The Ties That Bind

Starlight

I looked straight up and just took in the stars shining above us, with nothing blocking their view, and suddenly regretted all the nights I'd slept with anything between me and the sky.... I had a feeling [my brother] was about to fall asleep, and I knew I wasn't going to be far behind him. I closed my eyes only to open them once more to make sure it was all still there—the riot of stars above me, this whole other world existing just out of reach.

—Excerpted from Since You've Been Gone by Morgan Matson

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"You could go anywhere in the world. Where would it be?"

Luke's voice drifts, unbidden, from the tip of my felt pen to the page, right underneath the title of Professor Knowles's essay.

Mi Ciudad Natal.

My hometown.

★ ★ ★

Ting. Ting. Ting.

The steady stream of pebbles bounced gently off of my second-story window, each in an easy succession of the one before it.

Ting. Ting. Ting.

Despite the incessant string of noise, a smile twitched at the corners of my mouth as I laid my pencil next to the preparatory book.

Ting. Ting. Ting.

I opened it ever so slightly. "Lucas! You are going to wake my family."

"Lo siento, querida." He shrugged up at me as he delivered the flippant apology, his brown hair flipped back from his brow in that carefree way while a smirk quirked its endearing way across his lips. "But you need to come with me."

"It is the AP exams in a week, Luke." I pointed over my shoulder, but even then, I knew my protests were futile. "Besides, if my papá finds out—"

"It's five minutes, Elena. Five! Then you can come back to your papers, and no one ever has to know."

We had done it so many times before, I thought even Luke had started to believe it.

"Por favor, mi amor?" He gazed up through my open window, his brown eyes turned down in a puppylike plea.

I shook my head, unable to say no to his endearments, as ever. "Five minutes, Lucas. No more—"

"No less," he finished with a chuckle. "Yo sé. You always worry too much, querida."

With a long sigh, I pushed the window open further and edged my way onto the rope trellis that hung beside my room, climbing down it to greet him with a kiss.

His hands slid into mine, and our fingers twined together briefly before he pulled away.

I gazed up at him curiously, my familial apprehension dissolved with the prospect of another adventure. "So what is this surprise that I had to sneak out at one in the morning for?"

He tugged at me in answer, and I found myself being pulled along behind him.

The words flow easily for a few moments, but I soon find myself flipping the pen end over end as the tip taps an impatient cadence on the paper.

WRITE it NOW.

This paper is not about him, though the existent words seem to prove that a lie.

HURry UP.