3.1 Waiting for Sterling

ELIZABETH

I remember a time I could see my father’s face.

I remember grey eyes. Mouth faintly smiling. Oddly enough, his hair was silver. I asked my mother about this once, and she said, “That’s right, it is. Starlight silver.”

Now all I see it a drawn up black hood. His face is always in shadow. It’s been like that since around the time Altair was born, but I’ve never questioned it. I’ve seen stranger things.

If my memory serves me right, I look nothing like him. I look nothing like my mother either, though my father always tells me I have her smile. I am made of all the residual features hidden through the generations: thick eyebrows, a stubborn chin, a long nose. Too tall for a girl. I’ve accepted that I’ll never be a beauty. But maybe, just maybe, it won’t matter to boys if they’ve known me a long time. If we’re best friends.

Just one boy, really.

“Hey.”

I turned to see Sterling peeking out from the trees. “Heeeey.”

“I saw something scary by the stream, we should check it out,” he said with his crooked smile, the left side of his mouth tugging higher than the right.

“Okay.” I felt my own mouth pulling into an answering smile as I hiked up my skirts and followed him into the woods.

“Where did Vega go?” That voice was my father’s.

“She ran off into the woods with Sterling Goth.” That was Altair’s. Tattle tale.

I was late for dinner, but I didn’t care. I crouched against a tree on the edge of the woods as my family’s voices drifted through the kitchen window. Waiting for Sterling to come back with his self-made fishing rod. He was taking a while and it was getting cold. I shuffled my feet against the dirt.

Maybe he wasn’t coming back. He often left me hanging. Just an hour more then, while I reflected on why I bothered waiting. There was nothing more fun than spending time with Sterling. I liked his laugh. His inappropriate sense of humor. The way he called me ‘Elizabeth’ rather than Vega.

An hour later I decided he wasn’t coming. I shrugged off the dull disappointment along with the stiffness in my back and started the trudge across the lawn.

The strange thing? More than anything, the feeling crushing me was the one of missing him.