Body of Stars

by Laura Maylene Walter

  That a woman’s predictions are not always predictable is a common source of frustration, but we implore readers to maintain patience in the face of uncertainty. Some markings, it is true, provide as many questions as answers. A thoughtful interpreter knows to absorb those inquiries, layering them into her final reading. She is thorough and careful and slow. Most of all, she respects the few mysteries available to her.

  We ask all readers to be as wise as this learned interpreter—to remember that fate will unfold regardless of our demands, and that knowing a great deal about our futures does not entitle us to know it all.

  8

  That night I locked my door and wrapped myself in blankets. I pictured our cobwebbed basement, the word LIE etched into the dirt. Of the two of us, Miles had always been better at keeping secrets, but it was time for me to learn. I’d have to be careful, and smart, and I could never slip up. Not even once.

  Sleep came in spurts, in drifting periods of shallow unconsciousness. When morning finally broke, I waited until I heard Miles leave for school and then got in the shower, running the water as hot as I could stand it. Afterward, I wrapped myself in a towel and stepped into the hall. My mother had agreed to let me stay home for one more day, but she’d gone to the store and the house felt too quiet and empty.

  When I passed Miles’s room, I noticed his birthday presents lying on the bed. There, right on top, were the watercolor pencils I’d given him. A few spilled halfway from the opened package. Red, purple, green, brown. I let my gaze linger on the brown one. It was a fawn-colored shade, the color of my markings. I grabbed it and took it back to my bedroom.

  Down went the towel to the ground. In front of the mirror, I pressed the pencil to my cheek. When I pulled back, a perfect dot floated on the surface of my skin. If I only gave it a passing glance, I couldn’t distinguish this mark from a real one.

  I placed my index finger on the fake mole, applying pressure. When I lifted my finger the counterfeit mark remained, unchanged. I rubbed at it lightly, but still it endured. A tissue dampened in my water glass and more furious scrubbing finally erased it.

  With the thrill of blasphemy, I examined the moles on my left side. Adding a single dot in the star-shaped cluster would change its meaning. I lowered the pencil to my skin.

  “Celeste?” My father called. “Can I come in?” He was just outside my closed door. I jumped and grabbed the towel from the floor. I had been careless; I should have remained dressed and in bed until he left for work.

  “Not now,” I called back, tucking the towel securely around my body. “I just got out of the shower and I’m not dressed.”

  An uncomfortable silence. “That’s all right,” he said at last. “That’s actually why I’m here. I’m coming in. Okay?”

  I watched in horror as the door started to unlock. Our parents had keys to our bedrooms, for emergencies, but they’d never used them before. I tossed the colored pencil into the space between my dresser and the wall and clutched the towel to my body as my father stepped in the room.

  It looked like he had dressed in a hurry; his shirt was half untucked, his hair uncombed, the shadow of stubble still drifting across his jaw. He shut the door behind him with a click.

  “This isn’t an ideal situation for either of us,” he began.

  “Later. We can do this later.” My voice was shaking. My legs were shaking.

  “Your mother told me you plan to hide your markings.” He looked at me sadly. “I know this is difficult, but I need your help, Celeste. The whole family does. Your future is ours, too—surely you can see that.”

  Tears filled my eyes. I could only shake my head.

  “Dad.” I hated the high pitch to my voice. “It’s my birthday. You can wait until tomorrow, can’t you?”

  He took a step closer, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a camera. “We should have done it yesterday.”

  “You’re going to photograph me?”

  He looked embarrassed. “This is to prevent Miles from wanting to do a reading, too. Don’t worry, I’ll only photograph your markings up close. Now please, Celeste. I’m scared, too, but let’s get through this together.”

  With a pained expression, he moved closer. I heard a ticking that I thought was my heart but turned out to be a steady drip coming off my wet hair. All around me, the inevitability of my life and future churned. There was no escaping it. So I gave in.

  I looked off to the side, away from my father, and I let my towel drop to the ground.

  * * *

  * * *

  Miles would have known. My mother would have known. Anyone except my father would have known that one of the moles nestled among the others was fake.

  “That’s interesting,” he said. He picked up the camera and focused it on my ribs. I stood rigid with my arms crossed over my breasts, trying not to breathe. He didn’t notice anything was amiss. When he moved on from my left side to focus on another pattern, I could finally exhale. But he needed to check every marking, and to do this thoroughly, he had to touch. Hands on my back, my calves, the pulse at my throat. We didn’t make eye contact. I didn’t utter a single word.

  Afterward I swaddled myself in blankets and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t stop thinking of my father’s shaking hands, how he positioned the camera close to my markings and made the shutter click. As if I weren’t a person but a map.

  Wearily, I slid from bed and dressed. Now that it was over, I knew I could survive it.

  Once my father left for work, I retrieved the pencil from behind the dresser and returned it to Miles’s room. My mother still wasn’t home. For a while I wandered the empty house like I was looking for something I’d lost. Eventually, I gravitated toward a window and looked out toward the mailbox. Bringing in the mail—that was a simple, concrete task I could accomplish.

  The front door opened with a slow creak. I poked my head outside. The air felt fresh and pure, and the sun shined on. I stepped outside and paused, listening. It wasn’t that I expected someone might appear and attack me right there, in daylight in front of my own house, but rather that anything seemed possible. The world buzzed with uncertainty, with risk.

  But I was also at home, in my own neighborhood, and it was a glorious day. The leaves of the red maple across the street trembled in the breeze. A patch of clover sprang back into shape after I stepped on it. When I looked up, I saw the whole of the sky at once, all those layers of blue.

  At the mailbox, I sifted through a magazine, the electric and water bills, and a soft, cream-colored envelope embossed with a red square—the official insignia of the Office of the Future. I tore into the envelope. Inside was a form letter, two sentences long, denying Miles’s request to revise Mapping the Future.

  I lowered the letter and stared out at my neighborhood. I observed only invisible things: wind, the rising chill in the air, a sour odor leaking from the sewer. My high lucidity gave me beauty but also vulgarity. As I stood with my brother’s letter in my hands, it was the ugliness that consumed me—as though something ominous had taken hold there in my front yard, had burst to life as surely as the envelope’s red square imprinted a dull mark against my palm.

  * * *

  * * *

  My mother came home with a bouquet of orange and red poppies. She’d chosen poppies because they were scentless; she still remembered her own changeling days, when her father gave her daisies that emitted an odor so strong it turned her stomach. I thanked her for the flowers and watched as she sorted the mail I’d left out on the counter—everything except Miles’s letter, which I’d delivered directly to his desk.

  I was admiring the rich saturation of the poppies when the doorbell rang. I already knew it was Marie and Cassandra. It was just late enough for school to be out, and besides, I could hear their notes of laughter outside, the rustling of their clothing and hair. This was what high lucidity was meant f
or: to eliminate the element of surprise.

  When I opened the door, my friends stared, their eyes sparking.

  “You look so pretty,” Marie said. She didn’t try to hide the wonder in her voice and hugged me hard, as if we’d been separated for ages.

  I turned to Cassandra. When she and I embraced, I felt our hearts beating together, as if they were syncing. Maybe they were. Back then I believed my friends were the center of my universe, the sun that all else orbited. With them, I had always been able to reveal my full self. Until now. To successfully conceal Miles’s fate, I had to hide it from everyone, including Marie and Cassandra. I didn’t relish lying to my friends—I considered it a deception, even if only a lie by omission—but it had to be done.

  I took my friends up to my room, where Cassandra flung herself on my bed.

  “All right,” she said, “let’s see it.”

  I took a step back. “I’ve decided not to show anyone.”

  My friends exchanged a glance.

  “Surely you’ve shown your mother,” Marie said.

  “No.”

  “Miles?”

  I shook my head.

  “But your father.” Cassandra narrowed her eyes. “Did he?”

  I turned my face away. “Yes. He looked this morning.”

  The room was silent for a long stretch. Cassandra picked at the bedspread and wouldn’t meet my eyes. I thought back to her coming-out party, when her father had led her away to her bedroom. When Cassandra returned to the party, she refused to talk about it, said it was something every girl went through and that it was too embarrassing to dwell on.

  “Give us a hint about your marriage prediction, at least,” Cassandra said. “Will you end up with someone good?”

  I had to think. Aside from the prediction about Miles, my future appeared perfectly ordinary.

  “There are no details,” I said. “Just that I’ll marry at some point. I don’t know who it will be, or when. The markings for children are vague, too. A family is a possibility, but I see nothing concrete.” This was all true, and with each word I spoke, I felt a bit more dejected.

  “No illnesses?” Marie asked. Her father’s death had been predicted in her own childhood moles. As a baby and toddler, she carried the mark of his fate on her body. Then he died and her markings endured, a reminder of her grief until they could be replaced upon her change.

  “None that I can see.” Nothing aside from Miles, dead by twenty-one.

  “Then we should celebrate,” Cassandra said. “To your long and happy life.”

  My expression must have given something away, because Marie grabbed my hand. She looked so concerned that I teared up. Not only was Miles in danger, but my friends and I were facing one another across a gulf growing wider by the moment.

  “I think I understand what you’re feeling.” Cassandra patted my arm. “The high lucidity is disorienting at first. But don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”

  Marie didn’t say anything more, but she kept watching me. Like she thought I might self-destruct right there in front of her.

  It was only later that my friends reminded me it was my birthday. Marie presented me with a card she and Cassandra had both signed, and as a gift, they gave me a framed print of one of the old impression tests that psychologists once used. The image consisted of a black teardrop shape with a red smudge in the middle.

  “My mother ordered it for us,” Cassandra said. “It was in a catalogue of curiosities.”

  I brought the frame closer and stared deep into the red heart of the drawing. The whole point of impression tests was to encourage each viewer to project their own ideas and realities onto a drawing, but this one felt so certain to me. It was a flame, it was fire—there could be no other interpretation. I stared for so long my vision blurred, and the frame grew hot in my hands. It was a gift, I reminded myself. It was art.

  It was my future, burning and bright and encased in breakable glass.

  * * *

  * * *

  After Cassandra and Marie left, my mother took me to the doctor’s office for my birth control shot. She held my hand while the nurse slid a needle into my arm. At first the shot burned, like a splash of poison had been put into my veins, but within a few seconds I felt fine. Already it was behind me.

  “There,” my mother said. She stood up and gathered her things. “Now that’s done.”

  At home, I found Miles alone in his room. He was studying the photographs of my markings and copying the patterns in his new notebook. He used the brown pencil to dot out the markings and the periwinkle to lightly trace constellations between moles. I watched him work and thought about stars, galaxies, the entirety of the observable universe. The mystery of what might lie beyond.

  When Miles noticed I was in his doorway, he picked up his letter from the Office of the Future and waved it at me.

  “You were right.” He tossed the envelope down again. “Denied. But it’s okay. I’ll think of something else.”

  “Like what?”

  He ignored that and stared intently at the photographs. “I have to say, I’m surprised by how uneventful these markings are.” He held up the photo showing the cluster of moles on my left side. “This is the one that catches my attention. What do you think it means?”

  I took a moment to pretend to study the prediction. “It seems to indicate a big life change for you just before you turn twenty-one. If I had to guess, I’d say a move.”

  “Yes.” He frowned at the photograph. “But it doesn’t quite add up.”

  “Maybe you’ll go to graduate school.”

  He squinted. “It’s not that.”

  “You might study abroad, or join the military, get married and buy a house,” I said, rattling off all the events that could possibly line up with my altered markings.

  “Perhaps,” he said, deep in thought. “Or maybe it’s related to your childhood prediction, the one about us working together one day.” He looked up from the photographs. “Remember? It’s gone now. I don’t see anything in your new markings quite like it.”

  I kept my expression neutral. “That prediction had an outlier marking. And now my career pattern is so open-ended it’s like everything’s canceled out.”

  “I suppose. But something’s not adding up.”

  I tried to appear uninterested, but inside, I knew the truth. My juvenile career marking wasn’t wrong—a girl’s predictions could not be contradicted, even after the passage to adulthood—but now that it was clear my brother only had three years to live, we simply didn’t have much time to work together. As a result, that particular prediction did not shine through in my adult markings. It seemed the outlier marking from my childhood days had been the dominant one after all: I’d end up working alone.

  “If you let me see that pattern in person, I’d have a chance of figuring it out.” He looked up at me hopefully. “You’ve always shared your markings with me. Besides, it’s my birthday today, too.”

  “I’m sorry, Miles. But no.”

  He stared down at his drawing pad, resigned. “It doesn’t make sense,” he muttered. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or himself. “It’s not here. I expected it to be here.”

  “What do you mean?” When he didn’t respond, I took a step into his room. “Miles. What did you expect to see?”

  His eyes fluttered up to me, then back down to the copies of my markings. “I told you I’ve always felt something awful might be coming.”

  I felt chilled. I crossed my right hand over to my left elbow, where I’d once had that vague set of markings. No one had known what they meant, but maybe Miles had an inkling. Maybe he saw in those childhood markings what no one else could: a hint of his own fate.

  “You worry too much.” I tried to keep my voice light, but my throat felt scratched, every word a choke. It was not in my nature to lie
to Miles.

  “Maybe.” He looked up once more, and our eyes locked. We were in the basement again, down in the dirt. We were playing the most important game of Did You Know in our lives. I told myself to keep it up, to conceal the secret at all costs.

  “The trouble is,” Miles said at last, “that the future is the future. It cannot be stopped. So even if we knew that something terrible was coming, it couldn’t be prevented.”

  My heart, my lungs, my entire body: I felt it all under strain, the blood rushing in a panic. He didn’t know. He couldn’t. The way his face grew puzzled when he considered the image of the altered marking on my ribs—he had no idea what was coming for him.

  “Exactly,” I said, and this time I succeeded in sounding calm. “The future is set.”

  Miles turned back to his drawings. The more he studied them, the more his concern washed away. I saw it happen, watched his body language relax into complacency. I was relieved and guilty and proud, because everything I’d told him was a lie. And every lie was practice.

  Mapping the Future: An Interpretive Guide to Women and Girls

  On High Lucidity

  Through this natural wonder, changeling girls are gifted the strength and advantages they need to move safely through the world. A changeling in the throes of high lucidity is, in fact, living out the beatific potential of her sex. She is experiencing one of nature’s most glorious privileges while benefiting from an ancient form of protection.

  How any changeling can protest, experience fear, or permit herself to be damaged while in this state is a mystery not to be examined by this panel of authors. Time is too fleeting, and the state of lucidity too brief, to waste with such concerns. We direct changelings to be grateful for this phenomenon, and to respect it as one of nature’s forms of grace granted only to women. What a blessing to receive this gift. How astonishing to be a woman in this world!