed until she was already at the door.
The room was unlocked. The door creaked softly as Amy pushed it open. She peeked around it with apprehension. Thankfully, it was still too early for school—no one had arrived yet, not even the art teacher.
The art room was dim, lit only by the pale wash of morning light filtering through the tall windows. The scent of turpentine, oil paint, chalk, and old canvas hung in the air.
There was no one there, but Amy still felt the need to tiptoe, as if she were stepping into a church. Quietly, she rummaged through the canvas racks, searching for the boy’s painting.
“Aha!” she whispered, smiling as she found what she was looking for.
The painting itself was simple—a view of space, darkness speckled with stars of different colors. But there was something about it that Amy couldn’t quite put her finger on.
The darkness in the painting felt less like imagination and more like a memory. It felt familiar, like something she had seen before—back home, in the Mining Colony, out there among the stars.
Before she could think more about it, she heard footsteps approaching down the hall.
The door opened.
Amy froze.
It was him—the white-haired boy. The one who had painted the stars.
Her heart jumped into her throat. For a second, she thought of hiding behind the easel, but it was too late; he’d already seen her.
His gaze brushed over her without stopping. He moved across the room with quiet purpose—completely passing her—as if she were nothing more than another piece of furniture.
Amy blinked in confusion.
Without pause, he opened the supply cabinet by the back of the classroom and began to collect cans of paint.
Amy sat still, caught somewhere between relief and confusion.
No anger. No surprise. Nothing at all.
Maybe he really didn’t care. Maybe she was just imagining the meaning she’d seen in his art.
Sighing in relief, Amy set the painting gently back on the floor. She needed to get out of here. Whatever he was here for, Amy suddenly wanted no part in being caught here beside his painting.
Tiptoeing toward the door, Amy held her breath. Her fingers brushed the handle—finally, freedom—
“Achoo!”
The sound shattered the quiet. Paint cans clattered in the cabinet.
Amy froze, mortified.
She sniffed once, twice.
“Bless you.”
Amy blinked. Slowly, she turned around.
The boy was looking at her this time.
“There’s a box of tissues here. You want one?” he asked.
“Uh—” Amy hesitated. There was no reason to refuse. “Sure.”
She approached him calmly as he offered her the box of tissues he had taken from the supply cabinet. Amy wiped her nose and face before looking up again to thank him—but her breath caught.
He wasn’t looking at her anymore. His gaze had drifted to the painting—the one she had set on the floor.
Amy tensed, ready for a question, maybe an accusation. But none came. Instead, there was something quieter in his expression—a sadness that didn’t reach his face but seemed to linger behind his eyes, like starlight dimmed by distance.
The sight of it stirred something in her chest.
Before she could stop herself, she spoke. “Have you… ever been to outer space?” she asked softly.
He blinked, caught off guard. “…What?”
“The way you painted those stars,” Amy began. “They feel so… quiet and motionless—just like they do in space.”
He paused. “…Really?”
“Yeah.” Her voice grew gentler. “In space, the stars don’t twinkle, you know? I learned that when I first came to Earth. The stars twinkle here because we’re seeing them through earth’s atmosphere. But back in the Mining Colony… they stay perfectly still. So I was just wondering…” She trailed off, suddenly self-conscious. “Sorry, if I’m prying.”
“Huh.” His voice softened, thoughtful now. “I didn’t know that.”
Silence settled between them. He kept his eyes on the painting; Amy waited quietly beside him.
“To tell you the truth,” he said at last, “I wasn’t actually trying to paint the stars.”
Amy tilted her head. “Oh?”
“I was trying to paint the Nothing between them.”
“The Nothing?” Amy echoed. The word felt too big, too hollow. “I don’t… understand.”
“That’s what I see when I look at the world—a vast Nothingness. An emptiness,” the boy said quietly. “Most people are scared of the Nothing, so they ignore it. But you can’t deny it’s there. The universe is almost entirely made of it. Even the atoms in our bodies consist mostly of empty space. We’re just bits of matter, floating in a vast void.”
He paused. His next words came softer, almost to himself. “Sometimes I wonder if the material world isn’t just an illusion—some bedtime story we tell ourselves so we don’t have to think about the Nothing.”
Amy didn’t know what to say. His words hung between them like dust motes in the light—weightless, but impossible to ignore.
She felt a quiet ache in her chest. How sad, she thought, that someone could look at the same world… and see only emptiness.
“Did you know,” Amy began softly, “that the moon sometimes comes out during the day?”
The boy didn’t answer. He was still staring at the painting on the floor, his expression unreadable. So Amy kept talking, her voice light, almost conversational—as if to keep the silence from swallowing them both.
“I didn’t,” she went on. “I used to think the moon only came out at night—because that’s what movies always showed.” She smiled faintly, remembering. “But yesterday, I looked up, and there it was. The moon, pale and round, sitting right in the middle of a blue sky. There’ve been a lot of surprises like that since I moved to Earth.”
The boy frowned slightly, his gray eyes flicking toward her. “What are you trying to say?”
Amy drew in a breath, her words deliberate, careful. “My point is… the world is stranger than any story I could ever make up—and more beautiful than any illusion I could ever cast.”
She let out a small, self-conscious laugh. “So if the world is an illusion, then maybe that just means everyone has a vast imagination. Which I definitely don’t.”
For the first time, something shifted in his expression—a flicker, almost a smile. “You say that,” he murmured, “but how can I believe you? You might be part of the illusion.”
Amy laughed, the sound soft and bright in the dim art room. “I’m as real as you are.”
He looked up then—really looked. His eyes sharpened, focused, as though he could cut through the air itself.
“Prove it.”
Amy blinked at him, caught between surprise and amusement. There was something fragile about the challenge, like a plea disguised as defiance.
“Okay,” she said softly. “Give me your hand.”
The boy definitely didn’t expect that. “What?”
“Grab me a marker from the supply closet please.”
He stared for a beat, then, almost despite himself, turned and fetched a red marker.
Amy took it, uncapped it with a quiet pop, and gently caught his hand in hers. His skin was cool against her warm fingers. “Hold still,” she murmured, lowering the tip of the marker to his palm. The faint scent of ink filled the air.
“There,” she said at last, capping it again. “Done.”
The boy turned his hand over. A small, uneven smiley face looked back at him—its tongue poking out, drawn in quick red strokes.
He stared at it for a long moment. Something shifted in his expression, slow and subtle, like frost thawing under sunlight.
And when he looked up again, the distance in his gray eyes was gone.
For the first time, Amy felt it—the weight of his gaze, real and present.
For the first time, he truly saw her.
“Have we… met before?” he asked, voice quiet, tentative—like someone just waking from a long dream.
Amy’s smile softened. “No, I don’t think we have. I’m Amy.”
“Amy…” He repeated her name carefully, almost reverently. The name seemed to anchor him. “Nice to meet you… I’m Oliver.”
For a moment, the world held still.
And then, faint and far, the bell rang. The sound drifted through the still air like the closing of a dream.
It was time for school.
-
After missing three days of school because of a cold, Amy finally returned—this time bundled up properly in her coat and scarf.
It was unmistakably autumn: the air so cold she could see her breath, and the ground buried beneath a patchwork of yellow, orange, and brown leaves.
“Whee!” Amy dove into a pile of them. The leaves burst around her in a golden flurry. She giggled to herself.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of white. Her breath caught when she recognized Oliver’s hair. He was sitting alone under a tree at the edge of the plaza, his back turned, shoulders drawn tight.
Quietly, she gathered an armful of leaves, tiptoed closer, and—
“Boo!” she laughed, tossing the leaves at him like confetti.
Nothing.
Oliver was as still as a statue—never looking up. He didn’t even look like he had heard her at all.
Concerned, Amy waved a hand in front of his eyes. “Hello, Oliver? Earth to Oliver? Come in, Oliver.”
He blinked, slow and dazed. The distant haze in his gray eyes began to fade, like fog parting from glass. When his gaze found her again—for the second time—it was as if he were seeing something impossible.
“Amy?” He breathed.
Amy smiled at him, “What are you thinking so hard about?”
He paused, really taking her in, his expression torn between confusion and wonder.
“Oliver?” she said, tilting her head. “Is everything okay?”
“Sorry, I—it’s just…” He blinked again, as though trying to anchor himself. Then, after a pause, he asked quietly, “Where have you been?”
“I’ve been out sick for the past couple of days.” Amy said.
He blinked again, then exhaled—not quite a sigh, but close. “Oh.” He rubbed at his eyes, as if trying to clear away disbelief.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing…” Oliver murmured. “I just… got a bit worried.”
Amy smiled. “Aw. You were worried about me?”
“Yes.” His tone was entirely serious. “I was worried I’d never see you again.”
Amy blinked, her smile faltering slightly. “Why? What did you think happened?”
Oliver looked away. “I don’t want to say. You’ll think I’m crazy.”
Amy tilted her head and paused. Quietly, she sat down beside him on the cold concrete slab and patted his shoulder through the fabric of his brown coat.
He looked at her again.
“It’s okay,” Amy said softly. “You can tell me.”
Oliver looked conflicted, unsure whether to say something or not, his eyebrows drawn together in a frown. He opened his mouth tentatively, “I…”
Finally, he whispered, “I was afraid you didn’t exist anymore.”
Amy’s amber eyes widened.
“You have to understand,” Oliver said, his voice trembling slightly. “That conversation we had in the art room—it felt so strange to me, so surreal. You appeared out of nowhere, then disappeared just as quickly. I almost couldn’t believe it happened. But whenever I looked at my hand, there was that little face you drew, smiling up at me.”
He looked down at his palm, flexing his fingers. “But then you weren’t in class. Not the next day, or the day after that. And the doubts started creeping in.” His breath shuddered. “I started wondering if I’d just made you up. Maybe I couldn’t handle being alone in the Nothing, so I invented someone to talk to.”
His voice went very quiet. “It wouldn’t have been the first time…”
He turned his hand palm-up. “See? The drawing’s almost gone.” The faint smudge of ink lingered where a smile once was. “I was about to give up on ever seeing you again. But…”
He looked up at her then, with a wry, almost shy smile. “But now here you are—defying all my doubts with your very existence.”
Amy stared at him, her heart too full for words.
What kind of life had someone lived to make them doubt another person’s existence just because they weren’t there for a few days?
“You…” she began, but the rest caught in her throat.
After a moment, she simply said, “You have a leaf on your head.”
Oliver blinked, startled. He reached up, plucked the yellow leaf from his hair, and turned it over in his hand.
There was a heavy pause as Amy processed everything Oliver had told her. Oliver toyed with the leaf, waiting for her to speak.
“Sorry,” Oliver finally broke the lingering silence. “Did I freak you out?”
“No,” Amy said—a little too fast, a little too loud. She sighed, knowing how futile her attempt at lying was and rubbed her hand over her face. “Yes. A little.”
The air between them lightened, the tension thinning like mist. The sun had climbed higher now; school would start soon. Students passed by, their faces blurred and distant, as if Amy and Oliver existed in their own small bubble of quiet.
“Have you ever played peek-a-boo with a baby?” Amy asked suddenly, looking up at the pale sky.
Oliver blinked at her, then answered, his voice soft and far away. “Yeah. A long time ago.”
“The funny thing about babies,” Amy said, “is that they don’t understand object permanence. When you hide your face from a baby, they don’t know where you went. They think you disappeared. That’s why they’re so surprised when you show your face again.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying I’m a baby?”
Amy breathed a quiet laugh, “I guess.” She sighed. “I’m just trying to understand where you’re coming from. It seems like you believe people might disappear as soon as they’re out of sight.”
Oliver looked down at the leaf in his hands. “I do believe that,” he murmured. “That’s probably one of the few things I’m certain about.”
“Why?”
“Because…” Oliver sighed, the sound low and tired. “Because that’s just how life is.”
“Sometimes you lose people in an instant. Sometimes you lose your whole world in an instant. And you’re left wondering if what you had was just an illusion, because it’s hard to believe something so real could vanish so quickly.”
Amy’s jaw tightened.
Jemmah.
Amy closed her eyes, the ache surfacing again.
“I know how that feels like,” she muttered.
Oliver glanced at her. “You do?”
“Yeah.” She nodded.
Oliver looked interested in what she had to say, so Amy sighed, trying to string her words together despite the painful memories. “Well, I’ve told you before that I used to live in space, right? I used to live in the Mining Colony in deep space and I grew up with my two best friends.”
“My two friends—Jemmah and Dylan—and my family, my mom and dad—they were basically my whole world. The Mining Colony was my home.” She sighed in pensiveness. “But then… my dad got fired one day.”
Oliver leaned a little closer. “Then what happened?”
Amy hesitated, her voice softening as the memory surfaced. “Well, because of that, we had to move and—”
“HEY!” A loud voice interrupted.
They both jumped, startled. A few feet away from them, the school janitor stood over the leaf pile Amy had jumped into earlier. “Who messed up my leaf pile?!” He barked as he pointed at one of the students around him, “Was it you?!”
“Oh-uh,” Amy jumped to her feet, not willing to be the target of ire from the old janitor. “We should go! It’s almost time for class anyway so—”
“Wait—” Oliver caught the edge of her coat. “When can I see you again?”
Amy looked at him with mild amusement, “Are you afraid I’ll disappear again when you’re not looking?”
“I want to know more about you,” He said earnestly. “About your life in the Mining Colony, about your friends—about your world.”
Amy paused—caught off guard. No one has ever said something like that to her before.
“Really?”
“Absolutely,” Oliver nodded. “Do you think we can meet here again after school?”
Amy lingered and then smiled faintly. “…okay.”
As she left for class, Oliver remained seated underneath the leafless tree, waving his hand goodbye. For some reason, Amy had a strange feeling that he was going to stay there all day to wait for her.
-