Every Soul a Star by Wendy Mass

be interested in outer space.”
    I shake my head. “Why would you say that?”
    She scrunches her brows at me. “Well, besides the fact that you’re the assistant eclipse tour leader, you’re drawing pictures of aliens.”
    Okay, so she has a point. How can I explain that I never really thought of my aliens as living on other worlds, like they could possibly exist? I just think of them in some alternate reality, the same as wizards and monsters.
    “My name’s Stella,” she says, extending a frail hand.
    I reach out to shake it, afraid to hurt her. Her shake is surprisingly strong and firm.
    “My son and his wife are up front,” she tells me. “His wife doesn’t like it when I’m in the way too much. So I try to stay out of the way. You know that old saying, ‘your daughter’s your daughter all of your life, your son is your son till he gets a wife’?”
    I shake my head.
    “Yeah, well, it’s true. So be good to your momma while you’re young.” Then she pulls two long knitting needles out of her bag. A skinny red scarf is attached, clearly a work in progress. Stella starts knitting so quickly I can barely see the tips of the needles darting in and out of the yarn. I close my eyes and wonder again how I got here.
    I must have fallen asleep, but the clanking and hissing awakens me. Most people are sleeping, too. Stella isn’t in her seat. I see the restroom door says occupied, so she must be there. I lift up the armrest between our seats and slide out. We’re going pretty fast, and it’s hard to keep my balance, but I manage to make it to the front without too many “sorry’s” and “excuse me’s.”
    I kneel next to Mr. Silver, who is going through some papers. “I think there’s something wrong with the bus,” I whisper, so as not to alarm anyone nearby.
    “What do you mean?” he asks.
    “There’s a clanking and a hissing.”
    “Can you describe the clanking and the hissing?”
    “Well, the clanking sort of sounds like a clank, and the hiss is well, a hissing sound.”
    “I was kidding, Jack,” Mr. Silver says, laying his papers on the empty seat next to him. “Lighten up, kid, or it’s going to be a long two weeks.”
    Sometimes I’m not sure when people are joking. One of my many deficiencies.
    “We’re going to pull off for lunch soon, and I’ll have the driver check it out then, okay?”
    I nod. I’m starting to get a little nauseated facing backward, so I make my way down to my seat. Stella is back, her face buried in a book. As I get closer I realize with horror that it’s MY book she’s holding. Not the short story book—my sketch pad! I never, ever let anyone look through it. My first reaction is to grab it from her hands, and it takes a lot of self-control not to. I watch her expression as she turns each page slowly. She almost looks, well,
pleased.
    I clear my throat. Or I try to. It comes out more like a gargle.
    She looks up, then hoists herself out of her seat so I can squeeze by. “Well, my young friend. You are quite talented.”
    I don’t answer, I just take the pad from her hands and sit. She picks up her needles again.
    A few minutes later, the bus pulls off the highway and into a McDonald’s restaurant that says WE WELCOME BUSES on a big sign out front. The bus clanks and hisses to a stop. Everyone files out, and I’m the last one off. I linger to watch the bus driver unscrew a panel in the back, right under my seat. He tinkers in there for a few minutes and then goes back into the bus. He returns with a full toolkit. I want to watch, but the smell of hamburgers wafts through the air, and my stomach growls in response. I’m no match for the pull of the burger.
    When I get inside the restaurant I immediately flash back to the middle school cafeteria. I always hated walking in and not knowing where I should sit. Last year I wound up sitting with a few other kids who didn’t have a place to sit. It was better than sitting alone, but it’s tiring pretending