The lights flickered and for a second she was hopeful. They flickered twice more, and then they went out, completely. 

Boston wasn’t her first choice for a city. Or her second, or even her third. She was born in London and had planned on staying there her entire life, it wasn’t until her parents decided to return back to the States that all of her future plans drastically changed. 

She stood by the elevator in the lobby of her apartment building, and as she rocked herself up onto her toes, she looked out the front door, hoping to see the lights of the nearby buildings shining through the perfectly clear glass, only to see complete darkness.

“You’re kidding,” Tatum says as she falls back onto the backs of her feet.

Her parents had left a few days earlier, leaving her in Boston to finish up her senior year of highschool as they travelled to London on her father’s business trip. Charles Every was a name known around the world, he owned several hotels in almost every major city that one can imagine. Johanna Every on the other hand… was not as well known. They first met when Tatum’s father was establishing his first foreign hotel, in London. Her mother was born and raised in the U.K. and the unlikely duo fell in love, sooner or later along the line came Tatum, their only child. They returned back to the States, to her father’s favorite city, when Tatum was thirteen years old, and since that day, she had hated every single little aspect about Boston. The way the street lights flickered, the way the worn out buildings suffocated the streets below them, the way that she was forced to pass so many people only to hear them say “Howaryah?” in their thick Boston accent that she lacked. She had never felt connected to the people, and certainly not the place. 

But there she stood, stuck in the lobby of her apartment building, surrounded by nothing but empty space. As Tatum pulled out her phone, she heard a crash coming from across the room, from the mailroom, the first right after coming in the front door. Putting the brightness high on the flashlight, and pushing her glasses up into her long hair, she made her way past the front desk, where the empty chair swayed back and forth, and the pens overflowed the crisp white coffee mug that read “Boston” in the Red Sox lettering. 

“Jeremiah? Are you okay?”

“Oh hey! Tatum! Yeah, I’m just, you know, doing things,” Jeremiah calls back, obviously flustered, while picking up the mail from the floor, “Do you know what happened to the lights?”

Tatum stood still in the doorway for a second, leaning against the bright white paint, trying to come up with a wise answer to give one of her only friends for the past four years. 

“Absolutely no idea.” She walks to him, shining the light on the mail still on the ground, reaching down to pick it up and helping return them to their correct mailboxes. 

Taking the mail from her own, she hears him laugh.

“In my twenty-eight years on earth, I’ve never experienced a black out in Boston, Massachusetts.” 

“I suppose that there is a first time for everything, be safe.” Tatum exited the mail room, still shining the flashlight, and dragged her feet all the way to the bottom of the main staircase. As she looked up the stairs, she once more rolled onto her toes seeing as far up as she could possibly go. 

As she rolled back onto her heels, she thought to herself, Here goes nothing. 

By the time she reached the 6th floor, her face was red, her sweater clinging to her upper back. With no air conditioning, the stairwell was hot and stuffy, almost to the point of being completely unbearable. She grabbed the apartment keys from the left side pocket of her backpack, and unlocked the first door on the right. Room 601. As her eyes adjusted to the blackness, she threw her bag onto the couch, and fell to the floor, laying on her back. Her eyes staring at the ceiling, blinking several times to rid her view of those swirling black dots, as the softness of the rug below her clung to her neck. She heard the ringing from her phone, and as she turned over, she read the notification that had popped up.

Ten percent left. That’s just great.

She turned the phone off and laid back down for a bit more, doing nothing but breathing. Thousands of thoughts rummaging through her head as her glasses fell onto the floor behind her. 

How am I going to tell my parents I made it home? How am I going to sleep without any lights on? What if there’s someone in the apartment? What if the lights never come back on? Is all of the food in the fridge going to go bad? I hope it doesn’t smell bad, that would be absolutely disgusting. What if someone is sabotaging the city? No, no, ha ha very funny Tatum, that wouldn’t happen. At least I don’t think it would. What if my parents call me and I can’t answer. They’re probably worried. They probably wish they brought me with them now. They are probably thinking back to when I begged them to go with and they said, “But Tatum sweetie! You have to finish your school year.” They’re definitely regretting it.

With the thought that she couldn’t do much else, Tatum stood quickly, her breathing returned to normal, and her glasses remained on the rug behind her. She felt around on the couch for the keys, and when she felt something sharp, she grabbed it quickly, turned for the door, and shut it behind her. Then she went up.

Tatum slammed open the door to the rooftop, startling the boy that she recognized lives in the apartment below hers, a grade above her. He must’ve just started college.

“Hi there! I didn’t mean to startle you, I’m so sorry!” Tatum called out to the boy.

“No problem,” the boy stated in a deep voice.

The sky was dark, but lit brightly with stars, the first time she had been able to see the complete sky in her entire life. The lights of the nearby buildings had always prevented the sight and had always been a sort of distraction. There had been times where Tatum would sit on the ledge of the building, feet dangling below, swinging back and forth as she watched the varieties of families. 

In one dim window, a single father was rocking his baby back to sleep, hushing her and bouncing her. The one below she was able to see the old lady water her succulents that balanced on the windowsill outside. In another, a young boy taught his dog to stand, to sit, to wait, to fist bump. Tatum would laugh.

But tonight she couldn’t see any of that. Tonight she only saw a boy sitting alone on the edge. Tatum carefully made her way to him, making sure that he wouldn’t tell her to go somewhere else or that he wanted to be alone.

“I’m Tatum,” she says as she sits down, trying to unhook her sweater from the nail that it got caught on behind her. 

“Here, let me get it for you,” his fingers were big, but they were quick, “I’m Luke.” As he was working to unhook her sweater, she was able to notice the way that his hair hung just above the tips of his eyes, and when he looked back at her, he stared right into her eye. Tatum immediately got self conscious, knowing that he was staring at her birthmark, causing what should be her second brown eye to be black. She quickly looked down and began to crack her knuckles, trying to ease her self-embarrassment. Luke was able to quickly sense this and so he began to talk, “The later you come up, the easier it is to see the stars. It’s always been one of my favorite parts about this city.” He finally got the sweater edge to unhook.

“Parts? How can you even like one?” She grasped the hole tightly within her palm.

“It’s my favorite because it’s the only thing in the city that not everyone knows about. Everyone knows that this road is a one-way and that the best bakery is Mike’s Pastry. But not everybody knows that these stars exist, that there’s a big dipper, that there are thousands of constellations.” Tatum looked up, her eyes wide, her mouth curling into a thin smile. When she looked back down, Luke could notice something a bit different about her than when she first slammed the door open.

“There’s not much to do with no power.”

“No, I guess not, but I think it allows you to see things you hadn’t quite seen before,” and with that, Tatum got up, and ran. She ran to the door, as Luke sat behind her, smiling at the girl he just witnessed fall a little bit in love with her city.

Tatum burst out the door of her apartment building, jumping down the stairs, looking up and spinning in the middle of the street, lined with planted trees and dim street lamps. Her hair falling about, outlining her face. She stood in the middle of the street, listening to the eerie silence that she never heard before while living in a city. She turned the corner at the end of the street, and looked to her left. 

“Close your eyes, let me lead.” 

A couple, no older than their young twenties, dancing under the street light. The boy guiding her around, on the side of the road, surrounded by the towering brick, vine covered buildings. Her eyes were closed now, her head resting on the side of his shoulder, their hands enclosed within one another. They didn’t notice her standing there, but she noticed them. 

She noticed the way they didn’t care who else was around. How they were living in the moment, not wishing they were someone else, somewhere else. 

The night was still young and Tatum’s hair was wild, her mind spiraling with thousands of thoughts of everything she might have missed because she hated the city so much. She walked along the road, in the opposite direction of the couple, not wanting to ruin their moment, to bring them back down to Earth just yet.

She walked all the way down to lower Boston, the city quiet, for the first time in forever. She found herself in an intersection, surrounded by local convenience stores that were pure black in the windows, no lights flickering on the open sign. 

Tatum walked to the middle of the intersection, laid down, and looked up to the sky, her hair falling across the road, her palms out flat, caressing the tough street below her. She counted as many stars as possible, she looked to her side, the coolness touching her cheek, seeing the birds land on the benches by the park. After a bit, Tatum collected herself, and decided to take a walk through the dark park, no lights working, but the glow of the moon bright enough to become accustomed to. 

She walked along the concrete path, hearing noises of the animals she could not see, never once walking through this park before, but seeing a mom walking with her baby. She pushed the baby in the stroller, singing a lullaby as the baby lightly murmured to herself. Tatum stayed still and silent, unwilling to walk in their path, not wanting to stir conversation with the mother and wake the baby, but wanting to see the beautiful moment of the mother in the moonlight, caring for her child, the time close to midnight. 

Once they had passed, Tatum took a deep breath, not realizing how long she had been holding it in, and she walked through the rest of the park. Her feet dragged along the concrete paths that were lined with benches and overhanging trees, preventing the full moonlight from seeping its way through. 

Tatum spent the rest of the night about the city, finding new places and new things to fall in love with. The graffiti across the walls. The people, each in love with their own life. The starry night sky that shys away when the lights are on. By the time she returned back to her apartment, it was just past sunrise, which she was able to watch for the first time in forever as it rose over the Atlantic Ocean, its bright rays coming into full view within a matter of minutes, shining across her face, filling it with the warmth that the moon refused to give her. 

She walked through the clear front doors to hear the flickering of the lights above the elevator, causing it to be in full operation. She stood by the doors, rolling up onto her toes to look across the street, seeing the bright lights of the open signs spill out across the narrow roadways. As the elevator arrived at the sixth floor, Tatum crashed through the door to 601, seeing her parents standing there, suitcases in hand, their faces sickened with worry. Tatum stood in the doorway, the door swinging open and banging against the wall. Her hair wild, her eyes wide, her mouth smiling. 

“There are so many things to love about Boston.”