I Wish Upon You, Little Star

All the things from her bag fell down on her head, one, two, three, like drops of rain. They burnt her eyes but instead of crying she pressed her lips firmer together. Within her blurred view she could see her notebooks, pink, violet and white; there was also her pencil case, and her keys rang against the floor lightly.

“She’s fine, she’s not crying,” someone from the kids standing in safe distance whispered to a friend. Priscilla didn’t hear the insults from her bullies; she had become deaf to those. But her ears were sensitive to the other people in the classroom who were either watching or paying no attention at all. Their faces turned away from her pain hurt more than the names her bullies called her. Bitterness in her heart grew with another two of the watchers leaving the scene to go buy themselves a snack.

Her snack got stepped on with an Adidas shoe. She gulped thickly, swallowing the memory of her mum carefully preparing the lunchbox for her in the morning. It didn’t happen often that her bullies would attack her physically, but sometimes they were bored enough to do so. A small blue teddy bear made of glass fell onto a slice of bread from her lunchbox and got stained with mix of mustard and butter. She liked that taste, but not when it was covering her precious talisman.

Priscilla didn’t move. When she was six years old a teacher in kindergarten told her that an animal won’t attack you when you don’t move. The girl didn’t remember why it was so, but she took that piece of information and stored it in her self-preservation system. It proved to be a wrong piece of advice, however. One or two years later Priscilla got attacked by a swarm of wasps. She stood motionlessly for them to go away. All her little classmates ran, so did the teacher, but Priscilla wasn’t moving at all. Years that had passed since the incident helped her forget the pain of being stung many times, but they didn’t help her get over the shock from the realization the theory which was giving so much sense to her could be not applicable. There was something wrong with the wasps. They made the little girl believe that animals would attack you whenever they wanted. Standing still wouldn’t make them go away.

Priscilla remembered the wasps got provoked by a bunch of mischievous boys from her kindergarten class. They ran to safe distance when the insect got furious, so they weren’t attacked. Priscilla learned that when an animal was hurt, it didn’t care who the victim of its revenge would be. The wasps didn’t t chase the hecklers; they shot their burning anger into the innocent and silly.

The girl would think that humans weren’t that way. Their brains were so much bigger than a wasp’s!

Yet, there she was, on the floor, with the content of her school bag scattered all around her, some of it damaged. It was work of five human beings, boys and a girl in her age.

The reason why they were picking on her wasn’t even a point for discussion. She was the type of girl who attracted such handling. Her bullies at least let it out on her, so she could have no hopes in their occasional smiles meaning anything else than mockery.

But the rest of class was not so open about their dislike of her, and it hurt even more because she was a silly girl, maintaining belief in their hidden like of her. There surely was something to like about her. Anything. It wasn’t her chubbiness, her uncountable amount of freckles, or her upturned nose. Neither could it be her slowness, her shyness, or the fact she looked down on the people her age. But there had to be something.

The one girl in the group of bullies took a jar of glue and poured the content on Priscilla’s long hair.

It was her favorite part of her body, something she was proud of – her soft, shiny hair. She was wearing it in a long plait all the time. Now that the crown of her head got damaged, it made her heart cringe in horror and pain indeed. But she didn’t say a word.

Her trembling fingers collected all the things and put them back into the bag. She was quick with it, not wasting time in case anyone from her classmates would want to use her for one or two more jokes.

She went back to her seat and sat down quietly, obediently. The glue was getting harder in her hair, but Priscilla would wait patiently for the last class to be dismissed before she’d take care of it. Her hair would master it. Just like she always mastered it.

She was a silly, but a very strong girl.

The last class that day was math. Priscilla was very good at math. Despite of getting picked on for it, she never stopped liking it. It was not the math’s fault that some people didn’t like it. Priscilla knew that it was hard to like something you didn’t understand. She didn’t like P.E. at all. She would have, but her body was not pretty enough for somersaults, headstands, she didn’t run fast enough either, always ending up lonely in the last position on the track.

The math teacher sent one of the boys to sit next to her.

“Why?” he protested, sitting down. “She stinks!”

The teacher flashed a worried look to Priscilla, but found the girl calm, doing her counts with concentration. So the young woman let it be, and Priscilla felt special for it seemed her teacher thought she was strong enough to handle it alone.

And she was.

Later that day Priscilla closed herself in the bathroom to take care of her damaged hair. She cried big, desperate tears and hoped the fit would stop before her mum gets back from work. It was pointless to make her mum worry about her hair. She’d take care of the problem before her parents notice anything.

Priscilla washed her hair with a good load of shampoo, and then took a comb and sat down on the floor. She switched the radio on and listened to nice music while fighting knots of glue out of her hair and crying in frustration at every failed attempt.

She avoided the mirror with her eyes. She really hated the view it had been offering her recently. Not only didn’t she fit any clothes she’d like to wear, but all of her body was covered in those ugly freckles. Those on her face she minded the most. She could cover the rest, but not those. It was horrible.

It was the first time ever that she didn’t like how long her hair was. If it was shorter, it would be much easier to get rid of the glue. But she didn’t want to cut, even when the awfully sticky mass in her hair was bidding her to, telling her it wasn’t going to work any other way. She kept fighting, frustration and patience alternating inside her. At least the combing made physical pain strong enough for her to forget the actual pain eating at her heart.

Just when she felt like throwing the comb against the wall in anger, the voice of radio moderator caught her attention. The man was inviting the audience to watching a Perseid meteor shower which was to occur that night.

“All you have to do is to look at the night sky, to the north, around midnight. You will be able to see falling meteors.”

This got Priscilla excited. With a smile on her face the combing went much easier and soon enough she was done with it with a quite sufficient result. Enjoying the regained cleanness of her hair, she went on with running the comb through the wet locks for a few more minutes.

That night at exactly one minute after midnight Priscilla put a pair of long pants on her short pajama ones, and took on a thick green sweater her mum did for her few years ago. The view was not good from the window of her room, so she decided to watch from the garden. The house of Priscilla’s family was far enough from the city lights so at night it was possible to see the sky very clearly in case there were no clouds. When she was a child she would go to watch it sometimes. Holding a book with pictures of star constellations, she would try to find them above her head. She was not very good at it, so the night trips to the garden stopped very soon.

Her parents and her brother were already asleep. She pondered the option of waking someone up so that they would watch together, but then she decided to go alone.

Careful to not wake anyone up, she turned the key in the lock, slipped out of the house and then locked again. Her fingers slipped into the key ring to keep it safely. The backyard was a little frightening at this hour. An enormously big neighbor’s tree was rustling with its leaves gently, creating music which went so well with the view above her.

Priscilla stood in the middle of the garden. She’d never seen a shooting star before so she wasn’t sure what to expect. Her ears got filled with sounds; so many sounds she’d never imagine to hear in the middle of a night. There was the mysterious melody the trees around her were singing; it sounded as if they kept all the stars that had fallen already in their throats-trunks securely. There was also the quiet buzzing of mosquitoes hungry for the young girl’s blood.

She felt a little lonely despite of all her companions. With her gaze fixated on the sky, her brain felt much lighter suddenly. It was easy to forget unpleasant things when the sky was staring right back at her. The longer she stood there the clearer she could see.

There were so many stars. Right above her head some of them were gathered into a large stripe of milky light. She couldn’t do anything else but stare at it with widened eyes, wishing she knew words that would describe everything she saw. Small blinking objects could’ve been either falling meteors or airplanes. She couldn’t tell them apart, so with her breath hitched she kept gazing at all the moving wonders.

And then suddenly, a shooting star crossed her view for not more than one second, and fell right into her heart. Priscilla stopped breathing altogether for a moment.

Like a newborn for the first breath, she gasped for hers. With new intake of air into her system, her eyes filled with emotions. She could no longer mistake an airplane for a shooting star. They were so different. Priscilla kept gazing at the universe, waiting for more of those beauties to fly across her vision. Her neck hurt from keeping her face turned to the sky for such a long time, so she pressed her hand to it to relax it. The sound of her heart beating inside of her and making her artery throb against the palm of her hand accomplished her.

No, she wasn’t lonely. She’d never been. The moon was there too, as if to watch the performance with her. Priscilla was in awe, counting all the shooting stars that fell till it became so much she couldn’t count anymore.

The girl turned around and hurried back into the house. When an idea comes, it has to be taken use of immediately, otherwise it could disappear forever. That was the energy that kept Priscilla walking briskly. Once at the door, she slowed down, having to tame her suddenly so uncontrollable lungs. She sat down on a small fluffy carpet in her room and took off the long pants and the sweater. When she was just in her pajamas again, she grabbed a marker from her desk.

Carefully she connected one freckle on her arm with another by a thin black line. They were the two biggest freckles on her left arm. Two suns. She quickly joined them with three other freckles, creating something similar to the pictures of star constellations. And she went on drawing, covering her skin in many thin black lines till she looked like a young Maori girl. There were only the pajamas in the way of the universe suddenly printed on her body to absorbing her whole. She looked at her legs, spread in front of her, smiling inwardly at the sight of all those freckles being put in use. They didn’t look like freckles anymore. They all were a part of something bigger, forming the creation of Priscilla’s imagination. They were stars in a galaxy.

Priscilla drew many shapes on herself, just like the stars on the sky were gathered into constellations of different kinds by the imagination of human brain. Now her body was just like that, carrying zebras, birds, hearts, a pen, even a television. Only her right arm remained partially uncovered, as well as the back of her body. She looked into the mirror and a smile spread across her features.

Priscilla looked ridiculous, but she felt so beautiful.

She went to the window and opened it wide. The night air caressed her bare skin, turning her smile even happier. It dropped when she looked up.

There was something about the sky that made Priscilla doubt if the things she drew were really star constellations. The real ones were unrecognizable for her without a guide book so she saw none of them when gazing at the infinite blackness. And to give the stars shapes according to her fantasy was not easy. As soon as she drew an invisible line across the sky, connecting one star with another, those stars as if got bond to their places like handcuffed prisoners.

The stars looked much more breathtaking when they were free, when no human mind closed them into a structure reminding something known to the mankind. The universe had its own pattern, unknown to the human brain. Maybe that was what was making Priscilla’s heart fill with awe. No matter how hard she’d try, she wouldn’t be able to decipher that pattern.

She felt so small, face to face with the infinite source of mysteries. Yet, she was so big in how her brain, despite of it all, was able to see constellations her own fantasy wanted to see. The universe was hers and, at the same time, it was everyone else’s and no one’s.

Priscilla was a part of a bigger whole, just like a star was a part of a galaxy and a galaxy was a part of the universe. She was a part of the nature but by that she could no longer mean just the earthbound one, but also the universe and its time and space. Time and space belonged to nature just as much as the plants in pots on her window, and her dog, and her own body and soul. There was no way she could be not perfect.

The same was true about her bullies. They all were human beings. They felt big when they were alone, because they needed to fill their loneliness with something. So just like the universe filled it with the unexplainable, humans filled it with themselves.

They were stars. And when the stars interacted, it could bring either an infinite web of light, or a destructive collision.

Priscilla chose the first option. With resolution to become a better human, tolerant and open-minded, she set off for the bathroom to wash all the lines that were keeping her stars together. They were meant to be free. She wanted to become big, sun-size big, so that she would be able to do something good for her world, for everyone in it, whether it’d be a lover or a hater, an angry wasp or a boy who provokes it. That would be Priscilla’s victory over the heliocentricism of a man. That would be her mirror to beauty.