Eleven Fifty-Two and Counting
At eleven fifty-two, Aliyah sat cross-legged on her bed with the Memory book open across her knees. Tomorrow she would be nine. Eight years of pages were done: the lost tooth, the concert, the beach with the crooked sandcastle. One page stayed stubbornly blank.
"What belongs on a last page?" she asked Cat. Cat blinked slowly from the pillow, which was not an answer, but Aliyah had a hundred more questions anyway. Should it be a drawing? A song lyric? A list of everything she had learned? Each idea felt almost right, and almost wasn't enough.
Her pencil snapped. The clock said eleven fifty-seven. Aliyah's chest went tight and hot, the way it did when feelings got bigger than the room. She picked up the book, carried it to the window seat, and Cat leaped up beside her, tail curling around her wrist.
Outside, streetlamps glowed over the sleeping street. Aliyah breathed slowly, in and out, until her chest loosened. Then she looked at the blank page, the window, and Cat, and understood the page was waiting for something she hadn't decided yet.
Four minutes remained. She could fill the page with what she saw right now, exactly as it was, or she could let Cat decide how the page began.
Aliyah chose the window. She drew the streetlamps in pink, the quilt of stars, and the tired curve of Cat's back in the corner. Her hand moved quickly and surely, and the worry fell away line by line.
At eleven fifty-nine she wrote one line underneath: Eight was a good year. The page finally looked like a page that belonged there. She felt it settle, the way a held breath settles.
The clock turned to midnight. Aliyah closed the book, and Cat bumped her forehead against Aliyah's chin. "Happy birthday to me," Aliyah whispered, and Cat purred against her collarbone.
