Body of Stars

by Laura Maylene Walter

  For the purposes of sanctioned interpretation, any romantic relationships referenced within these pages assume lawful sexuality, i.e., one man paired with one woman, as is consistent with cultural and social decency. Those who act on attraction to the same sex should not expect to benefit from government support. Additionally, the descriptors “man” and “woman” refer exclusively to sex assigned at birth. Any interference with natural marking patterns—by tattooing, scarring, or other methods of self-inflicted deformity—in an attempt to alter the natural sex state is considered a misdemeanor under the law.

  As the government agency responsible for all matters related to markings and interpretation, the Office of the Future maintains control solely over this nation’s official editions of Mapping the Future and bears no responsibility for addenda published in other countries. Citizens are forewarned that foreign editions may be incomplete or inaccurate, either by error or by intent.

  6

  Cassandra showed up at school the next day with a stack of pink invitations. Thick pearl card stock, embossed lettering. Your presence is requested this Saturday at the coming-out party for Miss Cassandra Hahn. My invitation was addressed not only to me but also to my father, mother, and brother, our full names rising from the paper in relief.

  Cassandra stood by my locker sorting her remaining invitations. She was excited, jittery, energy coming off of her like steam rising from the street after a summer rain. She wanted things to be perfect. She wanted her party to be about her, not about my father’s banner or Deirdre’s abduction or any other distractions. I supposed that was her right. This was her time.

  I didn’t want a coming-out party of my own, which was for the best considering my family could never host an elaborate event like Cassandra’s. It had always been that way for us. Thanks to our shared birthdate, Miles and I had joint birthday parties as children. Our mother bought blank invitations at the drugstore and wrote out the details by hand. Every year, it was a battle to decide the theme of the invitations: Miles wanted robots, I wanted dragonflies. Usually we compromised and got the balloon design. It never occurred to us to ask for two sets of invitations, or, for that matter, separate parties. My father’s job didn’t pay as much as he seemed to think it should; plus there were debts and other adult matters Miles and I didn’t understand at the time. We just knew our family lived on the line between having enough and not.

  That day in school I marveled at the sheer number of invitations Cassandra handed out. Olivia, the fourth-year who played the female lead in every school musical, slowed her pace as she passed us in the hall. Cassandra dug through her stack of invitations and thrust one toward her.

  “It’s on Saturday,” Cassandra said brightly. “Come celebrate with me.”

  Olivia smiled. She was our school’s rising star, the kind of girl beloved by all and invited to everything, but she’d be sure to grace the party with her presence. I knew this just as I predicted the boys would trail Cassandra all day at school as though she were their queen.

  My friend’s invitations were coveted, a symbol of social success. To be invited to her party was to be welcomed into her world of beauty, and wealth, and the promise of a bright future. Throughout the day I caught glimpses of that card stock everywhere—carried in plain sight through the halls, conspicuously exposed during class. I tucked mine inside my history book, but sometimes I cracked the spine and reached in to touch it. The paper felt shimmery, solid. Even hidden away in the dark, it had worth.

  * * *

  * * *

  I returned home to an empty house. My mother had a doctor’s appointment, and my father was still at work. Miles was at Julia’s for a private lesson. I wondered where the money came from for this education, what he had to do to earn it.

  A few years ago, when he’d been invited to take a photography course and needed to pay for film, paper, and chemicals, Miles got creative. He made flyers advertising a dog-walking service and hung them around the neighborhood. He tried babysitting, but not many people wanted to hire a boy. One weekend he and I went door-to-door offering to mow lawns or weed flower beds, but that ended after I got a sunburn so severe my skin peeled for weeks.

  Miles refused to give up. He was devoted to that photography class, and he was going to find a way to fund it. He enlisted my help again, this time to participate in the neighborhood yard sale. Together we spent hours sorting through our old toys and dragging unwanted household items outside to sell. Miles’s biggest offering was the croquet set he found in the garage. It was a nice set, real wood, heavy, the balls with a heft like weapons. He placed the croquet set prominently in our front yard and sat for hours in a folding chair while no one bought it. Eventually I took a break and walked up and down the street, examining our competition. By then the day had become about more than Miles and raising money. It became about my curiosity, my nascent wonderings about the human mind.

  That neighborhood yard sale was where I found my first psychology book: Principles of the Mind. The author, Dr. Lauren Kisterboch, was pictured on the inside back cover wearing a black skirt suit, her arms crossed with authority. I bought the book with the loose change in my pocket. When I returned home, Miles was angry. He said the point of the yard sale was to make money, not spend it, but I told him the book had only cost twenty cents, which was basically nothing. Plus it was mine, first the money and then the book, which I placed in a prominent position on my bookshelf. It remained there still, its red spine setting it apart from all my other books.

  After school that day, I slid Cassandra’s party invitation on the kitchen counter and went to my room. I headed straight for my bookcase, resolved to stop worrying about how Miles might pay for his interpretation classes. He’d find a way—he always did for what he most wanted. It was time to direct my attention to my own interests instead.

  I pulled down Principles of the Mind from its place on the shelf among the other psychology books I’d collected: old textbooks I’d found in the used-book store, the remaindered copies of lesser-known professionals touting some theory or another, the biographies of the greats. They were mostly written by men, with the author’s photo printed across the full back cover. Gray hair, beards, suits, shiny knotted ties. It all meant nothing to me, not just the authors but the books themselves. Even Dr. Kisterboch’s Principles of the Mind, which I’d devoted the most time to studying, only made sense in flashes. The material was too advanced for me, impenetrable, and I waited to grow older and have it all make sense. I thought life was like that: reach a certain milestone and poof—complete understanding.

  For a while I sat on the floor flipping through Principles of the Mind, reading snatches of Dr. Kisterboch’s dryly balanced analysis of the human psyche. Before long, I found myself thinking of Miles instead. I thought of the game we played in the basement, how he could look me full in the face and withhold the truth about something so grave. I worried what else he might conceal, what secrets were yet to come between us.

  I abandoned my books on the floor and snuck into Miles’s room. It was a tradition for me to hunt through his things when he wasn’t home. I picked my way over the clothes and books strewn across the floor to reach his desk, where an envelope caught my eye. It was addressed in my brother’s handwriting to the Office of the Future, and when I picked it up, the paper seemed to slip out and unfold in my hands as if of its own accord. That was how snooping worked for me: it was an out-of-body experience, something for which I believed I bore no blame.

  I was holding a Petition for Addendum form. I skimmed its contents, expecting to read a mundane technical request, but soon I felt blood rush to my cheeks. My brother was petitioning the Office of the Future to create special interpretation training programs for men. The interpretation field was female-dominated, my brother argued, only because it was considered women’s work, which caused men to dismiss it out of hand. As a result, the strict gender line held, potentially robbing the world of men�
��s talents.

  “Just as our government forbids explicit discrimination against women in the workplace, men should receive rights equal to women in pursuing the profession of interpretation,” he’d written. “To discourage men from this line of work reinforces outdated gender politics, and it unnecessarily restricts gifted men from making valuable contributions in the field.” He went on to suggest that to alleviate fears of men taking advantage of girls, each male interpreter could be accompanied by a female assistant during readings. Like a chaperone, or like the nurses who stayed in the room while male doctors examined women and girls.

  I lowered the letter but didn’t let go of it. It struck me as a hopeless thing. The Mapping the Future authors and editors were exclusively male, but that didn’t mean they would be sympathetic to my brother’s request. The editorial panel was notoriously conservative, and they made updates to Mapping the Future only rarely. The latest addendum, which purported to focus on gender and sexuality, barely acknowledged the reality of same-sex attraction and relationships. Miles was asking the authors to take too great a leap. He was also being unreasonable, in my view. Girls could never truly be comfortable with male interpreters. It was just common sense.

  Back then, my teenage self did not understand the distinction between official channels and the underground, the place where real progress was born. A Mapping the Future addendum would eventually be published, yes, but not for what Miles had originally petitioned. In the years to come, I’d buy the revised edition not for myself but for all the girls who had a different sort of future—one I could hardly begin to imagine back then.

  * * *

  * * *

  I was still holding that form when Miles returned home, when he bounded up the stairs toward me. He took one step into his room and stopped when he saw me.

  I held up his letter. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m trying to change the system.” He came forward and snapped the paper from my hand. “It’s a waste to keep good men out of the profession.”

  “You know what Mapping the Future says about male interpreters.” I walked over to his bookcase to locate our family copy of the text. I plucked it down and paged through until I came to the section “On Men and Interpretation.”

  “‘A woman is marked by nature, but a man is naked, unreadable,’” I read out loud. “‘For this reason, men are dissuaded from pursuing interpretation professionally. No man is as gifted as a woman in the interpretive arts, and he should harbor no illusions concerning the scope of his abilities. A man’s role is to guide society, set laws, and accept responsibility for the larger arc of the future. The realm of the domestic and individual, meanwhile, falls to women.’”

  “I know what it says.” Miles looked flustered. “You have to see the bigger picture, Celeste. Maybe men aren’t considered skilled because they haven’t learned properly, or they never thought to try. And maybe the Office of the Future hasn’t seriously considered this because no one has fought for it. I’m willing to do that.”

  Like my brother, I understood what it felt like to be held back based on gender. My bookshelf full of psychology books written by men was proof enough of that. At the same time, I’d never want to undress for a male interpreter, with or without a woman chaperoning him. We’d never even met a male interpreter in real life—the few men who did practice lived in bigger cities. Even then, their work was considered a lark.

  “Did Julia have you do this?” I asked. “I told you something was off about her.”

  “No. This was my idea, but Julia supports it. She knows I’m talented. She knows what I can be.”

  I scanned the final sentences of the “On Men and Interpretation” section, which I read silently, to myself: Our stance on this issue is clear and concrete: It is the female sex that bears the burden of interpretation, and thus it is women who are best qualified to study the finer parts of this art form. A man, in this case, is no woman’s equal.

  “Anyway, that doesn’t matter right now,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “Where?”

  Miles didn’t answer me. He reached down to dig through a pile of clothes on the floor. When he found his navy zip-up sweatshirt, he tossed it on. I noticed for the first time that his hands were trembling.

  “Miles. Tell me what’s going on.”

  He wouldn’t look at me. “It’s Deirdre,” he finally said. “She’s back.”

  The book grew heavy in my hand. “She is?”

  “I just heard. I’m going over to see her.”

  “I’m sure she doesn’t want to be alone with a boy right now. I’ll come with you.”

  “That’s not a good idea.” Miles adjusted the sweatshirt. “Trust me.”

  For a moment I worried the shaking would start again, that I’d be so stricken with terror that I would not be able to move. But no. I had to see Deirdre, to face what had happened to her.

  “I’m coming,” I said firmly, and I replaced Mapping the Future on Miles’s bookcase. The gold-embossed letters on the spine glinted dully. Not like stars but like a pair of eyes watching me. Remembering where I’d been and where I’d yet to go.

  * * *

  * * *

  According to Miles, Deirdre had been found unconscious, dumped in an alley somewhere. Paramedics lifted her body and took her to the hospital, where she spent four days recovering in the Reintegration Wing. Only then was she sent home. There was no public announcement, no parade or welcome-home party. It was almost as if she were still gone.

  Deirdre lived at the edge of our neighborhood, about a mile away, in a modest brick bungalow covered in overgrown vines. We crossed the uncut lawn, passing a rusted birdfeeder hanging cockeyed from the pine tree out front, to knock firmly on the front door. Deirdre’s parents invited us inside at once. They were probably grateful their daughter had any visitors at all.

  Upstairs, we found Deirdre in bed. She looked smaller, as though she hadn’t eaten for many days. Her hair was chopped off at her chin, which I found odd—did her kidnapper do this? Maybe it was her parents, in an attempt to conceal her identity, or perhaps it was the nurses at the hospital, or maybe Deirdre did it herself, precisely because she knew she wasn’t the same person anymore.

  Miles took a seat at the desk while I sat cross-legged on the floor. I noticed Deirdre wasn’t wearing her opal necklace—just one more bit of brightness wiped away.

  “How are you?” Miles asked.

  Deirdre fixed him with a blank stare. “The only thing I have going for me right now is that I can’t remember anything.”

  Miles and I nodded. Kidnappers drugged abducted girls to keep them quiet and under control. It was a fortuitous side effect, some people said, that the drugs also erased memory.

  Deirdre shifted her gaze my way. I had so many questions for her, questions I knew I could never ask out loud. What her body felt like, her skin, whether she could still smell him. If she had a sense of who he was, how he hurt her, what he did. It was too horrific to imagine, and yet I was imagining it: A man making Deirdre exposed, vulnerable, raw. Breaking the life she’d known. That her hair was cut short seemed appropriate, making her a pruned thing, snapped off at the source. These thoughts collided in my mind, a mess of salacious details, but I could not stop myself. I felt like a monster for even thinking of what Deirdre had gone through—and for the tiny part of me that desperately, nakedly, wanted to know more.

  Deirdre was still watching me. I worried she sensed the grotesque scenes blooming to life in my mind.

  “I brought you something.” Miles pulled out a plastic bag containing two red pills. They shined like spots of blood in his palm.

  Deirdre leaned forward on her knees in bed, allowing her comforter to fall away. I couldn’t help but look at her body—her thin, bruised body, no longer glorious because her changeling period had passed. She was a woman now, a dull copy of the girl I’d seen in the s
chool bathroom just a few weeks ago, but she was also something else. She was strong. She had to be, I decided, to live through that violence.

  “Bloodflower,” she said, reverence in her voice. Miles spilled the drugs into her open hands.

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked him. Bloodflower was illegal. I knew it was fairly easy to obtain, and possession only amounted to a misdemeanor, but still.

  “I know a guy,” he said, as though that was enough.

  Several years ago, our school brought in a recovering bloodflower addict as a speaker. The man was skinny all over, with ropy tendons visible in his arms and neck. He told us how his use of bloodflower over the years made him disassociate from reality. How he went from living an average, productive life to living one built on fantasy and delusion. He lost weight, lost friends, lost his job. All he wanted was to swallow those red pills, to float himself onto another plane of existence. And for returned girls, bloodflower had an additional effect: it could help recover memories from the abduction.

  Deirdre set one of the bloodflower pills on her bedside table. She swallowed the other one dry. I wanted to protest, to point out that the drug would make Deirdre hallucinate or lose herself in a dreamworld or break into an uncontrollable sweat. To remember what might best be lost forever.

  I was so young then. I had no idea what people did to carry on.

  When Deirdre raised her eyes again, she focused on me.

  “You haven’t changed yet.” She said it like an accusation. “Who else has, since I’ve been gone?”

  “A few girls in your interpretation class,” I said. “Khalia and Yvonne. Their parents are keeping them at home. And my friend Cassandra.”

  Deirdre considered this information. “Is Cassandra stuck at home, too?”

  “No. She’s going to school, spending time with friends. Like everything is the same.”