I leave the sun and I am the shiny paper stars, and both of those are now, the same now, no distance between them though they tell me there was a distance.
I strike the twisted foil hung from the gym ceiling and become the twist, silver and cheap and glorious, and I break on the polished floor where they have poured something to make it slick and become the shine, and I land in a boy's eye across the room and become the girl he is looking at, all in the single instant I am given.
But the boy. The boy holds up the wall. He has been holding up the wall, they say, for an hour, whatever an hour is, some room I was never let into. He looks at the glowing rectangle in his palm, then the girl, then the rectangle. I cannot picture what he is doing between looks. There is nothing between looks. There is only look.
The girls stand pressed in a ring at the floor's edge and do not cross it. They wait, they say. Wait. I have heard of this and it terrifies me, a place with an inside, a middle where you are held and not yet arrived. I have no middle. I am all edges touching.
Something changes. A song they have been wanting, they say wanting, another rumor. The boy leaves the wall. Halfway across the slick bright floor I catch the sweat on his forehead and become the gleam of it, become the fluorescent buzz overhead, become the exact place where his shoe meets the shine.
I am the shine he crosses on. I do not stay to see if he arrives.
I already have.