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

“Celeste?” My father called. “Can I come in?” He was just outside my closed door. I jumped and grabbed the towel from the floor. I had been careless; I should have remained dressed and in bed until he left for work.

“Not now,” I called back, tucking the towel securely around my body. “I just got out of the shower and I’m not dressed.”

An uncomfortable silence. “That’s all right,” he said at last. “That’s actually why I’m here. I’m coming in. Okay?”

I watched in horror as the door started to unlock. Our parents had keys to our bedrooms, for emergencies, but they’d never used them before. I tossed the colored pencil into the space between my dresser and the wall and clutched the towel to my body as my father stepped in the room.

It looked like he had dressed in a hurry; his shirt was half untucked, his hair uncombed, the shadow of stubble still drifting across his jaw. He shut the door behind him with a click.

“This isn’t an ideal situation for either of us,” he began.

“Later. We can do this later.” My voice was shaking. My legs were shaking.

“Your mother told me you plan to hide your markings.” He looked at me sadly. “I know this is difficult, but I need your help, Celeste. The whole family does. Your future is ours, too—surely you can see that.”

Tears filled my eyes. I could only shake my head.

“Dad.” I hated the high pitch to my voice. “It’s my birthday. You can wait until tomorrow, can’t you?”

He took a step closer, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a camera. “We should have done it yesterday.”

“You’re going to photograph me?”

He looked embarrassed. “This is to prevent Miles from wanting to do a reading, too. Don’t worry, I’ll only photograph your markings up close. Now please, Celeste. I’m scared, too, but let’s get through this together.”

With a pained expression, he moved closer. I heard a ticking that I thought was my heart but turned out to be a steady drip coming off my wet hair. All around me, the inevitability of my life and future churned. There was no escaping it. So I gave in.

I looked off to the side, away from my father, and I let my towel drop to the ground.

*   *   *

Miles would have known. My mother would have known. Anyone except my father would have known that one of the moles nestled among the others was fake.

“That’s interesting,” he said. He picked up the camera and focused it on my ribs. I stood rigid with my arms crossed over my breasts, trying not to breathe. He didn’t notice anything was amiss. When he moved on from my left side to focus on another pattern, I could finally exhale. But he needed to check every marking, and to do this thoroughly, he had to touch. Hands on my back, my calves, the pulse at my throat. We didn’t make eye contact. I didn’t utter a single word.

Afterward I swaddled myself in blankets and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t stop thinking of my father’s shaking hands, how he positioned the camera close to my markings and made the shutter click. As if I weren’t a person but a map.

Wearily, I slid from bed and dressed. Now that it was over, I knew I could survive it.

Once my father left for work, I retrieved the pencil from behind the dresser and returned it to Miles’s room. My mother still wasn’t home. For a while I wandered the empty house like I was looking for something I’d lost. Eventually, I gravitated toward a window and looked out toward the mailbox. Bringing in the mail—that was a simple, concrete task I could accomplish.

The front door opened with a slow creak. I poked my head outside. The air felt fresh and pure, and the sun shined on. I stepped outside and paused, listening. It wasn’t that I expected someone might appear and attack me right there, in daylight in front of my own house, but rather that anything seemed possible. The world buzzed with uncertainty, with risk.

But I was also at home, in my own neighborhood, and it was a glorious day. The leaves of the red maple across the street trembled in the breeze. A patch of clover sprang back into shape after I stepped on it. When I looked up, I saw the whole of the sky at once, all those layers of blue.

At the mailbox, I sifted through a magazine, the electric and water bills, and a soft, cream-colored envelope embossed with a red square—the official insignia of the Office of the Future. I tore into the envelope. Inside was a form letter, two sentences long, denying Miles’s request to revise Mapping the Future.

I lowered the letter and stared out at my neighborhood. I observed only invisible things: wind, the rising chill in the air, a sour odor leaking from the sewer. My high lucidity gave me beauty but also vulgarity. As I stood with my brother’s letter in my hands, it was the ugliness that consumed me—as though something ominous had taken hold there in my front yard, had burst to life as surely as the envelope’s red square imprinted a dull mark against my palm.

*   *   *

My mother came home with a bouquet of orange and red poppies. She’d chosen poppies because they were scentless; she still remembered her own changeling days, when her father gave her daisies that emitted an odor so strong it turned her stomach. I thanked her for the flowers and watched as she sorted the mail I’d left out on the counter—everything except Miles’s letter, which I’d delivered directly to his desk.

I was admiring the rich saturation of the poppies when the doorbell rang. I already knew it was Marie and Cassandra. It was just late enough for school to be out, and besides, I could hear their notes of laughter outside, the rustling of their