The Boy and the Sky

Slowly she lifts her head toward the boy. He’s in quite a comical position, his legs are bent over his head and his butt is in the air. It makes him look like a circus contortionist which is just as concerning. The boy’s eyes are pressed into a wince, but he flips himself back into a sitting position. Brushing grass out of his hair he turns and looks up at her. He seems to be disoriented and stares at her blankly for an unusual amount of time, squinting at her face before a wide-eyed look of realization overtakes his own.

With a yelp he scrambles and looks around, startling Asuka. Desperately he pats at the grass around him. Asuka sweats; she can guess what he’s searching for but can’t bring herself to lift her foot off of its shattered remains. 

Unable to find what he’s missing, the boy turns back to where he fell from, and she follows his movement up the hill with her eyes. He slips on the grass and falls until he reaches a black and gray contraption Asuka hadn’t noticed before. He must have brought it with him and lost his grip on it when he presumably slipped and took his tumble. 

He inspects it frantically, checking for any signs of destruction and rubs off any dirty smudges with his white, grass-stained shirt. Fortunately, everything appears to be fine and he heaves a sigh of relief. Asuka is slightly baffled but supposes she is happy for him. It doesn’t do much to undo the feeling of guilt in her chest at having destroyed his glasses, though. 

With a hard swallow, she finally removes her boot from the wrecked eyewear to take a better look at the damage. It was as she feared. The part that connected both lenses together was broken clean in two, and only one of the lenses even remained intact.

“Excuse me!” her head snaps up at the boy who was hugging what appeared to be a decently sized telescope in his arms as he gingerly headed down the hill with more care than ever. He reaches the bottom of the embankment and Asuka finally gets a proper look at his features.

He was shorter than her by a few inches, and his messy black hair was probably a result of being tousled by his fall, still decorated with bits of grass. He was wearing a middle school uniform with black slacks, but his gakuran was open and showed a dress shirt that was now smeared with grass and dirt.

“I seem to have lost my glasses; do you see them anywhere?” Asuka slowly stands up with his glasses in hand. Sweat beads her forehead as she shamefully presents them to him. Once he realizes they are his glasses and that they are beyond repair he panics. He takes them from her and words leave his mouth that Asuka is unable to decipher, but she can guess what he was trying to convey.

She apologizes, waving her hands, “I came over to see if you were hurt and ended up stepping on them…” she stops, realizing her explanation might come off as making excuses. “I’ll promise I’ll replace them. How much were they?”

The boy doesn’t answer her right away. The meager amount of money she was left with was not meant to accommodate for glasses, but there was no way she would be able to live with the guilt of destroying someone else’s property. She just had to take responsibility. “Come on, let’s find a glasses store.”

She moves a hand to guide him back up the hill. Not only was it already getting dark, but clearly he wouldn’t be able to see well enough to get to a store on his own. The boy, however, is not having it. He shakes his head frantically, “there’s no time!” he frets, “the convergence is about to happen, and I won’t be able to see it if I go back to get a new pair!”

“Convergence?” Asuka repeats. Judging by the telescope, she assumes that he is referring to something having to do with outer space like the planets. “Venus and Neptune are going to converge tonight and now is my only chance to see it!” So, she was right. Asuka has personally never had much of an interest in astronomy, sports were more her thing.

Well, she wasn’t interested in astronomy at least until she heard of the upcoming meteor that’s supposed to wipe out all life on Earth like the one that ended the Jurassic period. Or was it the Cretaceous period? Whatever.

She tries to reason with him, “but your glasses are broken, how are you going to watch it if you can’t see?” It comes out harsher than she intends, but Asuka doesn’t know how else to word it.

The boy looks devastated and he hangs his head. “I’ve been waiting months for this…” he hugs the telescope closer to himself, his eyes shine with tears that he tries to hold back. “I’ll never get another chance like this again, I can’t just go and miss it…!” Asuka felt as though her heart was being covered in sludge.

She stutters out her next words in a rush, “d-don’t cry, okay? I’ll…I’ll think of something.” She has her hands up, hovering, trying but failing to give him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. He looks up at her expectantly.

Crossing her arms she closes her eyes and files through her brain for an answer. What does she have right now. Her house keys? Her phone? Her hat? How could those do anything to help? Come on, come on, think!

Her eyes fly open.

The next thing she knows, she’s helping the boy, who had revealed himself to be Youta, set up his telescope in the grass. The sky has delved into a bluish black hue. A small spattering of the cosmos visits them with the rest left invisible by the city lights.

“Will this really work?” Youta asks while he adjusts the settings on the space viewing apparatus. She replies with a noncommittal and nervous chuckle, averting her eyes from the tripod she was holding for him. Asuka has yet to test if her idea will succeed, but this is her best and only bet.

“How about this. If nothing happens, I’ll grant you a wish, okay?”

“A wish?”

“Yeah, but I’m not a fairy so try not to aim too high,” she mutters, embarrassed at her inability to think of something better to make up for her mistake. Hopefully her plan won’t be as much of a flop.

With a few more modifications from Youta, the preparations are complete. For now, Youta instructs Asuka on where to look to locate Venus and Neptune. She keeps her right eye shut while the left one peers into the scope. This telescope was the type with an eyepiece one can look down into and see reflections from the mirrors placed inside, so her neck was not craning upwards.

“By the way,” she makes sure to choose her words carefully this time, “how are you able to tell what’s happening without your glasses?”

“Don’t worry, if there’s one thing I’m confident about it, it’s this. I’ve been plotting the course of Venus and Neptune on my star charts for weeks now! I was even mapping the path in my head before I got here. Er, that’s how I ended up tripping down the hill, because I was watching the sky instead of my feet.” He ends the last part with a sheepish laugh, twiddling his fingers.

According to him this is a phenomenon that only happens every 165 years, so this really would be his only chance to see it. She’ll be damned if she ends up being the sole reason he misses it because he broke his glasses. A light twinkles in her eye though the telescope that makes anticipation pop in her chest. “There! I think I see them! Here, get the phone, I’ll hold it just like this.” Youta takes Asuka’s phone that she had given to him as a part of her plan. Eager but nervous, he holds it close to his face, switching the camera on and putting it on the eyepiece of the telescope. 

They both hold their breath as the lens focuses and locks on to what the telescope is projecting, showing a bright and visible picture of the conjoining planets on the screen.

They both cheer, careful not to shake the telescope and throw the visual off. Like this, Youta is able to see the image of Venus and Neptune crossing paths clear as day thanks to the camera. Asuka is relieved seeing the smile on his face. 

In just a few minutes, the planets go their separate ways again, but the two of them spent more time after that viewing the other planets and constellations that were available that night. Youta was like an encyclopedia of knowledge on astronomy. Though he had seemed quiet and timid before, in his excitement, he ended up sharing various bits of information on almost everything he had Asuka turn the telescope towards. She unexpectedly found it all rather comforting to listen to.

“You know, I’m the only member of the astronomy club at my school.” The two of them are on their way to Youta’s house after Asuka insisted on walking him home so he wouldn’t get lost or bump into anything.

“I even bought this telescope with money I saved up from what my parents would give me for school lunch. They’re always too busy to watch the stars with me and prefer that I focus on studying.”

When Asuka was starting to wonder if she should be concerned about his home life, he giggles. “What’s up?” she asks.

“Oh, it’s just, I don’t really get the chance to talk to anyone about my hobby with, so it makes me kind of glad that this happened; it was really worth a pair of glasses!”

Asuka feels a twinge of guilt again, “a-about that…” she starts.

“Oh! Don’t worry about replacing them, really!” he shakes his head in reassurance.

“But—"He interrupts her with frantic waving of one hand, the other supporting the telescope he insisted on carrying, “It’s fine, it’s fine, I promise! I have spares at home and that one was falling apart already!”

She feels uncomfortable accepting his forgiveness, and insists on doing something else, still not feeling fully redeemed. She points to the large telescope cradled in his arms, “at least let me carry that for you, it looks real heavy.”

Youta silently considers before accepting. “Well, my arms are getting a bit sore.” He carefully hands it to her, and she carries it in her arm like it’s a fragile baby. She would never be able to forgive herself if she dropped his prized possession right after destroying his glasses. “We can take turns! I want to get stronger so I can to keep doing this when I’m older!”

His toothy smile makes her heart ache. Surely someone as obsessed with space as him knows about the meteor. She opens her mouth to ask him about it, but doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t want to put a damper on his good mood.

After a few more kilometers, the two finally make it to Youta’s home. “Are you going to be okay getting back to your house?” Youta asks, taking back the telescope from her.

“Yeah, my place isn’t too far from here.” She pauses thoughtfully, “good luck, man. I know you’ll be the best astrophysicist ever.”

He laughs bashfully, and then they wave goodbye to each other.

Asuka remains until she knows Youta has made it inside. A woman opens the door and ushers him in, looking worried. She can hear them talking from where she’s standing until the door closes.

Asuka didn’t realize the corners of her mouth had been twitching upwards until that moment, but a small shadow clouds her once she’s alone. Slowly she moves her hands to her pockets and tiredness overtakes her from the excitement of the day. With a spin on her heel, she is on her way back to her own home. Somehow satisfied despite the empty feeling that lingers.

“Ah.” She stops momentarily, just realizing she wasn’t able to complete her second objective for the bucket list. Oh well, there’s always tomorrow. And she knows exactly where to start.

The bridge looms before her once again, now illuminated by the lights that come on automatically when it starts to get dark. The bridge is not so long that she can’t see the other side of it from where she’s standing, even at night, but it still intimidates her. This time, she covers her ears from the beginning, convinced that the noise from the ocean is what triggered her to fall into that state before. Steeling her nerves, she lunges forward.

Blocking the noise turns out to help a lot, and the cars passing alongside her make her feel as though she has company. Within a few minutes of speed walking, she had crossed the bridge, and the sound of the ocean waves felt significantly less suffocating.

Exhaling a cold breath, she tilts her chin upwards and observes what few stars dot the now completely black sky, a newfound appreciation for the cosmos now sparkling within her. Her stargazing is interrupted by what looks like a bird popping into her field of vision. That is until she realizes it’s much closer than that. 

A soft laugh escapes her when she recognizes the butterfly from before. It leads her eyes away practicing the same circling dance as when she first encountered it. She follows it with her phone light until it leads her into a nearby patch of grass on the side of the road, it flutters to a stop.

She crouches down to take a picture as it rests before it flies off again. After admiring it for a while she pauses. A squarish shape catches her eye, different from the usual shape of a clover that’s been burned into her brain from hours of searching. Moving her eyes from her phone, the butterfly is gone, but where it stood was a clover with four leaves standing out amongst the greenery.