This story by sophomore Unnathy Nellutla won a 2017 Scholastic Gold Key for Fiction.
The Sun, The Moon, The Stars
I wish she could’ve been less like me, that might have made it easier, you know? She thinks I don’t care anymore, that it’s no big deal. Don’t forget you’re mine. She has this thing with her hair—blonde and brown but not dirty blonde, like it’s all blended together in one inexplicably light and dark color—So yeah, I love her.
At least, I hope I do. If this isn’t love I don’t know what is. Well, I can’t think of an easier way to make myself crazy.
I’m carving on my desk in English class with scissors trying not to stare at her sitting across from me.
From the beginning she was mine I knew because we did the same little math puzzles in our head when we were bored, because we were seven years old and I could see her eyes moving around in the spaces of the magic square, adding up the rows and columns 2 9 4
7 5 3
6 1 8 we looked at each other’s feet and matched steps when we walked side by side and for the first time I felt like I spoke the same language as someone else on this planet. Well, we knew back in those good old days that love was the fusing of pure minds– I guess hearts had nothing to do with it.
Desiderata- plural noun, singular desideratum.
1.
Things wanted or needed; “And here are some words from Chapter 4 you all should pay attention to because you may need to remember them sometime next week…”
I already said she’s beautiful right? Her long, lovely fingers tap- tapping with her pencil on the desk— green veins just like her eyes just like when we were nine years old and I went over to her house with that jewel-toned and messy, overgrown garden spilling over into the front yard, swallowing up her little purple-gray house. With her it was lying among the trees with our legs tangled together and listening to nervy teenagers on The Voice sing Frank Sinatra covers, while caterpillars fell down between the pages of Alice in Wonderland and writhed in an angst- ridden struggle with their own futility of existence
“So the chapter from last night’s reading is called The Monsteress Manifesto, and it’s not only a reference to one of our protagonists, The Monsteress, but also to…”
“Um, The Communist Manifesto?” She said.
“Exactly, The Communist Manifesto. Now, I know you guys learned a little about Marxism in history, so does someone else want to explain the fundamentals? Anyone? Okay, how about you look on page 9.” I didn’t like that she didn’t like my friends. I mean sure, Karl Marx and Che weren’t interested in pretending the floors were made of lava or slow dancing to the love songs from Disney movie soundtracks, but until then I thought our minds worked in the same way.
Not that I understood it, when my grandfather had me read him Das Kapital by the light of the moon and one dying bulb, but I liked what Grandpa said, when I, on an assignment from my mother to talk to him more, asked what Dialectic Materialism meant.
“Your mother tell you to ask me? Tell the truth kid. It’s got something to do with change, and that’s not something I care for. Not just because I’m an old guy, though I probably seem about a hundred to you. Is that the truth kiddo? You want some ice cream? Well, I’m not allowed either. Diabetes. I won’t tell if you won’t. Change would be great if we could remember what it was really like– good things pass you by and you barely notice.” He didn’t tell me, what it meant though. Maybe he didn’t know?
Others have been carving into this desk too, although none of them seem to be as expert with the end of a pair of scissors or compass as I am. “NB was here”, “ I love sex”.
“With the intersegmental particle compressor, and with the help of the Monsteress, Jane and her friends can stop the planet’s spinning for an entire day. Now obviously a planet can’t stay completely still at all, but Finch is trying to tell us something about technology and the effect it has on the world today, all the while playing off of the space opera style–.” Any way I look at it, it seems like a weird kind of deception, to build an imaginary world with imaginary characters to say things that can be distilled into academic turns of phrase. Thusly, this quotation shows that the effects of technology are serving to make us a population more focused on changeable whims than on the social mores that have bound us together as human beings for centuries, the irony is the Monsteress can actually see the future she knows that their nostalgia is a lie and it will inevitably get better, but she cannot inform the other characters so because they regrettably do not speak the same language.
“Um. Actually I think part of it is more, they’re literally trying to turn back time. Because I guess they think it was better then, but the irony is, they spent all those years doing nothing but working together super seriously in the commune thingy to build all those machines, but they now they’re using them to try to go back to a time when they were happier without all that stuff– I mean, they weren’t happier, but now they think they were–but instead they’re literally and figuratively trapping themselves in this weird limbo where they can’t move forward or backward, they’re just stuck. Um. I guess. ” She looks briefly at me before her eyes drop back down to the book. All those people you love, they’re only there for a moment, is what I learned from her. Then you see the light go out of their eyes when you say the wrong thing and only God can help you now because you’re wrong, wrong as hell, wrong because you don’t belong, don’t belong with them.
Smart little bitch. Sometimes I have arguments with her when I’m in the shower, or late at night. How could you just leave me behind? Like I’m nothing (without you, like I live and die in your shadow)? How do you see through me every day? How do I not exist in your world anymore? Call me crazy, but it seems a little unfair that I can’t help but think of you all the time, and yet you are never so afflicted by the memories we shared. Well, what I’m trying to say is, you were good at that. Good at making it seem like people were more important to you than they were. I could’ve told you before and after that it’s dangerous to care more than the other person, but I allowed you to be the exception that proves the rule. That’s not how that works, you would have told me, laughing. I tell her everything I should have said back when I could read her looks across the classroom. ”You told me love was too plebeian, told me you were through with me and–” I wonder if she still likes jazz, or if she’s one of those people who spend English class carving Fall Out Boy lyrics on the desk, just like me. If so she might be better at it, I remember she actually knew how to whittle, just like my grandfather. He killed a man in 1968. He ran him over with his rusty red Pontiac, reckless driving at the speed of light in a residential area. Well, he always told jokes about it, the serious kind. What’s supposed to get you over a thing like that? Drinking. I dig the blunt knife blade of the scissors into the desk.
“Our story is set on the planet Mania, and there’s very little we know about it except for the fact that the seasons seem to last for a very long time, which is reminiscent of which other story we read this year? Right, ‘All Summer in A Day’, by Ray Bradbury. Do you all remember? The one where the girl gets trapped in the closet while the sun is out, even though she loves it more than anyone–”
If this is love, and it can’t be. I thought love had no walls. If I’m in love, why can’t I be a creature of the light, a true believer, a star hanging from the darkness instead of some sort of crazy person who crystallizes and disintegrates with every stroke of the blade? Well how did we get to be so small?
HER VOICE IN MY HEAD: You’re not crazy. It’s normal, this silly pain. Don’t think you’re special, it’s like that for me too. You just didn’t realize it when we were together, I guess, but I always knew the truth. (She walks away, then turns back to look at me, dramatically. Well, maybe not dramatically. I’ve never seen her angry before). And, by the way, I never wanted to keep it a secret. Maybe you liked it, because you like, I don’t know, hiding things and bottling things up inside. (Well that’s not what it was, I just hate the idea of being a part of other people’s lives, that they could and would have thoughts about us. That’s all it was. And no matter what she says, that’s not the same as being ashamed.) That’s not me. I don’t care what other people think, they can’t touch me (because it’s like she has this exoskeleton made of glass I was born without. Maybe I’m a different species). All I ever wanted is, “Hey, do you have time to stick around after class for a minute?” The other people stream away. “So is everything going well in your other classes? You seemed a little out of it today and I just wanted to make sure everything’s okay.”
I’m fine. It’s nothing. She’s nothing.
She taps me on the shoulder
“Hey. Did you hear her say when we’re going to be tested on this?”
Um. I think it’s going to be a pop quiz, so no.
“Oh. Ok.” And she walks away,
holding the hand of some other girl
and everything shatters apart
into broken light.