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

was our own invention, created on a long-ago summer afternoon much like this one, but we hadn’t played it in ages.

Miles rooted in his pocket for a coin. “Call it,” he told me, and the coin turned over itself in the dim basement light. Heads or stars. I called heads, but when he caught the coin against his arm and lifted his fingers, it faced stars up. A sly expression crossed his face. My brother was nearly eighteen but could still look impish, like a twelve-year-old boy just coming into his own.

“Ladies first,” he said.

Going first was a disadvantage, but I was ready. I turned to write my answer in the dirt behind me, where he wouldn’t be able to see it.

“Did you know,” I began, “there’s a chance the upper school might make gym class coed, like it is in the lower schools?”

He looked amused. “I don’t think so, Celeste.”

“Just listen. Cassandra’s mother is on the school board, which met last night.” When crafting a lie in this game, it helped to mix some truth into the matter. I went on to explain that a board member was advocating for mixed-gender physical education to help girls and boys view each other as equals. Combining curricula could also save money.

As I spoke, my brother studied me with one side of his mouth twisted, a sign of his uncertainty. “If that’s true,” he said, “you wouldn’t have waited until now to tell me.”

“Saving information for the game is a good strategy. You taught me that yourself.” A sense of calm washed over me, an understanding that I could go on lying for as long as it took to win. “Besides, nothing’s settled. It’s just an idea someone suggested at the meeting.”

Miles rolled the coin between his palms. I could tell the implications of coed gym were flashing through his mind—how girls newly matured into their adult markings, and thus at the height of their beauty, would be thrust into closer contact with boys at school. But if this was the allure of my story, it was also its downfall.

“Lie,” Miles said at last. “Parents would complain about their changeling daughters being so close to boys during physical activity.”

Before I could try once more to convince him, Miles crawled around me to peer at the answer in the dirt. Lie, I’d scrawled in looping cursive.

“My point,” Miles said. “But that was a good round, Celeste. You almost got me.”

I waited as he wiped clean my answer and replaced it with his own. Once he’d finished, he settled cross-legged before me, dust battering his knees and shins.

“Did you know,” he said, “that Mom and Dad tried to have another baby after you?”

I worked to keep my face impassive.

“I know what you’re thinking—that’s impossible, because Mom’s markings showed she’d only have two children.” Miles lowered his voice. “Here’s the thing. They thought maybe the markings left something out, or were unclear. Maybe they indicated a minimum of two children. You know how these things can go. For a time, they even thought she was pregnant. Mom started showing and everything.” He mimed the arc of a belly over his own flat stomach.

I watched him closely, trying to understand why he would bother with such a blatant lie—was he testing me?

“This was when you were around three years old,” he continued, “so I was five. I remember it, but barely. They were thrilled. That’s what always comes back to me, this sense of excitement about a third baby. That they wanted more than just you and me.”

A muscle in my cheek twitched, but I held my ground. I would not reveal that I was starting to believe his story could be true.

“But it wasn’t meant to be,” Miles went on. “For a long time, I thought I’d dreamed it. It was outrageous, to think Mom and Dad would believe they could have another child. Then I started to wonder what happened to the pregnancy. Was it a miscarriage? Or maybe it was one of those pregnancies that aren’t real. Imaginary pregnancy, I think it’s called.”

“Phantom pregnancy,” I said. “They’re rare.”

“In any case, I never asked about it. I assumed they wouldn’t admit they believed something so foolish in the first place.”

“You’re right that it’s a ridiculous thing to believe.”

Miles held my gaze. “This is the deepest kind of truth, Celeste—what seems impossible, what we keep secret. I never mentioned it because I remember how upset Mom and Dad were after it fell apart. They wanted that third baby, even and maybe especially because it wasn’t fated, and look what happened.”

I let the silence stretch between us. It was untrue, it had to be, and yet I hesitated to give my answer. Miles was a master at this game. He wouldn’t propose a scenario so preposterous without thinking it through.

“Time to answer,” he said. “Truth or lie?”

I bit the inside of my cheek. Everything in me wanted to say Lie, but I couldn’t form the word. I was imagining our parents delighting in the possibility of a third child. I imagined them heartbroken when it didn’t work out, when they resigned themselves to Miles and me.

“Lie,” I said, finally. The word tasted wrong in my mouth.

Miles looked at me steadily. “Are you sure?”

Weak sunlight fell from one of the basement windows and illuminated the dust drifting through the air. When Miles turned a certain way he looked anointed, the dust motes ringing his head like an ethereal crown.

From above, our mother called for us.

“Miles? Celeste?” Her voice had the quality of being underwater. She tapped something on the kitchen floor to get our attention, the legs of a stool, maybe, or else her own foot. “Come up here.”

I rose and brushed dirt from my shorts, eager to escape both the game and my brother’s scrutiny. A rift had opened between us, the narrowest of fissures that could nonetheless widen under pressure. For Miles to suggest that our parents had defied the facts of fate struck me