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

the conversation we’d begun earlier that day in our Heritage and Rituals class. The lesson had focused on the father-daughter inspection ritual, that shameful rite of passage we’d each endured back home before we had the language to denounce its flaws. One of our classmates was determined to give a public lecture about the ritual once she left the mountain and returned home, but my friends thought her plan imprudent.

“Nothing she can say will change the minds of fathers back in her hometown, or anywhere,” Bettina said. “To them, it’s an honorable tradition. They see it as their right.”

“Even mothers advocate for it,” Alicia added. “People get sentimental over anything they consider tradition.”

I carefully placed my teacup on Bettina’s bedside table. “You sound defeatist. Remember what our professors say—while fate cannot change, people can. If we go home and say nothing, the ritual will carry on as always. These traditions stick around for so long precisely because no one tries to stop them.”

“True,” Bettina said, “but I don’t see how we can change something that big. It’s not like people are eager to listen to returned girls. Besides, we have to be careful not to call too much attention to this place.”

She was right. When we eventually returned to the outside world, we’d need to be subtle regarding what we’d learned on the mountain; our professors stressed that above all else. That was why I hadn’t told my friends that I wrote to Julia and Miles about all I was learning on the mountain, or that I hoped to put this education to use with them in the future. In any case, I was not in a hurry. I’d been on the mountain for a good stretch—five hundred and seventy days, to be exact—but I had another year remaining before graduation.

We were still debating the merits and risks of trying to upend the father-daughter ritual when our friend Lena appeared in the doorway. She was holding something behind her back.

“Celeste.” She seemed nervous. “I need to show you something.”

Lena was only fourteen—she’d changed younger than most, and she’d only joined us at the Mountain School a few months prior—but she was clever and courageous. She’d attacked her captor, pressing her thumbs into his eyes until he released her. Though she might have escaped without anyone knowing about her abduction, she went right to the police. Not that it did much good, since her abductor was eventually set free on a technicality, but the fact he was arrested at all was a victory.

Lena waited. I was starting to feel uneasy at the sudden change in the room, the way the air had grown heavier.

“Whatever it is, just tell me,” I said. “You know I hate secrets.”

Lena stepped forward. From behind her back she produced a plain green box. I knew what it was at once, even before she handed it to me.

A tarot deck—the newest erotic edition.

I swallowed, determined not to cry. In my nearly two years at the Mountain School, I’d rarely cried. I was happy there. My bedroom had a view of mountain peaks, plus a sliver of far-off river that blazed in the setting sun. Out back were horses to ride, and berries to pick, and friends to laugh with. It was a good place. It still was, even with that deck in my hands.

I opened the box. Inside, the top card showed a drawing of a brown-skinned girl, naked with small breasts, her markings dotted in iridescent ink. The deck I’d seen years ago, at Rebecca’s house, had been of the style that drilled tiny holes for the markings. This deck represented the classic version, the predictions painted on in spots as tiny as needle pricks.

It was my turn, anyway. Most of the other girls had already endured this. Bettina was back in her hometown, still recovering in a Reintegration Wing, when she appeared on flyers tacked up in sex shops. A nightmare. Alicia had been in a comic book, which was even worse. In comics, you were given movement, plotlines, partners. You were acted upon.

The cards were cold in my hand. I could not bring myself to look. In addition to my naked body and all my predictions, my card would also include one key detail: the marking pattern on my ribs predicting Miles’s death. I had never told my friends about my brother’s fate. Only Professor Reed knew the full truth.

I considered, then, that I’d made a grave error. The mountain was not the real world. It was a place of safety and trust, and I should have shared the truth with my friends. Instead, I’d reverted to my old ways of secrecy and solitude.

“I’m sorry.” I covered my face with my hands.

My friends did not ask me to elaborate. They drew closer and curled around me on the bed. I let the tarot deck fall on the bedspread and imagined retreating back in time, to when I still had those telltale markings by my left elbow. Back to a time when Miles knew a secret about me while I knew nothing of what was to come for him.

*   *   *

When I first came to the mountain, Professor Reed handed me a copy of The Mountain School: An Origin Myth. Every girl received a slender leather-back copy of this story when she arrived, and tradition dictated that she sleep with the book under her pillow that first night. On my first morning on the mountain, I’d woken up feeling changed. Like I had absorbed the story overnight.

I was a different person back then. I was frightened, and sheltered, and hadn’t yet untangled the ways girls and women were held back in this world. It took a month until I acclimated to the rhythms of the mountain, until I began to understand the other girls and their unfamiliar language. They critiqued the rituals we’d all grown up with, and questioned why things worked the way they did, and proposed solutions. They seemed, to my young eyes,