Star by Eliza Witte - HTML preview

36

‘Well, if there’s no money to pay, this’ll be good for the customers…,’ Louie was already making the calculation, ‘Get him on Monday! But no money!’

‘YESSS!’ exclaimed Annie and surprised him with a hug. He felt uncomfortable but hey, these were just kids. Jessie appeared at the door, ‘Annie, shall we?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘Goodnight, Louie!’

‘Goodnight, Louie!’

‘Good night, good night!’ he said hastily and the girls ran outside.

‘Let’s get a cab!’ Jessie suggested. ‘I know it will be a dear but I’m dead tired.’

Annie smiled. When she studied the human talk, as if an eternity ago, she had come across this expression. It sounded very sweet to her as the humans, who loved to be different from anybody else, used it in quite the opposite meaning from the universally accepted one. A star could tell you that a nebula is a dear because it brings friends closer, or that the temperature around some celestial bodies is dear because it provides excellent conditions for skating. So in fact the meaning was ‘priceless’, ‘precious’, but people as always expanded on it and developed it in their own way – to its polar opposite. Just another proof of their ingenuity and inventiveness, be it in a positive or negative aspect, which in fact didn’t matter much since ‘inventive’ described ‘progressive’

in the Purpose of Meaning in both cases, anyway.

Annie and Jessie were riding the cab and Jessie was chatting with the driver when Annie surprised her with one of her questions, ‘Jessie, when is it exactly ‘after 6 p.m.’?’

Jessie looked upon her puzzled but gradually she was getting used to this kind of questions. Whenever one of Annie’s questions hit her like this, she always tried to accept her friend just as a very talented girl, who had had an abnormal childhood – in an abandoned village maybe, or she’d just been an international student – maybe French.

‘Annie, I always wondered why you never wear a watch. They say that usually it is happy people who don’t wear a watch.’

‘I don’t have a watch,’ Annie just had to admit.

‘I have one in my room. It’s an old Swatch. I don’t wear it. Do you want it?’

‘O-o-o-oh, Jess, you are a friend indeed!’

The cab pulled over in front of the barrier marking the exit to the College area. From there it was just 5 minutes walking to their dorm.

‘It’s your turn.’ Jessie turned to Annie.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I paid for the cab last time, remember?’

‘But I don’t have any money.’

Jessie jumped on her seat, ‘Didn’t Louie pay you today?’

‘Louie doesn’t have any money.’