Trapped In My Dreams

1. Shooting Stars

1. Shooting Stars

Tammy

I love watching stars. You would think that a semi- rich girl with hundreds of dollers at her disposal would spend the couple thousand on a teloscope and maps of the constelations. Or maybe books, books, and more books on space. But I don't. I just went out one day, and saw a bunch of space posters that looked really awsome. Even with the national geographic logo on the bottom. I knew I just had to have those posters. I covered my whole bedroom ceiling with them, and started collect more posters, until every inch of open wallspace in my room was plastered with a poster of a nebula or galexy or planet.

That's why it must have been so easy for me to get into this habit of watching stars. I was in my backyard, laying on a very weedy hill. My dad would have loved for all ten of our acres to be perfectly manicured, but I had pleaded with him to leave a little back corner of the yard for me, somewhere to start a garden or to lay on my back and watch stars. Below me were my flower beds, which were still a bit yucky because of the melting snow and all the rain we had been getting lately. They were pretty barren, just some dried stems of flowers and lots of little green weeds. In the moonlight, they looked spooky and silvery. I was too lazy to plant some seeds after school, so my favorite place in the world would have to wait until tomorrow, which was Saturday. My hill was another story. I had already come through and scattered it with weeds, but the pretty type of weed, the kind that is low and has little lacy flowers hta ttickle your skin in the most enchanting way. But my back didn't feel them yet.

My stars were twinkling above me. I'd tried to memorize some of the constellations or clusters or galexies, but when people talked about constellations, I can never really see them. The sky is just a pretty jumble of stars to me. I was sqinting at the sky that night, because the moon was full, and too bright for me to see when I looked for the cosmos. Then I saw something. It was a comet, a shooting star. It left a firey streak in the sky. This was worth it, sitting out in the dark and cold in a tee shirt and jeans, looking at the sky. 

It hadn't seemed very cloudy that day, but as I watched, clouds started rolling in. I was trying to decide whether or not I should go in, because I didn't want to fall asleep out here and get soaked, when the wind started up. The stars lost their twinkle a bit. I started getting up. If a storm was coming and I stayed out any longer, my dad was going to explode on me. My mom would just press her lips together and ignore me like she always did. I didn't care much though. She was the one with the paycheck, not dad. He worked as a CEO's assistant while my mom was a docter. Her turning a blind eye to me was a kinda good thing.

I was standing on my hill, facing my house when I felt the electricity in the air spark. I prayed it wasn't lightning. It was only spring, way to early for that. Spring gave you rain, summer gave you thunder, fall brought the wind, and I hated winter because of the cold air and the snow. So there shouldn't be any lightning, I told myself. I gingerly wiped off my pants and my shirt. Most of the lights in the house were off, except for my dad's study and my bathroom. I started walking down the hill.

Then I felt like I was on fire. Square in my chest was the end of a bolt of lightning. It was there for half a second and then it was gone. I could smell my singed shirt, singed hair, singed eyebrows. I saw the brown ashy marks right in the center of my white tee. I felt it in every inch of my skin. I just lay there, waiting for the pain to go away.