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You’ve developed strange habits, though they’re only strange because they’re normal. You say hello to people you meet in the street, knowing they won’t say it back. You say “good night” out loud every night before you sleep. About once a week, you dress up in something long and flowing and go for a night out on the town, which always means walking through rows and rows of identical buildings, saying hello and good evening to all the black and white people who don’t say it back, only these nights you greet every single one that you pass instead of only a random few. You sit on the edge and watch the water for a while, and then go back.
It would be easy to say that you do these things for their own sake, as a routine, any routine, to keep you sane, but you think that’s a little reductive. You have your cats and your portal experiments and your writing and your drinking and your online friends for that. Your life is more than just tally marks on a prison wall, to the extent that anybody’s is. Dirk has insinuated that it’s effectively a big game of make believe, trying to transpose the world you’ve learned about onto the one you’re actually in, but you’re not a child, nor, again, are you insane. You eventually settled on the simplest explanation: you act like you owe something to the people around you because you do. You talk to them because they can hear you.
Your mom left you a 36 pack of magic markers. Among all the random bullshit stacked up around the house, who knew the magic markers would end up being so important?
You didn’t used to leave the house in your early years. The people were so much bigger that it scared you; they would walk right past you without even looking. Once, you had tried to touch one's hand, caught it at the wrong angle and cut a large gash along the inside of your palm, crying and rushing back inside for six more weeks of winter. But when you hit a growth spurt and started to miss the sun, you crept out for longer and longer periods. You would get onto your roof and watch them for hours on end. They were utterly silent, aside from the loud and ever-present click clack clicking of their rigid feet on the marble floor. But they weren’t, as you had initially thought, asocial. You remember the day when you saw one of them fall down in the middle of the street, and another help them up. You were about eight when you decided that you were no longer scared of them.
You were about twelve when you met Star Boy. You were depressed. You had just gotten into a fight with Jane, and hadn’t spoken to her in three days, three very long days. It was the third time you had had that exact fight, but the worst yet by far. What kind of friend doesn’t believe you when you tell them things? What kind of friend demands that you lie to them?
You were lying prone on your chest at the edge of town, crowded out by the buildings, dipping your hand in and out of the water, water that you could have sworn was a few inches lower when you first saw it. Your left cheek was getting cold and uncomfortable after being pressed into the marble for too long, so you turned your head and switched sides.
There he was, looking like a mirror image of you, lying on the marble, smooth, rigid hand swooshing around in the water. He was the same size as the rest of them, all of them were the same size, but something in his confused, browless eyes made him seem young. He was a boy, pitch black from head to toe. You forget when you decided that black ones were boys and white ones were girls.
Hardly thinking, you splashed him, lackadaisically swinging your arm through the water like a pendulum. He flailed around and looked utterly betrayed, making you wonder if you’d somehow killed him, until he calmed down and splashed you back in the exact same fashion. He had no lips and no eyebrows, but his beady pupils moved an inch up on his face, and you could tell he was smiling. You laughed; you hadn’t laughed in weeks, and you could have sworn that his pupils raised even higher, smiling wider. And you wished so badly that you weren’t wearing the ratty, unwashed black T-shirt you had been wearing for three days straight, suddenly felt so ashamed of yourself that before you knew it you were crying. He looked like he wanted to help, but hadn’t any idea where to start.
Still crying, you got up and grabbed his arm. He seemed resistant at first, reaching toward the water, but eventually walked with you through the crowded streets, through the rows and rows of identical buildings, through the throngs of people and the loud click clack clicking as you clutched his arm tighter and tighter. Until you were home.
Though you were no longer grabbing him, you kept a finger resting on his hand as you sorted through stacks and stacks of junk, until finally you found the unopened 36 pack of magic markers. He sat down on your carpet. He knew.
You’ve never looked at somebody’s forehead like this. You don’t like how reflective they are up close, a funhouse mirror version of yourself staring interrogatively back at you. You try black. No. White. No. Yellow. Yellow looks ugly, you’re not going to use yellow. He fidgets but does not move. Blue. The blue stands out just enough that it can be seen from a distance. You drew a five pointed blue star on his forehead and filled it in with color.
You hugged him, sniffling, holding him close for about 2 minutes. He mostly stood still. Eventually he put his arms around you too. After you let go, he looked at you, picked up a half empty bag of crackers off your desk, and walked back outside. After another two days, Jane would text you an apology, though she still would not say outright that she believed you, and Star Boy would show up at your door again, holding the now empty bag of crackers. You don’t tell anybody online about him. You still haven’t.
For a year, things were simple. You would see him in the streets, run up to him, hold his hand, and he’d hold yours, too. He didn’t used to do that in the beginning. You started to get better at body language, the few signs you needed, at least. You’d nod your head towards whichever way the waves were coming from, and it would mean “let’s go to the beach”, and you would sit around at the beach and hold each other some more, and occasionally lean down and splash each other, the same way as when you met. You wouldn’t swim, though. The water seemed very deep.
You shared parts of your life with him. You’d fish together, play with your cats. When you figured out how to work your mom’s appearifier, you started taking pumpkins from random places in spacetime. He loves the pumpkins, and his friends do too, if “friends” is the right word to use. They’d eat, demand more, eat, demand more, and when the appearifier needed to cool down, they’d only stare at you for a few minutes before leaving. None of them ever wiped their faces, so they all walked around with disgusting orange gunk all around their mouths. Once again, you found yourself scared of them, though in a much different way than when you were eight. You would wipe Star Boy’s mouth with a rag occasionally, but eventually stopped bothering.
Sometimes, at night, you would regret feeding him at all, of corrupting what you two had, of making him need you in a way that made it impossible for you to know if he wants you. You’d tell yourself that he was starving, that they all were, but you didn’t know if it was true. You’ve never seen a dead body.
At about 14, you got sick. Really sick. You had never been ill before or since. It started as a headache, then a cough, and within the day you had a fever so intense you could hardly move, only lie under your covers and shiver. You had texted your friends that you might be dying, and then passed the night in a fitful, nightmarish sleep. You could vaguely hear the muffled noise, the click clack click of the daily food mob, bodies casting shadows through the thin curtains on your window. After twenty minutes, all but one had left. You heard your door creak open and saw the blue star on his forehead.
He sat by your bed for three days and fed you tomato soup.
You're sixteen now. He sleeps next to you sometimes, or sometimes on the other side of your room, or sometimes disappears altogether. You don’t have it in you to be possessive. One night, in a moment of weakness, you stalked him with a pair of binoculars. He walked around for a few hours and fell asleep on a rooftop, looking at the stars. He had laid awake for a while first, though.