Body of Stars

by Laura Maylene Walter

  “They don’t know about it. Besides, I’m more like Julia’s assistant. For now, she does the readings and only calls me if she needs confirmation.”

  “Confirmation on what?”

  He didn’t answer. He took me to the guest bedroom and told me to have a seat on the bed. He sat at the desk, pulled open the top drawer, and took out a bag of bloodflower pills.

  “You want one?” he asked.

  I shrank back. “Definitely not. I’m surprised Julia allows bloodflower in her house.”

  “This is my stash. She lets me sleep in this room, sometimes, and she never comes in to poke around. She respects my privacy.” He looked at me pointedly, as if he were too weary to bother telling me I had to keep his secret. All the while, he fiddled with the bag in a distracted sort of way. He looked half a second from removing a pill and popping it into his mouth.

  “Miles, you can’t take that. Not now.” I heard the alarm in my voice. Fatal bloodflower overdoses were rare, almost unheard of, but I still worried. Any end was possible for my brother.

  He sighed and tossed the bag into the drawer. “I never take bloodflower when I’m working, and Julia might need me to work today. So you can relax.”

  I pulled my legs up to sit cross-legged on the bed, trying to make sense of all that was going wrong. “I still can’t believe you dropped out of school.”

  “Not everyone is a star student like you.”

  “Like that does me any good now.” I paused, thinking. “On the way over here, Julia mentioned the Mountain School. It made me wonder if maybe they have scholarships. You know, for girls who are disadvantaged and have no other options.”

  “That describes every girl who needs that school, Celeste. It’s only the ones with money that have a chance.”

  I frowned. “You might consider how frustrating it is for me to watch you throw your education away when I have nothing—no chance of getting into university, no way of becoming a psychologist.”

  “I had to drop out.” He wasn’t looking at me. “It’s my only way to make up for what I did to you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, but he was silent. “Miles, what are you talking about?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Forget it. Go on downstairs and join Julia for a little while. The girls won’t mind having you around. Maybe you can even help them.”

  I was about to argue, but when I saw his expression—wounded, guilt-ridden—I agreed to leave him and go to Julia. He and I probably needed some space from each other anyway.

  The girls waiting in the parlor raised their heads in unison when I came downstairs, but when they saw it was me, they looked down again and stared silently at their hands. Seeing them like that, vulnerable and uncertain, made me feel motherly. It made me feel old.

  “Before I changed, Julia read my markings, too,” I told them. “I was scared. But don’t worry. Julia’s very skilled.”

  “She is,” one girl said. “But Miles is even better.”

  I was about to ask what she meant when Julia entered the parlor. Her face was pale.

  “I need Miles. Now.” She directed her words my way, but I had the sense she wasn’t fully seeing me. “Celeste, hurry. Tell me where he is.”

  I blinked at her, startled. “He’s upstairs. In the guest room.”

  Without another word, Julia turned and stiffly ascended the stairs. The girls were now visibly agitated.

  “That’s not a good sign,” one whispered to another.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, but the girls only studied their hands again.

  A faint sound drifted from down the hall. It sounded like crying. I followed the sound to Julia’s office and pushed open the door to find a girl sitting on the chair next to Julia’s desk, gulping back sobs. She had wide-set eyes and a smattering of amber-colored moles across the bridge of her nose. Like the other girls, she looked to be maybe fourteen or fifteen years old and unchanged. She was tall, her body wrapped in a pale blue hospital gown.

  “Hi,” I said softy as I entered. “I’m Celeste. I’m Miles’s sister. What did Julia tell you that has you so upset?”

  The girl looked at me, tears streaking her cheeks. “Nothing yet, but I saw the look on her face.” She paused to take a strangled breath. “Julia wouldn’t have gone to get Miles if she hadn’t seen something.”

  I was still confused. “Like what?”

  She lifted her left arm and pushed back the gown. “Here,” she said, pointing to the markings near her elbow. “It must be those, right there.”

  Gently, I placed my fingers on her arm and traced her markings. All I could see was a vague indication of illness, like a bad cold.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Julia reappeared, pulling Miles into the room.

  “Look,” she told him, gesturing to the girl’s arm. “Please tell me I’m wrong.”

  Miles pressed his fingers firmly to the girl’s arm. Within moments, his face set in a grim expression.

  “Yes,” he said simply. The girl snatched at her hospital gown and started to cry harder.

  Julia took a deep breath. “Try to calm yourself,” she said. “Think of the other girls waiting out there. You don’t want to frighten them, do you?”

  The girl shook her head, the tears streaming down.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  My brother’s eyes skittered across the room instead of meeting mine. “It’s her markings. She’s going to be abducted after she changes.”

  “Markings don’t reveal that type of information. That’s not possible.”

  “It is,” he said simply. “I learned how to do it. I can tell if a girl is going to be taken.”

  A rushing sound, like water or a train or another unstoppable force, flooded my hearing.

  “You didn’t see it with me,” I said.

  When Miles finally faced me, he looked stunned, his bottom lashes wet with tears. His eyes were entire worlds unto themselves, portals of our grief and lies, the secrets we kept and the futures we destroyed.

  “That’s the thing,” he said, “the thing I never told you. I kept it from you to protect you.”

  “Miles, stop. This can’t be true.”

  “It is. I could tell you were fated to be taken.” His pupils looked huge, about to swallow him up and take me with him. “I never told you, but I knew the entire time.”

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

  Stage 7: Acceptance. This final stage is the most elusive. Indeed, many patients never fully accept what happened to them, but it is imperative to try. Acknowledging that you are powerless in the face of your newly changed future need not be distressing; instead, it can be liberating. Give yourself the gift of letting the past wash over you. Allow your trauma to be a part of your new reality.

  Absorb it, accept it, let it set you free.

  20

  Miles called his ability a gift. He said the prediction came to him like starbursts of color behind his closed eyelids: three sparks, all red. Then he knew to check more closely to confirm the girl was destined to be taken.

  That was how he knew with me.

  We left Julia with the ill-fated girl in the exam area to shut ourselves in the guest room. We sat on the bed next to each other, our shared weight creating a dip in the mattress, a bit of gravity pulling us closer.

  “I don’t believe this. I can’t and I won’t.” I leaned forward at the waist, pressing my forearms into my thighs. I was so furious I was shaking.

  “I first noticed something odd about the markings on your arm when we were kids, but I didn’t understand what it meant,” Miles said. “Later, when I found a similar pattern on Deirdre’s arm, and then when she disappeared, I started to suspect it was a real prediction.”

  “If you’d said something,” I told him, “
maybe I could have been saved.”

  “I kept hoping I was wrong. I had no way to prove it, and not enough evidence to be certain.”

  My heart was pounding, and I felt ready for flight. But there was nowhere to go, no way to escape what my brother had just revealed.

  “I told Julia after Deirdre disappeared,” he said. “She wasn’t convinced, especially since it doesn’t present as a regular pattern. The pattern itself varies, it’s inconsistent, and interpreting it is partly based on touch. She thought it was a coincidence.” He looked away, ashamed. “I was stupid. I made so many mistakes.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to reimagine my childhood through the lens of this new information. I saw Miles pulling at my shirt to look at my markings, his hands lingering on my left arm—how he so deeply and openly anticipated my change.

  “I kept telling myself that even if I was right, I couldn’t do anything to prevent the prediction from coming true. If it’s fated, it’s fated. End of story,” he went on. “But that doesn’t excuse what I did that night. I wanted to get you alone to look at your markings. I thought they might give another clue, that they’d reveal exactly how you’d be taken. I planned the whole thing, you know. I told Cassie what to do beforehand, how she should go to Julia’s so I could be alone with you. But I was reckless, and I’m sorry.” His breath came out in a gasp. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I swear I’ll never forgive myself. That’s why I left school, so I could try to help other girls. It will never make up for what happened to you, but it’s all I can do.”

  I got up from the bed and grabbed Mapping the Future. I flipped through the pages so quickly they made snapping sounds. “If it’s not in here,” I said desperately, “then it can’t be true.”

  “I’m trying. I’ve contacted the Office of the Future. I sent them copies of your childhood markings, plus copies of Deirdre’s, and explained as best I could how to do the reading.” He looked pained. “I thought they’d be grateful.”

  “No, you were showing off. You thought this could be your way into the profession.” I dropped the book onto the dresser, where it landed with a hollow clap.

  He flinched but kept going. “Imagine the change that could come, at some point in the future, if that prediction becomes an official part of Mapping the Future,” he said. “It might make things better for girls. For even just one girl. Julia says we can’t change fate, but she also says our actions can have tiny, nearly imperceptible consequences. Think of what that can mean. Maybe fewer girls will be abducted, or maybe they won’t be punished anymore for the crimes of men. Things could be different, Celeste.”

  All the pieces were clicking into place. My brother’s contact with the Office of the Future, his revelation about this prediction—these were minor breezes that could shift his future in a new direction. Fate was a sensitive, complicated, evolving phenomenon, and maybe this was the catalyst pushing Miles toward the end of his life.

  “Don’t go through with this.” I stood in front of my brother, summoning the will to plead with him even as I despised him, even as I understood his fate was set no matter how I tried to save him. “Don’t try to get these markings added to the official record. Please.”

  “I have to, Celeste. Julia agrees. Girls should be fluent in their own futures, she says.”

  I laughed, the sound rolling out of me like pain. “Fluent in their own futures?”

  “Yes.”

  I started pacing around the room. When I stopped at the dresser mirror, I confronted my reflection. I looked wild-eyed and furious. Feral.

  Miles met my eyes in the mirror. His face was wet.

  “Maybe this was the real reason I invented Did You Know,” he said. “I thought it might help you, to be able to lie. I knew you’d have a hard time from here on out. If you could keep some things to yourself, to not reveal all your truths—that could make a difference.”

  “You might have done too good of a job,” I said. In one swift motion, I grasped the hem of my shirt and pulled it over my head. Underneath I wore only a bra, solid black without a hint of lace.

  Miles took a step back. “What are you doing?”

  I wished I could say I was driven by guilt or compassion, the resolve to not let Miles live in the dark as long as I had. But in truth, I was consumed with anger. The horror of my own abduction was still all-consuming, and I wanted to exact a punishment. I wanted revenge.

  Miles turned away. “Put your shirt on.”

  I took another step toward him. “I can’t hide this anymore.” I resisted the urge to cross my arms over my chest. I waited, cold and shivering and revealed. Agony.

  At last, Miles faced me. He went directly for my left side, as I’d known he would, to the markings he hadn’t been able to puzzle out from my father’s photograph. A diagonal, an arc, a smattering of stars.

  He lifted a finger and placed it on the markings. He traced them, gently, and in his touch I recalled all the other times he’d read my markings. How serious and insistent he’d been. Now I felt his hand shaking against my skin.

  “Say something,” I told him.

  He closed his eyes. I felt, for a disorienting flash, that I was no longer in the room with him. He was alone, standing in silence, grasping at his own receding future.

  Time slowed, stopped, held steady. I found myself swimming in a memory. It was a few summers back, out in the heat of our neighborhood, when Miles and I came across a group of boys tormenting a praying mantis. They’d tied a string to it, ripped off one of its legs, and were twirling it around. They were laughing. I started to turn away, but Miles inserted himself into the group and confronted those boys, speaking in low tones until they hung their heads and drifted away. We were left with the mantis lying at our feet, mangled and dismembered but still alive. Miles looked down at the struggling insect for a long moment before he lifted his foot and brought it down, hard, on the delicate green body.

  I couldn’t shake that memory. It had been a time I’d witnessed two parts of my brother at once: his mercy, his ruthlessness. How even his kindest intentions resulted in ruin.

  Miles picked up my shirt and handed it to me, looking away as I slid it on. He wore a hardened expression, his body tensed as if bracing for impact.

  “I’ll tell Julia,” he said. “She needs to know we’re running out of time.”

  “Miles.”

  “Those markings on her ankle make sense now,” he added. “I worked so hard to try to figure it out, and it turns out I’m the one she’ll lose.” He looked at me, his eyes sharp and daring. “Julia can know, but that’s it. I’m serious. Don’t tell anyone else, Celeste. Not your friends. And especially not Mom and Dad.”

  “I’m the one who’s been keeping this a secret in the first place. But it’s going to get out before long. This is too big, Miles. This is your entire life.”

  “Exactly. It’s mine, and I don’t want them to know. Not telling them is a kindness.”

  “Do you wish I hadn’t told you?”

  He wouldn’t answer. He stepped to the mirror and studied his face up close, as if he could find a clue to his future there.

  “It’s not an easy secret to keep,” I added. “It was the hardest one of my life.”

  When Miles looked at me again, I fell silent. Of course he would succeed in concealing his future, just as he kept my future from me. Not only was he a master liar, but he taught me his trade. Deception had become our shared language.

  “Only Julia can know,” he repeated. “At least until I’m ready.”

  I said nothing, refusing to offer him reassurance. As furious as I was, part of me understood that in his own way, he had been trying to protect me. Lying by omission was his gift to me—the very same gift I’d attempted and failed to give him.

  The sound of approaching footsteps pulled our attention to the door, which Julia pushed open to face us. I could read ever
ything in her eyes. She wanted to know if I was all right, if I could forgive her and Miles for withholding my fate. I couldn’t stand to look at her.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Julia, and then I pressed past her and fled.

  * * *

  * * *

  On the way home, I was determined to reveal everything. Now that Miles knew the truth, I couldn’t imagine not telling our parents. I believed that to move forward, we all had to start from the same place. That meant they needed to know.

  It was mid-afternoon, far too early for my father to be home from work, but his car was in the driveway. I let myself inside and heard my parents’ voices drifting from the kitchen. I didn’t pause to consider what that might mean. In that moment I was still thinking of myself—how I’d hidden the truth about Miles from them, how they’d react when they learned his fate.

  I rounded the corner into the kitchen. My parents sat at the table, their hands open and empty in front of them.

  “You’re home early,” said my mother.

  The school day crashed around me, a minor catastrophe overshadowed by the rest of the day’s horrors.

  “So’s Dad,” I said.

  My father shifted in his seat. “I was let go today.”

  A wave of vertigo hit me. “It was because of me, wasn’t it.”

  My father wouldn’t look my way. “Cutbacks were in the works for a while now, and it seems my department was bloated. That’s the word they used. Bloated.”

  “They could have let someone else go. You’ve been there forever.” My legs were shaking. I sat down, heavily, at the table with my parents. “Now we won’t have any money, and it’s all my fault.” I started to cry.

  “Don’t,” my mother said. “This family is going to be fine.”

  They couldn’t know I was crying not just for the lost job, but also for what would happen to Miles—for what I couldn’t possibly tell them now.

  “It’s not your fault, Celeste,” my father added. “We each played a role in this. All we can do is find a way to move on.”