A Pocketful of Stars. Aisha Bushby

are party poppers going off in my chest. I check my phone. It’s been twenty minutes since Elle texted me. How did so much happen in that time?

      A violent shiver passes through me as I make to leave, and suddenly I can feel the midwinter chill again. It’s like I’ve been dunked in ice-cold water. It slams against my chest and for a second I can’t breathe.

      I lean against the curtain rail next to Mum’s bed. My limbs feel tingly, like they’re not quite attached to me, and my head is swirling with the dream.

      Eventually, after I say goodbye to Mum, I make my way back to the reception desk, where I find Dad, and notice again the room with the old man in it. It feels like a lifetime since I first saw him. A young woman and two children surround him now. He’s chatting and smiling with her while they play with the settings on his bed. He has a pile of books on his bedside and a tartan blanket by his feet. They make the room look alive.

      I’ll bring some of Mum’s things next time, I think.

      When we get home I still feel a little strange. I wave my hand in front of my face and I swear it blurs, just like in the dream. It makes me wonder if I’m still asleep. I blink once, then twice, and hope that everything becomes normal again. But nothing’s normal any more, is it?

      I want so much to go back to last week, before everything went wrong. We’re going to see Mum again tomorrow after school, but what am I supposed to do until then?

      My feet tread the familiar path up to my room, and I automatically jump on to my computer, without really meaning to. But as soon as my headphones are on, it feels like the rest of the world disappears.

      I click on the button, which resembles an old scroll, and wait for the screen to load.

      My bedroom walls pull apart brick by brick, and in their place sprouts an ancient fairy palace; my bed folds up into a giant nest; and, instead of street lamps and terraced houses, my windows show me a dense forest as tall as the eye can see. And, all at once, I feel calm.

      The world of Fairy Hunters unfolds around me. I’ve been playing it since I was ten, and I’m getting pretty good at it now. It’s an online game where you’re put into teams to battle it out – fairies against wizards. I always choose Team Fairy. The aim of the game is to protect our nest of eggs from the wizards, who try to steal them to make potions.

      There are four kinds of fairy on each team – earth, fire, water and wind. Earth fairies are the protectors; they go in first as they have the best defensive spells to protect their team. Then come the fire fairies – the close-range spellcasters. They need to cast quickly and attack the wizards before they have the chance to defend themselves. Next are the water fairies, the long-range spellcasters. Their job is to cast spells that take more time to conjure but are more powerful. They usually hang back. Then there are the wind fairies. I’m one of them. Our job is to help the rest of the team. Most people don’t like playing as wind fairies, because they think we’re useless.

      We’re not. A lot of the time we’re the difference between winning and losing the game.

      As I walk through the map and see the ruined palace in the distance – ivy growing all over it, walls cracked – I can’t help but remember the house from my dream with the silver branches. The park, too, looks similar. Except, instead of palm trees, in Fairy Hunters, the trees are oak; and, instead of a corner shop, there’s the Wicked Woodlands where the wizards live.

      Almost an hour later I’m just about to be crowned most valuable player when Dad’s voice floats up from the living room beneath me. ‘Safiya!’ he calls, piercing the bubble that my headphones have formed. ‘Dinner!’

      And, just like that, the spell is broken.

      

      The next day at school everything’s a little strange. The teachers keep talking to me in really high-pitched voices, eyes creased with sympathy. It’s the way strangers talk to Lady in the street. Usually she wees on them in response. She does that a lot when people are nice to her.

      As I was getting ready to leave Maths for lunch Ms Belgrave called me over, handed me a pack of sweets and winked, like it was a secret. Except, instead of winking she kind of just twitched her eye. I didn’t wee on her, the way Lady would, I just took the sweets and said thank you.

      I suppose Dad will have told the teachers about Mum, but that doesn’t explain why everyone else is staring at me. I keep checking to see if I have toilet roll on my shoe or a giant spot in the middle of my nose.

      ‘What do you think, Saff?’ Elle asks halfway through lunch.

      I turn to her, eyes wide. I realize I haven’t been listening. I’d been thinking about the strange dream I had at the hospital yesterday.

      Izzy saves me. ‘I think he’s cool,’ she says.

      That’s when I realize they’re talking about Matty Chung, Elle’s latest crush. I glance over at him, where he sits with his best friends Jonnie and David.

      I don’t know how to respond because I don’t really think anything of him, or any boys, for that matter.

      I remember when we were in Year Seven and no one else talked to us. Sounds weird, but I preferred it. We used to have a sleepover at Elle’s house every Friday night. We would do our homework first while Elle’s mum baked. It was usually cookies or a cake that she would let us have as a treat before dinner. Afterwards we always watched a film and then stayed up late chatting or playing silly games in bed when we were supposed to be sleeping.

      But then Year Eight happened, and we made more friends, and now everyone wants to hang out at Maccies after school or go to the cinema with boys. Everything’s changing so quickly that it feels like my world is crumbling, just like in the dream. Like everything I’ve ever known is made of sand; one big wave could wash it away into the ocean.

      ‘Saff !’ Elle whispers furiously. ‘Don’t stare at him. He’ll know we’re talking about him.’

      ‘Sorry.’ I smile sheepishly and turn back to my lasagne.

      ‘What’s the latest anyway?’ Elle asks. ‘How’s your mum?’

      Three pairs of eyes turn to me just then, and I want to shrink away from their sympathy, hide from their curiosity.

      ‘I don’t really know,’ I admit, playing with my food. ‘Mum’s in a coma still. Apparently she had some sort of stroke. There’s a fancy name for it, but I can’t really remember it now.’

      What I do know is that being in a coma is kind of like you’re asleep, except you can’t be woken up by loud noises or dogs licking your face in the morning.

      Often the patient – which is how they keep referring to Mum – wakes up after a few weeks, once their body has recovered from the trauma. I don’t think about the other outcome, which is that some patients never wake up.

      The doctors asked Dad and me if Mum had any symptoms in the weeks leading up to the stroke. The main symptom, they explained, was a headache about a week or two before.

      My heart dropped when they said that, because Mum had complained about a headache during our argument. And then I’d . . .

      I didn’t tell the doctors about it, though, because that would mean I would have to tell them about the argument, and I don’t know if I could bear to find out that it was all my fault.

      ‘She had an operation on the first night, so now all we can do is . . . wait,’ I finish lamely.

      Waiting feels so . . . wrong. I want to do something, to help. But instead I just have to live life like normal.

      Dad