glow in the dark stars

laying on the floor of her bedroom she 
stood up to turn out the light, revealing
the rows of glow in the dark stars on 
stuck to the ceiling. that was most of the reason
why i wanted to have sleepovers at Kat's house.
she also had a big room & she would make
me a grilled ham & cheese sandwich in the morning. 
we were in third grade, which was a big
year for sleepovers. i had a sleeping bag
that came with a matching flashlight &
when the other girls fell asleep i would turn 
the flashlight on & shine it around the room,
inspecting all the different corners,
noting the various stuffed animals & plastic dinosaurs.
the other thing i liked about sleepovers
was that everyone would confess secrets.
we shouldn't doubt the depth of what third grade
girls want to confess to each other. 
Kat talked about her chest growing & 
showed me her plain white bras. they were soft
& i didn't want one even though i said to
her that i did. i told her that my grandmom
said i was fat & i asked her if she thought so too.
she didn't answer, she just said that her 
mom sometimes said she was fat.
we talked about all the things we would do 
when we were finally 16 & big enough to drive cars. 
we said we'd want to go to  the zoo 
& to a national park & to Washington D.C. 
(mostly because i told
her there were huge museums there). eventually
we'd get on the subject of boys. i loved
to talk about liking boys, i'd write
initials on the back of my hand & make Kat 
guess who they were (which was easy because
there were like twenty boys in our grade). 
in third grade Kat liked Justin &
i don't actually remember who i liked.
i just remembering thinking that Kat
could do better than Justin because 
he yelled loudly in gym class & 
sometimes kicked trees. i always 
pretended to be tired kind of early,
around eleven (terribly early for sleepover time).
Kat would tease me but she'd let us 
go to bed. i was never actually tired though,
i just wanted time alone after it all
to sit in the dark of someone else's house.
out the windows, the street lamps would
come in dim & orangish. this night i got up &
pulled shut her curtains. she was already  
asleep. i took out my flashlight to
shine on the glow in the dark stars
to charge them up. flicking off
my flashlight i laid on the floor
to look up at them & thought to myself
how when i was older & had my own house
that i would put glow in the dark stars
on the ceiling of every room.