Catch a Glimmer of Your Star

Constellations

The bright afternoon sun illuminated a landscape of rolling hills, corn fields, and vast green pastures. Power lines zipped by as their car sped down a rural highway that reminded Sunny of the road out of Faraway Town. Most of the other vehicles on this highway were delivery trucks. He wondered how many of them were carrying goods bound for Coup de Soleil factories.

Basil wore an anxious look. Sunny wanted to provide a comforting arm for Basil's shoulder, but that was not wise while driving.

Sunny gazed at the mounds of melting snow in the fields and got a quietly nostalgic feeling. He remembered the piles of shoveled snow that always covered the lawns along the sidewalks of Faraway in early spring. He remembered the big snow mounds in Faraway Park that Kel dove into, pretending it was a pile of leaves, only to find actual leaves buried underneath all that snow. He'd come out of the mounds with a face full of muddy autumn leaves that were half disintegrated after being unfrozen from their winter cage.

"It's nice out here," Sunny said. "Quiet."

The roar of their car driving on a cement road, and the rush of other cars speeding past at over eighty miles an hour, was actually anything but quiet. Still, he felt a certain silence away from the city, a silence born from the emptiness of everything.

"Yeah," Basil replied. "I kind of like it."

"It's great," Sunny said. "When we get to the rivers, it'll just be the two of us out in nature."

"Y—Yeah. Are you excited, Sunny? Scared?"

"Maybe a little. I don't know what we'll find out there! Wolves? Bears? Wendigos?"

Basil laughed softly. "We won't be that far out from a town or a village. We're going to take water samples from the parts of the rivers near the factories."

"I was thinking," Sunny mentioned, "what if guards from the factories see us and tell us to go away?"

"That could happen," Basil said. "We should keep a lookout for Coup de Soleil employees."

"You can count on me," Sunny promised. "I'll watch out for people while you collect those samples."

"Thanks, Sunny."

"No problem!"

No matter what, I want this project to work out and become successful.

Basil's spent so much time and effort on it, especially with all the hijinks he pulled to get access to my mom's car.

Sunny didn't want to use the word 'steal' to describe Basil driving his mom's car without her permission.

He was still angry at his mom. Basil had done every possible thing he could to prove that he was trustworthy with a car. His driving was practically safer than her own! And Ms. Sato had said that both of them were doing great with therapy. Granted, she didn't exactly say the words 'Sunny and Basil deserve to have the car to go out driving', but she did say that they were making remarkable progress with getting past their anxiety, their guilt, their repression, and their hallucinations, and that if they stayed on this track, those would not become recurring problems again.

Even after hearing all that, mom still refused to let Basil have her car.

I just don't understand what she's so worried about.

It's like she's paranoid that we're going to go commit a crime again.

The irony quickly hit him.

I guess...we kind of are right now...

Well, we wouldn't have had to hijack her car if she'd just let us use it in the first place!