Maybe all the Beautiful People aren't gone. Maybe Elio is one of them. And I never knew. All I had to do was show the pain.

Could it be that easy?

I wish they'd do a weather pattern; that they'd let it rain or snow above us to explain the drops on my cheeks and those I must be leaving on his shirt. But no-because this is the stars' dance, the weather in the room is black sky and showery silver light. When it's Mia's turn, the room will be bright and white. Everyone will see her dance and everyone will want to look, but for a completely different reason than they wanted to look and laugh at me.

He runs his hand down my back just as the music ends and the silver lights dim.

And suddenly I think he might kiss me. He whispers, "Sora. Are you all right?"

"Yes," I say, and I think he holds me a little tighter.

Please kiss me, a voice in my head whispers, and though I'm hearing my own thoughts, I almost don't recognize them. There has to be a reason to stay here.

He leans just a little closer; I feel it in his breath on my cheek and in every piece of me that's touching any part of him.

The lights begin to come back on, slowly. I'm still holding on, holding on, my face tipped back, looking up at Elio.

"Sora," he says, gently, and then when I don't let go, he looks around. People are watching again. And starting to laugh. He lets go and I step back.

Mercifully, the room plunges back into darkness. Someone yells at someone else to fix the lights. It's common, the power shorting out inside the Globe.

I have to leave.

I didn't think one touch would undo me.

I think I might hear Elio behind me but I don't stop. I hurt too much. I feel too much. This is dangerous. My father succeeded because he shut himself off before he left. I have to do that too. Though he doesn't know it, Elio has put everything at risk.

The auxiliary power has come back on by the time I reach the transports, so I can get home. The night sky of the Globe throbs dull gray. We've never seen a real sky. I slam the door of the transport shut and it begins to move.

And I let myself look at other truths as I slide along in the dark.

My father lied to me. He never intended to come back to me. He never went back to the time of the Beautiful People. He didn't believe in them. He had no faith. He went back to when he first met her. My mother. Just to be with her, even if it was for only a handful of moments.

Someone might say that was beautiful.

I don't think so at all.

I don't know what he planned to do. To stop her from having me, perhaps. I wondered for a long time if I would someday vanish, if he could change the future when he walked back into the past. But I didn't go anywhere.

I'm here, but I've forgotten how to take up space. How to think about anything except going away.

I couldn't change his mind. So I didn't try to change anyone else's mind, either. I let them think I'd been Outside too, and when they looked at me, I gave them the hard, flat stare of someone who has seen too much. When Elio or any of the others tried to talk to me, I didn't answer back, or I said words that meant nothing at all.

What has happened to me is my fault too.

I can't stand to be touched anymore. It breaks me.

I have to be healed. I have to be loved.

And the Beautiful People can do it.

The transport stops.

It's dark inside my apartment, but that doesn't matter. I walk to the little table, open the drawer, unlock the box with the key I wear around my neck. I don't need light to do any of it. The sphere rolls perfectly into the hollow of my hand.

I know I can leave. It's all I know how to do.

I think of the year: 2011. That will be the one. I look at an image from that time. Not the one of the wedding; I'm worried that if I choose that one, I'll fly straight past the cake and the people and into that sky full of sunset and burn up before I've seen anything. Instead, I look at a picture of one of the Beautiful People. She walks across a red carpet and everyone stands near her, stretching out their hands, screaming, calling to her, while she turns a beatific smile upon them.

I pick up the little glass world that my father gave me before he took what was left of my own.

This is how you leave.

You sit. You are quiet. You close your eyes. You think. You put the stone in your hand and hold it. There is no short way to this, no magical spell. Rushing will do you no good at all.

And not many people can do this. There is always something that holds them back and ties them down.

Not me.

I'm gone.

I didn't expect to like it so much in here, in the in-between. So dark, so quiet. Maybe there is no sense in trying to find any time. Any place. Just leaving might be enough.

If you stay here, you become lost. And no one can find you.

I like lost.

Wherever I am, in the corners of my mind, in the edges of space, wherever it is, I lie down to rest.

There is no time.

There is no me.

And then something happens. A light here, another there.

Is it them? Are the Beautiful People coming to find me?

No.

I'm alone.

I'm standing in the stars. I'm standing on top of the Globe, I think, and then I look down and see it's the moon under my feet. Or maybe the sphere. I can't tell if I am tiny or enormous, and it doesn't matter because I'm really outside, under the stars.

I stand there for a long time, trying to find the right words for what I see. Spending minutes, hours, years perhaps, choosing each one.

Infinite.

Bright.

Beautiful.

And I remember: I should think of the Beautiful People, if I want to find their time and escape my own.

Their time. My time.

The real gift is to have any time at all.

And suddenly, in the clarity of the starlight, I can see how things really are. The Beautiful People are real and they are not real. They lived, but they are not who we have made them out to be. The Beautiful People were not beautiful. Not any more or less than any other people throughout time and space. They reached out their hands sometimes and not others. They were kind like Laura and Elio and cruel like Mia. We made them beautiful because we needed to believe in them. And we wanted to believe they would heal us. We-I-wanted to believe they would love us.

And I see that my father chased a memory when there was someone real who loved him right there in his imperfect world. Me. He shut down and folded in, and his body became small because he had let his mind become even smaller. As I have done.

It will hurt, I see, to try to open up again.

I am stronger than he was.

I take one last look at the stars.

For a long time I feel only the pain. Then other things nudge at the edges of my mind. The feeling of my face pressed deep into the rug. My fingers clasped tightly around a glass sphere.

The sound of a voice at the door.

"Are you there?" he asks.

Elio.

His voice is rough but soft, as though he's been calling for hours. And in all the distances traveled tonight, the one I think of now is the one when Elio reached out his hand and touched me.

The room is dark and quiet and still. I stand up and walk to the door. I let go of the sphere. It doesn't make a sound as it falls onto the thick rug at my feet. But there is a sharp snap when I crush it under my heel.

"I've been Outside," I say through the door.

There is no sound on the other side for a moment. Is he still there?

And then, he speaks.

"So have I."

At the Late Night, Double Feature, Picture Show

by Jessica Verday

he worst thing about cannibal Girl Scouts are the badges. You would think it's the fact that they want to chase you down and strip the flesh from your bones. I mean, what's worse than that? But you'd be wrong.

It's the badges.

The badges tell you exactly how those little green devils will turn your skin into bite-size Fruit Roll-Up pieces. Trust me, I've seen it happen before.

The one that was tracking me now had four badges: knot tying, tree climbing, fire building, and archery. Basically, that meant she could shoot me with an arrow, hang me from a tree (with a proper knot, of course), and then roast me over a big ol' campfire.

Girl Scouts. They're doing it wrong.

A twig snapped behind the bush on my right and I honed in on it, focusing again on the task at hand. Waiting for the little girl to come out and just show herself already, so that I could do my job and prove to everyone at home that I was part of their team.

Well, a bigger part than I already was.

My phone vibrated, the special one-two-three vibration that told me it was Andy. I ignored it and tried not to think about how much my back was killing me.

"Come on," I whispered. "Nice, juicy piece of meat sitting right here." I was pretending that my shoelace was tangled and I'd been fidgeting with it for the last twenty minutes.

Something crunched in the woods. There was a flash of dark green, and she catapulted herself at me from the trees.

"Hrrrruuunnngggghhhh!"

She made the unintelligible sound midlunge.

I sidestepped and whirled out of the way. Little brown shoes and carefully styled blond curls went flying as she crashed into the tree on my left. She couldn't have been more than ten. Hands raised into dainty claws, she turned around and came at me again.

Fishing for the pouch on my utility belt, I counted the seconds as she came closer and closer. One Mississippi . . . Two . . .

And then she was on me.

Sixty-five pounds of squirming, snapping, biting child that wanted to tear off my nose, ears, fingers, anything she could get her little chompers on. She opened her mouth wide, using both hands to hold me down. Tiny bits of fragmented flesh were caught between an ingrown baby tooth and a new adult tooth.

"Damn it!" I yelled, fingers finally grabbing hold of my saving grace. The one thing that would hopefully distract her long enough to stop her from turning any of my digits into her next Happy Meal. "Stop! Here!"

I withdrew a piece of turkey giblets. It's the closest thing to human flesh that I've found without it actually being human flesh, and I thrust it up under her nose. Her face turned frantic, nostrils flared as she greedily grabbed onto it with both hands and shoved it into her gaping jaws.

She ripped and tore her way through the entire thing. I pulled up my watch and timed her.

Eight seconds. Not bad.

Her eyes glazed over and she looked down at me, a tiny smear of blood staining the corner of her mouth.

"That's it," I said. "You're not getting any more."

She cast a glance at my arm. The one that I was still holding up to look at my watch.