Body of Stars

by Laura Maylene Walter

  “It’s not the same.” Deirdre pulled at a loose thread in her comforter. “But listen. I’m not going to tell you to stay locked in your room when your time comes. You can’t let what happens in the worst cases prevent you from living your life. Do you understand?”

  I nodded, but Deirdre was already looking over my shoulder, into the distance.

  “This was meant to happen to me,” she said. “That means it has to be okay.”

  I didn’t know what to say, or whether I believed a girl’s fate could truly be that bleak. In so many ways, Deirdre was trapped, her future cut off before it began.

  I let my gaze wander around the room until it landed on the bureau. A brochure lay there, its cover displaying pine trees and horses. I went over to it and picked it up.

  “Is this for the Mountain School?”

  “One of my aunts sent me that,” Deirdre said. “As if there’s any way my family could ever afford that place.”

  The brochure was glossy, thick. Full-color photos of classrooms, a science lab, stables, tennis courts. Teenage girls flung their arms over one another and beamed. Those girls had to be the richest of the rich. No one else could pay for such a reprieve from the real world.

  “It was from the aunt I always suspected secretly hated me. She must have sent it as a form of torture.” Deirdre paused, putting a hand to her forehead. Her eyes were unfocused. “Wow. I can really feel it kick in.”

  “It will help you relax,” Miles said.

  Deirdre gathered up the comforter and rolled onto her side. “I have to face it anyway,” she said. “Might as well start now.”

  Miles and I waited, as if Deirdre might pop up in bed at any moment and return to her old self. Instead, she closed her eyes against us and lay silently, without moving.

  After a long moment, Miles and I shared a wary look and got up to leave.

  * * *

  * * *

  During the walk home, I asked Miles again where he’d gotten the bloodflower, and how, and whether he ever took it himself. He told me not to worry about it. He said this without breaking stride, his eyes not meeting mine. This only confirmed he was capable of keeping more secrets than I’d imagined.

  We arrived home to find our parents sitting at the kitchen table. My father was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, definitely not work attire, and he was drinking a beer.

  “God forbid someone takes a creative risk.” He looked right at us while saying this, as if we’d been following their conversation. “These people can’t even articulate why they’re so angry. Some say it’s because it’s a lewd image, others because the woman in the drawing has no markings.” He shook his head. “What a crime, to ask people to use their imaginations.”

  “So Mom was right.” Miles reached behind me to slam the door shut. I’d left it hanging open, like I’d forgotten we needed to keep the inside separate from the outside. “You got fired.”

  “No.” Our father took a swig of beer. “Suspended. And removed from three of my best accounts.”

  “A demotion,” our mother explained.

  “It’s not a demotion, Paulette.”

  She shrugged. Her hands were empty, but I saw her fingers twitch. I wondered if she was thinking about cigarettes, the papery drag against her skin.

  “Kids,” she said. “Give us a few minutes, will you?”

  Miles pulled me from the kitchen and led me upstairs to his room. He closed the door and turned to me.

  “This is serious. We were already only scraping by, did you know that?”

  “Yes,” I said, but maybe I didn’t. I looked more closely at my brother. His expression was tight, frightened. “Hey.” I put a hand on his arm. “It’s okay. He didn’t get fired. He’ll get those accounts back before long.”

  He nodded. “You’re probably right. I’m overreacting.” He started to move toward the door but stopped. “I can’t shake it.”

  “Shake what?”

  “The thought that something terrible is going to happen.” His eyes searched my own. “I think about it all the time. Sometimes I can’t even sleep because of it.”

  I stared back at him. Much later I’d remember his words as a clue, a prophecy unto themselves, but in the moment I only felt compassion. My older brother was afraid. He was weak and uncertain. He was human.

  From downstairs, we heard our parents’ voices rise and grow louder.

  Miles looked at me. “Not a word,” he mouthed. He waited until there was a break in the argument downstairs, until a heavy silence settled over the house, and only then did he push open the door.

  * * *

  * * *

  On the day of Cassandra’s party, my father put on his suit as though nothing were wrong. I stood behind him to help brush the lint from the back of his jacket. This suit will have to last him, I thought when I touched the fabric. That was a surprise, to have words like my mother’s arriving unbidden in my head.

  I wore my best dress: dark blue, tea-length, with a full skirt that flared out from my hips. Miles put on pressed khakis and a collared shirt. I watched him slick his hair down in the bathroom with a tub of product I didn’t recognize. I wanted to tease him for trying to look nice, but at the last second I lost my voice. That was how it was for me back then. One moment I’d be focused on something insignificant, like Cassandra’s party or Miles’s tentative pride in his appearance, and the next I was jarred by all that was wrong. Our father’s demotion. Deirdre lying broken in bed. My brother’s secrets and his impending sense of disaster.

  My father knotted and reknotted his tie while waiting for my mother to finish getting ready. She wore an older dress, a red one that was too tight around the waist, but I told her she looked nice. My father didn’t offer any compliments. He just stood jangling his keys, waiting to leave.

  We walked to the party as a family, crossing onto Cassandra’s property in the same order our names appeared on the invitation. Neil, Paulette, Miles, Celeste. An attendant directed us to follow a trail of rose petals into the backyard, where a pink-and-white-striped tent sheltered stations for fruit, appetizers, desserts, champagne, a butterscotch fountain, and the traditional rose sherry. Pink balloons bunched like grapes in the trees.

  “This is obscene,” my father said.

  “Look,” my mother murmured. “There’s Cassandra.”

  My friend appeared like a mirage in a crisp white dress laced through with pink ribbons. Her eyes had a certain shine I attributed to the flute of rose sherry in her hand. Behind her, a group of boys and men gathered like a cloud.

  When it came to changelings, men could not control themselves. That was what we were told. And yet not all men were monsters. My father, for example, would never hurt a changeling girl. Miles wouldn’t, either. I believed this to my core. Sometimes I studied men on the street and thought, would he? What about him? Who in this crowd would take advantage of a darkened sidewalk, the broken streetlamp, the girl out alone after dark?

  Most days, I couldn’t imagine any man capable of such crimes. Other times, I viewed every man as a threat. Just as girls held within their bodies a great capacity for the future, men, I suspected, carried the curled beginnings of violence. In the right circumstances, maybe anyone could strike.

  Cassandra was too busy greeting other guests to pay much attention to me. I sat at a party table sprinkled with pink flower petals. My mother got herself a glass of rose sherry and, as an afterthought, brought me one, too.

  “It’s almost time for you, anyway,” she said.

  I accepted the tulip-shaped glass and took a sip of the pink liquid. As I swallowed, I had to struggle not to make a face. Rose sherry did not taste as pretty and pale as it appeared—instead, it was a sharply sweet drink with a bite.

  I turned to see my father tucked in the far corner of the yard with a few other neighborhood dads. Their eyes followed Cassandra wherever
she went. Her own father was among them. After the divorce, he’d moved to the next town over with his new wife. Cassandra didn’t see much of him, especially not after her first stepsister was born, so it mattered that he’d shown up for the party. Later, I knew, he’d take Cassandra upstairs alone to inspect her markings. This father-daughter ritual was an honored tradition, but there at the party, it made me sick.

  “Everyone wants to devour her,” I said to my mother. “It’s disgusting.”

  My mother sipped her rose sherry. She was stoic at that party, so calm and in control. I’d later realize it was an act. She didn’t want to let on how afraid she was for me, how afraid all mothers were for their daughters.

  “These parties are practice,” she said. “They show us how to maintain decorum even and especially in the face of what courses beneath the surface.”

  As she talked, we watched a group of boys approach Cassandra. One boy reached for a ribbon on her dress while another touched her hair, an act that seemed to make him shiver.

  Another boy backed out of the circle and stood to the side. I squinted and saw it was Anthony from my homeroom. I’d noticed him sitting in the shade earlier, glaring at the ground as if he could will the party to disappear. As I watched his strained face, I slowly grasped the source of his discomfort. He wasn’t interested in Cassandra, just as he wouldn’t be in any changeling girl, or at least not in the desperate sexual way the other boys were. Like me, he surely felt a pull toward Cassandra, wanted to envelop her in his arms, press his skin into hers. And yet boys of his age had an extra desperation in their desires, a telltale gleam. No matter how hard boys like Anthony tried, the lustful pull toward these girls could not be faked for long.

  I felt an overwhelming sadness for him, a kind of grief. While boys like Anthony could go on to share their lives with male partners if they wished, they could never marry or receive partner benefits or full support from the government. It was perhaps even more difficult for girls—as it would be for Marie, I was starting to realize. The official stance in Mapping the Future asserted that her predictions of love and romance pertained to men, not women. It didn’t matter that the markings on her lower back indicated she’d one day live with a woman; the Office of the Future rejected that such a romantic pairing could be fated. Instead, the sanctioned interpretation might suggest that this woman in her future would be no more than a roommate. Like Anthony, Marie was destined to spend her life halfway in denial.

  I turned away from Anthony, my eyes stinging. What a dangerous time we were all living through. It was a time for girls and boys my age to be exposed for who they really were.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I sat sourly next to my mother. I watched Marie play with children near the butterscotch fountain, but I did not join her. I watched men ogle and caress Cassandra, but I did not intervene. I sat, watching the party carry on before me, and I silently begged Cassandra to be careful. She was a wholly different person now, and the world was filled halfway with men.

  * * *

  * * *

  The next morning, and the one after that, and the one after that, I woke up the same: marked in my juvenile predictions. My parents bickered about money. Miles continued his interpretation studies and checked the mail every day for a response from the Office of the Future. Marie visited me a few times, and together we sat on my bedroom carpet and played board games like children.

  Miles had given up on his blue notebook. There was no need for it now that my juvenile markings were all but expired. In its place he had bought a hardbound, unlined artist’s pad with thick, heavy pages. It waited, clean and professional, for my new future to reveal itself, to submit to being recorded.

  I had grown up hearing rumors of a girl born completely blank, without a mole or mark on her body. Everyone claimed they had a friend of a friend who had a cousin who knew this unmarked girl. The truth was that no girl like this existed, no girl ever. Girls with albinism were marked in tiny pale dots. Dark-skinned girls bore markings that shined the color of honey or amber in the sun. The girl without markings was as unreal as a shimmering unicorn.

  Cassandra was like a mythical creature, too. That was how I saw her, now that she had changed: beautiful, ephemeral, untouchable. At school, Marie sat on the other side of the cafeteria so she could eat in peace instead of reaching toward our friend with quivering fingers. I stayed with Cassandra to keep her company, but it felt bitter, this preview of what was to come for me. I was impatient and angry all the time. I woke up sweating under the covers, and every morning I stood in the shower, willing the water to wash off my childhood markings just to get it over with.

  In reality, my change would happen as it happened for nearly everyone: in bed, silently, while I slept. A natural wonder. Later I’d think back and try to remember my dreams from that night, but I came up empty. I was a big dreamer, the dreams elaborate and long-winded; someone once told me this meant I didn’t sleep well and that I must be walking around in a state of perpetual exhaustion. This I would not disagree with. But when I think back to the night of my passage to adulthood, I can only imagine myself lying still in bed, everything inside of me taking its slow shift, regular and careful as a clock. When the clock’s hands had ticked their way to a predetermined hour and minute, it happened:

  At 6:48 a.m. on Monday, October the second, I woke up changed.

  II

  Changeling

  Mapping the Future: An Interpretive Guide to Women and Girls

  Method for Conducting a Reading

  Breathe. Steady yourself. Rely not purely on sight but also on touch, on instinct. The task you are about to complete is both a gift and a responsibility. Respect it.

  Once the subject has disrobed, take her left hand in both of your own. Hold her wrist fast with one hand while your other skims the length of her arm. Study the diagrams in this book, but also allow yourself to move by instinct. Allow the electricity to jolt straight through your bones.

  Left shoulder, right shoulder, then cross over to the back of her neck. Lift your subject’s hair and read her scalp as best as possible. Move to her temples, her forehead, her cheekbones and collarbone. Cross now to her right arm and right hand before moving down: breasts, ribs, stomach, pubic area. Then upper back, lower back, hips, buttocks, the legs and ankles and feet.

  Markings in this text are arranged by category, location, and pattern. Follow the index to find the applicable part of the body, the number of markings, and the precise arrangement. The diagrams are intuitive, designed for laymen and professionals alike, but this alone does not ensure accuracy. Some patterns are ambiguous, and others reveal more than one interpretation. Pay attention. A star is not a circle is not an arc is not a ring. A pale mole is not the same as a minor one. Remain open, therefore, to professional assessment. Be willing to reveal yourself.

  To read and to be read is an act of trust. A true reading is an offering, a question, an act of surrender. And so we ask you to breathe again. Move your finger from the page to the skin. Touch, hold steady, tremble. Release.

  7

  I knew before I opened my eyes. A gentle tingling radiated through my limbs from a deep and secret source. It was subtle, like catching the glimmer of a faraway wind chime and wondering, after the sound faded away, whether it had been there at all.

  The night had passed in chills and drafts, the quilt a heavy weight on my body. I did not want to lift it away. I did not want to see what had changed. I lay there, feeling my skin touching my pajamas, which touched the sheets, which touched the blankets, which touched the quilt. I could hear the beating of my heart. It was the day before my sixteenth birthday. Time was moving forward, the future shifting, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  I pushed off the quilt and stood. Slowly, shivering with the cold of morning, I dropped out of my pajamas and my underwear. I avoided the full-length mirror, since reflections could distort markings, and
looked down at the new future made manifest on my body.

  My skin flashed before me, a swerving wreck of predictions. I shut my eyes, disoriented. The morning sun seeped brassy and strong through my eyelids. I could feel it—thermal energy, the hot center of the earth. I cracked open my right eye to see the sunlight shimmering between the slats of the closed blinds, a wavering vision of heat and salt and painful bright.

  So this was high lucidity. I sensed the blood moving through my veins, spreading outward like the branches of a tree. I could hear it, too, along with the thrumming of my heart, the rustle of leaves outside, the wind coursing over grass. This was survival-level hearing, the kind meant for wild animals, for the hunted and the primeval. And then came the smells: an egg frying downstairs, a wisp of old bleach in the bathroom, the spots of dried toothpaste on the medicine cabinet mirror. I bent forward, gasping for air. Which I could feel moving in and out of my lungs, every ragged desperate gulp. As if someone had turned me inside out.

  I remembered the breathing exercises I’d been taught to dampen the lucidity. A breath in, a breath out. Slower, then slower still. It worked, my senses narrowing to a dulled pinprick of their former strength.

  With new confidence, I began my reading as I should have from the start: slowly, carefully, an inch at a time. First my left fingers, hand, and wrist; then the left forearm and upper arm. The vague markings by my left elbow were gone, replaced with nothing. How strange to see blank skin in that spot.

  When I reached my stomach, I paused to marvel at the constellation meant to predict children. The open configuration indicated that children were a possibility in the coming decades, but that was it. The pattern was not specific enough to spell out the number of children or their genders, as my mother’s markings had for Miles and me, but I wasn’t bothered by this uncertainty. Future children were not something I fixated on.