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

mother to lose a child is one of the worst tragedies imaginable. Maybe we aren’t given what we can’t handle.”

“But why? Our markings give us so many clues about the future. They’ll indicate whether we’ll get sick and die young. They usually say if we’ll have kids, and whether the family will be a happy one.” I thought of the pale dots on my mother’s stomach, her shining stars of two children situated close together to indicate closeness in real life. “But certain things never appear in the markings. Like suicides, murder, abductions. Sometimes I’d rather have no predictions than an incomplete view of the future.”

“Oh, Celeste. I know it can be torture to know a little but not everything. It’s especially hard right after you change, when your future has been upended.” She stopped to look at me. “What I’m trying to say is that it’s normal to feel a little depressed right now.”

“I’m not depressed.” I stood and moved out of her reach. “I saw Donny’s little brother at school today, that’s all. It made me think of them, and how sad the funeral was. Remember?”

“I do. You were brave to come with us to support Miles.” She paused, her expression thoughtful. “I admit I’m relieved. I know we have your father’s reading, but I thought you were trying to tell me you’d seen something terrible in your future. A disease, an accident, a short or painful life.”

I forced a smile. “Of course not.”

I could never let my mother know what was coming for Miles—that was clear. The truth would be too much for her to bear.

*   *   *

In my short time as a changeling, I’d already developed a few coping mechanisms for the high lucidity. One was to close all the blinds in my room and lie in the dark while listening to Top of the Hits on my portable radio. I loved Top of the Hits because it was more or less the same every day. I lay on my comforter in the dark and listened, my eyes tracking the dull glints from the plastic stars on the ceiling. Every song was about one of three things: unrequited love, lost love, or fated love affairs that had not yet begun.

A ballad in which a man sang about the journey to find his fated wife had just wrapped up when my mother knocked on my door to tell me Cassandra had called for me. I headed downstairs to the phone, squinting against the lights. In my mind I kept seeing Cassandra, only hours before, insulting me by her locker.

“I need you to meet me at Marie’s house,” Cassandra said. Just like that, as though our encounter at school had never happened.

I glanced out the window. It was growing dark, the treetops in the backyard turning black and tangled. I’d need to convince my mother to drive me.

“I thought Marie was busy tonight,” I said.

“She is. That’s a cover. Rebecca Delbanco is having one of her parties, and we’re going.”

Rebecca was a fourth-year. She and Miles attended the art camp together every summer. For the past few years, she’d hosted parties in honor of newly changed girls. Other girls were invited, too, including those who still hadn’t changed, but I had never before been included among them.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. I wanted to tell Cassandra that going out at night was a terrible idea, but I stopped myself. The word bore reverberated in my mind.

“We’re only keeping it a secret because of what happened to Deirdre, to prevent our parents from worrying.” Cassandra paused, her voice turning gentle. “Celeste, please. I need you there. Besides, these parties are a tradition.”

We were meant to revere tradition, especially when it came to our markings. The readings, the professional interpreters, the rose sherry at coming-out parties, the connections shared among girls and women—it was all hallowed ground. I remembered that moment in the school bathroom with Cassandra, how in love we were with our newness and each other. She was my best friend, and I needed her more than ever now that I carried the burden of Miles’s fate. What she had said to me in the hallway at school was just an outburst, I decided, a symptom of this tumultuous time in her life.

“All right,” I told her. “I’ll get a ride.”

I hung up the phone and dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and a thin black scarf stitched through with silver thread. I added a dab of lipstick and studied myself in the mirror. I felt covered but visible. Protected yet accessible. Yes and no, bright and dark, pleasure and pain—all of it waiting within the universe of my own body.

Mapping the Future: An Interpretive Guide to Women and Girls

On History and Tradition

In the beginning, when the body of woman was first understood to bear the future, the interpretative arts were a rolling dark sea. Prophesies emerged as stars in the night: separate points capable of telling a greater story when viewed as one. And so women were anointed. And so flesh became future.

Our modern traditions illuminate our rise from that shadowy past. Coming-out celebrations for newly changed girls acknowledge the profound way young bodies are gifted with prescience. The father-daughter inspection ritual recognizes that fathers, while unmarked themselves, gave their daughters life and thus the future. Daughters, in turn, carry the responsibility of sharing what is to come with others.

But traditions among women are perhaps the most powerful. Mothers and daughters, sisters, female friends—when women and girls gather together, they speak their own language of the future. For this we must be grateful. It is women alone who bear the truth and weight of prophecy. It is women who offer this gift to the larger world.

And it is women we thank, through tradition and ritual, for enabling us to spread the sacred word of the future, the truth, and the light.

10

Marie and her parents were visiting her aunt across town that night. I’d