Word Count: 5117 | Reading Time: 18 min
This is how it goes:
In sophomore year, amidst five hundred girls unpacking their lives into the crammed, concrete-ceilinged hostel rooms on the seventh floor of Female Hostel 6 — I glance away from the studded night sky to Sahr, and — I blink —
It’s like my eyes are opening for the first time.
I look at Sahr. She looks back at me. We’re sitting on the fifth floor balcony that looks upon the city’s face. I can barely see even her through the haze of streetlights and light pollution. It’s warm. Sahr is smoking, legs crossed on the concrete bench, and curious. I am stood in front of her, hands on my hips.
My friend: Sahr Vellani, half a year younger than me, here attending university from Sharjah, vegetarian, 5’1” but she does look taller or at least she carries herself like she’s taller, or maybe her shoes just have really thick soles. At the end of the summer, right before soph Fall, Sahr and I had been texting almost every day. I’m shy, so I didn’t call at all — I had, however, wavered about a million times at the Botim home screen, staring at crypto ads and ignoring the little call button. Which counts.
I’m looking at her now, eyes narrowed.
There’s a sheen of something… different, to her. Perhaps I can see her eyes better through her glasses: they are a lovely almond shape, grave — or are they alight? — and very brown. Perhaps the light shining off her hair is more twilight than sunlight; more like the way things go warm when the sun-setting turns all light pink, and everything darkens with a flush.
Maybe she just got a haircut. Well: she did get a haircut. It’s shorter than last year, and looks rather lovely on her.
Of course, I am a generous and open-hearted person, so I intone, “Yo.” I remain straight-faced. “Sahr Vellani.”
And she goes mock-suspicious. She’s playing it up, nose wrinkled at me — in her lovely voice, it’s low and mellow and frank and I have not heard it in far too long, which, really, yes, again, is so my own doing — “What is it?”
I tell her that her hair looks really nice.
She blinks. Tilts her head at me. I cross my eyes at her. She makes a face and calls me stupid. Then she says: “Thanks. Heh.” She’s pleased; her eyes tilt up a little more — when they do, I see them catch an inordinate amount of light. The ember at the end of her cigarette bobs.
I smile back at her in the most obnoxious way I can, and pinch her knee (just to piss her off) from where it sticks out from the marble bench; she’s in stupid short red basketball shorts — oh, it’s Sahr, and I’ve missed her. Sahr, I missed you.
Her hair is new, and I’m wondering what she’s done to look overall strangely more shiny, but, well. A girl comes back after four months of summer and it’s like the whole world is focused differently, but Sahr is Sahr and I know her — like, we’ve kissed, basically! (I puffed a shitty puff from her cigarette once). A year isn’t that long, but when it’s freshman year in university it feels like ages. I clamber onto the bench to knock my elbows into her, and she huffs a laugh as I knock my head against her bare shoulder. My cheekbone is hard against warm bone, and I hope my earring isn’t pinching her.
When I get back to my room, half an hour later, the smell of smoke is still tingeing my clothes, and there’s a sheen of faint silver on the side of my face. Not a reflection, not metallic — just a different tone of glow. I tilt my head, lean closer to the mirror. I’ve never seen any pigment like it before, paint or eyeshadow, and I know my colours. Strange. I didn’t put makeup on today.
✴︎
I dream of —
A cupid’s bow. The contours of an ear, pooled with shadow, a metal spike going through the outer curve. Silver glinting in the corner of an eye. A glittering waterline. My eyes are filmy with darkness, so I close them. There is something brushing against my mouth; I open my lips — I feel petals — I can taste the dew on them, new and green like something that sparks. Slowly, almost hesitantly, starbursts start peeking in behind my eyelids, like when I would press my fingers into my eyelids as a child, unsleeping and bored in my parents’ air-conditioned room in the middle of summer, on my mattress on the floor like lying in the middle of a low sea, it could be a riverbed, like unfolding around me, exploding —
Burning, searing, freezing white — and —
✴︎
I stare upwards, brow furrowed, but then Sahr peeks into my line of sight and looks down at me with a weird expression — eyes a little bright, mouth tamping down — laughter? My head is on her lap because I’m lazy and I get tired too easily when I’m out and about. We are sprawled on the bench next to PDC, ignoring our friends. I’ve been stargazing with extreme incompetence, and I say incompetence because I cannot see even a single star in the sky, even though I’m used to really having to look — I’m from Karachi. I know light pollution.
Sahr says: “You look like a narwhal, Zoya.”
Hey. “Hey!” I protest, attention diverted.
Her grin breaks through. She goes, “Yah. Your ponytail is shit.” And pats my shoulder condescendingly. “There’s a bit of hair down the middle of your head that’s just sticking straight up — you fidgeted too hard. Zoya, you look a little like comics Jughead.”
It’s been a week and a half of us falling back into step with each other — maybe even more in step than we had been last year, which is curious. I affect a distressed look but she just keeps smiling at me, a little mocking. Awful girl. “Maybe I’m trying the slicked back look, for my cool girl arc,” I tell her. “Maybe I meant to do this. Okay, Sahr? Because I’m so much cooler than you.”
She laughs, eyes crinkling, her hair curling down over me, and suddenly I will let her make as much fun of me, all the time, if it just — god, who is this Sahr who laughs freely, whose face is open and bright so very often, now? My heart constricts — and then I notice: past her ear, in the gray-blue darkness, a small star winks to life.
I stare up at it. That wasn’t there before. And — my eyes dart to the side. The freaking north star still isn’t there, how can this tiny, tiny star be so bright? Sahr’s been speaking so I resettle my attention, distracted. She’s talking and talking, and then she runs her hand through her hair, pushing it back — for a second, I think I see her hand pushing the star back — and then, through the dark strands, ridding my mind of all other thoughts: I spot little patches of shiny, raised skin dotting her fingers. I stare, blood cold. Are those — scars? Or burns?
“Sahr,” I ask, cutting her off. She goes quiet, blinking at me. “What happened to your — one sec,” and I lever myself up, twisting to face her, and, gingerly, reach out towards her hands.
She lets me take them, suddenly silent. I don’t look up to meet her expression. My hands aren’t sanitized, so I don’t touch anything — her hands are littered with what I can now see, even in the dim light, are small, but vicious, burns. Some the size of a nail, some the size of a large coin, rippling across her skin and too-close to one another.
My breath is caught in my lungs. Oh, god. Can she even hold anything? How is she going to class — can she write, type? Can she eat?
How long has it been? These don’t look fresh. How has no one — how hadn’t I —- noticed yet? Speechless, I look back up at her, and —
She asks, “What happened,” then sees my face and reroutes, instead trying, “Um. I heal fast?”
I look at her like she’s crazy because that’s fucking insane, sorry. She glances around at everyone else surrounding us, all none the wiser.
Sahr presses her lips together, still looking so very off-centre, and tugs gently. I let go. She hides her hands in her rough, jean-cladden lap firmly, and I can’t help but wince at what must hurt. Then Sahr leans forward a little bit and looks me in the eye, all signs of unsettlement wiped clean.
“It looks worse than it is, Zoya. Trust me,” she tells me, sincere. Her face is clear. She’s managed to control herself, and is trying to placate me. She is also, I notice, evading the question. “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself and I swear these don’t hurt, they look worse than they are, and I will be alright in a day or two. Like, look —”
She grabs the handle of her bag, heaves it up, and a half gasp, half strangled yelp escapes me; I grab the fucking bag to haul the weight off of her hand — but Sahr isn’t even wincing.
Something’s off. Other people aren’t noticing, and we aren’t being surreptitious. I sling on her bag, standing up — Sahr glances at me, brushing her bangs out of her face, then pushes off the bench with her palms. She hooks a rough hand around my arm, dragging me away past everyone, past the pillars and the cafeteria, past the outdoor seating at the café next door, past the benches marking the start of the dark, grassy area hidden behind the main walkway of campus.
And then it’s just the both of us with the sky stretching out above us, yawning with its flooded edges, so much bigger in this little patch of green without any buildings to curb it. Wet grass brushes my ankles. I can barely see Sahr. Whatever I can glints silver, incessantly. Her eyes, her hair, the curve of her cheek. The backs of her glasses; the spike of her helix.
She turns to face me and sets her wrists on my shoulders firmly, leaning in a little bit. My gut goes funny.
“Zoya,” she says urgently, shaking me a little. “You shouldn’t be able to see these. But. I am okay. Like — look.” And she claps her hands loudly against each other. I gasp, jerking forward, grabbing her forearms. “Sahr,” I say, but then I look up at her. There is no pain on her face whatsoever; just her looking back at me, patient and waiting. I am shrinking a little, inside. My heart is thudding; I don’t know what’s going on. I know what burns look like, and these are burns, I saw them, I stared at them —
“Hey,” she says, soft. “I get it. It’s okay.” She looks slightly scared too, but then her face smooths out, and she’s nothing but her normal, certain self. For a second, I think I see the same star winking in her left eye that I did before, like it superimposed onto her, shining out onto me. But it passes, and Sahr asks, “Do you trust me?”
And — what can I say to that? Fuck. Fine. I do.
✴︎
She takes me to her room the next day, after she’s picked me up from my evening class.
I don’t think she wants to — or, at least, I don’t think she’s sure about all this. She seems conflicted as we walk, face more oblique and stony than usual. I don’t mind it: that’s just what Sahr looks like when she’s thinking.
We approach round the back of the hostel, where the faculty apartments are, and Sahr pushes down the ropes cordoning the area off with her ravaged hands so I can step over them without hiking my skirt up to my knees. Her burns do look so much better today, and I’m not thinking about how this is possible, instead, I steel myself and do not wince.
There’s glitter streaking the tips of her hair, winking at me in the orange light. I squint, lightly catching a thin lock, letting it run through my pinched fingers. Sahr looks at me questioningly. I tell her there was something in her hair.
We walk to the entrance, and she scans her card to open the door. I look at my fingers — nothing.
There is a feeling bubbling inside of me. I’m not a skeptical person, but neither am I particularly superstitious, nor prone to flights of fancy. But. Painless burns? Shifting stars? Dreams? The shine, the silver, the way shadows fall more luminously on her, only like they can’t bear to strip any colour from her; the way she seems to trap more light than she did last year? It’s all a bit strange, isn’t it?
Do I have something to do with it? It’s definitely Sahr, but — why me? We’re in the elevator going up to the 7thfloor. I look at Sahr, leaning on the mirrored wall. She meets my eyes, reactionless. I, of course, make the most wrinkled, scrunched up, heinous face at her to try and rile her up. Instead of responding in kind she just gives me a small smile, a little rueful, a little bright, and stays slouched against the wall. My heart flips. Through her glasses, I see crow’s feet framing her eyes.
Hmph. I am not indulging this. I stick my fingers in her side to tickle her, and she shrieks and shoves herself away from me. “Zoya!” she hisses, widening her eyes at me, and I grin back at her. Back to normal.
The elevator dings. We shuffle out, Sahr giving me a dirty look and staying a good two feet away. I hop after her, guileless, and she huffs her way to her door. Room 703 smells like perfume and cigarette smoke. I love this room: the curtains are almost always open, and even when they aren’t, light still filters through and lifts the shadows in the corners. Sahr and her roommate’s walls are lined with tapestries and fairy lights and posters — Sahr’s side is always neat. Her shelves have little trinkets lining them, and every time I have to get something from there, I knock at least two over. There is a lovely crocheted vine, olive and white, hanging from under her shelves. She made it herself.
I drop my bag in the corner and take off my shoes. Sahr is standing in front of her desk, looking at something on it.
I hold my breath. There is something different about the light here.
Her room just barely faces sunset, and so everything is tinged with orange-gold, but — there is something more brightening the room. There are more colors breathing through this light than there should be — it is splaying out in angles I am not familiar with; the fairy lights are off, the lamps are off, the overhead lights are off, and there is something else glowing in this room. Something is strange. Something is different.
Sahr and I are almost half a foot apart in height. There is nothing like a smaller space to remind me of this — I step up next to her, and on the top of her head, her hair has shifted for the parting to make the smallest whorl of a star, and I look and see her helix piercing and it glints in a way it shouldn’t at me, brighter, more twinkling, and —
On her desk is a glowing thing, and I don’t know what it is.
It makes my eyes prickle. It’s as if a flame was perfectly circular — it has a pinpoint nexus so deeply, breathtakingly black I can’t look at it, shreds and filaments of light shifting across it in a delicate orbit; so painfully delicate, so beautiful, like oil on water on fire, given exploding luminance — all white gold; edged with colors I have never seen before.
It glimmers. There is the faintest suggestion of a song coming from it, and my heart seizes. Oh, god. I am staring at it, and I feel as if I am in the presence of something that either is so terrifyingly fragile, or will leave me such. What is it.
I look to Sahr for an answer, and my breath catches.
She glows. The tips of her hair are backlit, gilded with brightness as they curl against her face. Light has nestled warmly in the brown of her eyes. She is speckled with spaced out constellations of silver radiance. She looks at me, uncertain, and I am just — struck dumb.
I don’t know what’s going on. This is real, and for all intents and purposes, it shouldn’t be.
And then I close my eyes, take a breath and let it back out, and tell myself to get the fuck on with it, Zoya. Nothing doing. This is so normal.
So I open my eyes, put my hands on my hips, and narrow my eyes at Sahr, who is looking alarmingly nervous and uncertain. “Sahr Vellani,” I announce, and despite how silly I am realising my pose is, there is very little mirth in my voice because I am serious — I am not about to move on from the thing that really matters, which is, “Is this what burned you?”
Call me a detective. It glows and looks like it would be hot and is anyways not entirely normal — like Sahr’s burns.
She doesn’t answer, and still looks a little lost. I soften, immediately, and turn towards her more directly, shuffling so I am leaning against her chair, blocking her view of — whatever that thing is.
“Hi,” I say, ducking to face her properly. My legs are sorted through hers in the cramped space. I trap one of her ankles between mine, and poke at her hip. “What’s up?” And then, because I can’t help but think it, I say, gently, “I don’t think I’m supposed to be seeing all this. Right?”
Why else would she be surprised? Why else would no one have noticed? I am really close to her: our faces are inches away, and — there are, literally, stars in her eyes. I press my lips together, and reach for her wrists again. Of course: the marks, fading as they are, are little puddles of pure brilliance, now.
I look back up at her. Sahr’s brow creases a little and she is looking at me like I am a problem to solve. Then she lets out a small gust of a sigh, and slumps down a little, looking plaintive. Her hands are still in mine.
She tells me, “Yeah. You’re not supposed to be able to see this. No one’s ever seen them before. And — Zoya,” and she looks like she’s forcing the words out of her mouth. “I think. I am going to need your help.”
✴︎
“Oh. Well. It’s a star. The north star, actually.”
“Uh huh.”
“Yeah, it, um. Sort of fell down.”
“Yeah?”
“And I kind of have to put it back up in the sky.”
I close my eyes. Sahr pats my shoulder, and I twitch. I am not qualified for this. This is what she tells me, then, haltingly:
Seven years ago, when she was on the cusp of turning twelve, Sahr woke up in the middle of the night choking on something. She doesn’t remember much — who would, in that state? — but she does remember arcs of reddened light piercing out of her, snagging on the curtains and walls and ceiling. Once she hacked and coughed it out, hunched over on her bed, she looked down to see: glowing shards of a crystalline orb.
Each star that came was different, she tells me. We are sitting on her carpet, leaned against the bed with our knees knocking, and there is something complicated figuring itself out on her face. She is looking at me almost like I am a stranger. She’s never spoken about the stars to anyone — and at this something in me seizes with a plain, small worry — can I even do this, how can I help her with this? And then, a smaller, deeper worry: would she really want me here, butting in, if she didn’t supposedly need me?
She tells me her hands have always known how to fix the stars. For the first one, she tells me, she had to put it all together and swallow it back (chills go down my spine — imagining her, at eleven, having to put the thing that almost killed her back in her mouth). When she was thirteen and found the next, a dead, spiked orb behind her ear, she went and stole the small kitchen blowtorch to breathe the heat back into it. At seventeen — a small, silver ball — just a kiss, and it etched itself with what, she tells me, was maybe the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her life, a whirling design which may have been a very, very tiny mapping of the universe (at this, I balk. “Okay,” I say, and then make fun of her huge glasses and tell her there’s no way she’d be able to see something as small as all that).
“But the issue now is,” she says, tight, “I don’t know how to fix this. And — it’s big, Zoya, it’s the north star. It’s already been more than three months.” The set of her mouth is crooked. She puts her palms out. “The stars never hurt me like this either, and I don’t know how you can see them, and I have like three quizzes next week but I think something really bad is going to happen if —”
Oh, Sahr. For the first time, I reach out for her hands and not her wrists. She lets me have them, still somewhat bitter, still upset — I cup them in mine gently, brushing a thumb across her palms.
For a second, just as I open my mouth to speak, I am struck with a wild fear of just — being wrong, of not being able to help and somehow being a clumsy, brute-force intrusion in Sahr’s magical life, and who the hell am I to say anything, right.
Then I tell myself don’t be silly. Enough with this pity party. It’s Sahr.
“But you don’t want help, do you,” I tell her, and she goes quiet. I smile at her. “It’s okay. Why would you? Now?”
I just barely catch her eyes reddening before he squeezes them shut, viciously. She hardly moves, but every single minute shift is like a demolition: tightly controlled, but crumbling slowly nonetheless.
“Well,” she whispers, deliberate and measured. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s been a long time, you know.”
“I know,” I say.
“No one else can do this like me. No one else can ever do it.”
I can barely hear her. I stay quiet. The sun is setting, and the softest interplay of light and colour fills the room. Sahr’s flyaway hair glints orange.
Sahr looks at me, finally. She’s crying — she’s flushed, her cheeks tracked with wetness, her nose is so fucking red, but mostly she looks very, very tired. “Zoya,” she says. I curve towards her, minutely. “You’re awful, you know? I was doing just fine without you.”
I smile at her, and bring our clasped hands to my heart. “I know. I get it.” I tell her. “You really were.”
Her face clears. She lets her head drop onto my shoulder. “I was.” She says, muffled. “And it was hard, and scary, and it hurt, and I was always really confused” Her voice falters. She finishes, softly, “Zoya. I’m tired.”
I kiss the top of her head. “I know.” I say gently. “And I am so very proud of you. You did really well, and you are just the most amazing thing ever.” She slumps further into my side. Oh, Sahr. “I know. I know. It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”
She peeks up at me.
I grin, slow and utterly fond. “Yes, Sahr Vellani, I’d love to help you out! You are so very welcome. Oh, please, darling, no need to thank me. Just doing my job.” “Yeah?”
“Yup,” I tell her. “Okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.” She smiles back, a little abashed, then raises her hands to show me her fingers.
Lines cut through the glow. Where she’s touched me, the marks shine a furious, blinding white. She tells me — there’s a certainty, a certain edge of unreal sonorance, in her voice where it wasn’t before — “I think you’re gonna have to carry this one anyways. It’s got something to do with you.”
✴︎
Polaris simmers. In the depths of its depths, a spark joins another, and then another, and then — a million stars burst into song, dance around each other, slow and then fast, and closer, and closer, and closer — till their noses just — about — touch —
✴︎
In the end, the north star does not burn me to death.
Sahr was worried. Compared to her, I am either normal or too attuned to the star, and there is no telling what will happen with the burning. I see her point, but I don’t think it’ll be as much of an issue anymore. I have half a guess that even Sahr wouldn’t get burned, now, but I don’t tell her, and I wouldn’t want her to test it. Hypocritical, maybe.
I tell her I wanted to go to the roof, so we do. She gathers up the star in a little tissue, which really drives me insane, how does that work, how does she get burnt and the freaking tissue doesn’t, and then I tell myself to really stop thinking rationally. We sneak up the service ladder and emerge onto the pitch-black roof of the hostel.
It’s a gorgeous place. Sahr shines her phone torch, and we pick our way to an empty spot. It’s like — the sky around us has rained down onto the city. Our hostel is the tallest building for a distance around it, which means that we can see, unobscured, all the blazing lights lining the campus, and beyond it, Lahore, resplendent and strange — scarlet and white lanes of moving traffic, glowing signs atop buildings, and twinkling houses and stores and streets just sparking to life all around us. It does mean the sky is mostly starless, but — we are hoping to change that, at least a little.
Sahr pools the star on a raised step, and both of us huddle around it.
I blow on it — the pinprick blackness inside sparks and brightens, not with light but with something else — and before can Sahr can stop me, before she can move, everything around me stills.
I know, with a bone-deep clarity, what I need to do. I am, admittedly, a little disgruntled by the inexplicability of it.
Gently, gently — as if I am holding dried flowers or an atomic bomb between my fingers — I take Polaris between my index and thumb. It flares outward from where I touch it in the most gorgeous way, the thin filaments of light bursting, quick as buckshot, into ribbons of piercing radiance that brush against me and — I look up — they encircle the two of us in a whirling cluster, and my hair is lifting, and I look at Sahr and she is aglow. Her pupils are silver — her irises glint brown like fire is dancing beneath her skin; her hair, her skin, is gilded in light. Her fingers and the tips of her ears glow red from the inside. She looks at me, eyes wide and a little lost: she doesn’t know what to do.
It’s fine. I got it.
I make a silly face at her. Then — quickly, quickly — I drop the north star in my mouth — it’s cold against my teeth — and I swallow whole.
Sahr chokes on a gasp. The light around us dies as quickly as it started. Above us, Polaris sparks back to life.
It comes back gentle and easy, with a noise like leaves rustling on sidewalk. Everything is quiet, and it is night. And here: it is just me and Sahr again, in the darkness. In the light of the city — and yes, okay, I will say the north star as well, it’s only fair — I can only really see the barest suggestion of her face. I can see the glint in her eyes, wide and looking a little up at me.
“Done?” she says, sounding younger — or maybe just more tired — than I’ve ever heard her. I exhale out, and sink down so our folded legs are tangled, propping myself upright with my hands on her knees. She sucks in a breath, suddenly, and grabs my chin. I freeze.
“Zoya,” she says, and tilts my face a little more towards her. I can tell she’s trying to peer at me because of her eyes, still-and-ever glinting with more light it should. To the absolute tips of my fingers, I am tingling. She leans closer. Lord. “Zoya, there’s a little star in your eye, I think?”
Jeez. I drop my head onto her shoulder for a second, defeated, then shove my fingers into her ribs. She shrieks and jerks back, scrambling back almost a foot away, and I poke my hands menacingly at her again. She slaps them away.
I grouse, “Done, your majesty.” And then I give up on being grumpy. All in due time. I tell her, properly, “We really did it. And —”
She leans in, quick as anything, and kisses my cheek. “Yeah.”
I am — I stare at her, heart lit up from the inside. Okay, then. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”