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

mussed around her face, her expression unknowing. She stared right through me. I was finally close enough to make contact with her, but the moment I grazed her skin I leapt back, feeling stung. My fingertip hummed with recognition.

The girl on the bed was me.

I blinked and found myself lying on that same bed. I wore a thin cotton tank top but nothing else, my legs curled to one side. I propped myself onto my hands and stared down at my changeling body. I was beautiful, a wild thing trapped underground.

The palest light pooled into the room as someone entered. A man shut the door behind him and stood at the foot of my bed. This was it. A far-off voice in the back of my head urged me to look up, to study his face, to recognize him, but I couldn’t do it. I stared at the man’s gut, refusing to raise my eyes.

He joined me on the bed. A patient tiredness overcame me, like this was so routine, so ordinary, that the event barely registered. When he lowered himself to me, I turned my head to the side. I felt ancient inside my own body.

The light flickered. Time stretched to accommodate this moment, as if it were a horror wholly without end, but I refused to acknowledge it. I worked to erase what was happening, what was changing me every second.

It went on until it didn’t. The sound he made at the end was one of agonized loss, and I lay still beneath him as he labored to catch his breath. By the time he finally moved his body from mine, I was so far outside of myself that I barely registered the lift in the mattress when he stood.

“That’s too bad, about your brother,” he said as he began to dress. He nodded toward the markings on my ribs.

I hated him, he disgusted me, I wanted to burn him alive. I fixed my gaze on his face and stared hard, memorizing every wrinkle, every flaw in his skin.

“What do you think you’re looking at?” he snapped. His hands were shaking; his zipper jammed. “I’m not attracted to young girls—only women, after they’ve changed. That’s important. I don’t feel this way about my students.”

So he was a teacher. I told myself to file that information away.

“You can’t know how difficult this is,” he went on. “It’s like being a prisoner. Once you girls change, you’re irresistible.”

I shifted on the bed so I could look at him. His face was bland, expected, universal. He was just a man.

“Poor baby,” I said, my voice velvety. “Imagine the struggle.”

He leaned down and wrapped his hand around the back of my neck, pulling me close. “I would stop if I could,” he breathed against my neck. “But I can’t. I’m human.”

“You’re not,” I said.

Later, when he came back into the room and pushed me down, I looked off to the side and pretended I was somewhere else. I was good at pretending.

When I raised my eyes again, I saw a massive blueprint pinned to the wall. It was not a blueprint of a building but of my body: a more official and intricate version of how Miles had drawn me when we were children. All my predictions were there, including the ones on my left side.

I was shaking. Even in that hallucination, I understood that my markings were no longer my own. I pressed my fists against my eyes and realized, with a start, that I had begun praying. My family was not religious, and we did not attend church. More surprising was that I was not praying to God, but rather to something I feared did not exist: the mythical blank girl. She appeared before me, flashing her hair, filling the room with a luminous glow.

I stretched out my arms to make contact, but it was too late. That girl, if she had ever been real in the first place, was gone.

*   *   *

I jerked awake. My head was swimming, my eyes watering. I struggled to stand and fell into a heap on the floor. After a few dizzy moments, I managed to make my way out of the room and crawl to the bathroom so I could vomit into the toilet.

I threw up once, twice, three times, then jerked with dry heaves. I could still feel his skin against mine. I heaved and gagged, as if by emptying myself I could undo the past. Because what I had seen in that dreamlike state was true. I was confident the bloodflower hadn’t made me hallucinate or invent a false account—those images were unearthed memories, no more and no less.

From my place on the bathroom floor, I lifted my head to gaze out the window. Hours had passed and now it was night, the stars visible because I hadn’t been able to turn on the bathroom light. In my imagination, the stars morphed into marking patterns and the sky flattened into a blueprint. My markings had been stolen. Who knew where they’d turn up: on flyers in sex shops, in an erotic comic book series, in the tarot. Men bought these items for the voyeuristic thrill of viewing real girls and their real markings. It only took a bit of money to claim the body of a girl.

I was sick one last time. Once I finished, I rose to my feet. My body felt creaky and broken. I washed my mouth out in the sink and drank a glass of water. Finally, I swatted my hand along the wall until I found the light switch. At the sudden brightness, I lost sight of the stars outside. They remained only in my memory, arranged and unchangeable in their constellations.

“Celeste?” Miles was outside the bathroom, knocking. “Are you all right?”

I opened the door and looked at him blearily. He was holding Mapping the Future but lowered it once he saw my face.

“Come on,” he said. “You need to sleep this off.”

He led me to