"Last one to the end of the field is an old shaak!" Jess screams, and I bolt after him, as fast as my legs can carry me. I'm only seven cycles into my little life, and Jess, the neighbor's boy, is the closest thing I have to a brother. We spend the hours we have away from our chores with the fields of mouraan--the shared crop of our families--as our own endless playground. Between the high, teal-blue stalks of the mourann, we are smugglers and Jedi and rulers of planetary systems. Most often, we are pilots, racing in our invisible crafts to one end of the field or the other.
"Wait up!" I shout, as Jess gets closer to our finish line.
He doesn't listen, and instead, crosses and cartwheels in a sign of victory.
"That's not how racing works," Jess says in a matter-of-fact manner. "I'm not gonna slow down because you're slower. If you wanna beat me, just get faster."
"But I'm a girl." I slow down, my feet squashing into the ground below with each momentum-filled step.
"So?" Jess plucks an ear of mouraan from its stalk, takes a big, juicy bite. "Doesn't mean you can't go fast."
He extends the mouraan to me and I shrug, roll my eyes and sit down beside him. We finish the ear together and Trikaan's star begins to set.
"I don't get why we have so much of this stuff," Jess sighs, looking around at the mouraan.
"Everyone eats it," I reply with an adult-like matter-of-factness. "We have to plant lots and lots to feed just this star system, let alone the whole galaxy."
I watch Jess try to understand. "'s still crazy to me that that, right there--" a gangly finger points to the stalk in front of us-- "Could feed somebody far away, like on Courescant or Jakku."
"I wish the mouraan could talk."
Jess giggles. "Why?"
"'Cause then we could tell it to say 'hi' to the people far away."
Jess stands on his gangly legs, shouts to the mouraan stalk--"Hey! Tell General Leia we said 'hi'!"
I like this game. I stand up, too. "Tell her we said, 'May the force be with you'!"
Jess howls at the sky, "May the force be with you!"
We sing those words into the stars until our mothers call us home.