Star
boys
Every summer, Dylan would cut through the pasture separating our houses, and we’d play Star Boys.
Most kids played it, or some variation. Star Boys, Star Girls, Star Puppies and Unicorns. The game came from a legend, which was also just history, though nobody could separate the two. Every few centuries the moon went out and the stars sent down a piece of themselves to find it. A person made of sky. We didn’t remember the moon—we were babies when it happened—but that didn’t stop us looking for it, checking branches behind the shed or rooting through Dylan’s old barn. It would be white, like the pictures, and made of light. The moon itself was still there in the sky, pulling at the tides, but it was dark. New, the adults said, but it seemed old to me. It was always, always dark. The light had fallen to Earth, and it was up to us Star Boys to bring it back.
We’d take turns. The Star Boy would search for the moon while the soldier protected him from aliens. We fought over who got to be the soldier. Dylan said he got sick of looking for the moon, but he wouldn’t dive into bushes or crawl through irrigation ditches to protect me the way I did for him. And I looked the part, stocky, with hair like dead grass and a stick in my hand. Dylan was sharper, clean, a sniper hitting his target from a mile away. The aliens didn’t stand a chance.
Some days we both got to be soldiers, separated from the Star Boy or Girl we were protecting. We’d duck under the overturned wheelbarrow in the barn, breathing hard as fire rained down around us, all dirt and scrapes and shit-eating grins.
Then at sunset, Dylan would chase his long shadow home. His parents were strict about that. Nights at our house were quiet without him, just Mom and Dad and me, books and board games and wholesome edutainment. A window full of stars and the dark place where the moon blocked them.
“What happens if the moon never gets found?” Dylan asked once. We were lying on plywood his dad brought out for some project, fingernails black-rimmed. Dylan’s brown skin looked warmer under the sun. Mine was starting to turn pink, but I was too stubborn to look for sunscreen. Star Boys were immune to the sun.
“I dunno,” I said. “I guess it just stays dark.”
“But don’t people need the moon?”
I shrugged. “Ask a scientist.”
Dylan worried about things—homework, diseases, the gap between his teeth—but he worried about the moon most of all. I worried about Dylan.
“Where do you think it would be?” he asked.
I pressed my lips together, thinking. “The bottom of the ocean.”
He bolted upright. “What?!”
“Most of the world is water. Just makes sense.”
He collapsed back onto the wood with a groan, and I grinned at the clouds.
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One day when we were eleven, sunset snuck up on us. We were watching a movie, and it was going on longer than we thought it would, spinning us a cocoon of colors and noise and musty throw blankets Grandma crocheted when I was a baby. The light creeping around the curtains’ edges turned from gold to pink to blue.
It was some dumb joke, I don’t even remember. Somebody in the movie did something funny, I guess, because I looked at Dylan to see if he was laughing too, and he—
He was—
I didn’t understand.
I stared, waiting to, waiting for it to click into place. And he just—
Lights. All over his skin. Dylan, my Dylan, who bled from scratched up knees and bruised like nobody’s business, looked like he’d been dipped in diamonds. Like an optical illusion that wouldn’t resolve into something real, no matter how long I looked. He was made of galaxies.
Dylan watched me watching him, and I saw the moment he realized, when his eyes flicked down to his skin—void blue, cosmic—then back up to me. And he swore. That was the first time I heard him swear.
“Are you okay?” I asked, because I didn’t know what this was, but he looked like he was in pain, like all his constellations were coming undone.
His lips parted. He still had a gap between his teeth.
“Dylan?” I asked.
He ran.
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