Body of Stars Laura Walter (chrome ebook reader .txt) 📖

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 ever, 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