Body of Stars

by Laura Maylene Walter

  “How awful,” I’d told my mother. I tried to give her the dress back, thinking the girl who made it could use the beauty in her own life. But my mother refused to take it.

  “Once these girls make things, they want nothing to do with them. These items remind them of their grief.” She held up the dress, fingering its silken fabric. “Besides, this dress will be glorious on you. You deserve something pretty.”

  During that visit, I’d tried to mine my mother for more information about her work as a humanitarian. I wanted to know that what she was doing could change the world. But she was reticent; she said her work required the utmost confidentiality. I, meanwhile, did not tell her about Miles. And so we circled each other, afraid to reveal ourselves.

  I swept the tarot cards from the bedspread. Soon, I would have no reason to continue hiding my brother’s fate. Once my parents discovered this card bearing my image, I’d stand exposed, the truth sliding from my grasp as easily as a swath of fabric pieced together by the hands of girls who struggled but nonetheless survived.

  Dear Celeste,

  You asked in your last letter if I’m being careful. I’m not sure how to answer that. You say you want the truth, but you and I have never been fully honest with each other, have we?

  I can assure you that Julia and I are hard at work, and the bits of curriculum you send us are exceedingly helpful. But what we’re attempting is difficult. You’re not here to witness the work we’re doing day after day, how futile it sometimes seems to try to influence the future, and how our personal concerns are so small in the face of all there’s still to accomplish. So no, I won’t say I am being careful. I’m just doing all I can with the time still available to me.

  As always, I hope you are learning as much as possible. I hope you are happy, and able to imagine a new kind of future for yourself. Please don’t waste time worrying about me. What will come will come. Isn’t that what we’ve always known from the start?

  Miles

  22

  In the chill of morning, I slid into a wool sweater and set off for class. I passed the dining hall, the administration building, the darkroom, and the performing arts center. Through clusters of trees I caught glimpses of the man-made pond we used for skating in the winter and swimming in the summer. If I proceeded to the outskirts of campus, I’d reach the stables, where we took weekly riding lessons, and then the cemetery, where the tombstones were engraved with marking constellations.

  Of all the miracles I experienced on the mountain—the friendships, the safety, the academics, the love—it was the school’s physical existence that seemed the most astounding. The campus had been built decades ago on a summit in the White Star Mountains, a place once slated for an observatory. The atmosphere was thin, the nights darker than the darkest any of us had ever seen. What a trial it must have been to haul the brick and stone all that way. Professors and staff made periodic trips down the mountain to town, but the other girls and I were content to stay behind. It was safe on the mountain, isolated, our lungs strengthened by the elevation. It was a place meant for viewing the stars.

  The academic hall was located next to the campus nursery, where I found my friend Jenn on the bench outside. She was nursing her infant daughter, Sophie, who was wrapped in a thick blanket.

  “Aren’t you cold?” I asked Jenn.

  “I needed some air. One of the toddlers vomited all over the playroom.” She laughed a little. “I thought I’d bundle up Sophie and give her breakfast while someone else cleans up the mess. Is that wrong?”

  I smiled and joined Jenn on the bench. “No. I would have done the same.”

  “Won’t you be late?”

  “I’ll only stay a minute. Sophie always cheers me up.”

  Jenn nodded. “Yes, I heard about the tarot. I’m sorry, Celeste. That’s awful.”

  I waved my hand as if the tarot were inconsequential, as if the most private part of myself hadn’t been wrenched from me and into the hands of the public. “I’ll be fine. Besides, it’s something we all have to go through.”

  “Hopefully not all of us.” Jenn nodded at her daughter, who was nursing blissfully, her eyes squeezed shut beneath a woolen baby hat.

  “I didn’t mean Sophie,” I said quickly. “Or any of the children here.” I paused. “May they all have brighter futures than we do.”

  “It’s all right. I know what you meant.” She shifted Sophie to her other side. “But it’s scary to think what’s out there, and what kind of fate my daughter or any other girl might meet.”

  I nodded. Aside from Jenn, several other friends of mine on the mountain had babies. Giving changeling girls birth control, the theory went in many parts of the country, encouraged promiscuity. I only grasped how backward and cruel that line of thinking was when I came to the mountain and found a nursery full of babies and toddlers, all of whom had been born to abducted teenage girls.

  “I want Sophie to be free,” Jenn said. “To grow up to be herself. You know?”

  I did. More than anything, I wished for those girls to have the ability to command their own lives, no matter what was marked on their skin. I wanted them to be liberated, and unafraid, and brimming with potential and possibility. But that wasn’t how the world worked for girls and women. Instead, we were made vulnerable through no fault of our own and held liable for the crimes committed against us.

  We were born already broken.

  * * *

  * * *

  I stayed with Jenn for longer than I’d expected, and when I finally left her, I bypassed the academic hall and headed toward the cemetery. I felt drawn to the world of the dead, to the quiet landscape of lives put to rest.

  We learned so much on the mountain, but sometimes this education seemed a waste. To avoid unwanted attention from the Office of the Future, we had to be careful. We couldn’t lead public charges against the crisis of abductions or the weak protections girls had compared to their kidnappers. Instead, we had to work covertly, making incremental efforts toward change. Our professors told us to think of our work like planting wildflower seeds. The seeds themselves were tiny, innocuous, and invisible once tucked into soil, and the person who planted them would be long gone before the first sprout pushed to the surface. It took time for the seedlings to grow to maturity, but if granted the right combination of sun and rain and patience, they’d one day flourish, covering the earth with color.

  It was a lovely image, but I didn’t want to make gradual, minuscule changes. I wanted girls and women to have better lives. I wanted the impossible: to upend the powers of fate. I wanted my predictions gone, erased, so I could move blankly through the future. So I could unlearn the truth of what was coming for my brother.

  When I reached the cemetery, I paused to take in the gravestones of past professors and staff, the silent stretch of the otherworld. Maybe I was looking at things the wrong way. In the end, what was marked on my body did not matter. One day I’d join the dead, my bones laid in the earth. Just like Miles. Just like everyone.

  In the older part of the cemetery, the headstones were made of marble instead of granite. While some of the engravings had faded or discolored beyond recognition, the marking patterns memorialized on the stones were still visible. I approached a cracked tombstone and ran my hand over its cold surface. Eloise Bethany Jenkins, born in the springtime and only forty-one years old when she passed. Her memorial marking—two large star-shaped marks offset by a trio of smaller dots at the top—represented fidelity.

  When a woman died, it was tradition for her family members to select a representative marking pattern to include on her gravestone. I touched Eloise’s constellation, feeling where the stone had been chiseled away for its creation. Fidelity would follow her forever. As women, we understood our memorial markings would remain a part of us even after our deaths—as if they mattered more than our skin, our breathing bodies, our entire lives.

  I
remained in the cemetery for a long time, thinking about the passage of time, and fate, and failure. That long-ago night in the alley, Miles tried to save me by better understanding my fate. He was clumsy about it, and wrong, and he failed—but all of this could also be said of how I’d reacted to the prediction of his death. We were two siblings on the opposite sides of a coin, forever connected yet held apart. Brother and sister. Heads or stars.

  * * *

  * * *

  By the time I doubled back to the academic hall, my International Texts class was nearly over, but I wasn’t worried. Professor Reed surely knew about the tarot by then and would understand that I might need time to myself. I slipped into my seat as she wrapped up a discussion of a foreign edition of Mapping the Future that included an addendum relating to gender expression.

  Gender expression was not a term the Office of the Future would ever deign to define, much less codify in an addendum. This edition, however, was from a far-flung country in the north, a country so liberal that people born in female bodies who identified as men could have their markings stricken from the official record. Likewise, those born biologically as men were free to tattoo marking patterns on their bodies to express their identities as women. Anyone whose gender expression was not strictly binary, meanwhile, could choose to what extent predictions played a role in their lives, if at all. This approach was so progressive, so vastly different from what I’d known growing up, that I was still absorbing its implications.

  I’d taken many classes on the mountain, from criminal justice to statistics, geometry, and interpretation theory, but this class had proved the most challenging. Most of us had grown up only learning about the worst policies of other nations; the more progressive laws elsewhere were largely a mystery. This class showed us more definitively how the rest of the world didn’t necessarily mirror the ways of our own nation, and that ideas that seemed frightening or confusing within our culture could have merit elsewhere.

  “For same-sex relationships, it’s simpler,” Professor Reed continued. “In this edition, there is no mention of whether romantic marking patterns refer to one sex or another. This, too, is a departure from our authoritative text.”

  I glanced toward Carmen and Jacqueline, who’d begun dating the year before. Whenever I saw them together, happy and unconcerned with how the outside world might view their relationship, I thought of Marie. I wanted my friend to experience this same level of freedom and love one day.

  Marie hadn’t written me in months, and it had been even longer since I’d heard from Cassandra. This was the way of the mountain, we were told. Some friendships from home might feel distant over time, but that didn’t mean they were over. Once we returned, our professors assured us, those relationships could resume with some time and effort.

  I didn’t want to think about going home, not even if it meant seeing Cassandra and Marie or living with my family again. Not even if I found a way to pretend that Miles wasn’t dangerously close to leaving us for good.

  “Celeste.” Professor Reed was standing before my desk. “Are you all right?”

  I looked up. The other girls were starting to mill out of the classroom—was class over already?—while my professor waited patiently before me. She wore a silk lavender blouse that brought out the honey-colored markings on her neck and clavicle, markings that glowed against the deep hue of her skin.

  “I’m fine.” I forced a smile. She obviously knew about the tarot, how my stolen markings had entered the market, and was worried about me.

  Professor Reed did not smile back. Instead, with an air of gravity, she placed a piece of paper on my desk.

  “Please, join me in my office,” she said. “We’ll have a chat.”

  I stared at her. As long as I maintained eye contact, I could ignore that paper—the formal business letter with the Office of the Future’s embossed red square at the top. The kind of letter Professor Reed received from her network of sources and that she only showed me whenever she had news about Miles.

  The letter that I understood might have the power to change everything around me once more.

  The Mountain School: An Origin Myth

  The girl journeyed out of the wood. Halfway across a meadow, she stumbled and fell to her knees. There in the meadow grass she found her: a sister, small as a teacup, curled inside the heart of a daisy.

  She scooped up her sister and carried on. She found another sister in the muddy ditch along a dirt road, and then a pair of twins who came pouring out of a tin watering can. By the time the girl reached the sandy dunes of the sea, she was plucking up sisters faster than she could carry them.

  The girl and her sisters made their home on a mountaintop. During the day they played in the glittering dirt, letting the wind catch and lift their bodies like paper. At night they spread stardust under their eyes and played firefly. They chewed the rubbery tentacles of mushrooms and brewed berries into wine, and at night they slept together on a speckled bed of lichen and moss.

  One morning, the girl woke to find a raspberry thorn wedged into her thumb. She yanked it out, put the wound to her lips. In that taste of blood she caught a flash of her return to the woods. How her body was swallowed by the shadow of trees. How she was made to reckon with the place from which she’d come.

  23

  Professor Reed rested her elbows on the desk and pushed her glasses onto her forehead. I sat across from her, facing the vast, arched windows that overlooked the orchard and hummingbird feeders.

  “The timing is not ideal, I know,” Professor Reed said. “First the tarot, now this. I apologize for that.”

  The letter was in my hands, but I was afraid to read it. If I ignored my brother’s fate, that fate might never arrive. This kind of denial was the only way I could thrive on the mountain, the only way I could allow myself to be so removed from Miles while his life grew closer to its end.

  Professor Reed nodded at the letter. “They’re preparing to take action, I’m afraid.”

  I finally made myself look at the letter, to read every last one of its stiff, businesslike words. It was a photocopy of a cease-and-desist notice from the Office of the Future, addressed to Miles. It demanded that he stop conducting unlicensed interpretations immediately.

  “That’s just a draft,” she continued. “I’m not sure when they’ll finalize and send it.”

  As the head of faculty, Professor Reed was the only person at the Mountain School who knew all my secrets. She had copies of my full government file, including the maps of both my adult and juvenile markings. She knew about the prediction on my left side. She knew that Miles could tell when a girl was predicted to be taken. She knew it all, and yet she never shared it with anyone. Privacy was cherished on the mountain, as was trust—and I’d always trusted Professor Reed, as much as I trusted my own mother.

  “They’ll issue a separate letter to Julia, too, though my source couldn’t obtain a copy of that one,” she added. “I imagine they’ll threaten to close her business if she continues to allow an unlicensed interpreter to work with her. Naturally, your brother will have no luck procuring a license.”

  Professor Reed pulled out the file on my brother. Inside, I knew, were copies of the letters he had sent the Office of the Future in the last year. In those letters, he explained his system for determining whether a juvenile girl was predicted to be taken. He requested an official revision to Mapping the Future, as well as special dispensation to conduct professional readings on his own. Every one of his requests was denied.

  “My other contacts indicate that your brother’s work is becoming known, at least regionally,” Professor Reed continued. “The more girls he reads, the farther word spreads. He and Julia are attracting more and more clients.”

  I already knew this. Miles and I stayed in close contact through letters, and I tried, as best I could, to share what I was learning on the mountain and to give him a b
roader perspective of what life was like for survivors. On the mountain, we even went so far as to call it the afterlife, the years of our altered futures stretching out like the vast unknown.

  My brother also needed to sharpen his skills, to hone his abilities to an art form. He conducted plenty of readings, but it wasn’t enough—he wasn’t enough. He was starting to come up against his limits as a man, in terms of both how much the girls trusted him and how he couldn’t fully grasp what they were enduring.

  I skimmed the cease-and-desist notice again. “I don’t understand why the Office of the Future refuses to acknowledge Miles’s work. It’s as though they want girls to be hurt.”

  “Change is difficult, Celeste. Historically, the Office of the Future has been slow to acknowledge new findings. But it’s also about control. They can better control what they already understand. When it comes to markings, any new information is a threat to everything—to fate, to how our world works. In any case, your brother’s expectations regarding the rate of change may be overly ambitious. The future shifts gradually—so gradually it’s hard to tell it’s changing at all.”

  “Like glaciers.” We’d been studying the ice age in geology class. What struck me was that despite the painfully slow movement of glaciers, they were heavy and forceful enough to change the face of the earth itself. It reminded me of Julia’s metaphor of the tree, how subtle movements and changes could affect the larger shape. Even on the mountain, I couldn’t escape Julia’s philosophy.

  “The problem remains that word about your brother’s work is spreading. The Office of the Future won’t hesitate to shut it down, but there’s only so much we can do from here on the mountain. We can’t call attention to our curriculum. It’s too risky.”

  I handed back the letter. Professor Reed never allowed me to keep those bits of evidence. She only showed me in the first place because she said no girl should accept something sight unseen. We were taught to observe, to question, to think for ourselves.