"Blessed are those who have lived to see the Empire, but more blessed are the unborn generation that will only know the Empire. We must ensure the schools teach them the follies and corruption of democracy and the glory of the Empire and its Emperor."
-Pollux Hax, "From the Holoboard to Home: On the Intersections of Children's Mental Health, Education, and Social Policy"
The Tale of Luka Kroe and Vorena Enniss, or the Rebel's Tale
Vorena Enniss was new to Trebor High School. On the first day of school, her father dropped her off in a shiny new air speeder. He wished her a good first day as she got off, and she gave a shy, sweet smile and said she would try. She was almost inside the building when she hesitated, looked back and waved a small wave. Her father waved back. He watched her until she was inside and then he flew off.
That year everyone noticed Vorena walk through the school doors for the first time, for she was like the rare bird that sang against morning swathes of pinks and yellows and baby blues oblivious to itself. She was the girl teachers liked to call on for her soft, correct answers, and she was the one other girls rambled to and boys glanced at and shot away when she glanced back. She was the quiet breeze in the ruckus of the city, and she was the pale starlight in the dark and clouded night. When she came into the school with her books held tightly to her chest, she reminded everyone of trees and windy glades and dew-covered flowers they had never seen, for no such things grew on Coruscant.
Then there was Luka Kroe, a lanky boy who spent his time in class doodling in his textbook and tapping his foot furiously on the floor. On cool nights he slept with the windows open and listened to the air speeders whistle their electric wind, or he would stay up and watch the starships rise from Coruscant's ports and rocket silently into space. After school he walked in the city streets alone, with crumpled and balled up papers and weightless litter blown after him like wilted brown leaves. He went to his grandmother's house and played with her pet chiwa, or he sat on her porch and played himself a game of dejarik. Or you might hear him churn out a solitary tune from his mother's black ball organ by the small window. But most of the time he was in his room playing a sinthar that his father had bought him for his birthday. The sinthar was a fretted instrument with seven strings, and with it Luka played melodies his father had grown up listening to. And Luka was never seen with any other child.
That morning, the morning Luka first saw Vorena, she was wearing a neat blue blouse and a wrinkless black skirt and a little golden locket around her neck. She entered through the side door of the classroom and moved quietly to the seat in front of Luka. He looked at her and forgot to smile or nod, just looked, and she gave an uneasy look and sat down. Luka realized his textbook was open to a doodle he had just started of a xenu. He quickly erased it with aggressive rubs from his eraser.
The teacher, a rotund man with white hair where hair still grew, ambled into the classroom and wrote his name on the holoboard in big crude lettering.
"My name is Mister Daylu," he said loudly. "And I'm your homeroom teacher this year."
Mr. Daylu began lecturing about class expectations and test schedules and homework requirements, and the whole time Luka sat back-straight in his chair and listened attentively. He didn't draw once in his textbook for the rest of the class period, or for any other class period.
That day, when school was over, he watched Vorena switch out her books from her crisp blue locker and head for large double doors leading outside to the school yard. It was as if the nasty pallid lighting didn't touch her, as if the metal walls had been plied back to let in fresh air. She carried some books as she went and held them to her chest. Luka caught up with her and started walking beside her.
"Excuse me. I think I have you in one of my classes," he said.
She was caught a little off guard and seemed to contemplate. "I suppose we do," she said.
"May I carry your books?"
She shrugged. "I guess so. If you want to," she said.
He reached out and took her books from her.
"So are you new here?" Luka asked.
"This is my first day," she said.
"Where did you go before?"
"A small private school on Corulag. We moved here because of my dad's work."
"What does he do?"
"He works for a space transport company."
"Oh."
They walked out the double doors, and down the walkway was Vorena's father in his shiny air speeder.
"Thank you for carrying my books. I'll take them from here," she said.
"It's no problem," he said. He handed her back her books. "Can I carry your books tomorrow?"
"I don't know. Why?"
"Because I'd like to."
She was quiet for a moment. "I guess it'd be alright," she said at last. She glanced at her father waiting in the air speeder. "Well I better go. See you tomorrow."
"See you tomorrow," he said.
Vorena walked away slowly to the air speeder and was gone.
'
The next morning, he happened to class early and sat at the same desk as yesterday while Mr. Daylu prepped the holoboard for his lesson. Vorena came in just before class started, and Luka waved at her a little, and she gave a tiny wave back and sat in front of him again.
After school he saw her at her locker. He walked up to her.
"Well, here I am," he said, grinning.
She smiled a little. "And I'm not surprised."
"May I carry your books?"
"Are you sure you want to? I can carry them fine."
"I know, but I'd still like to, and I never do anything I don't like."
She nodded and held out her books for him to grab. He carefully took them, and they strolled alongside each other.
"You keep carrying my books, and I don't even know your name," she said.
"Luka," he said.
They walked all the way down in silence. Vorena decided to let Luka say something first, but he never did. She glanced slightly over at him and saw how at ease and how happy he seemed. They passed the school doors, and he stopped and handed her back the books.
"I guess this it," he said.
"Guess so," she said.
"See you tomorrow."
"Luka-" she began to say.
"Yes?"
"Never mind. See you tomorrow." She walked away.
And they saw each other every morning in homeroom and every day after class and would talk in the minutes before class started, and for the next two weeks he carried her books. One morning Mr. Daylu had to temporarily leave the classroom to call so-and-so at home about this-and-such, and he said he'd be right back, and so for about five minutes Luka and Vorena talked about nothing in particular, and they found their conversation engaging all the same. And each day the last bell of the day would blast its metallic rattling fanfare, and there was a brief moment of silence in the halls, and the doors burst open and out poured all the students in the halls, talking over each other and their feet hitting the floor in a loud droning rumble. And sure enough, there'd be Vorena Enniss at her locker, and then there'd be Luka offering to carry her books again. On their short walks they talked about all sorts of things.
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" she asked him.
"A singer," he said.
"I hear it's hard to make it as a singer."
"I know, but I'm going to try. I practice the sinthar a lot."
"You play?"
He nodded. "I can show you sometime if you'd like."
"That sounds fun."
Luka thought for a while. "Could you do me a favor, Vorena?"
"Tell me the favor first."
"In a couple of weeks they're having a light festival. There'll be giant hot air balloons that light up and change colors, and there will be lots of food and music. Maybe you'd like to come, too?"
Vorena pursed her lips, unsure of what to say.
"Don't you think it'd be fun?" he said.
"I don't think I can go. I'm going to be busy," she said.
He almost asked busy doing what but stopped himself.
"Some of the balloons let you ride them. And you can see the old Jedi Temple from them. And you can see the big dome where the Emperor lives. I'll pay for us so you won't have to pay for anything. It's a lot of fun and I hope you come. Have you ever tried a Coruscanti bantha burger? You can get some really good ones there."
"Thanks, Luka, but no, maybe some other time."
He looked at her and said, "I shouldn't have asked, should I?"
"It's not a big deal," she said.
The next morning Luka came to class early, but Vorena never showed, and after school, she wasn't at her locker, and he was afraid to approach her friends and inquire. That night he couldn't sleep and stayed up and watched the spaceships outside his window jump to hyperspace and noiselessly blip away from the planet in tiny white comet streaks, and his mind stirred restlessly, so he picked up his sinthar and strummed a pensive tune that sounded like water gently lapping a boat on a quiet autumn night. He fell asleep to the faint sound of air speeders. He overslept his alarm clock the following morning, and his mother woke him up, and he scrambled to put his clean clothes on and to brush his teeth. He grabbed his backpack and rushed out the door after saying goodbye to his mother. He walked fast to the school and into Mr. Daylu's classroom in the middle of the lecture. Mr. Daylu ignored him and kept talking and scribbling on the holoboard. Vorena was there in class but was sitting at a different desk on the other side of the classroom near the front. He looked at her, and she was looking down at her book, not reading, just looking at it.
That morning he saw her at her locker talking to some girls and laughing, and he didn't talk to her and instead left the school as he had every day in the years before he had seen Vorena for the first time. She watched him walk out the doors, and she chuckled at something a girl said as she looked, and she was only half-listening to the girl.
She continued to sit at her new desk, and a few days later she decided to bring her favorite album, John Dreamer's Galaxies in a Hand, to class with her. That day she approached Luka at his locker and said, "I'm sorry if I've been ignoring you." He said it was alright, and she handed him the album. "It's my favorite," she said. He took it home and stayed up that night listening to it, and he returned it to her the next day and the talked about the album. She brought up other singers and bands she liked, and he brought up the ones he liked. They walked together onto the schoolyard, and Luka thanked her for lending the album. "You're welcome," she said. They said goodbye and parted ways, she to her father's air speeder, and he to the streets of Coruscant and to his home.
It was about this time that she found it hard not to sneak a glance out the corner of her eye at Luka during class, more a flicker than glance, and every time she looked, his head was down and he was scribbling in his book and seeming to not pay any attention to Mr. Daylu. But whenever Mr. Daylu called on him to answer a question, he casually perked up and answered fine, and she found herself glancing at him for several seconds as he answered. And after class she would talk with some friends she had made and was unable to look in his direction at all as he passed.
And then on the night of the light festival, Luka didn't go, and he wondered if she did, and decided she hadn't. He felt a faint hope and imagined her going and standing under shining hot air balloons looking for him, but he knew it was a vain and selfish image, and more than that, he knew it was wrong and stupid to imagine such things. And the music from John Dreamer's album lingered with him, so he tuned it out by playing his sinthar and singing.
Later that month, a new girl appeared at Trebor High School. She had transferred from another school on Coruscant, and her name was Sara Farrell, and everyone noticed her walk through the school doors for the first time, for she was like the rare bird that sang against twilight swathes of greens and murky blues and fiery reds oblivious to itself. She was the girl teachers liked to call on for her confident, correct answers, and she was the one girls confided in and boys talked to with ease but never had any chance of catching her eye. She came in wearing modest and simple clothes, and when Luka saw her, she reminded him of the stirring of leaves in a quiet forest, or the swooshing of a deep and endless sea, though he had never heard such things. He shared no class with her, nor did he once speak to her, for thoughts of Vorena still weighed heavily on his mind.
He and Vorena spoke very little now, and only intermittently. She never returned to her old desk in front of him, and he never instigated any conversation with her. Whenever she spoke to him though, he was always friendly and talkative. The days they talked were the hardest. On those days he would roam the streets of Coruscant with his hands in his pockets, deep in thought and with the wind at his back.
Then on a weekend morning, when the sun was bright and warmthless and while a cold front swept through the neighborhood, Luka sat on the glass steps of his grandmother's porch playing his sinthar and mumbling a quiet song when a girl in warm running clothes jogged by. She stopped and listened, and the girl was Sara Farrell, the new girl at Trebor High School.
"Nice playing," she called, smiling.
Luka stopped abruptly and glanced up and saw her standing across the yard. "Thanks," he said and smiled back absentmindedly, distracted with other thoughts.
"I think I've seen you at my school," she said. "You look familiar."
He laughed and said, "Maybe. It's a big school." He paused. "Do you live around here?"
She nodded and pointed towards some houses. "My house is back behind there," she said. "Is this where you live?"
"No, this is my grandma's place. I visit sometimes," he said.
"Oh, okay."
And that was all of the first meeting of Luka Kroe and Sara Farrell. She waved and said, "Well it was nice meeting you. Maybe I'll see you at school," and he answered, "Nice meeting you," and she kept on her jog and was gone.
And they did see each other at school, though not often, and they would say hello to each other at passing and move on, and they didn't yet know each other's names.
After school, he saw her sitting on the school steps alone waiting for someone to pick her up, and he considered going up and talking to her, and he couldn't think of a single reason not to, so he did just that. And they sat together and talked about all sorts of things.
"And what are you going to do when you grow up?" he asked her.
"I want to be a doctor," she said.
"I'm terrible at science."
"I'm terrible at everything else," she said, laughing.
He laughed too. He hadn't laughed in a long time, and though it was genuine it felt unnatural to him and maybe manufactured, as if he was lying his happiness.
They talked for several minutes before her mother arrived to pick her up.
"My name's Sara, by the way," she said, extending a hand to him. He raised his hand and shook with her. "Luka," he said.
"See you around," she said.
"See ya."
She walked up to the air speeder and got in, and they watched each other as she flew away. He waved, and she waved back. "Who's that?" her mother teased. "Just a friend," she said, a little embarrassed. "His name is Luka."
They didn't see each other often, and it was only intermittently, but when they talked they got along well. Meanwhile Luka and Vorena stopped talking completely, and Luka hated going to Mr. Daylu's class. He wondered if seeing her in the class would ever become more bearable, and he deeply feared it wouldn't.
He began looking forward to seeing Sara though. Once every weekend morning he would be playing his sinthar on his grandmother's porch, and sure enough there'd be Sara Farrell jogging by, and she'd stop and they'd talk for a while. One time he invited her to play a quick game of dejarik on the porch, and she accepted the invitation and destroyed him twice. "I better get going," she said, realizing the time, and she hurried off.
Things stayed like this for nearly the rest of the semester. At some point Vorena Enniss began dating a tall boy, very attractive and sweetly mannered. The boy was sixteen, a good two years older than her. After school they would talk and hold hands, smiling but never so far as laughing.
And when the semester was almost over, the week of the school dance rolled around, and Luka decided he wouldn't go. Vorena was certainly going with her boyfriend, and when Sara mentioned the dance to Luka, she asked him if he was going. "No, no I don't think so," he said dryly. "Oh," was all she said, and they spoke nothing more of it. She heard rumors from other girls that several boys planned on asking her to the dance, all of them handsome and well-liked. And later that week, one of the rumored boys, an athletic boy named Tobe Spurket, asked her to the dance, and she agreed. "Great," the boy said, jubilant.
On the night of the dance, there was Luka, pacing back and forth on his grandmother's porch, hands sometimes in his pockets, arms sometimes crossed, and he kept his gaze on the floor, occasionally looking up at the street as if he was waiting for someone to show. His grandmother noticed and joined him on the porch.
"You look so stern," she said.
"It's nothing. I just wanted some fresh air is all," he said without looking at her.
"You won't mind me joining you then," she said, and she eased onto a chair.
"Of course not."
They both enjoyed each other's company in silence, he standing and observing the land speeders dart down the durasteel street, and she seated and contentedly reading a holobook. The sun had almost set, and the sky no longer shouted with golds and pinks and tangerines and now was a dark and shadowy blue, and the horizon glared red and showed just over the metal roofs across the street. He found himself thinking about the sounds of the ocean and imagined he could hear it sway.
His grandmother suddenly looked up at him for a long time, and then she set down her holobook.
"Luka," she said.
He turned, startled. Neither of them had spoken in the peaceful hour.
"Will you come and sit with me?" she asked.
He joined her and sat in the old plasticast chair beside her. She looked at him intently until he looked away. "Luka, something's bothering you."
"I'm fine."
"But you're clearly not."
"It's fine."
"Why don't you go visit that girl you're always talking to?"
Luka was caught a little off guard at the mention of Sara. "I can't. She's at the school dance right now," he said. "It's probably already starting," he added sheepishly.
"You should go see her then."
"She's already going with someone else." He almost added that another girl would be there, and he desperately wanted to say it, but he kept quiet from shame.
"So? I've seen how she lights up when she sees you. You should go see her."
"But the dance has already started."
His grandmother shook her head. "Why is youth is wasted on the wrong people?" she said, getting up. "If you change your mind, I still have your grandfather's old suit hanging. He wore it when we started dating, and it should fit you fine, and I can take you to the dance in my land speeder."
He gave a weak smile. "Thanks," he said. She nodded and disappeared inside. And he stayed and felt the chilled wind blow, and he watched the horizon's red band die out and fade to a smoky brown.
'
He did end up going to the dance after all that night. His grandfather's suit fit him like a glove, and he fixed up his hair, and his grandmother took him to the school dance in her old jalopy of a land speeder. The dance was being held on a luxurious sail barge docked and hovering beside the school. The barge was brightly lit: rows of little lights shone over the deck like stars against the night sky, slowly changing their colors. And there was plenty of food, and on a table was a glass bowl with a metal ladle and filled with frosty white punch, and everyone danced with their dates to the upbeat music of a live band.
And there near the prow of the barge was Sarah Farrell drinking punch and chatting with some girls, and her date Tobe Spurket stood beside her listening to the lively conversation. She was wearing a modest white dress that dazzled like starlight, and when Luka walked on the sail barge he was nervous and a little worried, but he noticed Sara immediately and suddenly the jumbled and screaming noises in his mind ceased, and he knew he had to go up to her. As he made his way up to the front of the sail barge, Sara saw him and for a moment she watched him with her lips just slightly parted, and her eyes did not once train off him. The other girls watched too, for Luka looked very handsome, and Tobe looked back and forth between Luka and the girls trying to make sense of what was happening.
"Sara," Luka said.
The girls watched intently, and so did Tobe.
"Sara, I know I said I wouldn't come," he said and trailed off. He gave up trying to find the words and extended a hand to her. He smiled at her, and he didn't look arrogant nor did he look sheepish. He looked assured, and gentle. She smiled and glanced at Tobe as if to ask for approval, and she reached out and took Luka's hand, and he led her onto the dance floor.
"That's my date!" Tobe called.
Luka swayed a hand dismissively. "She's out of your parsec anyway," he said.
And Luka Kroe and Sara Farrell danced together for the first time that night, and he admitted he didn't actually know how to dance, and she laughed and admitted she didn't either, and they hallooed with laughter, and they had never had a more fun night.
Meanwhile a beautiful Vorena Enniss stood by the punch with her boyfriend, and she saw Luka dancing with a very pretty girl in a white dress, and he looked enrapt with her, and Vorena smiled and was happy for him.
"Let's dance," her boyfriend told her, and he led her onto the dance floor and they danced to the live music and had a good time, and occasionally she couldn't stop herself from glancing over at Luka, and she would look for several seconds at a time. Luka and Vorena never forgot each other, nor did they ever speak a word to each other again. Vorena would remember him as that boy who had carried her books for her, and he would remember her as something more, then something less as he became older. But while he and Sara Farrell danced, he thought nothing of Vorena, and he talked with Sara under the many colored lights of the sail barge, and under the many starships blipping brightly into space like shooting stars.
