Page 100 of Colliding with Ten

Mom hugged her. She held Ayla’s face in her hands. “He doesn’t usually allow people into his space.”

I shook my head, trying not to be embarrassed.

They went inside and closed the door. Then it was just us and several billion stars. I leaned back in the Adirondack chair. Autumn nights in the hills turned clear when the Santa Ana winds pushed haze out to sea. Firelight danced on her face, and I couldn’t stop looking at her.

“Did you know that the stars we’re seeing right now, the light left them years ago? Some of them, decades.” I pointed at one near the horizon. “I think that one is thirty light-years away.”

“So it took thirty years for us to see it?”

“Yeah, the light hitting our eyes started traveling before either of us was born.”

“So the star could already be dead?”

“Yup, and the universe looks different now.”

The fire cracked, sending a constellation of sparks upward, competing with the real ones. She was watching me. Her eyes seemed to be reading everything.

“You’re nervous.”

I chuckled. “Why do you say that?”

“Every time you are, you talk about the solar system or dinosaurs.”

“Or maybe I like talking about that.”

She gave me a skeptical look. “I think I’m right.”

I swallowed and chuckled. She was right. “Let’s make s’mores instead of talking about dying stars,” I said, deflecting.

I reached for the supplies: graham crackers, chocolate, marshmallows, and long metal skewers. I loaded a marshmallow onto a skewer and held it over the flame, rotating it. Ayla grabbed her own skewer and pushed the marshmallow into the fire.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Making a s’more.”

“That’s not how you make a s’more. You’re cremating it.”

“I like it charred.”

“Nobody likes a burnt s’more.”

She pulled her marshmallow out. It was black and collapsing. She sandwiched it between two graham crackers with a piece of chocolate, and the thing began to disintegrate. Chocolate smeared sideways. The marshmallow oozed out the back. She bit into it, and one of the crackers cracked in half and fell into her lap.

She held up the wreckage. “See.”

I looked at the abomination in her hands that bore no resemblance to a s’more. I pulled my golden marshmallow from the fire, and assembled it with care.

I held it out to her. “Try this.”

She took it and bit into it. The look on her face as her eyes closed, and the sound she made, told me everything I needed to know about what constituted a proper s’more.

She looked at her own s’more, and I knew she wasn’t going to be eating the rest of it.

“What do I do with this?”

I took it from her and chucked it into the bushes.

She chuckled. “You threw my s’more into a bush.”