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MIDSUMMER. A celebration of the warmest season on the longest day of the year. A happy holiday filled with warm laughs and warmer air. Five days after Valentina's birthday.
Also Valentina's least favorite day of the year.
The days got longer and the nights felt shorter. Though, in reality, they were the same lengths they'd always been, just shifted.
But it didn't feel this way for little Vee Varner.
With blonde curls and wide eyes, the young girl dreaded this time of year, each year. It always came around, and she knew it did—having learned about it several times in each of her science and astronomy classes—but that didn't stop the undefeatable loathing that scribbled in her stomach like a black crayon in the background of some other kid's drawing of the night sky.
Not Valentina, though. Her sky was statically midnight against the beauty of her moon, saving the scribbles for the inner-workings of her mind. No, not the future-astronomer, who spent more time perfecting her drawings of the sky than she did on her homework. Work for other classes besides science, that is. But not just any science...
Astronomy.
The study of everything beyond Earth's atmosphere. The natural science of celestial objects. The phenomena of the cosmos. The origin and experience of the ever-evolving universe.
Astronomy, the heart and soul of a ten-year old girl.
Little Vee Varner adored astronomy with everything in her. It was the reason she had a perfect attendance record at school. It was the reason her bedroom's ceiling was cluttered with glow-in-the-dark stickers shaped like stars that she'd received on her eighth birthday, along with a cardboard airplane because 'they didn't have a rocket skip,' according to her mother.
With everything in her, it was simply just that: everything.
And Steve Harrington was everything, too.
Her best friend. Her only friend. Her neighbor who'd stumbled across the street two years ago with her bright blue birthday present grasped tightly between his sweaty palms. The son of a woman who'd walked him to the front door to return said present.
Her other everything.
Who was sitting right next to her on the patio.
"But what if you make new friends and you forget all about me?"
Steve's eyebrows furrowed, deeply, to express the utter confusion that flooded his brain. 'Forget about her?' What was she talking about?
