“Sit and watch the stars with me.”

A boy, passing, stopped mid-step to look towards the clear voice. Its owner sat on a ragged army surplus blanket and stared back at him, her face glowing with her grin.

A party raged inside, and though the ground pulsed with techno from the sound system, these figures were frozen in the backyard quiet. Party-goers pushed around them, caught up in the bacchanalia, but these two stayed.

He shifted his gaze to the porch of the house, where friends stood chatting, and the flashing lights briefly played across his strong features, illuminating his crooked nose, his brown eyes, and the dark stubble on his head. His tan skin appeared lighter as it was bathed in the fluorescence of the porch. He again looked at her, but made no steps in her direction, no smile gracing his face.

“Why?” His slightly nasal voice was steeped in skepticism. “They’re not doing anything.”

They’re doing a lot more than the people in the party.” Her expression stayed in place, wide eyes just as lit up as before, but she carefully brushed strands of her long, tangled hair out of her face. “Saying more, too, if you just listen.”

So he listened. He lifted his eyes to the majestic blanket of blue and black and indigo, the heavens that swirled so darkly above all the action. He looked for movement in the stars that littered this blanket, those that gave the strange girl’s face such an ethereal glow. Yet they were stationary.

From his inconvenient locus, he heard no star-chatter, just the vapid gossip of friends. For this, he cared none, and so he sat.

“I hear them,” he whispered after a few minutes, trying not to interrupt, praying that the stars couldn’t sense him as he eavesdropped. “Thank you.”

She just smiled again, basking in her starlight.