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

and determined, ready to fight for my own future. For the first time, I not only questioned but outright refused what I’d been taught about the nature of fate. Perhaps the future was not outlined permanently, in stone, but rather made of something more malleable. With enough time or pressure, markings could fade, shift their meaning, or represent something else.

My brother had known before I had the tragedy that awaited me. I was furious with him, but I was also struggling to see the future a bit more like he did: complicated, interlocked, prismatic. Perhaps capable of change. No more did I see the markings as little gods, the rulers of my life and the future. They were part of my body, but that was all—one single aspect of my larger, more brilliant life.

“It all works out,” I went on. “You’ll get a fulfilling career, and I can get my education.”

“It’s an outrageous idea,” my father said, but my mother was quiet. Maybe she was already imagining the new life she could step into—something she could embark on alone before eventually retreating home, where she’d find her family intact again. We all needed some sort of fantasy.

“It had crossed my mind,” she finally admitted. She looked to my father. “We have so few options. We’re already in debt. With neither of us working, things will just get worse.”

“But you can’t leave. That will only tear our family apart more.”

“It’s a job. Not an abandonment.” My mother seemed to grow more determined with every word. “And the job wouldn’t last forever.”

“It’s the only way,” I confirmed, and the way my parents sat sagging in their chairs, helpless, made me feel lonelier than anything else. I was sixteen, and I was feeding them the answers. I was right to think that my father was so ashamed that he found it trying to be in my presence. I was right that my mother longed to follow her ambitions. I was right about it all.

I left my parents to make the decision I saw as inevitable. Upstairs, I entered my brother’s room. Two steps in and my fury was reawakened: how he’d known what would happen to me, and how he’d pushed me into a dark alley anyway. The scene replayed in my mind on a loop, always with the same result: Miles never able to save me, and the two of us destined to withhold the full truth from each other. It had all started when he wanted to record my markings, to put them down on paper as if they belonged to him instead of me.

I grabbed giant handfuls of Miles’s practice drawings and began tearing them to shreds. I used my bare hands, working so quickly and roughly that I gave myself papercuts. I didn’t care. I wanted to leave my blood in his room. I wanted, in that one small way, to leave him the evidence of what had happened to me. To give him a glimpse of what was one day coming for him.

*   *   *

Later, as I sat alone in my bedroom, I thought of the girl I’d seen roll blankly past in the hospital, and of the rumors that she’d hurt herself. I understood that girl better now. I sensed the dark temptation licking my own veins, calling out for something to change, and what was an ending but a change? Maybe I couldn’t do what that girl had attempted, but I could still make a break. I could erase myself from my family, from my past mistakes.

And so, when Miles returned home from Julia’s a few hours later, he found me dismantling my bedroom. I tore through my possessions, tossing armfuls of clothes and mementos into my suitcase. I was sweating, and excited, and sick, as if I were leaving that very night instead of waiting the weeks it would take to arrange for my departure. I tasted bile and blood and a deep thrumming energy as I grabbed the objects I’d soon display in my dormitory in the mountains. My brother found me like this. My brother—my weary, wounded, ill-fated brother—found me packing.

For the second time, he was forced to watch me disappear.

IV

Reclamation

The Mountain School: An Origin Myth

In the deepest reaches of the forest, a girl birthed herself from a rock that cracked open like an egg. Instead of yolk there was light. Instead of shell there was stone. A slice of stone slipped inside the girl’s heart. The light seeped, glittering, into her skin. She unfolded her limbs and came spilling out into the forest, a lonely creature with no parents, no siblings, no past, and no future.

There in the pale filtered light of the forest, she blinked.

21

I huddled with my friends Bettina and Alicia on the bed in Bettina’s room. It was late, but that didn’t matter. We had no curfew on the mountain, no quiet hours or dress code or any of the stifling rules we were accustomed to in our hometowns. The three of us were young women of seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old, cloistered away far from the real world with the freedom to be ourselves. We dreamed it could be like this always.

It was the first of June, but the nighttime mountain air was thin and chilled. Across my shoulders I draped the blanket my mother had sent me the previous fall for my seventeenth birthday. It was handmade, crocheted in jewel tones by girls assigned the task as therapy. As a humanitarian, my mother met girls who faced infinitely more harrowing realities than any of us had before we came to the mountain. I pulled the blanket close and poured myself a fresh cup of tea, mostly so I could feel the warmth through the cup.

“It’s easy to criticize the inspection ritual here, where we have the perspective to recognize how wrong it is,” Alicia was saying. “But to everyone back home, it’s just part of regular life.”

We were carrying on