Body of Stars

by Laura Maylene Walter

  I covered my face with my hands and cried—out of guilt, and shame, and humiliated disbelief—until I exhausted myself. I eventually must have drifted into a light sleep, because one minute I was alone and the next a strange woman was standing over my bed. She wore a navy skirt suit with a little red pin on her lapel. I gazed up at her, convinced I was dreaming.

  “Celeste Morton?” she asked. She held a file in her hands. It was my government file, a stack of papers so slender it seemed to have almost no substance at all. She flipped it open to a diagram of my juvenile markings and tapped the mystery pattern on my left elbow.

  “Those are gone now,” I said, holding out my arm. I still believed I was asleep. “You’re a government inspector, aren’t you?”

  She gave a curt nod.

  “Did you ever consider becoming a humanitarian ambassador instead?” I paused, gazing at the woman dreamily. “I was thinking maybe I’ll try for that career one day. I can’t be hired as a government employee, but I could become a humanitarian. Assuming they still hire women like me.”

  “It is an equal-opportunity profession,” the inspector confirmed. She kept looking back and forth between me and the diagram of my juvenile markings.

  “If I became a humanitarian, I’d make good money, plus I’d get to travel.” I let my gaze wander over the woman. The red pin shined on her lapel like a prize.

  “And I could help people,” I added as an afterthought. “Humanitarians do good work for girls. That’s what they tell us, anyway. But I’m not sure about inspectors.” I squinted at the woman. “Are you here to help me?”

  The inspector reached for my left arm and held it in her cool hands.

  “I’m here to confirm,” she said. She pulled out a penlight and shined it on my arm, then ran her fingertips lightly over my elbow. The contact lasted only a moment before she dropped my arm and made a note in the file.

  “Thank you, Miss Morton,” she said. “That will be all.”

  She withdrew from my bedside. A moment later, she was gone.

  I blinked, uncertain whether she’d really been there or if I’d dreamed it. She left no trace, not even a lingering scent. I lay on my side, facing away from the door that was always kept open a crack, and stared with wide eyes into the dark. All around me, I felt the press of night.

  * * *

  * * *

  During those early hours in the hospital, the inspector’s visit blended into everything else, making a dark smear of confusion. Years later I would struggle to remember her face. I’d study diagrams of the human brain, focusing on the parts responsible for emotion and trauma to better understand my compromised memory from that time. I read about the almond-shaped amygdala, the seahorse-shaped hippocampus. “Hippocampus” as in horse, as in sea monster, but I lingered on monster. I was consumed by a monstrous force in that hospital. I carried the wounds from a battle I couldn’t even remember.

  On the first night of my stay, I waited alone in the dark until Miles snuck in to visit me. I heard the door ease open, heard him slip into the chair next to my bed.

  “Celeste,” he breathed. “Hey.”

  He waited. When I did not respond, he tapped my shoulder.

  “Mom’s been in the family waiting area for hours,” he said. “She thinks you’re asleep.”

  I rolled over. “Did you see her?”

  He paused. “I just told you. Mom’s waiting down the hall. She didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Not her. The inspector.” I sat up.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “An inspector came to visit me. She looked at my arm. She had my file.”

  Miles reached over to flick on the lamp by my bed, and for a few seconds we blinked at each other. He had a shadow over his left eye. No, not a shadow—the remnants of a black eye. A whole bruise of his own.

  “I think I’m confused,” I said finally. “Maybe I dreamed it.” I was too weak to comprehend the true meaning of that woman’s visit, or to grasp the forces at work in our world—how the future churned on and how our vulnerable, mortal bodies struggled to control it. A dream was the best escape I could imagine.

  “It’s my fault,” Miles said.

  My first instinct was to comfort him. But then I swallowed, and my throat felt sharp, and I recalled my final memories of that night: How he pushed me into an alley to view my markings. How he was no longer the brother I’d known.

  “Chloe may have had a hand in this, too,” he went on. “She probably tips off the trappers whenever she has changeling girls in her office. I’d heard of that type of arrangement, but I never fully believed it.” Miles paused. “Still, I didn’t see her as a risk. And I thought that moment in the alley might be my only chance to look at your markings.”

  “You put me in danger.”

  He wiped his eyes. “I was selfish and stupid, and I’m sorry.”

  “An apology isn’t going to give me my life back.” I turned onto my hip, facing away from him. I saw our history unspooling, all the time we spent together: The game in the basement, the summer evenings of brickball, the strawberry stand. How, in the end, he betrayed me.

  But I had betrayed him, too. Miles had only a few years to live, and I hadn’t told him. I couldn’t do it, not even then, after my ruin. Maybe I was the stronger liar of the two of us after all—both better and worse.

  Miles pulled his chair closer to my bed. I heard the chair scrape against the floor, a grating sound drawing closer, like a threat. I worried he might touch me—I couldn’t bear to be touched, I even jumped when a nurse took my pulse—but he did not.

  “I’m so tired,” I told him. “You should go.”

  “I’m not leaving you. I won’t do that again.”

  I closed my eyes. Despite my reservations, I fell asleep. I was too exhausted to hold it off. When I startled awake about an hour later, Miles was still sitting by my side. A nurse bustled in to take my temperature, and then another entered to give me pain medication. My brother sat through it all, watching me. As if he alone could make me whole again.

  Strategies for Reintegration: A 7-Stage Guide for Recovery and Rehabilitation

  Stage 2: Withdrawing and Mirroring. During your time in this rehabilitation program, you will interact with fellow patients during meals, therapy, and structured social time. Be aware that these relationships may prove complex. Some girls withdraw by initiating arguments or avoiding their peers. Others find comfort in their fellow victims and cling to one another, a process known as “mirroring.” Either strategy is part of a normal recovery, and many girls cycle through both at different times.

  Expect to revisit this stage in various ways in the days, weeks, or even years to come. Your evolving relationships highlight a fundamental truth about recovery: it is a process with a beginning but no end.

  15

  That first full day in the Reintegration Wing, my father did not show up. Miles and my mother sat with me while I ate breakfast—limp toast, a plastic cup of orange juice, gelatinous oatmeal knotted with raisins—until the nurses ushered them out so I could begin the day’s programming. “Programming,” that’s what they called it, and families were not allowed to attend.

  When my mother and Miles left, I was relieved. I’d been embarrassed for them to see me in that state: the bruises lining my arms, the thin hospital gown I constantly pressed against my sides to make sure it kept me covered. My hair was greasy, but a nurse told me I’d have to wait until that night for someone to help me wash it in the sink. The only relief came in the form of a pair of gray cotton pajamas. Finally, I could cover up. The pants were a touch too short, and the bright red stitching down the legs reminded me of a surgical scar, but I was grateful for the clothing.

  Once dressed, I combed my hair as best I could with the flimsy plastic comb and followed a nurse down the hall to a meeting room. I already knew what I would find there: ot
her girls like me. Girls in gray pajamas, girls with shattered expressions, girls who were bruised. Girls who slept or couldn’t sleep in their own gray rooms, who pressed their cheeks into their gray pillowcases and dreamed of safety, of home. Just the thought of them made me miss Marie and Cassandra.

  The nurse took my elbow. She was gentle, but I couldn’t meet her eyes. I wanted a nurse who knew exactly what I’d been through, but that was impossible because ruined girls didn’t grow up to become nurses.

  “Come on, dear,” she said, and guided me toward the room. “It’s time to begin.”

  I dropped my gaze as I shuffled through the doorway, focusing on the sight of my feet in those gray slippers. My ankles were bare, and I was cold all over, and I could sense the other girls in the room even before I raised my eyes.

  There were three of them, all roughly my age. Two had been gone long enough to have grown out of their changeling periods, just as I had. But the last girl had miraculously been released after only a handful of days. She was still bright and vivid, still a changeling, still desirable. I could sense her spark immediately. When the nurse asked me, again, to take a seat, I knew I couldn’t sit by that girl. Next to her I would feel extinguished. It would be like sitting next to a warped reflection of my former self.

  It would be like watching my own body rise from the dead.

  * * *

  * * *

  I came to know those girls in the way all girls are first known: through their appearance, the physicality of their presence. One of the girls was tall, with pale skin and brown hair shot through with reddish highlights that looked natural, like they’d come from the sun. She had a narrow face and thick eyebrows and wasn’t particularly pretty, aside from her hair, and she had a habit of picking at her fingernails. The next girl was plump with a tawny complexion, her markings so light I had to squint to find them. The last girl was the changeling—black hair and dark skin, with a slight frame and intelligent eyes. Her markings shimmered under the industrial lighting.

  I did not recognize these girls. The city hospital ran the only Reintegration Wing in a seventy-mile radius, which meant my fellow patients could have come from anywhere: a faraway suburban town, an adjacent but smaller city, or even a country hamlet. Even so, I couldn’t stand to look any of them full in the face. I turned away as I did from my own reflection whenever I glimpsed it in the bathroom mirror: hollow eyes, broken lips, an expression revealing anxiety and rage. During my stay in the hospital, I was actually grateful for the loss of my high lucidity. To feel more than I already did in that place would have been a curse.

  “Allow yourselves to comfort one another,” a nurse told us that first afternoon. “You’ve all been through the same trauma.”

  We ignored her. We tried not to look at one another. I longed instead for Marie and Cassandra. I fantasized about returning home, how our threesome would resume as though nothing had interrupted our friendship.

  “Girls,” the nurse continued. “You are going to be all right.”

  As a rule, the nurses didn’t address us by name. They called us girls, dears, sweeties, loves. If I ever learned the real names of these girls, I forgot them at once. We chose pretend names instead, names we invented and whispered into being that first night over dinner. The girl with the brownish-red hair named herself Aurora, the girl with pale markings was Moxie, and the changeling was Glory—though it seemed unfair, for her to choose a name that flaunted her current state. I was the last to say my new name aloud because I was ashamed, both for how quickly it had come to mind and how unlike me it was: Violet. Delicate and feminine, a name that conjured the sensation of velvet. All the things I wasn’t, or no longer believed I could become.

  * * *

  * * *

  We gathered three times a day in the meeting room. We ate meals together in a cafeteria at the end of the wing. We played silent games of checkers in the game room. We barely spoke in our therapy sessions. Instead, we waited.

  We would be held in the Reintegration Wing for four days, which happened to be the same length of time women who gave birth remained in the hospital. The girl we knew as Aurora whispered that our wing was adjacent to the maternity ward. She said this quickly and then fell silent, like she’d left us a gift that she refused to watch us open. We were unable to confirm her information, since we were forbidden from wandering beyond our single hallway, but it made sense to me. I could imagine babies being born—half of them girls, born with tiny sets of predictions—while, only a few hundred feet away, a group of teenage girls tracked the ends of the lives they’d once known.

  A nurse confirmed this reality of our new fates during the second day of programming, when we discussed our educational options.

  “Most girls don’t reenroll in their old schools once they’ve returned,” she told us. “It’s too stressful. You might find it easier to pursue a different path.”

  “But I want to graduate,” I said, and I heard how petulant my voice sounded. My dream of becoming a psychologist was now impossible, though it still hovered like a mirage just beyond my grasp.

  “You’re allowed to return to school,” the nurse assured me, but she said it like that was a choice that would result in regret. “Just be prepared for the social fallout.”

  The other girls remained silent. As far as I knew, none of them had any intention of returning to their schools. But they were from smaller towns, I reasoned. While my hometown wasn’t exactly a metropolis—larger cities elsewhere were considered more sophisticated—it was surely more progressive than the rural areas these girls were from.

  “Returned girls have other options,” the nurse continued. “You might consider a correspondence course. It takes longer to earn your diploma that way, but many girls have made good use of it. Alternatively, you may wish to enroll in a local trade school.”

  “That’s what I want to do,” Aurora said. “You can study to be a manicurist, or a domestic employee, or even a culinary artist.” She said culinary artist with reverence, as if it implied working as a chef in a fancy restaurant, but we knew what it really meant: being trapped in steamy kitchens attending to vats of reeking soup and never-ending piles of dishes.

  The nurse turned to Moxie, who said she’d go the correspondence route and earn her diploma that way. Finally, the nurse looked to Glory.

  “What about you, love?” the nurse asked. “What might you do once you go home?”

  “I want to go to university,” Glory said, without hesitation.

  “Oh, darling.” The nurse sat back in her chair. “You know that’s impossible.”

  Glory’s face crumpled. I silently willed her the strength to not cry.

  After the session, I caught up with Glory in the hallway and reached for her hand. I suppose I thought I could comfort her. She wrenched away from my grasp.

  “Leave me alone,” she snapped. She disappeared into her room and shut the door fully behind her, which was against the rules. I waited for a nurse to rush over and crack the door open again, but for the moment, no one noticed. Glory had won a rare bit of privacy.

  For a long while, I stayed in the hall, staring at the closed door. Maybe Glory knew better than the rest of us how to survive.

  * * *

  * * *

  The nurses explained that time wasn’t what we thought it was. They assured us that even if it seemed we’d been gone forever, even if it felt as though this incident would loom large for the rest of our lives, it wasn’t so. We’d eventually view the experience as a blip in the long continuum of our lives. It would become like a bad dream, they said.

  They said nothing more about our transcripts, or university admission, or our future careers. Maybe they believed we could begin to forget these things if they stopped speaking of them.

  On that second night, I lay on the hospital mattress, so thin its coils pressed through the fabric like bone. The Strategies for Reintegrat
ion brochure sat on my bedside table, placed there by a nurse with good intentions. Aside from our group therapy sessions, when we were asked to take turns reading it aloud, I didn’t touch the brochure. I couldn’t face it, especially then when I was freshly returned, broken and bruised. Many years later I’d find that brochure in a box of my old things, and I’d hold it up to the light with a sense of awe. I couldn’t believe I had saved it. I couldn’t believe it had followed me that far.

  The nurses had assured us that if we focused on other things, on the small wonders and happiness even girls like us could achieve, we could begin to forget. I wanted to forget, and yet there in bed that night I also wanted to remember—because to lose that span of time forever made me feel shadowy, dead.

  What I needed was a written record of my abduction, a document outlining just how I’d ended up there. The full account of what happened to me might not exist, but there was always my transcript. All I had to do was seek it out and read it.

  I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. I put on my slippers. The hallway outside my room was bright but quiet, and when I peered around the doorframe, I saw the nurses’ station was empty. This didn’t surprise me. The Reintegration Wing wasn’t a high-priority area. Once girls’ initial injuries were tended to, the nurses mostly waited it out with us. They led us to programming; they offered us therapy. Doctors didn’t bother to check on us after the initial exam. It was possible, on that night, that the nurses of the Reintegration Wing had been called away to other parts of the hospital where they were needed more. Where the injuries were purely physical and easier to understand.