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

“An apology isn’t going to give me my life back.” I turned onto my hip, facing away from him. I saw our history unspooling, all the time we spent together: The game in the basement, the summer evenings of brickball, the strawberry stand. How, in the end, he betrayed me.

But I had betrayed him, too. Miles had only a few years to live, and I hadn’t told him. I couldn’t do it, not even then, after my ruin. Maybe I was the stronger liar of the two of us after all—both better and worse.

Miles pulled his chair closer to my bed. I heard the chair scrape against the floor, a grating sound drawing closer, like a threat. I worried he might touch me—I couldn’t bear to be touched, I even jumped when a nurse took my pulse—but he did not.

“I’m so tired,” I told him. “You should go.”

“I’m not leaving you. I won’t do that again.”

I closed my eyes. Despite my reservations, I fell asleep. I was too exhausted to hold it off. When I startled awake about an hour later, Miles was still sitting by my side. A nurse bustled in to take my temperature, and then another entered to give me pain medication. My brother sat through it all, watching me. As if he alone could make me whole again.

Strategies for Reintegration: A 7-Stage Guide for Recovery and Rehabilitation

Stage 2: Withdrawing and Mirroring. During your time in this rehabilitation program, you will interact with fellow patients during meals, therapy, and structured social time. Be aware that these relationships may prove complex. Some girls withdraw by initiating arguments or avoiding their peers. Others find comfort in their fellow victims and cling to one another, a process known as “mirroring.” Either strategy is part of a normal recovery, and many girls cycle through both at different times.

Expect to revisit this stage in various ways in the days, weeks, or even years to come. Your evolving relationships highlight a fundamental truth about recovery: it is a process with a beginning but no end.

15

That first full day in the Reintegration Wing, my father did not show up. Miles and my mother sat with me while I ate breakfast—limp toast, a plastic cup of orange juice, gelatinous oatmeal knotted with raisins—until the nurses ushered them out so I could begin the day’s programming. “Programming,” that’s what they called it, and families were not allowed to attend.

When my mother and Miles left, I was relieved. I’d been embarrassed for them to see me in that state: the bruises lining my arms, the thin hospital gown I constantly pressed against my sides to make sure it kept me covered. My hair was greasy, but a nurse told me I’d have to wait until that night for someone to help me wash it in the sink. The only relief came in the form of a pair of gray cotton pajamas. Finally, I could cover up. The pants were a touch too short, and the bright red stitching down the legs reminded me of a surgical scar, but I was grateful for the clothing.

Once dressed, I combed my hair as best I could with the flimsy plastic comb and followed a nurse down the hall to a meeting room. I already knew what I would find there: other girls like me. Girls in gray pajamas, girls with shattered expressions, girls who were bruised. Girls who slept or couldn’t sleep in their own gray rooms, who pressed their cheeks into their gray pillowcases and dreamed of safety, of home. Just the thought of them made me miss Marie and Cassandra.

The nurse took my elbow. She was gentle, but I couldn’t meet her eyes. I wanted a nurse who knew exactly what I’d been through, but that was impossible because ruined girls didn’t grow up to become nurses.

“Come on, dear,” she said, and guided me toward the room. “It’s time to begin.”

I dropped my gaze as I shuffled through the doorway, focusing on the sight of my feet in those gray slippers. My ankles were bare, and I was cold all over, and I could sense the other girls in the room even before I raised my eyes.

There were three of them, all roughly my age. Two had been gone long enough to have grown out of their changeling periods, just as I had. But the last girl had miraculously been released after only a handful of days. She was still bright and vivid, still a changeling, still desirable. I could sense her spark immediately. When the nurse asked me, again, to take a seat, I knew I couldn’t sit by that girl. Next to her I would feel extinguished. It would be like sitting next to a warped reflection of my former self.

It would be like watching my own body rise from the dead.

*   *   *

I came to know those girls in the way all girls are first known: through their appearance, the physicality of their presence. One of the girls was tall, with pale skin and brown hair shot through with reddish highlights that looked natural, like they’d come from the sun. She had a narrow face and thick eyebrows and wasn’t particularly pretty, aside from her hair, and she had a habit of picking at her fingernails. The next girl was plump with a tawny complexion, her markings so light I had to squint to find them. The last girl was the changeling—black hair and dark skin, with a slight frame and intelligent eyes. Her markings shimmered under the industrial lighting.

I did not recognize these girls. The city hospital ran the only Reintegration Wing in a seventy-mile radius, which meant my fellow patients could have come from anywhere: a faraway suburban town, an adjacent but smaller city, or even a country hamlet. Even so, I couldn’t stand to look any of them full in the face. I turned away as