Page 8 of Ghost Ribbon

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I already have things.”

Marco considered that. “Then maybe you can buy something you don’t have.”

“There’s nothing I want.”

“That is sad.”

“It is efficient.”

“No.” He shook his head firmly. “It is sad. Wanting things is what makes waking up not terrible. Even if you never get them, you can still imagine them. You can hold the wanting in your chest like a little fire and it keeps you warm.”

I again didn’t know how to answer. Why did he leave me speechless so many times?

Marco tilted his head back further, his eyes tracing patterns in the sky.

“Do you know what stars are?”

“Yes. Balls of gas. Hydrogen mostly. Nuclear fusion creates—”

“No, no, no.” He waved his hand dismissively. “That is what the science book says. I mean what they really are.”

I looked up at the stars. “What are they really?”

Marco’s voice grew soft.

“My grandmother told me before she went to sleep forever. She said stars are holes poked in the dark. Little ones, where the light leaks through. Because the dark is just a blanket, you see, and behind the blanket is light. More light than you can imagine. Light that goes on forever and ever. And sometimes the light pokes through the blanket, and we call those stars.” He smiled. “So the light can breathe.”

I looked up at the stars. Through the leaves, the sky was black and endless, scattered with white fire, unimaginably distant.

Stars had never meant anything to me before.

They were facts. Scientific phenomena. Things that existed because physics demanded they exist, burning through their fuel until they exploded or collapsed, indifferent to the creatures that named them and told stories about them.

But Marco looked at them and saw breathing light.

Marco looked at them and saw hope poking through darkness.

I remembered that.

I would remember that for years, for all the years I didn’t know I would carry him with me. That single sentence would burn in the void like a star itself.

“What is your favorite?” I asked. The question surprised me. I didn’t ask questions like that. I didn’t care about answers like that.

But Marco lit up again, delighted to be asked.

“That one.” He pointed at a star slightly brighter than its neighbors, low on the eastern horizon. “I call it la stella della speranza. The hope star. Because whenever I look at it, I remember that even in very big darkness, there is always a little light. You just have to look for it.”

He turned to look at me, his hazel eyes reflecting the stars he loved. “Do you have a favorite?”

I looked up at the sky, at the thousands of points of light scattered across the darkness, and realized I had never looked at them as anything other than data. “No.”

“Then you can share mine. When you are sad or lonely, you can look at the hope star, and you will know that somewhere, I am looking at it too. And then we will be looking at the same thing, even if we are very far apart.”

The pressure in my chest grew. It was uncomfortable.