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

what it says.” Miles looked flustered. “You have to see the bigger picture, Celeste. Maybe men aren’t considered skilled because they haven’t learned properly, or they never thought to try. And maybe the Office of the Future hasn’t seriously considered this because no one has fought for it. I’m willing to do that.”

Like my brother, I understood what it felt like to be held back based on gender. My bookshelf full of psychology books written by men was proof enough of that. At the same time, I’d never want to undress for a male interpreter, with or without a woman chaperoning him. We’d never even met a male interpreter in real life—the few men who did practice lived in bigger cities. Even then, their work was considered a lark.

“Did Julia have you do this?” I asked. “I told you something was off about her.”

“No. This was my idea, but Julia supports it. She knows I’m talented. She knows what I can be.”

I scanned the final sentences of the “On Men and Interpretation” section, which I read silently, to myself: Our stance on this issue is clear and concrete: It is the female sex that bears the burden of interpretation, and thus it is women who are best qualified to study the finer parts of this art form. A man, in this case, is no woman’s equal.

“Anyway, that doesn’t matter right now,” he said. “I have to go.”

“Where?”

Miles didn’t answer me. He reached down to dig through a pile of clothes on the floor. When he found his navy zip-up sweatshirt, he tossed it on. I noticed for the first time that his hands were trembling.

“Miles. Tell me what’s going on.”

He wouldn’t look at me. “It’s Deirdre,” he finally said. “She’s back.”

The book grew heavy in my hand. “She is?”

“I just heard. I’m going over to see her.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t want to be alone with a boy right now. I’ll come with you.”

“That’s not a good idea.” Miles adjusted the sweatshirt. “Trust me.”

For a moment I worried the shaking would start again, that I’d be so stricken with terror that I would not be able to move. But no. I had to see Deirdre, to face what had happened to her.

“I’m coming,” I said firmly, and I replaced Mapping the Future on Miles’s bookcase. The gold-embossed letters on the spine glinted dully. Not like stars but like a pair of eyes watching me. Remembering where I’d been and where I’d yet to go.

*   *   *

According to Miles, Deirdre had been found unconscious, dumped in an alley somewhere. Paramedics lifted her body and took her to the hospital, where she spent four days recovering in the Reintegration Wing. Only then was she sent home. There was no public announcement, no parade or welcome-home party. It was almost as if she were still gone.

Deirdre lived at the edge of our neighborhood, about a mile away, in a modest brick bungalow covered in overgrown vines. We crossed the uncut lawn, passing a rusted birdfeeder hanging cockeyed from the pine tree out front, to knock firmly on the front door. Deirdre’s parents invited us inside at once. They were probably grateful their daughter had any visitors at all.

Upstairs, we found Deirdre in bed. She looked smaller, as though she hadn’t eaten for many days. Her hair was chopped off at her chin, which I found odd—did her kidnapper do this? Maybe it was her parents, in an attempt to conceal her identity, or perhaps it was the nurses at the hospital, or maybe Deirdre did it herself, precisely because she knew she wasn’t the same person anymore.

Miles took a seat at the desk while I sat cross-legged on the floor. I noticed Deirdre wasn’t wearing her opal necklace—just one more bit of brightness wiped away.

“How are you?” Miles asked.

Deirdre fixed him with a blank stare. “The only thing I have going for me right now is that I can’t remember anything.”

Miles and I nodded. Kidnappers drugged abducted girls to keep them quiet and under control. It was a fortuitous side effect, some people said, that the drugs also erased memory.

Deirdre shifted her gaze my way. I had so many questions for her, questions I knew I could never ask out loud. What her body felt like, her skin, whether she could still smell him. If she had a sense of who he was, how he hurt her, what he did. It was too horrific to imagine, and yet I was imagining it: A man making Deirdre exposed, vulnerable, raw. Breaking the life she’d known. That her hair was cut short seemed appropriate, making her a pruned thing, snapped off at the source. These thoughts collided in my mind, a mess of salacious details, but I could not stop myself. I felt like a monster for even thinking of what Deirdre had gone through—and for the tiny part of me that desperately, nakedly, wanted to know more.

Deirdre was still watching me. I worried she sensed the grotesque scenes blooming to life in my mind.

“I brought you something.” Miles pulled out a plastic bag containing two red pills. They shined like spots of blood in his palm.

Deirdre leaned forward on her knees in bed, allowing her comforter to fall away. I couldn’t help but look at her body—her thin, bruised body, no longer glorious because her changeling period had passed. She was a woman now, a dull copy of the girl I’d seen in the school bathroom just a few weeks ago, but she was also something else. She was strong. She had to be, I decided, to live through that violence.

“Bloodflower,” she said, reverence in her voice. Miles spilled the drugs into her open hands.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked him. Bloodflower was illegal. I knew it was fairly easy to obtain, and possession only amounted to a misdemeanor, but still.

“I know a guy,” he said, as though that was enough.

Several years ago, our school brought in a recovering bloodflower addict as a speaker. The