Give the heavens above more than just a passing glance

6:00 AM-9:00 AM

Nick felt the warm kiss of sunlight against his face, which came as a surprise. After comforting Dani through the night, the two fell asleep together in bed. But it wasn’t the comfort of his cushy mattress he felt against his back, rather the hard dirt and grass of solid ground.

He slowly opened his eyes and then squinted, nearly going blind from the bright glow in front of him. Huh? Why am I outside? He asked himself, turning over and trying to get his vision back.

“Nick.”

A familiar voice caught his ear and he sat up, looking around. He was in… a park? Yes, a very familiar public park, in his hometown. He hadn’t been here in years.

Not since…

“Nick.”

Oh, right. That insistent voice was still calling for him.

Nick turned to see Dawn standing next to him. It looked like she’d borrowed from Kim’s wardrobe, because she was wearing a school uniform. Not as fancy or pornographic as the ones Kim was **** to wear, though. It was a collared blouse the color of the sky, and a frumpy beige skirt her tail peeked out of. He recognized it instantly.

“That’s… Sunnyside’s uniform?” Nick asked, stunned. Dawn was wearing the uniform of the private elementary school they’d attended.

“Yup!” Dawn grinned and spun around to show off her outfit. “It’s been a while!”

“It still fits you?”

And like that her good mood soured.

“Even I’ve grown since elementary school, you jerk!” She scowled. “No, I had these made up for our date! Look!”

Nick looked down and realized he was wearing his old uniform as well, or at least the adult version of it. A blue shirt and beige pants. Nothing fancy (it wasn’t one of those private schools) but still a comfortable uniform separating his school from the others.

“So why are we here?” Nick asked, standing up and taking another look at the park. “You said you had these made up for our date, what do you mean by that?”

“Our date!” Dawn said, a little louder this time. “You and me! On a… a d-date!”

Nick took a second to process that. “Wait, you’re asking me out?”

“No!” She exclaimed. “…Okay, well, yes. But it’s only fair! Dakota got to spend the whole day with you, didn’t she? So why can’t I?”

“I mean, no one’s saying you can’t,” Nick clarified. “I’m just… surprised I guess. I really didn’t think you were the type of person who would be up for this sort of thing.”

Dawn’s face fell. “Because I’m cold, right?”

“Err… I didn’t mean…” Whelp, Nick had royally fucked up. “You just never showed an interest before,” he stammered. “That’s what you said, right? You were too young to be dating, and you had more important things to think about?”

Dawn winced at her own words being thrown back in her face. She remembered it like it was yesterday, that’s what she’d told him the very first time he asked her to be his girlfriend.

“…I know,” she mumbled, hanging her head. “That was different… back then, I was… look, it’s not important right now!” She shook her head. “This is our date! I spent 5000 BP on it, you know!”

“5000 BP!?” Nick’s jaw dropped.

Dawn nodded. “It was one of the options from the shop. 5000 BP buys me a 24 hour date with you. One I can customize however I wish. There’s this place, called Dream Alley. I used it to craft the perfect date for the two of us.”

“Dream Alley… Holly used that on our date!” Nick remembered. “It lets you create places from memory!”

“Exactly.” Dawn tapped her forehead and smiled. “So for someone like me who never forgets anything, it’s perfect.”

“So why here?” Nick looked around, not sure what they were doing at the park.

Dawn wrapped her hand around his, and lifted it to point towards a group of kids lined up in front of a building across the street.

“See anything familiar?” She giggled.

Nick squinted and they walked closer to get a better look. The kids were all wearing the same uniform they were, and she was right, they did look familiar…

“Wait, that’s us!” He gasped.

He recognized his own face in the crowd, back when his hair was a lot blonder than the messy brown it was now.

“You were a lot cuter back then in your little uniform,” Dawn teased.

“I look like a complete dork! This is bullshit, you’re twisting things around!” Nick refused to accept that he looked like that as a kid.

“Sorry, but my memory is perfect. That’s 100% what you looked like in sixth grade.”

Sixth grade. That meant this was…

“But hey, it could be worse. Look at me.” Dawn nodded to the girl at the front of the line. “I was short even back then.”

Dawn may have been taller than her past self, but the younger version of her was still dwarfed by her classmates. In spite of that, she was cute as a button. Her hair was shorter, cut in a bob that framed her cherubic cheeks, and for once she was actually smiling.

“Oh yeah, you didn’t get glasses until middle school, I forgot…” It took seeing her as a child again, but Nick finally remembered she looked less like a nerd and more like a tomboy. It had been one of the things that had first attracted him to her.

“I had friends back then, too…” Dawn mumbled under her breath.

“Hmm?”

“No, sorry, it’s nothing,” she sighed, shaking her head. “Anyway, let’s get going! The show’s about to start!”

She led him across the street, and they shadowed their old class. Nick wasn’t sure what she had planned, or why she’d brought them to this specific memory. But given how focused she was, he didn’t feel comfortable asking.

Did she just want to come back here? I guess this was fun for the whole class, so maybe that’s why…?

The planetarium. Nick and Dawn had grown up in one of the only cities that still had a planetarium. They’d come here on their sixth grade field trip, and it had been surprisingly not as boring as he’d expected.

Is she just competing with Dakota over reliving the past? Nick wondered as he followed her into the building. Or does she really know…?

They took their seats, and the lights dimmed. They leaned back so they were staring at the ceiling, and watched the planets and stars swirl above their heads. Nick felt like he was back there, in that dark room. But instead of goofing around with his friends, he was here with Dawn.

“I’ve always loved stargazing,” Dawn murmured. The fact that she was talking surprised him. The Dawn he knew was such a diligent rules-follower that she would never interrupt a presentation like this. He turned to see her staring at him in the dark.

“I-I see…”

“It’s really interesting to see how the stars change every night. Did you know they’re a little different, every time? That’s what I hear, anyway. Even with my memory the changes are so gradual it’s hard to tell!”

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Because of the constellations and stuff.” Nick had taken one astronomy class in college, and the most memorable thing about that course was all the work he put into keeping Holly from flunking it.

“That’s what’s so strange about the Harem Hotel.” Dawn lowered her voice to a whisper.

“Huh? What are you talking about?” Nick looked at her in confusion.

“The stars. They’re wrong. I noticed it the first night here,” Dawn hissed. “The positions are all different, and I can’t make out any familiar constellations, or even the North Star, Polaris. That doesn’t make sense. Polaris should be visible anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. The fact we can’t see it at all means we must be on the Southern Hemisphere, but the stars are all wrong for there.”

“So what are you saying?” Nick asked.

“I’m saying that wherever we are, we aren’t on earth.” It was a pretty obvious thing for her to say. Nick was well-aware of the fact that they weren’t on earth. Sylvia had only said it about a million times. Even Dawn wasn’t that shocked.

But knowing something and being able to prove it scientifically were two entirely different things.

The two of them sat back and enjoyed the show, reminiscing about their childhood. When they were finished, it was almost nine.

“So what now?” Nick asked, turning to Dawn. She seemed a little anxious judging by the way her tail flicked back and forth.

“Now, well… now we need to eat breakfast!” Dawn decided. “I’m starving!”

She led Nick back to the park, where their class had already set up shop at the picnic tables. While Nick and Dawn would be eating their breakfast, the actual field trip had gone a little differently. The kids were eating lunch right now.

Which was exactly what Dawn had packed. Nick recognized the blue and black lunchbox she took out of her school backpack. He reached for his, only to see that it was empty.

“Um, Dawn…”

“Hmm?” Dawn looked up at him with a teasing smile. “Forgot your food again?”

Nick blushed. “You… you really do remember,” he stammered in embarrassment.

“Of course I remember,” she said, rolling her eyes. “How many times do I have to say it? Don’t worry. I packed enough for you, too. And this time I’ll give you more than just an orange.”

Nick blushed. His eyes instinctively traveled over to the kids eating a few feet away. He spotted himself sitting in the middle of the crowd with a glum look on his face and an empty tablecloth in front of him.

“My dad ordered me hot lunch,” he sighed, slumping down in his seat. “And I didn’t get to eat it until we got back to school. He’d had to watch the other kids finish their lunches while he starved.

The two of them watched the younger Dawn, sitting next to him, slide her eyes his way. She frowned a little and said something neither of them could hear, and then gave him an orange from her own lunchbox.

“I think that was it,” Nick said, turning back to his Dawn. “That orange. I think that’s when I really started crushing on you hard.”

“I kinda got that vibe too,” Dawn admitted sheepishly. “You weren’t as subtle as you thought you were. I guess that’s what you get for being nice, right?”

Nick’s face got even hotter. He really felt ashamed of what he’d done. “Look, Dawn, it’s not like-”

“I told you a thousand times already, we’re good,” Dawn assured him. “You were a hormonal kid. And, um, it’s not like… it’s not like my motives were EXACTLY the purest ones around.”

Nick stared at her in shock.

“…Maybe I gave you that orange because I liked you and I wanted you to like me back.”

“Dawn?!”

“It was just a crush!” Dawn hid her face in her hands. “I told you before, remember? I had a bit of a crush on you! Just a small one! And when I saw you were hungry, I saw a chance to do something nice and maybe get you to like me back!”

And yet, when her plan had succeeded, she still turned him down. Because past her wasn’t able to date.

Dawn sighed. “Look, Nick… back then, we were kids. We didn’t know what we were doing. We liked each other, but… that wasn’t enough.

She unwrapped her sandwich and pushed half of it towards him.

“But we aren’t kids anymore. We don’t have to be all awkward like that.” Her tail was flicking excitedly through the air. She was way more into this than he’d expected.

“Dawn…” Nick took the sandwich she offered him, and then noticed she’d given him something else, as well.

An orange.

He glanced at her blushing face and she turned away from him, pouting a little.

“This date… do you know why I wanted to go here? To the planetarium?” Dawn asked as they finished up their meal.

Nick shook his head. He had a pretty good idea, but he wanted Dawn to explain it directly.

“This was where we really… well, started, I guess. We weren’t that close in fourth or fifth grade, it wasn’t until sixth that you really started hanging out with me. …Competing with me, I mean.”

“Like I said, that was when I first really noticed I had a crush on you,” Nick explained, still feeling a little embarrassed. Even though his feelings for Dawn weren’t as intense as they once were, he’d gone a lot further with her in these last few weeks than he had in all the years they’d known each other.

And Dawn looked just as embarrassed as he did, though she tried to hide it better.

“Back then, I didn’t really play with the boys. You know, cooties and all that,” she joked. “But I guess even back then, you still had Dakota, huh?”

Remembering that chapter of his life was painful. But she was right. Dakota was still alive in the fall of sixth grade.

“She wanted to come to Sunnyside too, you know,” Nick murmured solemnly. “But her mom wouldn’t pay the tuition. Meanwhile, my stepmother wanted me to go here. You should have seen the tantrum I threw, being separated from her.”

“I can imagine. No wonder you always looked so lonely, even with the other guys in class.”

Nick couldn’t think of one real friend he’d made back then. It was only now, thinking about his past, that he realized how central Dakota was in his life. He tried to change the subject. “But hey, you were pretty popular! You had a lot of friends in class!”

A shadow crossed Dawn’s face. “It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

She gazed sadly at her past self, chatting with a bunch of the girls in her class.

“Dawn? Is something wrong?” Nick asked, not sure why she looked so solemn all of a sudden.

“Do you know why everyone was my friend back then?” Dawn asked quietly. “Because I was a star. I was the smartest girl in class, after all, and everyone was so impressed. I was cute, I was smart, and I was really athletic. Back in elementary school, that stuff made me practically the queen.”

Nick had to admit he felt that way a little about her, too. It was one of the many reasons his friends had teased him for confessing his feelings, because Dawn was so “out of his league” that he would never be able to win her over.

They hadn’t been wrong. But they’d been right for the wrong reasons.

“That was only in elementary school, though,” Dawn coldly finished.

“Huh?”

“It wasn’t that way when we got to middle school. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I was still cute, even with my glasses. And I still did my gymnastics. And of course, I was still a genius. In fact, it became even more apparent how much smarter I was than the rest of the school.”

She glanced down at her food. “And that was precisely the problem.”

“Dawn…”

She looked up at him. “Nick, quick question. Who was the most popular boy in sixth grade?”

“Um… Tyler?”

“Right. He ran the fastest, so all the girls liked him,” Dawn explained.

“Was that really why…?” That didn’t sound right to him.

“Yes. That was why. Elementary school girls are NOT that sophisticated. But what happened to Tyler when we got to middle school?”

“…Dawn, Dakota had just died, I really didn’t pay attention to-”

“He just became some guy. That’s it. Some guy. All the stuff people think is cool and popular in elementary school, it ends up not mattering as much when we grow up. And usually that’s a good thing.” Dawn sighed and shook her head. “But when it came to me… all my ‘friends’ who liked me because I was smart, they started being more interested in clothes and boy bands and stuff that didn’t really interest me. I realized that we weren’t friends because we liked each other, we were friends because we were all in the same class. But when we all started going to different classes and weren’t spending all our time together… we all just drifted apart.”

“Wow, I’m sorry… that must have been really difficult.” Nick hadn’t even noticed that. He’d been so busy dealing with his own shit that his friendships had just naturally collapsed.

“Being smart wasn’t enough to make friends anymore, I need to be social, too,” Dawn mumbled. “But I’ve never been good at that. I suck at making friends. And if that wasn’t enough, like I said, it was really becoming clear to everybody just how much more intelligent I was. My genius stopped being something that drew people to me, and started becoming something that would drive them away. I was just some nerd who everyone assumed thought she was better than everybody else!”

Dawn slammed her fist against the table, startling Nick. He stared at her questioningly, but she quickly regained her composure.

“Sorry for that,” she apologized, pushing up her glasses. “I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just… that part of my life gets me really frustrated.”

“And I guess me stalking you didn’t help, did it?” Nick sighed.

“…Well… if I’m being honest? At first… you liking me… I actually felt kind of flattered. I mean, I didn’t have any real friends, so your feelings… I kind of appreciated them,” she admitted. “But eventually it reached the point where I got really uncomfortable. I guess… you just crossed the line.”

“Again, I am so-”

“Stop apologizing! Like I said, it’s water under the bridge,” Dawn assured him. “It’s just… coming back here, looking at how we were back then… a part of me wishes I gave you a chance.”

Nick didn’t know how to process that. “…What?”

“W-Well, think about it. I told you before, on our last date, that I couldn’t go out with you back then because dating was for when you were grown-up, and had reached a stable point in your life. That’s why even though I liked you, I still rejected you.”

Dawn glanced away. “And my dad… he wouldn’t have been okay with it for the same reason. It would have gotten in the way of my studies.”

She slowly turned back to him, embarrassed by what she was about to suggest. “But… we don’t have to worry about that anymore, do we? I don’t have to study or anything. But just starting over, with all that history between us… it would be awkward. So I wanted to ask if we could try something.”

“Of course,” Nick agreed, curious where she was going with this. “Try what?”

Dawn bit her lip. “Let’s pretend like I didn’t reject you. Like we started going out in sixth grade. Instead of avoiding my feelings, I want to embrace them.” Her cheeks pinkened, and her tail wagged back and forth. “I want to do the things I never got to do when we were kids,” she admitted.

Then she leaned across the table and pressed her lips against his. Their kiss tasted like oranges.

She pulled back and let out a small moan.

“…I liked that better as our first kiss than the real one,” she admitted.