Ellie Bennett
Will stands at the edge, bouncing once, twice, just enough to feel the springs answer him. “No, it’s too steady,” he says. “Planes blink.”
“That one’s blinking.”
“That’s because you’re blinking.”
Aster laughs, a short sound, surprised into being.
They’ve been coming out here most nights since school finished and time started to feel wide again. The trampoline sits at the far end of Aster’s garden, the grass around it worn down by years of overconfident landings and rough-and-tumble dares: two boys flinging themselves into the air to see how much force they could survive. The safety net came down after Will launched himself through it, tearing both the fabric and the ligaments in his ankle. After that, instinct filled in; they learned where the edges were by feel. You didn’t need a net if you trusted your own sense of momentum not to overstep.
Inside, parents move through the kitchen, outlines softened by warm overhead light. They don’t pause at the window, don’t watch the other side of the garden where the trampoline rises and falls in time with the breath of their sons.
“There,” Will says, pointing. “That one. First star.”
Aster squints, closing one eye and then the other, drawing a small hum from the back of his throat – a placeholder for certainty.
Will drops down hard beside him. The mat dips under their combined weight, then adjusts, finding them again. “Make a wish.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“It is if it’s the first one.”
Aster turns his head slightly. Their temples are almost touching. He can feel the heat of Will’s skin, the way it radiates even without contact, the faint sting of yesterday’s sunburn still trapped there. “You don’t know it’s first.”
“You always do this,” Will huffs, not annoyed, not smiling either. “You wait too long and then say it doesn’t count.”
Aster’s mouth quirks. “I like knowing what things are. You’ve gotta be sure, you know?”
“Yeah,” Will says. “You like deciding. And being in charge.”
Aster bumps him with his shoulder, harder than necessary, a small sideways protest. Will lets it happen. They settle again, pressed up along their arms and thighs. Together, they watch the sky finish what it started, the blue deepening like a bruise under the poke of curious fingers.
Will and Aster have been friends long enough that no one remembers the beginning. There are photos, somewhere: two kids in op-shop t-shirts, arms thrown around each other’s shoulders, grinning, teeth missing in different places. Still, no one can point to when it became them. They simply appear together in every memory.
For a long time, they are the same age in every way that matters. They misjudge the world in the same way. They want the same things: skateboards, and Beyblades, and the shadow of someone familiar running down the street asking if the other can please come out to play. They sit cross-legged on warm concrete trading Weet-Bix cards – glossy rugby players bent at the corners, duplicates bartered like currency in a country all of their own. It lasts long enough to feel fixed, as if time has agreed to look the other way for a while, as if growing up will happen to other people first.
They keep playing together because they always have, and because no one tells them to stop. ‘Student athletes,’ the adults say, pleased with the balance implied by the phrase – academics and ambition in tidy proportion. Their bodies are handled by people who know exactly where to press, where to pull, how far is too far. They learn when to slow down, when to push through, when pain means progress and when it means weakness.
They also learn, early, how to be near each other without making a thing of it. Because making a thing of it would require time they do not have.
Alone, discipline loosens. Their bodies remember other possibilities, are exhausted enough to be soft. They sprawl.
Travelling for tournaments, somewhere at the top of the North Island, they take the bed farthest from the door without discussion; the other remains unused, sheets still neatly tucked, a place to dump their bags. Weekends are spent in borrowed rooms, identical hotel carpets patterned to forgive spills and footprints, air-conditioning rattling through the night.
Will and Aster fall asleep facing away from each other, slack with relief at being able to rest, and wake up tangled – one leg slung over the other, an arm heavy across a chest, breath warm and shared. In the morning, trained to wake before their alarms, the sky is pale and unfinished. The first star is long gone. Their coach’s barely-more-than-bread toast and watery Milo wait downstairs.
Summer eases things. Days stretch and blend into each other, made slippery by sweat that pools behind knees, in the hollow of the lower back, at the hairline. There is always something to do, though none of it urgent. Somewhere to go – someone’s house, someone’s driveway, someone else’s idea. Barefoot visits to the dairy on the corner, ice-blocks melting faster than they can eat them, under a sun the colour of kōwhai flowers. They stretch out on the floor with a fan pointed vaguely in their direction and let it decide who cools down first.
Winter snaps things into place. A small shared life assembles itself overnight: half-empty water bottles on the nightstand, unwashed socks kicked off into corners, two toothbrushes standing side by side in a paper cup. There is a thrill to it, this unsupervised tenderness. No one checks in while they try on domesticity, life a few sizes too big. Rules are invented and obeyed immediately: the floor is lava, the couch an island. A line is drawn and crossed without ceremony.
Will lies on the bed, legs crossed at the ankles, complaining about training. His voice has that end-of-day softness, like a favourite pyjama shirt.
“They’re changing the drills again,” he says. “Like it’s the drills that are the problem.”
Aster nods from where he’s sat on the floor, his back against the bed, stretching his hamstrings because he’s supposed to. His body has started speaking up in new ways. Will’s foot rests briefly against his shoulder blade, then stays there. Closeness can be incidental. It does not have to announce itself to count.
They talk about anything. About their dream cars, about which guys from the team claim to have lost their virginity. When one speaks, the other already knows where the sentence is going, interrupting only to agree. They speculate endlessly. They talk about space the way boys talk about things they can’t touch: casually, inaccurately, with confidence. Black holes. Wormholes. How long it would take to die if you drifted far enough that no one could reach you.
“Instantly,” Aster says.
“That’s not true.”
“You’d freeze.”
“You wouldn’t even feel it.”
“You’d feel it for a second.”
Will goes quiet, contemplates.
Then: “You could take your helmet off.”
Aster imagines it – the deliberate act, the choice of it, the silence rushing in. He doesn’t say what he’s thinking. Only shrugs. Will’s foot presses a little more firmly into his back. Touch between them is shorthand. Sometimes a nudge means stop. Sometimes it means don’t go anywhere yet.
They like the idea of satellites best: objects that stay aloft because they’re moving fast enough not to fall. Momentum as mercy. Keep going, keep circling what you’ve been given and you won’t have to think about the drop.
Night thickens around them. The room dims.
Phones glow between them. One goes dark, set face-down on the mattress, and they scroll shoulder to shoulder, leaning against the headboard, faces illuminated by an equal spotlight. Videos play out loud. Someone laughs, someone else keeps laughing long after the joke is done. After Aster keeps asking Will to scroll back to three videos before, to read the comments, they’re always the best bit, no, dude, seriously, go back go back, Will makes a fist with his hand and gently knocks it against Aster’s cheek. It’s more a brush of his knuckles over the side of Aster’s face than a hit.
Knees rest wherever they land. When one of them gets up to use the bathroom or visit the vending machine in the hallway, the other does not panic. He trusts the orbit to hold. Trusts that neither of them will drift so far the other can’t feel it anymore.
They fight properly for the first time in late January. It is brief and louder than either of them expects, like the first trailer that plays in a darkened movie theatre.
“You don’t get to decide everything,” Will says. His voice cracks on everything, breath coming too fast for the size of the sentence.
“I wasn’t deciding,” Aster says, words rushing to keep up. “I was just saying—”
“You always just say,” Will cuts in. “You say and then it’s done. All talk. Some of us put the work in. Some of us actually want this.”
It lands harder than he intends. The word hangs there. Want. Will looks like he’s already trying to take it back.
They stand on opposite sides of the garden, the gap between them suddenly too wide to cross without effort. Cicadas whir, high and constant, a restless vibration that thrums through the air between them. The grass is dry and flattened from weeks of sun. Aster kicks at it, toe digging in.
“I’m just trying to plan,” he says.
“For what?” Will asks. He laughs, sharp and incredulous, then stops. “For both of us?”
Aster opens his mouth, then closes it, jaw setting.
They don’t talk for the rest of the afternoon. They drift to separate rooms, separate ends of the house, killing time badly. Doors open and close with more force than is necessary. A tap runs. The day edges towards evening before the air finally cools, heat relaxing its grip.
Will goes out back at dusk. No need to look; he already knows where Aster will be.
He’s lying on the trampoline, flat on his back, staring up. He doesn’t turn when Will clears his throat.
“Is it out?”
“Not yet.”
Will steps onto the mat. It dips under his weight, the familiar sag tugging him forward, static prickling through his socks. He waits, ready for the space between them to close the way it always does – elastic and forgiving.
Aster doesn’t move.
The mat settles unevenly. Will feels the wrongness of it at once, and for a second he considers stepping back off.
Then, Aster shifts, just enough, creating room for him.
Will lies down beside him, the two of them watching the clouds slide over where the stars should be.
“Sorry,” Will says, after a while.
“Yeah,” Aster says. He means it’s fine. He means don’t do it again.
A new season starts up. Expectations cinch tight, draw blood.
They don’t have to be told they’re doing well. Coaches linger. Language gathers around them in a haze: future, potential, next level. Cameras appear, lenses capturing effort from flattering angles, pre-strain, just before it breaks the face. Wanting something this badly is rarely pretty, but the footage edits that out. The cost stays offscreen. Their names begin to circulate, spoken by people who do not know them.
Mid-game, the sudden pull of pain goes hot and bright and stupid through Aster’s thigh, down into his knee – a flash like something burning up on entry. He stumbles, corrects, pushes through the next stride on instinct. The leg answers wrong. The whistle blows somewhere far away.
In the changing room, he keeps his face arranged into something close to neutral. The physio kneels in front of him, wrapping tape tight around the joint. “Give it a couple of days and we’ll reassess. Probably just a strain.” Probably.
The others are already showering, laughter ricocheting over the hiss of water. Conversations overlap, then thin out as they move farther down the corridor. A few of them clap him on the shoulder on their way past, casual gestures, minds already elsewhere.
When the room empties, he waits. Counts to ten. Then he yanks his bag off the bench and hurls it at the opposite wall, where it hits the floor and slumps there, half unzipped, a hoodie sleeve spilling out.
He stands, glancing guiltily down the row of benches to where Will would be, always spending too long untying his laces, too caught up in some joke or pretend disagreement between the other boys to worry about rushing. The spot is empty. Aster feels something twist in his chest, lungs squeezing around it, a pressure he can’t shift.
The tape around his knee feels suddenly too tight. Suffocating.
He picks at the edge of it, meaning to peel it back carefully. It catches in the fine hair along his leg and he yanks it off in one violent strip.
“Fuck!”
The sting is immediate and his vision blurs before he can stop it. He blinks, hard, furious at his own body for betraying him twice in the same hour.
He reaches for his bag and zips it closed, tugging it over his shoulder as he limps out the room.
At their next home game, two weeks later, he’s relegated to the sidelines, sat next to the halftime oranges, an ice pack strapped around his knee. It has already gone watery, condensation leaking cold into his sock.
The team reorganises itself around Aster’s absence, and Will slots into place beside someone else, settling into the new shape of things without hesitation. He leans into the rhythm of the group, laughing at something one of the boys says and shoving him lightly in return. Aster has never been able to take teasing so naturally.
He realises, with what might be embarrassment, that Will belongs here easily. Aster has mostly belonged to Will.
You, he thinks.
You.
You.
He presses the heel of his hand into the melting ice until it goes numb.
Aster reads the email twice after Will shows him.
“This is good,” he says.
“I know.”
“This is really good.”
Things accelerate the way they always do when someone else is steering.
Will’s games are televised. He shakes a lot of hands, gives a lot of interviews, always just humble enough, and makes every time look easier than the last.
Stars do this, Aster learns. They spend years of themselves to be visible for seconds, turning mass into brilliance. Not all bodies survive the conversion.
They are older now, but not old. Visible in new ways. No longer bright without consequence.
Sometimes, without warning, Aster thinks of hotel rooms, homesick for the feeling of homesickness – for borrowed beds and unfamiliar ceilings, for the certainty of waking up somewhere temporary with Will breathing nearby. He remembers the moments just before they gave the day up entirely. One of them turning away, the other following.
It looks like sleep. It is not yet sleep.
Much later, when the arrangement loosens, they will struggle to name what has changed. They will say time. They will say circumstances. They will say nothing at all.
The sky keeps changing. Light arrives late, exhausted, already belonging to the past. When Aster lies back on the trampoline for a stolen moment at home, the springs complain beneath him.
“There,” Will had pointed.
“First star.”
Aster used to wait too long. This time, he lets himself be sure. Okay. That one. And he wishes, whether or not it was a star at all.
They never said what they were wishing for.
Ellie Bennett hails from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She has recently completed a BA(Hons) in English at the University of Otago - Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka. She loves writing, overthinking, and summer.