Amidst The Stars

First Snow

   A scream woke him up.

  Head still clouded with sleep, Vicente's eyes snapped open and he promptly rolled out of bed. Across the room, Leon sat up, rubbing his eyes groggily. "Wha?"

  The back of his head throbbing from the fall, he stood up, approaching his desk to look for his glasses, and then it hit him.

  "Ling!"

  He shoved his glasses on and ran to her room, not caring that the loud thumping of his feet might wake up his parents. He threw the door open, fear rushing through him, and —

  "Look!"

  His little sister was standing on her bed, bouncing excitedly as she tried to look out the window. "Look outside!"

  He joined Ling by the window and gasped.

  Down on the ground, where everything seemed small from their apartment, everything in eyeshot was carpeted in white. The roads, the sidewalks, the rooftops... everything was pure white. Even the treetops were white like they were covered in powdered sugar.

  And white was falling from the sky, little soft tufts like cotton descending down to earth. Ling squealed in excitement as one of them landed on their outer windowsill. "Jia Lin, is this — is this — " she kicked the wall as she thought of the phrase. It came out in Mandarin. "Xià xuě?"

  Snowing! They'd never had to use that term before, for Taiwan's winters never saw snow except on the highest hills. But that was the word for the white wonderland outside. "Yes, it's snowing."

  "It's pretty!" She began to bounce on her bed, and the thin mattress creaked its protest. "Everything is so white!"

  He pressed his nose against the ice-cold window, gazing at the snow that blanketed the ground. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a pillow hit him in the back, and he fell back to the mattress in shock.

  "Quiet down." Yao's cranky, sleep-dulled voice came from the other bed in the room. Vicente looked behind him and saw a Yao-shaped lump underneath the quilt. "'m tired. Need t'sleep."

  He realised that the sun was barely up, and it was most likely still early in the morning — on the weekend, too. A ratty stuffed panda whacked him in the chest next, and Vicente swiftly threw it back onto Yao's bed.

  "I'll go back to sleep too, then." He hopped off Ling's bed, feet landing on the freezing floor, and slowly padded back to his own bedroom. On the way back, he ruffled Ling's hair. "Don't disturb Yao, okay?"

  "Mm." Ling went back to staring out the window.

  Vicente sat down on his own bed, and Leon stared at him curiously. "Are you going back to sleep?"

  He nodded.

  Leon snorted, grabbing a comic book from his desk and spinning around on the chair while leafing through it. "Hah? You're still tired?"

  "My teachers are giving me lots of homework, and I have to study for the exams next month," Vicente said, yawning. "And I nearly cracked my head open after falling off the bed. I need to recover from all that."

  "You did not crack your head open."

  "But I nearly did, and it still hurts." He pulled the blankets over himself. Leon muttered something about over-dramatic older brothers, and that was all he heard before he drifted back to sleep.

...

  The incessant, unfortunately-familiar feeling of poking at his sides woke Vicente up a second time. He cracked an eye open to see Ling, beaming with excitement. "Wake up! Wake up!" She hollered, pulling the blanket off of him. "Brother made breakfast and I want to go outside!"