Body of Stars

by Laura Maylene Walter

  This type of life might be preferable to returning home, where the abducted girls would discover everything had changed. Their families were theirs but not. Their communities rejected them, as would universities and most employers. The stigma followed abducted girls forever. Not to mention that the girls’ markings—their very futures—might have been stolen, marked down and duplicated, then sold and transposed onto illustrated cards or books, all so collectors could have the thrill of owning the image of a real girl’s markings.

  “Once those markings are recorded, they could end up anywhere,” Mrs. Ellis said. She illustrated her point by jabbing her finger at the world map rolled down over the chalkboard, as if the potential for our ruin—for the shame of having our bodies exposed to all who cared to look—lurked everywhere. I understood what Mrs. Ellis was really trying to say: that the world did not belong to us.

  I burrowed deeper under the covers and reminded myself that the terror and risk we experienced was nothing compared to what girls faced elsewhere: openly thriving sex tourism, changeling river cruises, or the equitorial beach resorts where changelings were booked as just one more luxury accommodation. The information we gleaned from other nations was often vague, but we were taught in school to be grateful for our own progressive government. Our country had rape laws, antidiscrimination policies in workplaces, birth control, and the chance for most women to access the same education as men. Here, women could not be arrested based on suspicious markings. A woman fated to become a homemaker could still choose to attend school and might even be admitted to one of the lesser universities. We authorized the access of our transcripts. In short, we had rights, legal protections, and at least some degree of privacy.

  We could convince ourselves we were safe.

  * * *

  * * *

  Miles and I walked to school the next morning through thick fog. Droplets stuck to my eyelashes, and I felt covered, as if the fog could shield us from the signs of Deirdre’s disappearance that blinked into view all around us.

  Overnight, Deirdre’s parents had plastered MISSING GIRL signs on every telephone pole within a three-mile radius. They’d photocopied Deirdre’s photo onto the flyer, and the repeated image of her smiling face took on a ghostly, otherworldly expression, the staples gleaming in the paper like little silver stabs. Already her pre-changeling face seemed a shadow of her more brilliant self. The girl in the flowing skirt in Julia’s classroom, the girl applying lipstick from a gold tube at school—I couldn’t find her in the photocopied flyer. It was like two versions of Deirdre had disappeared at once.

  When I glanced at Miles, he was staring straight ahead, avoiding Deirdre’s image. Maybe he was thinking that the MISSING GIRL flyers were a futile effort. The police would give the appearance of searching for Deirdre, but they already knew she was with a man who’d set her free soon enough. The worst had already happened, they probably told Deirdre’s parents. Now it was time to wait for her to come back.

  I could only wonder what my brother might be thinking because he was quiet and withdrawn that morning. Holding his secrets close yet again.

  When we arrived in the schoolyard, Miles and I separated. I found Cassandra and Marie by the flagpole, their hands in their coat pockets. The top of the flagpole disappeared into the fog.

  “You okay?” Cassandra asked. She wore a chic black raincoat I’d never seen before. She looked like she was in mourning.

  “No,” I said. “Are you?”

  Cassandra shook her head, as did Marie. We hugged, one by one, and turned to face the school’s entrance.

  “Let’s get this over with.” Cassandra tightened the belt of her raincoat. “They’ll lecture us, I’m sure.”

  Marie nodded. “This school hasn’t had an abduction in a long time. I saw the paper this morning. It’s been a decade.” She gazed at the building. “We don’t want to get a reputation like the city district.”

  “We’re still a long way from that,” Cassandra told her. “I heard the city’s upper school stopped taking attendance this year because the skip and dropout rate is so high. And they have the highest rate of abductions of anywhere around.”

  “This one abduction is enough to draw comparisons,” Marie said. “Don’t you agree, Celeste?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Celeste.” Marie touched my wrist. “You’re really pale.”

  I blinked at my friend. She wore a red headband, the skinny plastic kind with teeth that dug into the scalp. Those headbands hadn’t been in fashion for a long time. On another day I might have felt frustrated with Marie for making such a childish fashion choice, but in that moment, it comforted me.

  “I’m fine,” I told her. “Cassie’s right, let’s get this over with.”

  We headed inside and were swept up at once in a flood of students moving toward the auditorium. Our teachers stood grimly in front of their open classroom doors, watching us pass. When I accidentally caught the eye of my homeroom teacher—her expression projecting undercurrents of horror—I averted my gaze and kept moving, letting the crowd carry me forward.

  * * *

  * * *

  During those days I was a good student, but I tended to view my teachers with detachment. I did not imagine my teacher’s inner life, her future or her past or her private goals and dreams. Instead I was impatient to leave the upper school for university, where I would at last have professors instead of teachers, new opportunities, freedom. It was, I believed, where I could develop into the person I was destined to become.

  To be a school-age girl, meanwhile, was to be constrained and controlled, to receive lecture after lecture about appropriate behavior and the rules of our sex. Even the assembly following Deirdre’s disappearance was a variation on the same safety talk we had endured for years, often read aloud directly from Mapping the Future: never go anywhere alone, but especially not at night; never enter into a discussion with strangers about our markings; never wear short skirts, plunging necklines, or other provocative garments; and never be alone with men we did not know. These precautions were necessary precisely because the markings never predicted abductions, making that bit of fate unknowable to us.

  While boys weren’t included in those safety lectures—they were sent out of the classroom for free periods, or even went home early—they were compelled to attend the assembly. I resented having them there that day. They fidgeted, knocking their knees against the seat backs, and the auditorium felt too small to contain them. I was jealous of their freedom, their easy way of moving through the world. Boys could afford to not pay attention to the assembly: how Principal Radshaw had placed an oversized photograph of Deirdre onstage, how he gestured to her portrait as he talked, how he warned us against repeating her mistakes.

  The photo was the same one from the MISSING GIRL poster, an image already seared into my mind. I stared hard into Deirdre’s photocopied eyes, willing her to become unlost and whole once more. This was no more than a fantasy, but I couldn’t help myself. For the rest of the day I wouldn’t stop thinking of Deirdre, not for one minute.

  Her face haunted me right up to the final bell.

  Mapping the Future: An Interpretive Guide to Women and Girls

  Category—Misfortune

  Location—Ankle, left

  Cluster A: Here, the meanings of individual markings mean less than the whole. The arc of the pattern, and the way smaller markings orbit the larger, indicate multiple losses. This is a marking of grief, yes, but also strength. This is a marking to endure.

  5

  When Deirdre disappeared I felt the world should operate differently, that the days should be longer or shorter, the skies brighter or darker. I expected food to taste hotter, oxygen to pierce sharper in my lungs. If I pricked my finger, I believed the blood wouldn’t stop. I thought everything would hurt more.

  I was wrong, but also right. The world kept turning same as eve
r, night to day and back again, but I noticed a shift within my family. Miles began shadowing my every move. He insisted on walking me to and from school, and more than once I turned from my locker to find him watching from across the hall.

  Our father, too, grew more protective in the days following Deirdre’s abduction. He ate breakfast with me before school each morning, a new routine for us. He showed up to the table freshly shaven, still adjusting his tie; sometimes he wrenched it so furiously it looked like he was punishing himself.

  “You’re growing up so fast,” he said once, without warning. My father was not a sentimental man, and this comment caught me off guard.

  “You could pass to your adult markings any day now,” he added, “and then you won’t be my little girl anymore. You’ll be a woman.” He said this with a sincere sense of loss.

  By the third morning at the breakfast table, I noted the stress in my father’s shoulders and jaw, the way he clenched the fork in his fist. I worried he was coming undone. He was busy, I knew, preparing for the installation of the new banner advertisement at work, a project that consumed him. At the time, I was only aware that the ad was expensive, and important to his career, and that it would soon hang on the bank building downtown. I knew it was coming, we all did, but that didn’t mean I was prepared for the disruption it would cause.

  In hindsight, it’s clear the timing was all wrong for the ad. If its debut had been delayed by a few weeks or months, things might have gone better for my father, for our entire family. But on the morning of the fourth day of Deirdre’s disappearance, the banner went up as scheduled. It appeared quietly, in the earliest light of the day, and waited for the city to take notice.

  The ad showed a drawing of a naked woman—that was all I heard, at first, through the rumors already circulating at school. I couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t see how my father had a part in something so scandalous. I might have ignored the gossip had my brother not appeared at my locker that afternoon. He put a hand on my shoulder, tightly, like he was trying to hold me in place.

  “After school,” he said, his voice low, “we’re going downtown to see it.” And then he was gone, flowing like water through the crowded hall, the lingering pressure on my shoulder the only sign he’d been there at all.

  * * *

  * * *

  Miles and I walked downtown that afternoon without saying much, without even looking at each other. We were on a mission. When we reached the bank building, we stood side by side for a long time, staring. So this was what our father had brought to life.

  That banner was a marvel, a catastrophe—a triumph and tragedy at once. It showed a woman drawn in black ink strokes on a white background, a body defined in lines soft as a new star at dusk. She was stylized, which meant she had no markings, the details glossed over. Her face, turned in partial profile, featured an aquiline nose and half-lidded eyes. Hair billowed in clouds around the woman’s cheeks, her breasts drawn full and round with frenzied swirls for nipples. Her waist drew in sharply, the belly button a smudge, and beneath that, a shadow between her legs.

  MORE THAN A PRETTY FACE, the banner read. It was an ad for skin cream. The jar could be spotted in the lower right corner, but even I understood that wasn’t the point.

  “I can’t believe he really went through with it,” Miles said at last.

  I looked at him. “You knew about this?”

  He didn’t answer. I didn’t tell him what I was thinking, which was that I couldn’t understand how our father had created this, or how he could have told Miles but not me. How people harbored secret parts of themselves. My brother and I just looked straight ahead, embarrassed by the woman’s nakedness. But I was also drawn to her—maybe because she was so clearly a woman, not a girl. Maybe because she seemed to have chosen this nakedness, to revel in it, and I couldn’t imagine growing up to become that confident myself.

  Or maybe I admired her simply because she had no markings, no future, no dark realities awaiting her. Because she was free. Because her body was her own.

  * * *

  * * *

  Miles and I returned home to find our mother sitting alone in the kitchen. She’d cracked the window and pulled her chair close. She was holding a lit cigarette, a little brown one that smelled of vanilla and cloves.

  “You don’t smoke,” Miles said.

  She exhaled. “He’s going to get himself fired. I warned him.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I assured her, but that was a lie. People were already connecting the ad’s obscenity to Deirdre’s abduction. They said the public display of such scandalous material was cosmic retribution, or else a warning. The city was becoming increasingly depraved, they claimed, which could lead to more abductions, and this monstrosity proved it all. Rumor had it the skin cream company already regretted signing off on the ad and was going to pull it.

  “He took too much of a risk.” The cigarette smoke rose to trace my mother’s cheek. “Now we’ll have to deal with the fallout.”

  My father had worked for the advertising agency for ages. It was small and family-run, but the skin cream company was only one of his many accounts. Even if he lost this one, I reasoned, he had others.

  My mother leaned forward to stub out her cigarette.

  “This smell will stay in your hair for hours,” she said, and started fanning the air to send the smoke away from me. I told her I didn’t mind, but she only waved harder, creating a space for me that was clean and pure.

  * * *

  * * *

  The day after the banner appeared, Cassandra and I sat next to each other in health class for our annual lesson on the passage to adult markings. This, too, was so familiar it was embedded in our memories, but we were asked to endure it again regardless. “You can never be too prepared for such a monumental change,” Mrs. Ellis said, and she started the filmstrip outlining how we’d change overnight while we slept. Our childhood markings would vanish and be replaced by more detailed, mature markings. It would be a painless process, nothing extraordinary. It was, droned the narrator’s authoritative voice, perfectly natural.

  When the filmstrip ended, Mrs. Ellis lectured us on the high lucidity we’d face during our changeling periods, and how we could control the flood of new sensory awareness with breathing exercises. We practiced together as a class, breathing in and out, loud and slow, until a girl in the back row broke into laughter.

  Mrs. Ellis marched over to her. “Do you think this is funny?” she asked, meaning our bodies, our lives, our futures. The girl fell silent.

  Cassandra and I shared a glance. Outside of class, we didn’t always take our bodies so seriously. We delighted in discussing rare cases, like the boy someone once knew who tattooed marking patterns on his body because he felt he was meant to be a girl. Likewise, we heard of girls who identified as boys and tried to scar their predictions out of existence. These were stories adults chose not to address, but privately, we reveled in sharing them. They hinted at a broader, more complex world that expanded beyond the rigid male-female gender roles we lived with every day.

  “Girls,” Mrs. Ellis said, “if you learn only one thing today, I hope it will be to respect yourselves.”

  That day in class, Cassandra and I passed notes back and forth. We wrote to each other in bubble letters and folded slips of notebook paper into tighter and tighter squares until they felt thick, indestructible. But in reality, our notes were no more than paper, easily torn or crumpled or otherwise transformed. They were as fleeting as our girlhood, which I could feel ticking toward its conclusion. And Cassandra, I predicted, would pass to adulthood before me. I could sense her impending change, could feel it approaching with every passing hour.

  That was Friday. By Sunday, when my mother woke me in the blue light of morning to tell me Cassandra had called, I knew I’d been right. I rose and followed my mother to the kitchen, where I pressed the receiver to my ear. Through the
trick of the phone line Cassandra still sounded like my friend, but something was different. She was changed.

  * * *

  * * *

  Cassandra lived six blocks away on one of the more prosperous streets in our neighborhood. I put on my tennis shoes and headed out, planning what I’d say once I arrived. Be serious, I imagined telling her. Be careful. You are entering a delicate and dangerous time.

  By the time I arrived, I was sweating. I paused on the flagstone pathway to wipe the moisture from my temples. Cassandra lived in a Colonial with a perfectly landscaped lawn. Her parents were divorced, but even so, her family was well-off, and they had the time and inclination to keep up a meticulous appearance. I had often envied this about Cassandra, but on that morning I was too distracted by worry to feel jealous. I let myself in, as usual, and hurried upstairs before Mrs. Hahn could intercept me. This was no time for adults. This was a time for girls—or, in Cassandra’s case, girls who’d just become women.

  I flung open Cassandra’s door to find her waiting in the center of her pastel bedroom. My friend, newly changed, stood with her palms held forward like she was making an offering. She was naked. It had been a while since the three of us had stripped down to look at our markings, so the sight of Cassandra—her defined waist, her hips, her developed breasts—was a shock. Her body revealed the truth I’d long known but had never witnessed so intimately: that once a girl passed to her adult markings, she was transformed.