Cat Boy

10 | callisto

Daehyun has absolutely no idea what Vernon's doing.

Leftover bits of her earlier excitement had prevented her from being bored for the time she sat on his bed, watching him with brimming-over interest, but her patience rarely lasts more than five minutes, and it's already been ten. Reclines is a better-suited verb for what she's doing now—one foot propped up against the empty cardboard box, one dangling over the side of the bed and occasionally poking a fully focused Vernon in the back.

"How much longer?" she asks petulantly, propped up on her elbows. The muscles cording the back of her neck and the top of her spine have begun to ache, and she briefly leans her weight on her right arm to massage them with her other hand. "If assembling a telescope took so long, you should've gotten over with it before I came."

"You weren't supposed to be here until half an hour later," he reminds her with a patience that, from the tone of his voice, is wearing thin. "Blame your enthusiasm, not my telescope-assembling skills."

"There's no such thing as telescope-assembling skills." She closes her eyes and flops down on the bed. In a way, she supposes it is kind of her fault, since she's always way too early to everything. What's not her fault is being a bit too excited to stargaze through a real, actual telescope. Who wouldn't be excited?

"Done," Vernon calls, and she hops up. He leans over the telescope, fiddling with its lens. The mouth of the telescope is pointed at the night sky out of the attic window, a quaint window with a pentagonal shape. The wall goes up to a certain height and then inclines at an angle, like the open-book roof of an attic. Well, his room practically is an attic. Simply standing in it is an experience in itself, like half of one wall is bending towards you as if in a bow.

The room is dark, the only light coming in from the small attic window. Tiny glow-in-the-dark stickers pepper the ceiling, tiny points of illumination like stars, but the starlight is bright today.

"I have to say, the two of you clean up pretty well for a bunch of boys." The tripod stand is fixed on a creasing, semi-folded carpet on which Vernon kneels. Daehyun goes up to stand next to him, peering out at the sky curiously. "Can you see the moon from up here?" she asks. "Don't the other buildings get in the way?"

"Why don't you see for yourself?" he says, and she smiles. He scoots to the side, patting the space to his right, and she slips in behind the telescope. His skateboard, which she had been playing with earlier, lies on her other side. The space next to the bed is very confining—his room is small, in a comforting way—and she feels like she's sitting in a tiny, homelike space, like an igloo or a pillow fort.

Hansol taps a smaller cylindrical piece attached to one end of the scope. "Look in here," he instructs, and she obeys, her arm brushing his as she does. She's too absorbed in the wonder that is the sight she's seeing to notice him stiffen, then relax, like someone diving into cold water and take a few seconds to get used to the sensation.

She closes one eye and looks into the lens. The moon is full and bright and beautiful, and her lips part in awe as she takes in the sight of all its craters and the shimmery bits, like silvery dust coating it. It's not like she hasn't seen HD pictures of the moon before, but seeing it through an actual telescope, albeit a smaller one, is a novelty that doesn't feel like it's going to wear away quickly. Somehow, it feels almost personal.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Vernon asks, tone wistful, and she pulls away from the sight. She can barely see anything in the dark, but his face is aglow in the moonlight, like a firefly. "Lucky you picked the day the full moon was going to bloom."

One corner of her lips goes up in a smile, and he glances at her quizzically. "Nothing," she says, still smiling, and looks away briefly before turning her face back to him. "You said 'bloom'. I've never heard someone saying the moon blooms."