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The Boy Who Lit the Stars

Why the second star to the right shines the way it does.

Long before any child in London had ever heard of Neverland, the night sky was empty. The moon was there, and the sun took his turn, but between them there was nothing at all — only a great dark blue, quiet as a held breath.

In those days there lived a boy who could not sleep. His name has been forgotten, which is how it is with boys who don't grow up. Every night he climbed the tallest tree he could find and sat in the crook of its branches and looked at the empty dark, and it made him lonely in a way he did not have a word for.

One night a very old woman with a lantern came walking through the wood beneath his tree. She looked up and saw him and said, quite kindly, "Whatever are you doing up there, child?"

"I am watching the sky," said the boy. "But there is nothing in it."

The old woman set down her lantern and thought about this for a long moment. Then she reached into her coat and brought out a small tin box. She opened it, and inside were what looked like little grains of salt — except that each one, on being lifted between finger and thumb, gave off the tiniest possible glow.

"These are stars," said the old woman. "I have been carrying them about for years, waiting for someone to bother with them. Would you like to put them up?"

The boy climbed down from the tree so fast he tore his shirt. "Yes," he said. "Please."

So the old woman gave him the box. And the boy went up, and up, and up — you can, if you want it hard enough, and if nobody has told you that you can't yet — and he began to pin the little grains one at a time into the great dark blue.

It took him all night. He was very careful. He put the biggest ones where he thought children would need them: over cradles, over ships lost at sea, over gardens where lovers were making promises they would have to keep. He put clusters over the deserts because deserts have no other company, and he put a whole scattered handful over the ocean because he was worried about the whales.

But when he came at last to the very last star — a small, ordinary one, no bigger than the tip of a pin — he did not know where to put it. So he held it up in his fist and he thought, and he thought.

"I shall put you," he said finally, "where I can always find my way home to you. So that any child who is lost, ever, only has to look for you, and then take the next star along, and follow you both."

And he set it down. Just there. A little to the right of the brightest one. The second star to the right, and straight on till morning.

That is where Neverland is. It has always been there. It was only waiting for someone to find it.

The boy went back down. The old woman had gone. He never grew up, of course. You already knew that. But every night, still, he checks the sky to make sure every last grain is where he put it. And if you look — really look, on a clear night, with the window open and the lamps low — you can sometimes see him at his work.

Goodnight, small sailor. The sky is looking after you.