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It was very cold on Peter Quill’s last day on planet Earth. It was so cold that the nine-year-old could almost see his breath indoors.
Sitting on a hard plastic bench listening to his Awesome Mix Tape Vol. 1 on headphones he’d gotten for Christmas, Peter looked down and fiddled with the buttons on his tape player. He tried not to think about where he was, in a hospital where his mother lay sick. Very sick. She’d been seeing doctors for a long time, and Peter had almost gotten used to the way she sometimes called him by the wrong name, or forgot things he knew she knew.
But now the family was gathered in the room, Gramps and Peter’s aunts, and Peter knew things were much worse. He tried to sink away into the music and not think about it.
“Peter, your mama wants to speak with you.”
Peter looked up to see Gramps kneeling in front of him. How long had he been there? Peter didn’t move. He knew what would happen if he stopped listening to the music. It was the only thing that stood between him and ...
“Come on, Pete. Let’s take these fool things off,” Gramps said, removing Peter’s headphones. His voice was firm but warm. He stopped the tape and put the player and headphones in Peter’s backpack as he walked Peter into his mother’s room. He couldn’t see his mother from the door. All he could see was the bed and the beeping machines and the worried women clustered around the bed.
Gramps stood back as Peter walked around the bed and stood where his mother could see him. He could hear her breathing, slow and wheezy. She tried to lift up her head and greet him. Her hair was gone from one of the treatments the doctors had given her, and her skin was pale.
Peter could see the shapes of her bones under the skin. She had some trouble focusing her eyes, but when she looked at him she smiled a little. He saw her looking at his face, and her smile slipped a little when she noticed the bruise under his eye.
She frowned at the welt and asked, “Why have you been fighting with the other boys again, baby?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
Peter shrugged.
“Peter?” she prompted. He didn’t want to say anything to worry her, but Peter had never been able to keep anything from his mother. They were a team, especially since his father wasn’t around.
“They hurt a little frog that ain’t done nothing,” Peter said, trying to explain about the bullies in his neighborhood. He looked down and away from her, embarrassed and scared and unsure of what to do. “They smushed it with a stick.”
“You’re so like your daddy,” Mama whispered. “You even look like him.” Her eyes drifted up toward the skies, a dreamy expression crossing her face. “And he was an angel composed out of pure light.”
Peter didn’t know what she meant. He didn’t know what his daddy looked like because he’d never seen him—but deep inside he was glad to hear it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gramps exchange a quick look with one of Peter’s aunts, a look that said, She’s getting “confused” again.
“Meredith,” Gramps said, trying to bring her back. “You’ve got a present there for Peter, don’t you?”
She looked dazed for a moment as her vision of angels faded away, but then Mama looked down at the present sitting on the bedsheets.
Mama stared down into her lap as if seeing the present for the first time. “Of course,” she said. She tried to pick up the package, but she didn’t have the strength.
Peter took it in his hands and looked at the sloppy packaging and crooked bow. “I got you covered, Pete,” Gramps said as he picked up the present and stuck it in Peter’s open backpack.
“You open it up when I’m gone, okay?” she whispered. Peter was trying to be brave, but when she said that he felt his eyes start to get hot and sting with tears. He didn’t want to cry in front of her. Not now.
“Your grandpa is gonna take such good care of you, at least until your daddy comes back to get you.”
She swallowed deeply and then held out her hand to Peter. “Take my hand, baby.”
Peter looked at Mama’s hand, turned palm up on the blanket. He wanted to take it, he wanted to touch her one last time, but he knew if he touched her it would make everything real. If he could hold back, maybe that would stop it all from happening. He turned his face away, tears rolling down his cheeks.
“Pete, come on,” Gramps said.
“Take my hand, baby,” Mama said once again. Peter was trying to work himself up to do it when she hitched her breath and then let out a long sigh. The beeping sound from the machine next to her bed turned into a steady drone and Mama’s eyes drifted shut.
“No,” he said. “No.” He kept saying it over and over again, building up until he was screaming. No, he should have taken her hand. No, she couldn’t be gone. She couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t have left him all alone. No.
Gramps picked him up and Peter thrashed, still screaming as Gramps carried him back out into the hallway. A doctor rushed into the room past them. Gramps set him down, and Peter saw that Gramps was crying, too. “Pete,” he said. “Just stay here. Okay? Please?”
Gramps turned and walked slowly back into Mama’s room—no, not Mama’s room. The room where Mama had been before she died.
No, Peter thought. It couldn’t be real. None of it could be real.
That’s when Peter ran.
He didn’t think about running. He just did. No one stopped him.
He burst through the hospital’s outside door and ran across the parking lot. When he got to the field on the other side of the parking lot, he kept running. A cold fog swirled around him, and his shoes were soon soaked from the wet grass, but he continued. When he finally was out of breath, he dropped to his knees and sobbed. No one came looking for him. He was alone.
A deep groan came from above him and the wind kicked up, blowing the fog away. A brilliant light shone down on him, too bright to look at directly. He squinted through the wind and his tears, seeing the outline of something incredible.
It was a giant spaceship, the size of a jet plane or even bigger, hovering in the air over him. Its wings spread out to cover most of the field, and it was tipped down so its nose pointed directly at Peter. Astonished, he froze there, unable to believe what he was seeing. Lights pulsed on the outside of the craft.
The beam of light tightened its focus on Peter and began to swirl in a storm of color. He cried out, but the light picked him up and stole him away.