A Real Planet!

There was never any agreed upon time that Blondy and I were meant to meet up, but I had a good feeling she was going to be waiting on that balcony by the river.

And as I assumed, so she was, leaning over the railing, longingly looking out into the sunsetting sky as our local star set on the horizon. Her hair caught the final bits of daylight and lit up with a magical flair, like it was a river of fire full of life.

Every so often she’d turn her gaze around to skim over her surroundings, eventually locking those diamond blue eyes on me as I approached, wielding her oversized cannon of a telescope.

“Sorry I kept you waiting,” I said as I grew courage to step up beside her, handing over the telescope for her to hold while I placed the tripod down. “I gave everything a nice shine, but the tripod is…”

I grunted as the three legs of the stand would not cooperate and extend enough to stand on its own.

“This thing needs some oil or something…” I grunted again as the legs screeched loud enough to make my skin crawl. “Yeah… It was a pain last night too. Probably needs WD 40 or something.”

“Aha!” Blondy snapped her fingers and reached into her purse, pulling out a pocket sized can of said oil.

With a few good squirts, that tripod leg was good as new.

“You keep that in your purse?” My brow raised.

She let me examine the can more closely, happily showcasing the WD ‘41’ on the label.

“Oh, that makes more sense.” I nodded, realizing that a girl would definitely want a can of ‘41’ in her pocket.

Once I got the three legs set up, next came the telescope to top them, capping off the universe observation apparatus.

She seemed skeptical of my cleaning handy work and inspected every inch while muttering something to herself. As expected, she concluded it certainly was cleaner than it was last night.

She wasn’t earning a medal for that deduction. But it may have earned me a little trust from her, manifested as a genuine smile, and that was a good enough reward.

The next step after the telescope was set up was to adjust all the lenses to her liking. Neither of us were very well versed in how to do that, so I played the proactive part and found a manual for it online.

Thank goodness for the Forever Web Archive, or we’d both be stuck in the stone age, maybe hitting this thing with a rock to get it to work.

While she was twisting knobs to get the perfect magnification, I noticed there was an old music pedestal behind her. It was so rusted that Beethoven would have called it an antique. The little LED she’d taped onto it for light, powered by a cord connected to her phone, was a whiplash of contrast.

“Where do you keep finding this old stuff?” I said, wondering if this resourceful girl was going to expect me to perform a cleaning miracle on that too. If I had to guess, she either owned a collection of outdated junk, or maybe she visited the local antique shop.

Her recently sanctified notebook was displayed on it and opened a few pages deep to a checklist. The first thing in big bold letters was the words ‘Make a discovery!’ It was followed up by some cursive chicken scratch that I assumed was more objectives for later.

“Does someone have big dreams?” I said as I walked behind her and started flipping through the book.

She had all these cute doodles everywhere. Mostly memes, but they all correspond to something related to space. For instance she drew a picture of a little green alien abducting a cow from a pumpkin farm when referencing recent news. “You’re a little artist, aren’t you?”

“Eh…?” She turned away from her inspection of the telescope to see me flipping through her notebook. “Madde yo!”

She scrambled to the book and snatched it from my loose grip, then hugged it close to her, pouting with a sinister stare that sent shivers down my spine.

That’s so cute… What a cute little pout! Eeeeh!

“Maka-jan E-m-min-Minaide!”

“I can at least look at the thing that almost killed me, you know?”

“Gorozanai e! Kegitegi na.”

“I am not being dramatic,” I argued. “You should join the baseball team, because you got a home run on my face.” I pointed to the obvious patch of male makeup I slathered over my once pristine skin.

Suddenly she grew a bit downcast at the reference of my bruises. I didn’t mean to make her sad, despite how much I detested it too. It was supposed to be funny.

“H-hey, I was just teasing,” I clarified, growing as stern a face as I could. “You already apologized and meant it. No reason to feel bad anymore.”

Her mourning gaze shifted slightly, but not enough to where I saw her let go of the offense.

“Weeeell, if you wanna’ make up for it, I could always call the police and have you arrested for assaulting a celebrity.” I made sure to speak in a goofy voice so she knew I wasn’t serious. But considering she was deaf, my voice work was kinda’ pointless.

“Ugh…” she grimaced, but laughed. “Maka-jan.”

“There’s that cute smile,” I said. “Although, I don’t mind a pouty girl.”

That statement got me exactly what I wanted. That silly scowl reaction.

Once the dust of remorse settled, she made a claim that the telescope was set up to perfection. Her words, not mine.

“Ooh, that’s a beautiful star,” I said, looking at my own reflection on the surface of the front lens. “You were right about it being perfect.”

“Maka!” she pointed to the eye piece on the other end. “Mide!”

“How silly of me!” I laughed, joining her to take a deep peek into the night. “But I don’t know how what you're about to show me is going to top my refl-.”

I gazed into the eye piece and was struck with awe for just a moment. Inside there was a view of a fuzzy yellow dot, surrounded by a ring and several even smaller little dots. I would have thought it was just more dust on the lens, but I knew for a fact I’d cleaned this thing better than that.

I lifted my head from the view and looked at Meda, who was all kinds of eager faced as she waited for my reaction.

“Was that…?” I pointed to the eye piece. “No way that was…”

“Saturn.” she uttered clearly.

With only my eyes, Saturn looked like nothing more than a twinkles star, brighter than most others surrounding it. But with this telescope, it came to life as a planet. A real planet! Small, sure, but that was another world clearly in my view.

The excitement really got to me. I made some squeal sounds that I was glad Meda would have never heard, or she might’ve made fun of me for it.

“Can we see other planets too?” I begged. “I wanna’ see Jupiter next! Go big or go home, right?”

She got me caught in her web. This glee really reminded me of the first time I listened to that old radio in my room, and now I wanted to see everything. She was more than happy to oblige my request on her journey to making a discovery, whatever it would turn out to be. But tragically Jupiter wasn’t going to rise for a few hours, and we only had so much time until we had to get her back to school.

Too bad we couldn’t go any later than 6 pm, but with what time we had, we were going to make the most of it and see some other celestial sights.