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

damp from rose sherry and how it gaped in our direction, an endless dim cavity. It made me remember.

When I was a young child, my mother and I came upon a pair of teenagers wrapped together in the park. It was dark, and they were half hidden under the feathery branches of a willow tree. I could hear their breathing, hard and fast. There was a muffled fumble, the sound of cloth rubbing against cloth, and, just before my mother hustled me away, a delicate, feminine moan. It was my first sense of what people might do together when they were alone, how they could turn into something frantic and primal.

That night, as a boy stood staring at Cassandra and me in Rebecca’s basement, I felt the same mixture of fear and excitement that I’d had in the park. I was repelled, and I was attracted. I wanted to look away, and I wanted to step closer.

Once I finally realized the bottle was pointed not at me but at Cassandra, all those sensations rushed out of my body at once, leaving me drained and airless.

“Good turn,” one of the boys said. “A changeling on the first try.”

Cassandra ran her hands over her hair. “Two minutes?”

“Two minutes,” Rebecca confirmed.

I watched as Cassandra picked her way through the crowd, which parted in waves to let her through. Jonah frowned as she passed, but Cassandra ignored him and headed straight for a closet built under the stairs. The boy followed her inside, then pulled the closet door shut to close them in. Rebecca turned up the music and set a timer.

I turned to Janine. “What exactly is going to happen in there?”

“I think it’s up to Cassandra. But don’t worry, Lewis is perfectly decent.” She looked around the basement. “I hope I get your brother when the time comes. He seems like the type who will just stand there and wait it out with me.”

I glanced at Miles. He stood apart from the others, his arms crossed.

“There are more girls than boys,” I said. “Maybe we won’t get chosen at all.”

The corner of Janine’s mouth twitched. “We’re the changelings. The game goes on until all of us are chosen.”

I fell quiet. I was thinking that it was good Marie wasn’t at that party. She would never go into a closet with a boy. I understood without anyone telling me that girls could not go in the closet together, just as boys couldn’t. Young people might be more tolerant of same-sex relationships than adults, but even we had limits.

The timer finally dinged. When Cassandra emerged from the closet, her cheeks were pink and her hair shaken loose, but she didn’t seem unhappy. Lewis came out after her, his eyes shyly fixed on the floor. They separated; Lewis went to his friends while Cassandra headed to the refreshment table, where she poured herself another glass of rose sherry from a fresh bottle. She looked flushed, thrilled. I could see the pulse jumping in her throat as she drank.

The game went on, the bottle making its lazy turns to land on girl after girl. My brother did not take a turn, which the other boys did not comment on—they were too eager to spin for themselves.

The next boy leaned into the circle to send the bottle whirling. He was a fourth-year, tall with a pale complexion. I didn’t know him. Around and around the bottle went, spinning in a drunken wobble. When it stopped, it landed on me.

My first instinct was to look not at the boy who’d spun but to Miles, to glimpse his reaction. I knew he’d be upset, and maybe angry, but I also thought he had no right. He’d kept this party from me, making it one more of his secrets, and it wasn’t fair. As a boy, he was allowed to come here at night, to mingle with whomever he wanted, while I was meant to be trapped at home. But if I wanted to go into the closet with a boy, as the other girls had before me, that was my choice.

The boy who’d spun for me waited, a patch of red spreading slowly up his neck and cheeks, from either embarrassment or excitement or both. I took a tentative step toward the closet while he held back, letting me take the lead.

Waves of energy rolled off the other girls as I passed them. They chose this ritual. Maybe not every one of them, maybe Janine or I would never have dreamed this up, but some girls chose it. They wanted to dispel the tension, to plunge off a cliff and land in water deep enough to hold them. The other side of the closet door contained a party of their friends, and besides, not much could happen in two minutes. The time it took my father to check my markings was far longer than that—the length of entire days, it seemed, compared to this.

The closet door loomed closer now. I glanced back at the boy following me. He was blond, and as he came closer I saw that he had fine silken hairs sprouting just above his eyebrows, thin cobwebs of hair that made him look delicate and soft.

I didn’t remember opening the door or taking the first step inside, but somehow those things must have happened. The boy entered and I focused on the green of his shirt: new-day green, fresh-lawn green. Then the door shut, and we were enveloped. My back to the wall, our breath between us.

“I’m not sure I want to be here,” I whispered. The music on the other side of the door swelled louder.

“We don’t have to stay.” He paused. “Not if you’re scared.”

“I’m not.” All at once, that was true. He had made it so by offering a way out.

“Good,” he said. “Because I won’t do anything you don’t want.”

I considered him. “You’ve been in here before, I bet.”

“Yes, but not like this. You’re my first changeling.”

“I’m not your anything.”

“I know. I’m