Body of Stars

by Laura Maylene Walter

  On History and Tradition

  In the beginning, when the body of woman was first understood to bear the future, the interpretative arts were a rolling dark sea. Prophesies emerged as stars in the night: separate points capable of telling a greater story when viewed as one. And so women were anointed. And so flesh became future.

  Our modern traditions illuminate our rise from that shadowy past. Coming-out celebrations for newly changed girls acknowledge the profound way young bodies are gifted with prescience. The father-daughter inspection ritual recognizes that fathers, while unmarked themselves, gave their daughters life and thus the future. Daughters, in turn, carry the responsibility of sharing what is to come with others.

  But traditions among women are perhaps the most powerful. Mothers and daughters, sisters, female friends—when women and girls gather together, they speak their own language of the future. For this we must be grateful. It is women alone who bear the truth and weight of prophecy. It is women who offer this gift to the larger world.

  And it is women we thank, through tradition and ritual, for enabling us to spread the sacred word of the future, the truth, and the light.

  10

  Marie and her parents were visiting her aunt across town that night. I’d gone there with Marie once before, to the stuffy house with aqua carpeting and a screened-in porch patched with duct tape. The aunt lived alone, a single woman whose markings indicated she’d never marry or pursue a lucrative career. She chain-smoked on the porch, stabbing her cigarette butts against an antique ashtray shaped like a fish. The aunt wasn’t a modest dresser like Marie’s mother, and when I’d been there, she wore a camisole that showed stretched-out bra straps the color of dishwater. I could picture Marie sitting in her aunt’s house that night, picking at a stale piece of coffee cake and watching the clock tick its way toward the time she could leave.

  My mother seemed in a good mood as she drove me to Marie’s house. I felt guilty for betraying her, and nervous that I’d be exposed, and afraid for what the night would bring if I succeeded in this deception. But when we arrived, I saw that Marie’s family had left lights on in all the windows, making the home look bright and safe. That, at least, was a relief.

  I unclicked my seat belt and hurriedly thanked my mother for the ride. I worried she might insist on walking me to the door. Thankfully, Cassandra appeared in the driveway just then, illuminated by the headlights. She wore a red maxi dress with a long-sleeved cardigan. My mother waved to her.

  “Cassie looks lovely,” she said. “Chic but covered up. Just the way she should be.”

  For a moment, I felt guilty. My mother trusted me, would never suspect that I’d conspire with Cassandra in this way. There was so much she didn’t know about both of her children now. Again, my mind filled with visions of what might happen to Miles: An overdose. A respiratory infection. Slipping on ice and hitting his head.

  “Have fun tonight, and be safe,” my mother added, but her words sounded automatic. She believed I would pass an uneventful evening inside Marie’s house. She couldn’t sense that something had changed, that I was capable of deceiving her.

  I slid from the car before she could change her mind. Cassandra hurried over to me and, after one final wave for my mother, pulled me around to the back of the house. My mother, no doubt, assumed we were going straight inside the back door. Instead we stood hidden in the shadows, our backs pressed against the aluminum siding. The neighbors next door were having a party. Twinkle lights buzzed in soft focus along the fence, and the faint sputtering of jazz drifted our way. Against this backdrop, I listened as my mother’s car pulled away and took off down the street.

  “What are we doing?” I asked Cassandra. We stood on wet grass, the dampness seeping through my shoes. When I exhaled, pale puffs of air floated away from my body.

  “Our ride will be here soon. We just need to make sure your mom is gone.”

  A pair of headlights shined into Marie’s backyard. We peered around the corner to see a blue sedan idling in the driveway.

  “That’s him,” Cassandra said.

  “Him?”

  Without answering, she took my arm and led me to the car. Cassandra threw herself into the passenger seat, but I stood frozen, staring at the driver. It was Jonah. He leaned forward, his left arm draped across the steering wheel. As I watched, his fingers curled halfway into a fist and then flared open again.

  “I told you she wouldn’t like this,” he said.

  Cassandra turned to me. The passenger-side window was open, placing her within my reach.

  “Get in,” she said.

  I stood motionless in the driveway.

  “If you don’t get in, where will you go?” she asked. “You’d have to walk the whole way home in the dark.”

  The neighbors with their jazz and lights, the clink of glasses. I didn’t know those people, but I could go to them, could submit to their mercy.

  “Celeste.” Cassandra leaned halfway out the window. “This party is safe. I promise. Do you really think I’d let anything happen to you?”

  Cassandra was my best friend. My foolish, vulnerable best friend sitting alone in a car with a boy. In a dreamlike state I moved to the back door, watching myself reach out and hook my fingers under the handle. That handle was slick to the touch. It flashed silver in my eye, blinding, a pierce as sudden as a needle. It reflected all the reasons girls did things they never imagined doing.

  The door heaved open with a creak. I slid onto the seat and shut myself in, away from the night. Before I was fully settled, Jonah reversed out of the driveway, shifted into drive, and pressed hard on the gas, jolting us forward and back again. I wondered how long he’d had his license. Boys could drive at sixteen, but girls had to wait until they were eighteen—the older age assured that we’d be out of our reckless changeling periods before operating vehicles.

  “Your problem is that you take all this too seriously.” Cassandra leaned forward in her seat to peel off her cardigan. The dress underneath was sleeveless with a V neckline. Jonah swiveled his head to look, the car drifting in response.

  “Girls have been changing since the beginning of time,” Cassandra went on. She rolled the cardigan into a ball and stuffed it into the space by her feet. “If things were as bad as you like to imagine, then women would be an endangered species.”

  “I’m worried, Cassie.” My voice was small. “I’m afraid.”

  Cassandra turned around and gave me a pitying look. “Poor Celeste.” She reached over the console between the front seats to touch my cheek. I felt a spark crackle between us. “Don’t you trust me?”

  I turned my face to the window. We sped on toward the party, the night slipping past in pulses of light interrupted by long stretches of vacuous black.

  * * *

  * * *

  We arrived at Rebecca’s house as if in a flickering dream, everything emerging through fog: a side door with a split screen, a staircase leading to a basement, brown carpeting underfoot, voices drifting up from below. On our descent into the basement, Cassandra held my hand and squeezed, her palm damp and hot as a fever.

  When we reached the bottom of the stairs, we stood in a cheaply finished room. The walls were covered in paneling that made hollow sounds when I tapped it with my fingernails. About twenty students were gathered in the basement, both girls and boys ranging from first-years to fourth-years. Most were my classmates, but even so, they looked newly unfamiliar in this environment. Many of them turned to stare when Cassandra and I made our appearance. My government changeling inspection was still days away, but entering that basement and having all those eyes on me at once was an exposure as intense as standing naked before a government employee.

  I scanned the room. In the far corner, I caught a glimpse of the person more known and yet unknown to me than any other: Miles, my brother, my false twin. He wore the same collared shirt he�
��d put on for Cassandra’s coming-out party, but this time it was untucked, making him appear careless. He was staring straight at me, his jaw set. I could tell what he was thinking, how furious he was that I’d risk coming to this party, but I only gazed back at him wordlessly. Sometimes when I looked at my brother his image seemed to waver, my imagination conjuring blank space instead. Like my subconscious was preparing for the future without him.

  I turned to see Rebecca Delbanco at the top of the staircase, the triangle shape of her tea-length dress flaring out to fill the narrow space. She was leading three girls down to join the rest of us: Janine Cotto, who was in my year and had recently changed, and two third-year changelings. Janine stumbled to a stop once she reached me. Her eyes pooled dark, and wet enough to make her blink. She might not have mastered the high lucidity yet. I reached for her hand and pulled her closer.

  At the refreshments table, Rebecca loaded a tray with rose sherry poured into the traditional tulip-shaped glasses. She brought the drinks our way and handed the first one to Cassandra.

  “Don’t,” I whispered, but Cassandra jerked her shoulder, like she was brushing me off. She accepted the glass. Janine took one, too, as did the other changelings. When Rebecca offered me a flute of the pale pink liquid, I made no move to accept it. She waited. She did not lower her arm.

  “It’s just rose sherry,” Janine said.

  Cassandra lifted her glass. “You drank it at my party.”

  “That’s right.” Rebecca smiled, relieved. “This is like any other party.” She pushed the glass under my nose.

  I took a step back. “I think I’ll pass.”

  “Take it,” Rebecca said evenly. “You don’t have to drink it, but at least hold it. You’ll draw less attention to yourself this way.”

  I relented and accepted the rose sherry. Rebecca let out a breath, like she’d just accomplished a major goal.

  “There now,” she said. “We can get started.”

  I adjusted my flimsy scarf while Rebecca told us why we were there, in a basement with boys during the most dangerous time of our lives.

  “Diffusing the tension can help,” she explained. “That’s why coming-out parties came into fashion. Those parties might have been enough a few decades ago, but now things are a little different. Now we need to do something on our own.”

  “Like a ritual,” Janine said.

  “Exactly.”

  I set my rose sherry down on a ledge near the basement window. I was trembling.

  “Relax,” Cassandra said quietly. “You don’t want to be like Marie.”

  I picked up the glass again. When I glanced to Miles, he looked away, as if he were too ashamed to meet my eyes. I watched him, fixating on the line at the back of his neck just above his collar, where hair met skin. He struck me as defenseless.

  Rebecca was still speaking, but I’d stopped listening. I felt far removed from the others, even the other changelings. They might be new like me, and they might feel just as raw and wild and vulnerable, but they didn’t have predictions mapping out their brothers’ deaths. I was alone.

  “All right,” Rebecca said at last. “We’re ready.”

  She shook the last drop from the rose sherry bottle before setting it on its side in the middle of the floor.

  “It looks like Spin the Bottle,” I said, dismayed.

  “Not exactly,” Cassandra said.

  “Good.” I was relieved. “No kissing?”

  She didn’t answer. The boys edged closer to the bottle, and one reached down to give it a spin.

  The girls around us erupted into laughter. I glanced up to see the boy who’d spun—a handsome, older boy with dark skin—standing over the bottle like he owned it. I felt sick as I realized what was happening.

  He was staring right at Cassandra and me.

  Mapping the Future: An Interpretive Guide to Women and Girls

  Sex and the Changeling

  A changeling girl may be at her most alluring, but she is also vulnerable. Her body is raw with possibilities for the future, her emotions are erratic, and she is charged with a new sex appeal when she is still too young to bear the sexual burden older girls and women can withstand. For these reasons, the changeling should refrain from intercourse.

  To bear the future is to bear the sacred, and as such, changeling girls are tasked with guarding their own bodies from sexual or physical threat. Those who behave appropriately should expect little to no difficulty in avoiding sexual contact during this time. Caution, prudence, and restraint are three of the most important qualities these girls can possess.

  Above all, we implore changelings to recognize that the burden of maintaining purity rests on their own shoulders—it is the first grave responsibility they must face in their adult lives, and a modest price indeed for the privilege of holding the future in their skin.

  11

  For a moment I could only focus on that bottle, how its open mouth was still damp from rose sherry and how it gaped in our direction, an endless dim cavity. It made me remember.

  When I was a young child, my mother and I came upon a pair of teenagers wrapped together in the park. It was dark, and they were half hidden under the feathery branches of a willow tree. I could hear their breathing, hard and fast. There was a muffled fumble, the sound of cloth rubbing against cloth, and, just before my mother hustled me away, a delicate, feminine moan. It was my first sense of what people might do together when they were alone, how they could turn into something frantic and primal.

  That night, as a boy stood staring at Cassandra and me in Rebecca’s basement, I felt the same mixture of fear and excitement that I’d had in the park. I was repelled, and I was attracted. I wanted to look away, and I wanted to step closer.

  Once I finally realized the bottle was pointed not at me but at Cassandra, all those sensations rushed out of my body at once, leaving me drained and airless.

  “Good turn,” one of the boys said. “A changeling on the first try.”

  Cassandra ran her hands over her hair. “Two minutes?”

  “Two minutes,” Rebecca confirmed.

  I watched as Cassandra picked her way through the crowd, which parted in waves to let her through. Jonah frowned as she passed, but Cassandra ignored him and headed straight for a closet built under the stairs. The boy followed her inside, then pulled the closet door shut to close them in. Rebecca turned up the music and set a timer.

  I turned to Janine. “What exactly is going to happen in there?”

  “I think it’s up to Cassandra. But don’t worry, Lewis is perfectly decent.” She looked around the basement. “I hope I get your brother when the time comes. He seems like the type who will just stand there and wait it out with me.”

  I glanced at Miles. He stood apart from the others, his arms crossed.

  “There are more girls than boys,” I said. “Maybe we won’t get chosen at all.”

  The corner of Janine’s mouth twitched. “We’re the changelings. The game goes on until all of us are chosen.”

  I fell quiet. I was thinking that it was good Marie wasn’t at that party. She would never go into a closet with a boy. I understood without anyone telling me that girls could not go in the closet together, just as boys couldn’t. Young people might be more tolerant of same-sex relationships than adults, but even we had limits.

  The timer finally dinged. When Cassandra emerged from the closet, her cheeks were pink and her hair shaken loose, but she didn’t seem unhappy. Lewis came out after her, his eyes shyly fixed on the floor. They separated; Lewis went to his friends while Cassandra headed to the refreshment table, where she poured herself another glass of rose sherry from a fresh bottle. She looked flushed, thrilled. I could see the pulse jumping in her throat as she drank.

  The game went on, the bottle making its lazy turns to land on girl after girl. My brother did not take a tu
rn, which the other boys did not comment on—they were too eager to spin for themselves.

  The next boy leaned into the circle to send the bottle whirling. He was a fourth-year, tall with a pale complexion. I didn’t know him. Around and around the bottle went, spinning in a drunken wobble. When it stopped, it landed on me.

  My first instinct was to look not at the boy who’d spun but to Miles, to glimpse his reaction. I knew he’d be upset, and maybe angry, but I also thought he had no right. He’d kept this party from me, making it one more of his secrets, and it wasn’t fair. As a boy, he was allowed to come here at night, to mingle with whomever he wanted, while I was meant to be trapped at home. But if I wanted to go into the closet with a boy, as the other girls had before me, that was my choice.

  The boy who’d spun for me waited, a patch of red spreading slowly up his neck and cheeks, from either embarrassment or excitement or both. I took a tentative step toward the closet while he held back, letting me take the lead.

  Waves of energy rolled off the other girls as I passed them. They chose this ritual. Maybe not every one of them, maybe Janine or I would never have dreamed this up, but some girls chose it. They wanted to dispel the tension, to plunge off a cliff and land in water deep enough to hold them. The other side of the closet door contained a party of their friends, and besides, not much could happen in two minutes. The time it took my father to check my markings was far longer than that—the length of entire days, it seemed, compared to this.

  The closet door loomed closer now. I glanced back at the boy following me. He was blond, and as he came closer I saw that he had fine silken hairs sprouting just above his eyebrows, thin cobwebs of hair that made him look delicate and soft.

  I didn’t remember opening the door or taking the first step inside, but somehow those things must have happened. The boy entered and I focused on the green of his shirt: new-day green, fresh-lawn green. Then the door shut, and we were enveloped. My back to the wall, our breath between us.