Outside the snow fell.
The strangers moved up and down on the blue carpet. Sometimes Daisy thought she recognized them, that they were friends of her parents or people she had seen at school, but she could not be sure. They did not speak to each other in their endless, patient wanderings. They did not even seem to see each other. Sometimes, passing down the long aisle of the train or circling her grandmother’s kitchen or pacing the blue living room, they bumped into each other. They did not stop and say excuse me. They bumped into each other as if they did not know they did it, and moved on. They collided without sound or feeling, and each time they did, they seemed less and less like people Daisy knew and more and more like strangers. She looked at them anxiously trying to recognize them so she could ask them.
The young man had come in from outside. Daisy was sure of it, though there was no draft of cold air to convince her, no snow for the young man to shrug from his hair and shoulders. He moved with easy direction through the others, and they looked up at him as he passed. He sat down on the blue couch and smiled at Daisy’s brother. Her brother looked up from his book and smiled back. He has come in from outside, Daisy thought. He will know.
She sat down near him, on the end of the couch, her arms crossed in front of her. “Has something happened to the sun?” she asked him in a whisper.
He looked up. His face was as young as hers, tanned and smiling. Daisy felt, far down, a little quiver of fear, a faint alien feeling like that which had signaled the coming of her first period. She stood up and backed away from him, only a step, and nearly collided with one of the strangers.
“Well, hello,” the boy said. “If it isn’t little Daisy!”
Her hands knotted into fists. She did not see how she could not have recognized him before-the easy confidence, the casual smile. He would not help her. He knew, of course he knew, he had always known everything, but he wouldn’t tell her. He would laugh at her. She must not let him laugh at her.
“Hi, Ron,” she was going to say, but the last consonant drifted away into uncertainty She had never been sure what his name was.
He laughed. “What makes you think something’s happened to the sun, Daisy-Daisy?” He had his arm over the back of the couch. “Sit down and tell me all about it.” If she sat down next to him he could easily put his arm around her.
“Has something happened to the sun?” she repeated more loudly from where she stood. “It never shines anymore.”
“Are you sure?” he said, and laughed again. He was looking at her breasts. She crossed her arms in front of her.
“Has it?” she said stubbornly, like a child.
“What do you think?”
“I think maybe everybody was wrong about the sun.” She stopped, surprised at what she had said, at what she was remembering now. Then she went on, forgetting to keep her arms in front of her, listening to what she said next. “They all thought it was going to blow up. They said it would swallow the whole earth up. But maybe it didn’t. Maybe it just burned out, like a match or something, and it doesn’t shine anymore and that’s why it snows all the time and—”
“Cold,” Ron said.
“What?”
“Cold,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be cold if that had happened?”
“What?” she said stupidly.
“Daisy,” he said, and smiled at her. She reeled a little. The tugging fear was further down and more definite.
“Oh,” she said, and ran, veering around the others milling up and down, up and down, into her own room. She slammed the door behind her and lay down on the bed, holding her stomach and remembering.
Her father had called them all together in the living room. Her mother perched on the edge of the blue couch, already looking frightened. Her brother had brought a book in with him, but he stared blindly at the page.
It was cold in the living room. Daisy moved into the one patch of sunlight, and waited. She had already been frightened for a year. And in a minute, she thought, I’m going to hear something that will make me more afraid.
She felt a sudden stunning hatred of her parents, able to pull her in out of the sun and into darkness, able to make her frightened just by talking to her. She had been sitting on the porch today. That other day she had been lying in the sun in her old yellow bathing suit when her mother called her in.
“You’re a big girl now,” her mother had said once they were in her room. She was looking at the outgrown yellow suit that was tight across the chest and pulled up on the legs. “There are things you need to know.”
Daisy’s heart had begun to pound. “I wanted to tell you so you wouldn’t hear a lot of rumors.” She had had a booklet with her, pink and white and terrifying. “I want you to read this, Daisy. You’re changing, even though you may not notice it. Your breasts are developing and soon you’ll be starting your period. That means—”
Daisy knew what it meant. The girls at school had told her. Darkness and blood. Boys wanting to touch her breasts, wanting to penetrate her darkness. And then more blood.
“No,” Daisy said. “No. I don’t want to.”
“I know it seems frightening to you now, but someday soon you’ll meet a nice boy and then you’ll understand'
No, I won’t. Never. I know what boys do to you.
“Five years from now you won’t feel this way, Daisy. You’ll see…”
Not in five years. Not in a hundred. No.
“I won’t have breasts,” Daisy shouted, and threw the pillow off her bed at her mother. “I won’t have a period. I won’t let it happen. No!”
Her mother had looked at her pityingly “Why, Daisy, it’s already started.” She had put her arms around her. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, honey.”
Daisy had been afraid ever since. And now she would be more afraid, as soon as her father spoke.
“I wanted to tell you all together,” her father said, “so you would not hear some other way. I wanted you to know what is really happening and not just rumors.” He paused and took a ragged breath. They even started their speeches alike.
“I think you should hear it from me,” her father said. “The sun is going to go nova.”
Her mother gasped, a long, easy intake of breath like a sigh, the last easy breath her mother would take. Her brother closed his book. Is that all? Daisy thought, surprised.
“The sun has used up all the hydrogen in its core. It’s starting to burn itself up, and when it does, it will expand and—” he stumbled over the word.
“Its going to swallow us up,” her brother said. “I read it in a book. The sun will just explode, all the way out to Mars. It’ll swallow up Mercury and Venus and Earth and Mars and we’ll all be dead.”
Her father nodded. “Yes,” he said, as if he was relieved that the worst was out.
“No,” her mother said. And Daisy thought, This is nothing. Nothing. Her mother’s talks were worse than this. Blood and darkness.
“There have been changes in the sun,” her father said. “There have been more solar storms, too many And the sun is releasing unusual bursts of neutrinos. Those are signs that it will—”
“How long?” her mother asked.
“A year. Five years at the most. They don’t know.”
“We have to stop it!” Daisy’s mother shrieked, and Daisy looked up from her place in the sun, amazed at her mother’s fear.
“There’s nothing we can do,” her father said. “It’s already started.”
“I won’t let it,” her mother said. “Not to my children. I won’t let it happen. Not to my Daisy. She’s always loved the sun.”
At her mother’s words, Daisy remembered something. An old photograph her mother had written on, scrawling across the bottom of the picture in white ink. The picture was herself as a toddler in a yellow sunsuit, concave little girl’s chest and pooching toddler’s stomach. Bucket and shovel and toes dug into the hot sand,
