An hour and a half outside of a dry college town, the girl and her friends escape to the canyon, where the sky is unpolluted by city lights. They get there early enough to bask in the golden hour that makes the red rockfaces shine like bronze and stay late enough to watch all the stars around them blink into view. There are so many of them. Too many for the girl to count, too many that she has never seen before this night. When the night rolls deeper and longer—the clocks reading 10 p.m., then 11, then midnight—her friends finally manage to drag her back into the car. But despite the late hours, the girl feels more awake and alive than she did when the setting sun still kissed her face.

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Her heart is full of unspoken wishes and dreams; her mind races with a thousand unanswered questions. Starlight glistens in her eyes, and she hangs halfway out of the car, letting the wind slap her hair across her face, tasting the midnight air as she shouts for her friends in the backseat to join her, to gaze up at the speckled face of the Milky Way. The car rushes down the empty highway, and her friends beg her to sit down and close the window so that they don’t freeze. She doesn’t hear them above the wind that swallows her blissful laughter. Her arms spread wide to mimic the feeling of flight. A hand tugs on the back of her shirt to ensure she doesn’t fall out of the car, and she tilts her head back, wind-whipped tears streaming from her eyes and falling away into the night. She knows that the stars don’t listen to her wishes, that the constellations are nothing more than invisible lines slicing through the darkness that stretches across the sky. But tonight, she is daring enough to pretend that they can be more. That they do listen, and that they do answer.