Shine (Short Story) Read Online Free PDF

them a small penlight and pulled the drapes shut and turned off the classroom fluorescents. Everyone lay on the floor, shining their penlights through the toilet paper rolls, projecting their constellations onto the ceiling.
    Ruth felt someone lie down beside her, and she turned to find Ms. Thomas staring up at the ceiling. “You see that star in the middle on top?” she asked, pointing, and Ruth nodded. “That’s called Sirius. It takes light from that star eight and a half years to reach us here.”
    “That’s how old I am,” Ruth said.
    “Well, then.” Ms. Thomas laughed. “If you can see it in the night sky, you’re looking at light that’s the same age as you.”
    Ruth liked the idea of a star that she had something in common with. She wondered if she could convince her mother to let her out on the fire escape tonight to try to find it.
    “It’s easy to find Sirius,” Ms. Thomas was saying, “because it’s the brightest star we can see.” She rolled to a sitting position and squeezed Ruth’s shoulder. “Sometimes, it even casts a shadow.”
    The whole rest of the day Ruth found it hard to concentrate. She kept looking out the window at the cars below, and the people walking their dogs, and the ladies pushing strollers. She pictured a world bigger than the classroom, bigger than Manhattan, bigger than the boundaries of her imagination.
    —
    The scariest part of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test was climbing the rope that hung from the ceiling of the tiny gymnasium. There were two: one with knots, and one without. Ruth was worried she couldn’t even shimmy her way up the one with knots. You had to excel at all the sections: the shuttle run, the one-mile run, the curl-ups, the pull-ups, the rope climb, the V-sit reach. If you did, you got a gold certificate as an award.
    Ruth, who got straight As, didn’t like failing at anything, even gym class.
    Because of their last names, it was Maia’s turn just before Ruth’s. She picked the rope with the knots (girls had a choice, boys didn’t) and made it halfway up before she started to panic. Her eyes squirreled shut and her face went red and she clutched the rope like it was a lifeline. Even when Mr. Yorkey, the gym teacher, told her to come on down, she couldn’t unhook herself. It took two other teachers to help pry her off the rope, and when Maia reached ground level the other girls flocked around her like worker bees to the queen. Lola was chosen to help walk Maia to the nurse’s office.
    When it was Ruth’s turn, she wiped her hands on her shorts and pulled with all her might to anchor her feet to the bottom knot. Then she closed her eyes and inched her right hand up to the next highest knot, and then her left, and then she crunched her legs up until her feet found their next hold. She did this again, picturing herself as a caterpillar, bunching and relaxing, concentrating only on getting to a knot higher than the one Maia had reached. When her hand reached up to grab the next knot and instead she found the bell on the ceiling to ring, signaling that she’d reached the top, she was surprised. She skittered down the rope, flushed and proud, and imagined coming home with that gold certificate. Mama would put it up on the refrigerator.
    About fifteen minutes later Maia walked back into the gymnasium, this time accompanied by the school nurse. Ruth heard the nurse say words like
panic attack
and
heights
and
sue,
and Mr. Yorkey agreed to let Maia sit out the rest of the test, and to be his assistant instead. He showed her how to work the stopwatch, and she sat on the start line of the mile run (eight laps around the gym track).
    “Seamus, you’re up,” Mr. Yorkey said. “Ruth, on deck.”
    Ruth stood awkwardly next to Maia, not sure if she should say something like
I hope you’re feeling better now
. But she didn’t know how without it coming out sounding like Ruth was lording over her the fact that she had rung the bell and Maia hadn’t,