The sunlight breaks off her hair in violent hues: Reds and purples and pinks that burst into the sky and shatter the earth with color. She is ablaze with color.
She stands awash with mid-afternoon light. It bathes the left side of her body, creating hollow areas of shade that throw angles in her face and make her seem more mysterious than she purports to be. I always think she’s mysterious; In the kind of way only a few people have, you might see a hundred or so in your life time, but only one or two like Lily, few people have that spark.
I watch her from the steps that make my legs ache with cold, seeing streams of sunlight get caught in the edges of her jacket as the taut leather stretches while she moves. She’s craning her head to see upwards. It’s like she’s trying to reach some high part of the heavens the rest of us can’t view, but I think she knows it all too well.
Sometimes I look at Lily and think this must be what happens to shooting stars. The were too bright for the sky to hold them, so they broke off and blasted themselves into a million different people, imbuing them with their light, and the need to extend higher than we are allotted, to be greater, to shine brighter.
I see flashes of this light in a lot of people. I might pass a stranger on the street and in the wave of their hand or the tilt of their head notice the slight star they caught; Just a sliver or the light of a ray glancing off them before crashing into someone like Lily.  Just enough to give them a twinkle in their eyes or a slight jittery feeling in their leg when they’ve stayed in one place for too long, intriguing, but slight, they won’t shine like Lily does, and they won’t save the world, but they’ll be supreme masters of the tiny things that make life grand, and for them, I think it’s enough.
That’s the thing about people like Lily though it’s never enough. They don’t stop where others do. When I crane my neck to the sky the sunlight burns my eyes, just a blinding white, stricken with pain. I have to look down, and then, afterwards, I see a dull red on my eyelids that I can’t ever make sense of. Lily doesn’t look down. She sees something in that blinding white. I’m sure of it.
Lily has a band, a punk something or another, and sometimes when she’s walking down the hallway I hear people whisper in an excited sort of way, about all she’ll accomplish, all she’ll do. They whisper, with slight glows on their faces, that she’s going to be a star.
I never tell them anything about it, but it’s moments like this when I see Lily waiting for a bus that should be a rocket ship, heading uptown when she should be ascending the heavens, burning like a beacon in the dead of winter on our grungy downtown sidewalk, that I know they’re wrong. Lily isn’t going to be a star.

Lily already is a star.