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handheld GPS unit. Programming that included science and
technology made summer camp a more attractive option.
    The GPS was so new, there was still a film of
plastic on the screen. Gen clutched hers tightly in her hand,
afraid of dropping it in the snow and losing it until spring thaw.
Scott would kill her.
    When
they ’ d left their cabin, everything was so dark, Gen was
convinced Jeremy would take four steps away from her and disappear
in to the darkness. Now that her eyes had adjusted, the inky
blackness had changed into a landscape absent of any color, but it
was a landscape she could see. She hadn ’ t fallen down.
Yet.
    When they reached the edge of the field that held
horses in the summer, Jeremy stopped for a moment and rested his
arms on the fence, his face looking straight up to the sky.
    The stars looked like fragments of glass floating on
navy-blue ink, shimmering as wisps of clouds slid above them on the
frozen wind. Gen shivered, and Jeremy pulled her closer to him,
stepping sideways so his arms were bracketed around her and his
body blocked the bite of the air. She faced away from him, but
their faces were close, both of their heads tipped way back to try
to see the sky all at once.
    “ I
miss the stars when I ’ m at home, ” Jeremy said quietly. “ It ’ s a lot harder to see them with all the lights from the
city. It ’ s not like the sky here. ”
    Gen shook her head. There were very few things at
camp that could be reproduced elsewhere.
    He glanced at her,
then looked up again before he spoke to her. “ What? ”
    “ What, what? ”
    “ You ’ re frowning. ”
    “ I
am? I didn ’ t mean to. ”
    Jeremy looked at her
again and raised one brow, but he didn ’ t press her. He
waited, but she couldn ’ t find the words to explain how she felt, how she
didn ’ t want the camp sky to be the only sky that they saw
together. She was still
watching him, trying to think of the right thing to say when he
looked back up at the stars. Then she spoke fast, without
thinking.
    “ Remember two summers ago, when we were hiking to the
waterfall at night? ”
    He nodded but
didn ’ t look down at her.
    “ And
you said that the stars were dead, and the light that was just
reaching us was from stars that burned out millions of years
ago? ”
    That made him look at
her. “ Yeah, I remember. ”
    “ That ’ s not … that ’ s not actually
true. ”
    “ Really? ” He shifted back away from her a fraction so he could
see her. She had his full attention, and it made heat run through
her, warming her from the inside out. He was better than any glove
warmer she could buy.
    “ Yeah. When I was in Iceland, at the school where I stayed,
there were a bunch of astronomy students. I called them the star
dudes. ”
    “ Star dudes? ”
    “ Yeah, a dozen or so. They were doing research on polar
astronomy or something. Anyway, one of them told me that most facts
about stars posted online aren ’ t true, and that was
one of them. I didn ’ t quite fully understand it, but the short
version is, the stars we see with our eyes, without telescopes,
they aren ’ t dead. ”
    Jeremy ’ s eyebrows dropped a bit, and he moved closer,
listening to her. No one listened like him. He paid attention with
his whole body, watching and absorbing. He wasn ’ t waiting for his
turn to talk. He was waiting to understand everything she said,
like she was the center of his orbit in that moment.
    “ Stars are mortal, like us. They ’ re born, they age,
and they die. ”
    Jeremy nodded slowly. That probably sounded very
familiar to him.
    “ But
they live longer than we do, like, millions of years longer. Only a
few of the stars we can see from the earth without telescopes are
actually dying, and astronomers know exactly which ones they are.
And they ’ re still a few million years from burning out.
They ’ ll die, but not for a long while, long after
us. ”
    Jeremy looked up at the sky the same moment she did.
When he spoke, his