If it was real

Chapter Three: The Space Between Stars

But I didn't.

Instead, I told Basmala everything. About Zain, about Dev, about how sometimes I felt like the parts of my life were puzzle pieces from different boxes. She listened, never rushed me, never told me I was being silly.

She just said, "You're still in the story. It hasn't ended yet."

And somehow, that made it okay.

By winter, the days felt shorter-not just because the sun went down early, but because time itself was shrinking. Everything felt faster: the school weeks, the holidays, the way our shoes seemed to outgrow our feet overnight. Even Dev noticed.

"Didn't it just become October?" he asked one morning while brushing his teeth.

I nodded. "It's basically already next year."

We didn't have snow in Houston, but we had wind-the kind that knocked over our recycling bins and turned the morning air sharp. Ba put out blankets in every room. Dada started wearing socks with his sandals and said, "This is why we left Pennsylvania."

Navya and Dania made paper snowflakes and taped them all over the windows. Basmala added stars to ours-cut from foil candy wrappers and magazine pages-and said, "Snow is overrated. Magic doesn't need to be cold."

Basmala came over often during winter break. Her mom made warm lentil soup with lemon and za'atar crackers, and we curled up under the same fuzzy throw blanket to read books from the library. She was reading a novel in French that I couldn't understand, but she translated the best parts for me in whispers.

Neel was going through a dinosaur phase and insisted on reading aloud from his fossil encyclopedia. We let him, mainly because his voice was serious and his facts came with sound effects.

Rohit had learned how to braid string into friendship bracelets and gave one to everyone at the house. Dev's had red and black, mine had silver and purple, and Basmala's was green and gold, which she tied around her ankle like it was a charm from a past life.

Zain came over once during the break, just for an hour, to pick something up for his mom. I saw him in the hallway. He smiled, a real one this time, like before.

"Hey," he said.

"Hi," I said back.

And then, almost without thinking, I asked, "Do you still write stories?"

He looked surprised. "Sometimes. Not as much."

"You used to be good at it."

He laughed softly. "You remembered that?"

I nodded. He nodded, too. And that was it. No big conversation. No sudden unraveling of everything we used to be. Just a moment that felt full and almost whole.

That night, I wrote a short story about a girl who found a star that could only be seen by people she missed. I named the star "Z."

Spring came slowly that year. The air softened. The trees out front of our school bloomed into clouds of pink and white, the petals like confetti shaken loose by some invisible celebration.

Ms. Herrera smiled more after spring break. She let us write free verse poems during language arts, and Basmala and I competed to see who could write the best metaphors. Mine always leaned into magic and longing. Hers were crisp and elegant, with surprising twists that made even Ms. Herrera pause.

Dev's soccer team made it to regionals, and he practiced nearly every day. He barely had time to tease me about my poems, though sometimes at dinner, he'd try to guess what rhymed with "constellation." ("Abomination?" he once said. "That better not be about me.")