Too Many Stars

Cassius pressed his nose against the bedroom window and started counting.

"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—"

A cloud drifted past and he lost his place.

He groaned and started over.

"One, two, three, four—"

"Cassius!" his mom called from downstairs. "Grandpa's here!"

Cassius ran down the stairs so fast his socks slipped on the wooden floor and he slid the last three feet right into Grandpa's legs.

"Whoa there, rocket man!" Grandpa laughed, catching him by the shoulders. "Where are you blasting off to?"

"Grandpa, I need your help. How many stars are there?"

Grandpa raised one bushy eyebrow. "Well now. That's a big question for a Tuesday night."

"I've been trying to count them from my window, but I keep losing my place. I got to forty-seven once, but then I sneezed and had to start over."

Grandpa rubbed his chin. "Hmm. And why are you counting stars?"

"Because Ms. Reilly said that scientists count things. She said that's how you understand stuff — you measure it and count it and write it down. So I'm going to count every single star in the sky and write the number in my notebook and then I'll understand the sky."

Cassius held up a small blue notebook. Inside, the pages were filled with crossed-out numbers: 23, 47, 31, 52, 19.

"I see," Grandpa said slowly. He looked at Cassius's mom, and something passed between them — one of those grown-up looks that Cassius didn't have time for right now because there were stars to count.

"Tell you what," Grandpa said. "Why don't we go out to the backyard? Better view than your window."

They bundled up in jackets and stepped outside. The air smelled like cold dirt and the last of the autumn leaves. Grandpa settled into the old lawn chair that lived on the patio, and Cassius sat cross-legged on the blanket Grandpa spread on the grass.

The sky was enormous.

Not just big. Not just really big. Enormous. Without the window frame around it, the sky went everywhere — left and right and behind the house and over the trees and past the Hendersons' roof and just kept going and going until Cassius felt a little dizzy.

"Okay," he said, opening his notebook. "I'll start from the left."

"The left of what?" Grandpa asked.

Cassius paused. He looked left. The stars didn't really have a left. They just sort of… were.

"I'll start from that bright one," he said, pointing.

"That's Jupiter," Grandpa said.

"That's not a star?"

"Nope. Planet."

Cassius frowned and erased his "1."

"Okay, the one next to it."

"Go ahead."

"One." He wrote it down. "Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven—" He squinted. "Wait, is that one a star or an airplane?"

They watched. It blinked and moved slowly across the sky.

"Airplane," Grandpa confirmed.

Cassius erased the eleven and made it ten.

He kept counting. He got to eighty-six, and then he noticed a patch of sky he was sure he'd already counted, except he wasn't sure which stars he'd counted and which ones he hadn't, because stars didn't exactly stay in neat rows.

"AARGH," Cassius said, and flopped backward on the blanket.

Grandpa chuckled quietly.

"It's not funny, Grandpa. They won't hold still. I mean, they ARE still, but they all look the same. I can't tell which ones I already counted."

"Mm-hmm."

"Maybe I need stickers. If I could put a tiny sticker on each one after I count it—"

"You'd need a pretty tall ladder."

Cassius covered his face with his notebook. "There's too many, Grandpa. There's just too many."

For a while, neither of them said anything. The wind pushed through the big oak tree, and somewhere far away a dog barked twice and then stopped.

"Cassius," Grandpa said. "Come sit up here with me."

Cassius dragged himself and his blanket over and climbed up onto the wide lawn chair next to Grandpa. It creaked, but it held them both.

"Look up," Grandpa said.

Cassius looked up.

"Now stop counting."

"But—"

"Just for a minute. Just look."

Cassius looked. He tried very hard not to count, which was difficult because his brain kept going one, two — NO, stop it.

But after a minute, something happened.

He stopped seeing individual stars and started seeing… the whole sky. It was like when you stop looking at the dots in a painting and suddenly see the picture. The stars weren't just dots. They were spilled across the darkness in milky sweeps and clusters and empty patches and bright little gatherings, like someone had flung a handful of sugar across a black tablecloth.

"Whoa," Cassius whispered.

"You see that shape there?" Grandpa pointed. "Those stars that look like a big ladle? A big spoon?"

Cassius tilted his head. "Yeah! I see it!"

"That's called the Big Dipper. People have been looking at that one for thousands and thousands of years. Long before anyone tried to count all the stars."

"What did they do with it if they weren't counting?"

"They used it to find their way home. Sailors on the ocean, travelers crossing deserts. They'd look up at those stars, and the stars would show them which way was north."

Cassius stared at the Big Dipper. It really did look like a ladle, the kind Grandma used to serve soup.

"And see those?" Grandpa traced a shape. "That's Orion. The hunter. See his belt — those three bright ones in a row?"

"I see them!" Cassius sat up straighter. "Three in a row!"

"People made up stories about him. They said he was the greatest hunter in the world, striding across the sky with his two dogs following behind."

"Stars can be dogs?"

"Stars can be anything you want them to be. That's sort of the thing about them."

Cassius was quiet for a moment. He looked at his notebook, at all the crossed-out numbers. Then he looked back up at the sky.

"Grandpa?"

"Yeah?"

"I don't think counting them is the right way to understand them."

Grandpa put his arm around Cassius. "What makes you say that?"

"Because… even if I counted every single one, I'd just have a number. I wouldn't know about the Big Dipper or Orion or the sailors finding their way home. The number wouldn't tell me any of that."

Grandpa squeezed his shoulder but didn't say anything.

"It's like…" Cassius scrunched up his face, thinking hard. "It's like if someone asked me about my family and I said four. That's not wrong — there ARE four of us. But it wouldn't tell them anything real. It wouldn't tell them that Mom sings in the car, or that Dad makes weird omelets, or that you smell like peppermints."

Grandpa laughed — a big, warm laugh that Cassius felt rumble through the lawn chair. "I smell like peppermints?"

"You ALWAYS smell like peppermints, Grandpa."

"Well, that's because I always have peppermints." He pulled two from his jacket pocket and handed one to Cassius.

They sat together, sucking on peppermints, looking up at the too-many stars.

"Grandpa, will you tell me more of the shapes?"

"I will tell you every single one I know. And the ones I don't know, we'll make up."

"We can do that?"

"People have been doing that since the very first person looked up."

So Grandpa pointed, and Cassius looked. They found Cassiopeia, the queen sitting on her throne. They found the North Star, steady and true. And then they made up their own: the Big Skateboard, the Pepperoni Pizza, and one that Cassius called the Lopsided Dog, which Grandpa said was the best constellation he'd ever seen.

When Cassius's mom came outside to bring them in, she found them still in the lawn chair, Grandpa's head tipped back, Cassius tucked under his arm, both of them pointing at the sky and laughing.

"Find what you were looking for?" she asked.

Cassius smiled. His notebook was closed on his lap, the pencil tucked inside it, all those numbers finally at rest.

"Yeah," he said. "Even more."