Shine (Short Story) Read Online Free PDF Page A

lunch box. Doesn’t it seem weird?” Ruth asked. “To not call something what it
is
?”
    Christina didn’t answer, and Ruth thought it was because she was still mad at her. But then she turned in her seat so that she was facing Ruth. “Maybe no one notices that you’re Black,” she said. “I mean, you act and sound just like
we
do.”
    Ruth thought about this. It couldn’t really be true, could it? If she dressed in pants and played baseball and did gross things that boys did, like have burping contests, would teachers not know that she was a girl? You couldn’t
unsee
what was right before your eyes, could you?
    Before she could mull on this further, Christina spoke again. “I never said I didn’t want to be your friend,” she said, her voice small. “It’s just…all of a sudden you’re at
my
school, with
my
friends, and I thought…I thought…” She raised her hand to the window and spread her fingers like a starfish. “What if they liked you more than they like me?”
    Ruth didn’t know what to say. It was the first time she realized that a person might look like Christina, and live in a fancy home, and dress in designer clothing, and have everything her heart desired, and still go to sleep at night worrying.
    Maybe we
are
more alike than we’re different,
Ruth thought.
    —
    When Ms. Thomas turned off the lights in the classroom, everyone got quiet. Then she flicked them back on again. “Now,” she asked, “how long did it take for the light to come back?”
    It was instantaneous, immediate. There was probably a word for faster-than-a-heartbeat but Ruth didn’t know it.
    “Light moves fast. It can move 186,000 miles per second,” Ms. Thomas said. “The reason it seems like we see light the instant I turn on the switch is because light is so quick, and because we’re so close to it. But some light comes from much farther away—light from stars. They’re so far away, in fact, that we don’t even measure the distance in miles. We measure it in light-years—the amount of time it takes for light from that star to reach us, on earth. The reason stars look so small in the night sky is because they’re so far away from us.”
    Ms. Thomas talked about the star that was closest to earth—the sun. She made Marcus stand at the front of the class with a flashlight and told him to turn it on. “If he was on the sun, and turned on a very bright flashlight…and we were all waiting in the classroom, we wouldn’t see that light for eight minutes.
That’s
how far away the sun is from us.” The next closest star was called Proxima Centauri. It was 39.9 trillion kilometers away from us, or 4.2 light-years, which meant that it would take four years—not just eight minutes—for Marcus’s flashlight to reach us on earth from there.
    Ms. Thomas said that when we look at a star, we’re looking backward in time. We’re seeing a moment that happened millions of years ago.
    Ruth thought about that. She knew Marcus’s little flashlight wasn’t powerful enough, but even so. What if there were kids on another planet who, years from now, saw it flash? What if, in the future, they had a piece of the moment Ruth was living right now?
    It made her feel like yesterday and tomorrow weren’t all that far away from each other.
    Then Ms. Thomas gave everyone a toilet paper roll and a circle of black paper. Each student could choose to create either the Canis Major constellation or Orion. Ruth looked over and saw Maia pick Orion. She reached for the other one.
    They had to trace the spiky limbs of the constellations, and poke tiny holes in at their joints to make the stars. Ruth carefully drew the T of Canis Major, and its split legs. It looked to her like a stick figure without a head. She used a pin carefully to mark the stars. Then with Ms. Thomas’s help she affixed the black circle to one end of the roll, with electrical tape to seal the edges. When everyone in the class had finished, Ms. Thomas gave each of