The Same Stuff as Stars by Katherine Paterson Page B

as if a slight breeze might just blow it off. There were rickety wooden steps leading to the door.
    â€œWhere you going, Angel?” Bernie was running to catch up with her.
    â€œShh. I just want to look—see if anybody lives in here.”
    â€œYou better not! It might be the man with the gun. He’ll shoot you dead if he catches you peeping in his house.”
    She ignored him, although her stomach gave a little flip at the thought of someone catching her in the act. Everyone knew it was against the law to be a Peeping Tom.
    The little window set in the door was dirty. She wiped it hurriedly with her sleeve and put her face against the glass. The inside of the trailer was dark, and in the shadows she could see a dark couch, a tiny oil stove, a sink, and books. Lots of books. No one was in sight, but it must be the star man’s house. Who else would have lots of books? Yes, there by the far wall was the long telescope, on its three legs. Barely breathing, she backed down the stairs. Bernie was standing several feet away, ready to run.
    â€œYou can relax, Bernie. Nobody’s home.”
    â€œI wasn’t scared,” he said.
    â€œI know you weren’t. I was just saying that.” And adding more to herself than to Bernie, “It wasn’t a dream.”
    â€œWhat’s not a dream?”
    â€œNothing.” She didn’t want to tell Bernie about the star man. She didn’t want to talk about him, much less ask Grandma about him. He was her wonderful secret. Just hers.
    ***
    That night she lay awake, staring out of the tiny window in the eaves. When it was pitch dark and the house silent except for Bernie’s wheezy breaths, she slipped out of bed, pulled on her jeans, and, with her sneakers in her hand, snuck down the stairs and out of the house. She sat down on the back stoop, pulled on her sneakers, and made her way toward a place where she now knew the fence rail was in ruins.
    She could see the star man’s outline against the night sky. He was hunched over the telescope in such a way that she could not tell where the man ended and the instrument began. What marvel was he pointing to up there in the sky? The black velvet sky alive with diamonds. Diamonds that were the light from whole systems of worlds millions of miles away, racing through the black emptiness of space for unimaginable years to come to her very own eyes this late-summer night.
    Did the stars know about her? Or was she truly nothing—not even a speck of dust—to whatever or whoever was there in those blazing, whirling worlds?
I’m here!
she called out silently.
It’s me, Angel Morgan.
    At first, he seemed not to know she was there. She didn’t dare speak out. He was still too close to a man from a dream, despite his very real trailer. You didn’t interrupt people in dreams; you waited to see what they had to say. Without taking his eye from the eyepiece, he spoke at last. “Did you know that always somewhere out there, there is a new wonder to be seen?”
    â€œNo.”
    He stood up. He had a lit cigarette in his right hand, which he put in his mouth. “There was a time,” he said after taking a deep drag and slowly blowing out the smoke, “there was a time I wanted to be the first person in the world to discover something in the sky. People do that, you know. People not so different from me. Just a few years back a man in Essex Junction discovered a nova. He looked for fourteen years. Every clear night for fourteen years.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth to cough, a rusty-sounding cough. She wanted to tell him not to smoke, that it wasn’t good for him, but she didn’t quite dare.
    â€œHow old are you, Angel?”
    â€œI’ll be twelve next April.”
    â€œSo fourteen years must seem a long time to you.”
    I guess.
    â€œIt takes the light from Andromeda two million years to get to earth.”
    â€œYou told me,” she