On the evening of the day he met the strange blonde girl at Nana's planetarium, Blaine, sleepless, gets out of bed and pads over to his bare window to gaze up into the night. There's a wind tonight, and so the thin, stringy grayish clouds skate over the surface of the bright, white full moon. It's lapping at the untrimmed branches of the huge old oak tree in the Anderson backyard, and the leaves push back, and rustle with discontent. The biggest star of the few that do burn through the cloud cover is a bright, bright bluish-white. It's dazzling. It's early summer, too, so the turbulence in the atmosphere makes it flicker like the diamond solitaire in his mother's wedding ring. Nana says the star is Sirius, the Dog Star, and that ancient Greeks thought it triggered the 'dog days of summer', when people who looked upon it became 'star-struck'. Blaine doesn't fully understand this. It's funny to think that a star would be at the center of so much heartache.
There's not much left of Nana's kaleidoscope. The strange little blonde girl had picked off the gold diamond-marked paper, peeled the cardboard, and thrown away the clear mirrors that give the toy its ability to make magic out of light. He still has the beads that make up the artificial stars within. They're the garish blue and red plastic prisms that are supposed to rattle inside the cardboard tube and make pretty star-like geometric patterns. Those, he decides, he'll always keep in his front pocket in case Nana ever asks him where they are. The rest of the kaleidoscope, he regretfully throws away, because the strange little girl has told him that he will only need the prisms for later. He doesn't know why, but he believes every single word she says as truth.
Now, he's seen actual stars through professional-grade telescopes, and of course there are the prisms in his pocket which stand in for stars, but until today he'd never thought that stars could exist in people. And he could have sworn that he'd seen one in a person, today - the boy who'd been standing with a man in a trucker cap, the boy he'd almost knocked over in his hurry to catch up to the strange blonde girl.
Cooper is much older than he is, and so, he has his own friends. His school friends are nice enough, and they eat lunch together or play video games and read comic books together on the weekends or at camp, but Blaine has never felt really close to any of them, either. So it's exciting to meet someone new, someone that could be a friend. His eyes, Blaine thinks, are like Sirius, which Nana says is a binary star system, anyway; two dazzling blue stars. It's an appropriate simile. The little boy's eyes were shining as he looked about the exhibits, and they were wide with wonderment, and they fascinated, because, like stars, there were undercurrents there, rippling beneath their shimmering surfaces. You were so curious that you had to know what was living and breathing underneath. Blaine remembers a sadness lingering underneath the little boy's expression that belied the light hanging there. He's sure that it's a sadness that the other little boy can't shake off, and he resolves to try to help. He doesn't know why there's a pull between them, or why he should try to help this stranger, but there is something between them. He has to follow it.
Blaine resolves to go back to the planetarium the next day, and every day after that, to see if he can catch up to the little boy. If the boy liked the planetarium that much, he'll convince his father that he wants to come back. Blaine wants to ask him what's happening to him and if he can help him, and if he can't, at least they could try to be friends. It'd be nice to have a real friend.
But the next day, over Sunday brunch, just when Blaine is mustering up the courage to ask if he can go to the planetarium again, his father gets a phone call. Blaine has to take tissues over to his father, and it's one of a handful of times in his life that he ever does see his father cry. Nana has had a stroke in her sleep the night before, and it's time to go and take care of her instead.
So, he never does see the sad-eyed little boy again; at least, not at the planetarium. Six years later, Blaine, in a blue-and-red blazer, stands at the foot of a spiralling iron-wrought staircase and meets another boy. This boy is just as beautiful, and has the same flawless pale skin and light brown hair; but he also has sadder icy blue eyes, and a heavier heart, and scars. Blaine never does fully remember who the first boy is. He just knows that when he's gazing at this boy with love, sitting across a little round table at the Lima Bean, that the boy's eyes outshine Sirius, and that he'll never get tired of looking at the stars in his eyes.