I shook my head. I was still crying. “I’ve tried to move on, and it was awful. Like school? I can’t ever go back. I quit.”
My parents took in that news with grim but unsurprised expressions.
“We’ll figure something out,” my mother assured me. “You can take correspondence classes, and I’ll find work.”
“No one will hire you now, Mom.”
For once, no one argued with me. Then I remembered something. I jumped up and ran upstairs, dug a paper out of my bag, and brought it back down. I unfolded it and lay it delicately before my mother. She picked up the application with two fingers and held it at a remove.
“I know it seems extreme, but humanitarians make a lot of money,” I said. “And you’d make an excellent humanitarian, especially with your teaching experience. Think of how gratifying it would be to help girls. This is perfect for you.”
My mother allowed herself a small smile. “Maybe. But this job is serious. I’d have to leave home.”
“Our expenses would be taken care of.” I paused. “Plus, it would help me. You’d make enough to pay for tuition at the Mountain School.”
My adrenaline was flowing, my solution big enough and wild enough to convince me everything was not yet lost. I felt defiant and determined, ready to fight for my own future. For the first time, I not only questioned but outright refused what I’d been taught about the nature of fate. Perhaps the future was not outlined permanently, in stone, but rather made of something more malleable. With enough time or pressure, markings could fade, shift their meaning, or represent something else.
My brother had known before I had the tragedy that awaited me. I was furious with him, but I was also struggling to see the future a bit more like he did: complicated, interlocked, prismatic. Perhaps capable of change. No more did I see the markings as little gods, the rulers of my life and the future. They were part of my body, but that was all—one single aspect of my larger, more brilliant life.
“It all works out,” I went on. “You’ll get a fulfilling career, and I can get my education.”
“It’s an outrageous idea,” my father said, but my mother was quiet. Maybe she was already imagining the new life she could step into—something she could embark on alone before eventually retreating home, where she’d find her family intact again. We all needed some sort of fantasy.
“It had crossed my mind,” she finally admitted. She looked to my father. “We have so few options. We’re already in debt. With neither of us working, things will just get worse.”
“But you can’t leave. That will only tear our family apart more.”
“It’s a job. Not an abandonment.” My mother seemed to grow more determined with every word. “And the job wouldn’t last forever.”
“It’s the only way,” I confirmed, and the way my parents sat sagging in their chairs, helpless, made me feel lonelier than anything else. I was sixteen, and I was feeding them the answers. I was right to think that my father was so ashamed that he found it trying to be in my presence. I was right that my mother longed to follow her ambitions. I was right about it all.
I left my parents to make the decision I saw as inevitable. Upstairs, I entered my brother’s room. Two steps in and my fury was reawakened: how he’d known what would happen to me, and how he’d pushed me into a dark alley anyway. The scene replayed in my mind on a loop, always with the same result: Miles never able to save me, and the two of us destined to withhold the full truth from each other. It had all started when he wanted to record my markings, to put them down on paper as if they belonged to him instead of me.
I grabbed giant handfuls of Miles’s practice drawings and began tearing them to shreds. I used my bare hands, working so quickly and roughly that I gave myself papercuts. I didn’t care. I wanted to leave my blood in his room. I wanted, in that one small way, to leave him the evidence of what had happened to me. To give him a glimpse of what was one day coming for him.
* * *
* * *
Later, as I sat alone in my bedroom, I thought of the girl I’d seen roll blankly past in the hospital, and of the rumors that she’d hurt herself. I understood that girl better now. I sensed the dark temptation licking my own veins, calling out for something to change, and what was an ending but a change? Maybe I couldn’t do what that girl had attempted, but I could still make a break. I could erase myself from my family, from my past mistakes.
And so, when Miles returned home from Julia’s a few hours later, he found me dismantling my bedroom. I tore through my possessions, tossing armfuls of clothes and mementos into my suitcase. I was sweating, and excited, and sick, as if I were leaving that very night instead of waiting the weeks it would take to arrange for my departure. I tasted bile and blood and a deep thrumming energy as I grabbed the objects I’d soon display in my dormitory in the mountains. My brother found me like this. My brother—my weary, wounded, ill-fated brother—found me packing.
For the second time, he was forced to watch me disappear.
IV
Reclamation
The Mountain School: An Origin Myth
In the deepest reaches of the forest, a girl birthed herself from a rock that cracked open like an egg. Instead of yolk there was light. Instead of shell there was stone. A slice of stone slipped inside the girl’s heart. The light seeped, glittering, into her skin. She unfolded her limbs and came spilling out into the forest, a lonely creature with no parents, no siblings, no past, and no future.
There in the pale filtered light of the forest, she blinked.
21
I huddled with my friends Bettina and Alicia on the bed in Bettina’s room. It was late, but that didn’t matter. We had no curfew on the mountain, no quiet hours or dress code or any of the stifling rules we were accustomed to in our hometowns. The three of us were young women of seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old, cloistered away far from the real world with the freedom to be ourselves. We dreamed it could be like this always.
It was the first of June, but the nighttime mountain air was thin and chilled. Across my shoulders I draped the blanket my mother had sent me the previous fall for my seventeenth birthday. It was handmade, crocheted in jewel tones by girls assigned the task as therapy. As a humanitarian, my mother met girls who faced infinitely more harrowing realities than any of us had before we came to the mountain. I pulled the blanket close and poured myself a fresh cup of tea, mostly so I could feel the warmth through the cup.
“It’s easy to criticize the inspection ritual here, where we have the perspective to recognize how wrong it is,” Alicia was saying. “But to everyone back home, it’s just part of regular life.”
We were carrying on the conversation we’d begun earlier that day in our Heritage and Rituals class. The lesson had focused on the father-daughter inspection ritual, that shameful rite of passage we’d each endured back home before we had the language to denounce its flaws. One of our classmates was determined to give a public lecture about the ritual once she left the mountain and returned home, but my friends thought her plan imprudent.
“Nothing she can say will change the minds of fathers back in her hometown, or anywhere,” Bettina said. “To them, it’s an honorable tradition. They see it as their right.”
“Even mothers advocate for it,” Alicia added. “People get sentimental over anything they consider tradition.”
I carefully placed my teacup on Bettina’s bedside table. “You sound defeatist. Remember what our professors say—while fate cannot change, people can. If we go home and say nothing, the ritual will carry on as always. These traditions stick around for so long precisely because no one tries to stop them.”
“True,” Bettina said, “but I don’t see how we can change something that big. It’s not like people are eager to listen to returned girls. Besides, we have to be careful not to call too much attention to this place.”
S
he was right. When we eventually returned to the outside world, we’d need to be subtle regarding what we’d learned on the mountain; our professors stressed that above all else. That was why I hadn’t told my friends that I wrote to Julia and Miles about all I was learning on the mountain, or that I hoped to put this education to use with them in the future. In any case, I was not in a hurry. I’d been on the mountain for a good stretch—five hundred and seventy days, to be exact—but I had another year remaining before graduation.
We were still debating the merits and risks of trying to upend the father-daughter ritual when our friend Lena appeared in the doorway. She was holding something behind her back.
“Celeste.” She seemed nervous. “I need to show you something.”
Lena was only fourteen—she’d changed younger than most, and she’d only joined us at the Mountain School a few months prior—but she was clever and courageous. She’d attacked her captor, pressing her thumbs into his eyes until he released her. Though she might have escaped without anyone knowing about her abduction, she went right to the police. Not that it did much good, since her abductor was eventually set free on a technicality, but the fact he was arrested at all was a victory.
Lena waited. I was starting to feel uneasy at the sudden change in the room, the way the air had grown heavier.
“Whatever it is, just tell me,” I said. “You know I hate secrets.”
Lena stepped forward. From behind her back she produced a plain green box. I knew what it was at once, even before she handed it to me.
A tarot deck—the newest erotic edition.
I swallowed, determined not to cry. In my nearly two years at the Mountain School, I’d rarely cried. I was happy there. My bedroom had a view of mountain peaks, plus a sliver of far-off river that blazed in the setting sun. Out back were horses to ride, and berries to pick, and friends to laugh with. It was a good place. It still was, even with that deck in my hands.
I opened the box. Inside, the top card showed a drawing of a brown-skinned girl, naked with small breasts, her markings dotted in iridescent ink. The deck I’d seen years ago, at Rebecca’s house, had been of the style that drilled tiny holes for the markings. This deck represented the classic version, the predictions painted on in spots as tiny as needle pricks.
It was my turn, anyway. Most of the other girls had already endured this. Bettina was back in her hometown, still recovering in a Reintegration Wing, when she appeared on flyers tacked up in sex shops. A nightmare. Alicia had been in a comic book, which was even worse. In comics, you were given movement, plotlines, partners. You were acted upon.
The cards were cold in my hand. I could not bring myself to look. In addition to my naked body and all my predictions, my card would also include one key detail: the marking pattern on my ribs predicting Miles’s death. I had never told my friends about my brother’s fate. Only Professor Reed knew the full truth.
I considered, then, that I’d made a grave error. The mountain was not the real world. It was a place of safety and trust, and I should have shared the truth with my friends. Instead, I’d reverted to my old ways of secrecy and solitude.
“I’m sorry.” I covered my face with my hands.
My friends did not ask me to elaborate. They drew closer and curled around me on the bed. I let the tarot deck fall on the bedspread and imagined retreating back in time, to when I still had those telltale markings by my left elbow. Back to a time when Miles knew a secret about me while I knew nothing of what was to come for him.
* * *
* * *
When I first came to the mountain, Professor Reed handed me a copy of The Mountain School: An Origin Myth. Every girl received a slender leather-back copy of this story when she arrived, and tradition dictated that she sleep with the book under her pillow that first night. On my first morning on the mountain, I’d woken up feeling changed. Like I had absorbed the story overnight.
I was a different person back then. I was frightened, and sheltered, and hadn’t yet untangled the ways girls and women were held back in this world. It took a month until I acclimated to the rhythms of the mountain, until I began to understand the other girls and their unfamiliar language. They critiqued the rituals we’d all grown up with, and questioned why things worked the way they did, and proposed solutions. They seemed, to my young eyes, on the brink of changing the entire world.
After my second month on the mountain, after making new friends and meeting with Professor Reed and absorbing my course work, I felt ready to face what I’d avoided back home: the study of interpretation. I started by asking Alicia if I could read her markings.
“Of course,” she’d said, and slipped out of her clothes right there in her dorm room.
It was a gift, that level of trust. I approached and ran my fingers over her skin. Instead of telling myself I had no talent, instead of turning away and giving up when I reached a complicated prediction, I kept with it. I waited for the hum in my fingertips. I closed my eyes and opened them again. I let the force of the future rise from my friend’s skin into my hands.
“Are you getting what you need?” Alicia asked me. I nodded, pressing my fingers to her markings to silently convey, Yes, thank you, yes.
I wrote my first letter to Miles and Julia after that reading. I didn’t explain how something had changed in me, that I was no longer the girl they’d known but rather a young woman with a new purpose—they could grasp that on their own. I simply offered my help, and asked for theirs in return. From that moment on we forged a partnership across hundreds of miles, across time and distance and betrayal and hurt. Across the past and into the future.
* * *
* * *
I returned to my room and tossed the tarot deck onto the nightstand next to The Mountain School: An Origin Myth. For a long time, I sat staring at those two items on the nightstand. One fairy tale and one horror story. Fantasies, both. Finally, I reached past the origin myth and picked up the tarot. I wrapped my fingers around its weight and told myself I could survive whatever I found there. I had to. Surviving was all I knew.
I fanned the cards on my bed, flipping past each girl quickly. I didn’t want to see these girls, didn’t want to participate in their exploitation. We had a whole class devoted to this matter on the mountain, where we learned that purchasing, possessing, sharing, or even casually viewing stolen markings contributed to the suffering of those girls. How we could refuse to participate in the systems that surrounded us.
I shuffled through the cards in a rapid blur until I felt a tingling in my fingertips, a desperate zip of alarm as if my body recognized my own card before I did. I steeled myself, and then I looked.
The image was stunning. The card featured a midnight-blue background with a border of gold stars. I stood facing forward but turned, slightly, to the side. My left hand reached to partially cover my right breast while the other arm trailed back in a graceful arc. My hair—my normal, everyday brown hair—was idealized, made to be long and thick and wavy, the curls cascading in gorgeous spirals. And yes, there was my body, my nakedness.
Ace of Stars, the card read at the bottom. A mere three words of text. Otherwise, my tarot-self existed purely as skin, limbs, future.
I brought the card closer. How strange, to see my markings illuminated in gold ink on my skin. They were minute and delicate, little needlesticks of gold. I had to squint to make it out, but I could, just barely: the markings on my left side. The pattern was readable even without a magnifying glass. If my parents came across this card—my parents, whom I had abandoned for the mountain to pretend this tragedy would not play out—they would finally know.
The tarot had a way of traveling, of ending up in the hands of more than just immoral men. Collectors, art enthusiasts, interpreters who claimed erotic cards were powerful, and regular people who bought the cards as gifts or gags or even romantic gestures. Some women bought erotic decks to honor the girl
s pictured there, to celebrate their beauty and their loss. Such tangled, misguided intentions.
My parents had never discussed the tarot with me, but that didn’t mean they weren’t looking. Perhaps my mother, off on a humanitarian mission, might hear about the newest edition. I could picture her scanning the deck with a hard-beating heart as she searched for her own daughter. It was too dreadful to imagine my father doing the same, that he would allow his eyes to rest on my naked body once more, but I couldn’t dismiss it. By then I knew not to discount any possibility, no matter how unsettling.
I spread the crocheted blanket across my lap, as if it could protect me. Officially, my mother’s humanitarian job dispatched her to foreign nations to meet with vulnerable populations of girls whose own governments failed to support them. But I learned on the mountain that humanitarians also worked within our own nation. It seemed at-risk girls could be found everywhere, the world churning with female oppression. In extreme cases, humanitarians were sent to help girls who felt so trapped they turned to self-harm. These girls might tattoo over their markings or dye their skin in an attempt to escape their predicted futures. One girl in a neighboring nation reportedly poured battery acid on her arms to obscure her predictions. Another girl lit herself on fire.
My mother negotiated with local leadership to encourage improved policies. She also provided domestic art therapy for the girls, such as crocheting, beadwork, weaving, and fabric dyeing—creative outlets that instilled a sense of autonomy. The single time my mother was able to visit me on the mountain, she brought me a gorgeous silk dress, its color an ocean of blues. A girl had made it while recovering from the burns she suffered when she tried to bleach the markings off her skin.
Body of Stars Page 22
