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

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