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ever hug me when it wasn’t a special occasion or I wasn’t crying, or would ever be as open with me as she was with Scott.
    One night in February, though, it was Ariel’s voice that pulled me from deep inside a bad dream. Waking breathlessly in my bedroom, I thought she was part of my sleeping mind, because I had dreamt of Ariel before. In those dreams, we were real friends who touched and laughed together where everyone could see us.
    “Ariel?” I said in confusion when I spotted the mirage of the person moving about my room.
    “Shhh,” she glanced back at me as she went through my things without asking. “Don’t wake everyone up. I want to show you something. Where are your warm clothes? It’s cold.”
    “Where are we going?” I asked a few minutes later, after I had pulled my clothes over my nightgown and Ariel was leading me away from the house by flashlight.
    “Just up here,” she replied, and I could barely see her smile in the light that cast upward toward her face. “Okay,” she came at last to a stop, clicking the flashlight off, and, the moon only a sliver above us, it was as dark of a night as night ever got. “Look up.”
    Despite her specific instruction, I looked to Ariel first, but I couldn’t see her standing right beside me, so I did as she told me, glancing to the sky to find the same stars that were always there. Wondrous as always, they were no more wondrous, and nothing that wouldn’t be there the next night at nine o’clock, instead of at three o’clock in the morning.
    Remembering Ariel had been living downtown, though, and in Boston and Chicago and other big cities before that, it occurred to me the stars over a country sky might be a remarkable thing for her, so I squinted hard, trying to see what she saw that put such excitement in her voice.
    It was then that the first light streaked across the sky.
    “What was...?” Before I could finish asking, another light streaked overhead, and another, until there was nothing but a blitz of stars, hundreds of wishes waiting to be made to change the course of the world.
    “Nan said you used to love to look at the sky,” Ariel whispered as one final light dashed over our heads, leaving a trail to slowly fade away, and, dropping my gaze, I looked for her again in the dark night.
    “I do,” I whispered.
    “It’s a meteor shower,” Ariel answered the question I never got around to asking. “It’s a really good one.”
    It was good. I had never seen anything like it. It had been a long time since I had stared into the stars like that. It had been a long time since I had remembered to look up at the sky at all.
    More remarkable than what I had seen, though, was how it felt, knowing Ariel had discovered something I hadn’t told her and had woken me in the middle of the night to show me something I would have otherwise missed.
    “You and Nan talk about me?” I questioned, and, for a moment, with no other soul around and winter’s cold holding nature in its quiet clutches, there was the deepest silence I had ever known.
    “She talks about all of you,” Ariel returned at last, and it sounded careful, as if she didn’t know how much she should say. “You’re important to her.”
    Though it wasn’t the answer I was hoping to hear, I didn’t know what answer I wanted enough to tell the difference, so I decided, for the moment, it was sufficient in meeting my curiosity.
    “Is it over?” I asked, eyes going to the sky in search of more of the spectacle when I could still see nothing closer to the ground.
    “No,” Ariel responded. “There will be a few more before sunrise. That had to have been the best of it, though. We got lucky.”
    I felt lucky. For a moment, with her, I felt like I wasn’t just waiting for the chores to need doing or for the next bad news. It felt like there was life on the ground beneath that endless, mysterious sky, and Ariel and I were living it together.
    “Can we stay a while longer?” I questioned,