Body of Stars

by Laura Maylene Walter

  Finally, I set down my pen. I had drafted a proposed roster of classes I envisioned creating. Some I could teach myself, but others, like gender theory, would require outside help. I’d have to write to Professor Reed to ask for her contacts. Perhaps we could receive materials or even host a visiting teacher from the northern country that published the gender expression revisions.

  Aside from this course list, I’d produced one more document: an addendum for Mapping the Future that described how to read the abduction pattern in juvenile girls. It was a draft, an opening attempt in need of Miles’s review, but it was a start. I titled it “Addendum X” even as I knew it stood little chance of ever being published in Mapping the Future.

  “Celeste?”

  I turned to see my mother in the doorway. As she stepped into my room, I held out my papers to her. I was tired of secrecy, privacy, holding my plans close. I wanted her to know everything.

  She stood behind my desk reading, her face expressionless.

  Finally, she looked up. “The Office of the Future will never publish this addendum.”

  “I know. Miles has already petitioned them to add this information, and he failed. But I thought—well, maybe we don’t need to go through the official channels. We could print a whole stack of these and slide them into copies of Mapping the Future. In bookstores, libraries, schools. An underground way to offer people the truth.”

  My mother shook her head. “It’s too risky. If you run around planting an unauthorized addendum, you’d surely be caught. And the penalty for tampering with an official document can include jail time, Celeste.”

  I was about to protest, to tell her we at least had to try, when she continued speaking. “If we’re going to do this, we have to be smart about it,” she said. “Fortunately, ambassadors know how to work without attracting attention.” She paused, looking at me. “Do you understand?”

  I stared at her. My mother, marked to marry and have children. My mother, marked for so much more.

  * * *

  * * *

  We checked on Miles, but he was still in his room, sleeping off the bloodflower.

  “Once he’s awake, I’ll have a talk with him,” my mother said. “I won’t allow him to waste his remaining time like this.” She closed his door. “But we can get started without him. Let’s go to Julia’s. You two can catch me up.”

  My mother drove us to the interpretation district. It had been so long since she and Julia had spoken in person—that open house Julia held years ago, back when Miles was still uncovering his gift—but once reunited, they fell into an easy rapport. In Julia’s office, my mother spent a long time studying the chart on the wall. She was taken by this chart, obsessed with it, even. She recited the marking outcomes like a chant: negative, negative, negative, negative, positive, negative, negative, negative.

  “You’re detecting a decline over time?” she asked.

  “That’s the hope,” Julia said. “We need to wait and see.”

  My mother had plans. She had connections. She talked of secrecy, of not attracting attention from the Office of the Future. Distributing the addendum locally, in a small and centralized area, would raise suspicion. But if humanitarian ambassadors could travel to us, to learn how to read the abduction prediction and take copies of the addendum away with them, the movement would be more difficult to track.

  We were deep in this discussion when Angel came for us.

  “Someone’s at the door,” she said. She looked worried. “Someone from the Office of the Future.”

  For a second it was like my high lucidity had returned. I felt all the blood rushing through my body, a series of rapids surging and falling.

  “Man or woman?” Julia asked.

  “A woman,” Angel said. “An inspector, I think, based on her uniform.”

  Julia nodded. “Invite her in. We’ll be there in a minute.”

  Once Angel had gone, my mother turned to me and touched my cheek.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “This is good news, if they’ve only sent an inspector. It means they haven’t escalated things too far, which gives us time.”

  “The three of us should go out there together,” Julia said. “It’s best that we appear transparent.”

  We walked as a group into the parlor, where a woman waited for us. She wore a navy suit and a tiny red pin glinting on her jacket lapel, and she carried a clipboard stacked with papers. Julia shook her hand, then introduced each of us in turn.

  “What brings you to us today?” Julia asked.

  The inspector held up her clipboard. “I’m meant to investigate this place of business. We’ve received reports of a young man offering readings without a license.”

  “I give the readings, and my license is valid.” Julia nodded to me. “I’ve made Celeste my apprentice, it’s true, but she works under my supervision.”

  “That’s not a problem. What concerns me is the flood of recent reports of a male interpreter.” She glanced at her paperwork. “It appears he’d be your son, Mrs. Morton,” she said to my mother. She paused, her eyes flicking my way. “And your brother, Celeste.”

  Julia gestured to the empty parlor. “I’m closed to readings this week. If you were to return, I could assure you that you’d find me working alongside Celeste, not Miles.”

  The inspector lowered her clipboard. “The problem is that I might not be the one to return in the future. Someone else, someone who might dig a little deeper, might show up next.”

  No one said anything for a long stretch. I studied the inspector, the way she carried the weight of that red pin on her jacket. She was a woman. She was like Julia, like my mother. Like me.

  “Will they hurt him?” I asked quietly.

  The inspector looked surprised. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  The woman started flipping through the papers on her clipboard. As a government employee on assignment, she carried the files that contained my transcript and every official record of my markings, which meant all the Office of the Future knew about me and, by extension, Miles. She stopped when she came to my medical records from the Reintegration Wing, turning the clipboard toward me so I could glimpse the map of my skin. There were my adult markings, including the pattern predicting my brother’s death. My secret was terribly kept.

  “The Office of the Future has no reason to take such drastic action.” She pointed to the markings drawn on my left side and gave me a sympathetic look. “Fate will take care of it for them.”

  I swallowed. “So you don’t know how he’ll die, or when?”

  My mother put a hand on my arm.

  “While it’s true the Office of the Future wants to prevent your brother from working, they don’t want to make a martyr of him,” the inspector said. “They’ll find a legal justification to stop his work. But these things take time—and it will take even longer once I report that I found nothing suspicious during my visit.”

  The inspector turned to the first page on her clipboard, checked a series of boxes, jotted down a few notes, and signed the bottom.

  “There, now.” She tucked the pen in her pocket. “Investigation complete.”

  I gave her a wary look. “What did you write?”

  “That I’ve just completed a site visit at an interpreter’s place of business. That I found no sign of a young man on the premises, just a licensed female interpreter, along with her female apprentice. No reason for suspicion or alarm.”

  She leaned in. She was so close I could see the beginnings of wrinkles around her eyes. “So long as you don’t raise additional suspicion, it may be months before they send someone else to check my work. If that follow-up visit doesn’t go well, it’s over. They’ll give Miles a choice: submit to being arrested, or have this entire business shut down. Julia’s license will be revoked.”

  “He won
’t allow them to shut it down,” I said. “I know he won’t.”

  “Then he’ll be detained.”

  “For how long?”

  “It’s hard to say. Long enough, perhaps. I recommend that you use the time until then to your advantage. And that you proceed with caution.”

  “Thank you,” Julia said. “We appreciate your assistance and your discretion.”

  Before she left, the inspector shook my hand. Her skin was warm, and the back of her right hand was free of markings. That was considered auspicious, to not have markings in that place. As I watched her descend the front steps of Julia’s townhouse, I dared to imagine a time when women could move through the world as if unmarked—absolved of the very future that once held them back.

  PROPOSED COURSE LIST

  Support and Action. Weekly meetings to provide confidential support, information, and preparation strategies for juvenile girls predicted to be abducted.

  Parental Education. A class offering parents the information and tools to raise healthy, well-adjusted, independent girls without resorting to shame, fear, or avoidance. A special focus on protection, empathy, and understanding.

  Sensitivity Training. A course specially designed to help boys and young men gain understanding surrounding the trials and challenges juvenile girls, changelings, and young women face.

  Gender Theory. A class examining traditional and evolving gender roles and norms, domestic law, and international customs related to gender and gender identity.

  Gender Expression. A gender theory course taught by guest instructors to help students of nonconforming gender explore their questions in a place of acceptance and understanding.

  Return and Support. A class offering confidential coping strategies for returned girls who suffered abduction.

  International Theory. A survey course providing an overview of the laws and customs related to markings in other nations, and the implications for girls and women here.

  Body and Mind. A course providing creative exercises to encourage girls and women to expand their worldviews beyond their predictions and to consider other possibilities or realities.

  Education Completion. High-quality, accredited curriculum to allow returned girls to complete their education post-abduction.

  28

  By late that summer, I was the one standing behind the glass doors of Julia’s classroom. I was the one passing out textbooks, scrawling notes on a chalkboard, offering lectures in our newly created education program. In the beginning I taught girls exclusively, but soon my students included parents, then even some boys. In the confines of that classroom, our students were allowed to question the society that made them, to reconsider the taboo, and to ask: Who am I?

  It was the same question I asked myself throughout those long summer months, especially during the Support and Action classes. A half dozen girls attended that class weekly, some traveling from as far as an hour away, to commiserate over the fact that they were each marked with the abduction pattern. I was constantly evaluating my role in helping these girls, trying to think of new methods to comfort, educate, and prepare them. Sometimes, the best I could do was roll up my sleeve to show my left elbow, how the skin there was free of markings in my adulthood. As if everything that had gone wrong for me was erased, scabbed over and healed.

  “I know how painful it is to have your expectations for the future taken away from you,” I told my students. “I’d always wanted to be a psychologist. Or, I should say, I always believed I wanted to be a psychologist.” I paused. “I have a different path now. I get to be here, with you. I get to share what I’ve learned.”

  The girls listened. They asked questions, they cried, and they grew angry and yelled at the cruelty of fate. Some were not convinced, not wholly, that the markings on their left arms meant anything at all. They entered my classroom with doubt and denial. Those who had told their families—and not all of them had—were met with skepticism. Any marking pattern that did not appear in Mapping the Future was subversive, uncertain, perhaps deceptive. That was what we had been taught.

  “One day, that prediction will be official,” I promised. “Until then, we need to have faith.”

  In reality, I didn’t believe in faith so much as I believed in connections, in covert operations, in my mother’s ability to quietly summon humanitarian ambassadors. Whenever an ambassador showed up, Miles and I supplied her with copies of our new addendum. The ambassador would ferry this addendum away and deposit it in a range of untraceable locations, such as in bookstores in the towns she passed through on her travels. If each addendum reached only one person, maybe that could make a difference.

  During this time, I lived in a state of near-constant fear. I looked at the girls marked for abduction and waited with dread for them to pass to their adult markings. But I also felt the same fear when I imagined a wider acceptance of this prediction. Once people accepted that some girls were destined to be abducted, I worried about how those girls might be treated. Perhaps they would be cast out even earlier, as children, before they could pass into their adult markings and become women. Perhaps things would get worse for these girls before they got better.

  I couldn’t say. I could only continue to work. So I showed up day after day in that classroom to stand behind a pair of glass doors that let in all the light, and all the darkness, of whatever was happening on the other side.

  * * *

  * * *

  My mother had a marking on her stomach that denoted daughter. As a young girl I often studied this marking, marveling that the whole of my being had once been packed inside that tiny dot, like a miniature universe waiting to explode. Next to this marking was another that indicated an older sibling, a son. In this way my brother and I were born before our time, tied together in the body of our mother.

  “Miles,” I said. We were alone in Julia’s parlor, long after the last girl had departed for the day. How difficult it was to be alone with him then, how easily I could imagine the time when he was no more and I was on my own. “Miles, when we were children, what did you see in my markings?”

  My brother was on the couch, immersed in Mapping the Future. Perhaps he was envisioning how our addendum would look if it were ever to be published there. He couldn’t know that eventually it would have its place in the official guide; that revision was years away, long after his time.

  “I saw what everyone sees,” he said. “The future.”

  “No. I mean the markings on my left elbow.” I paused, remembering. The basement with its dirt floor. How his bedroom and mine were next to each other, how we shared a wall. How he studied my skin with a sense of awe, of reverence. “For as long as I can remember, you were fixated by that pattern. How early did you know what it meant?”

  “I never knew, not for sure, not until you were taken. It didn’t seem like something that could be true.”

  I wasn’t convinced. I walked over and stood in front of him, looming, feeling the power of my body. I was nearly eighteen years old. I was a woman. I had a future—I had proof of that on my very skin.

  “You suspected it for a long time.” I tried to smile down at him, but it came out more like a frown; I could not control my expression. I felt everything inside of me was roiling, uncontainable. “There was always something different about you, Miles, ever since we were kids. You were beyond your years, beyond your gender, beyond yourself.”

  “No.” Miles clapped Mapping the Future shut and looked up at me. “I was never the one who was different. It was you.”

  “I refuse—” I began, but then I stopped. His death could not be refused, my body’s predictions could not be refused, our history and our future could not be refused. I knew this. Miles had known it already for years.

  How unbelievable the future was, how vast. One moment I was gathering wild strawberries and the next I was allowing my brother to read my childhood mark
ings. I was gazing with wonder at my newly changed body and I was riding a train into the mountains. I was holding a MISSING GIRL poster and I was being led into a dark basement. I was a girl and then I was a changeling. I was a sister and then I was not.

  “Celeste.” He waved a hand in front of my face. “Where’d you go?”

  I blinked. Miles was still sitting on the couch, still studying me. Still alive.

  “Please don’t do that again,” he said.

  “Do what?”

  “Abandon me. It’s like you disappeared, even though you’re standing right there.” He balanced Mapping the Future in his hands, as if testing the weight of all the future, of every last possibility in the world.

  The doorbell rang. We both glanced toward the entryway.

  “It must be another girl for a reading,” I said. “You should go upstairs, just in case.”

  We never knew when the Office of the Future might send someone else. We had to protect ourselves and our work. That meant my brother could never answer the door. He had to hide, which meant he had to leave me, again and again.

  With some reluctance, he stood and headed upstairs. Once he was gone, I went to the front door and pulled it open to stare into the face of a girl so young and frightened she reminded me of myself.

  * * *

  * * *

  I was forced to send the girl away that night. Accepting clients after hours could raise suspicion; the neighbors would notice if girls were coming and leaving after normal business hours, especially in the dark when changelings were not meant to be out.

  Fortunately, this girl was local and could easily return another time. Sometimes, girls showed up late at night after traveling for days. It was too risky for us to host them, so we made a list of sympathizers who might help. Marie’s mother was at the top of the list. She’d hosted three girls so far, giving them a safe place to stay while they attended our classes. She also remained true to her word by sending Marie our way once she was back.