"Two Lovely Berries Molded On One Stem"

I've been slowly reading through The Reading Promise. It's an unusual book about a father and daughter who keep up a ten year reading streak (from when she was 8 till she was 18).  Each chapter is about one day from that time, and also the time surrounding that day and its reading.

At the end of high school the author's sister went to study abroad and that became her thing from then on, spending a year in one country followed by another. Mom had left years before and our heroine, Alice, was lonely - living on a bare bones budget, just her and her school librarian dad - and pined for her only sister.

"Sometimes I lay in her bed at night and counted the stars.  Not the ones out the window, but the little glow-in-the dark ones all over her ceiling. We'd split a pack of them years ago, and most of mine had already fallen off, landing every now and then with a little plastic sound as hey hit my floor or dresser. But Kath had used more tack then I had, and hers were still up, even after the cold winters and hot summers our house had come to expect. I wanted to peel some off and mail them to her, so we could look at them together every night, but they had lasted this long, so I let them stay. The real things, the burning balls of gas in the night sky, weren't enough. Everybody had those; these plastic stars understood and remembered. They'd seen it all. They were still here."


(The Reading Promise By Alice Orzma, Grand Central Publishing, 2011 - page 131)