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

After my second month on the mountain, after making new friends and meeting with Professor Reed and absorbing my course work, I felt ready to face what I’d avoided back home: the study of interpretation. I started by asking Alicia if I could read her markings.

“Of course,” she’d said, and slipped out of her clothes right there in her dorm room.

It was a gift, that level of trust. I approached and ran my fingers over her skin. Instead of telling myself I had no talent, instead of turning away and giving up when I reached a complicated prediction, I kept with it. I waited for the hum in my fingertips. I closed my eyes and opened them again. I let the force of the future rise from my friend’s skin into my hands.

“Are you getting what you need?” Alicia asked me. I nodded, pressing my fingers to her markings to silently convey, Yes, thank you, yes.

I wrote my first letter to Miles and Julia after that reading. I didn’t explain how something had changed in me, that I was no longer the girl they’d known but rather a young woman with a new purpose—they could grasp that on their own. I simply offered my help, and asked for theirs in return. From that moment on we forged a partnership across hundreds of miles, across time and distance and betrayal and hurt. Across the past and into the future.

*   *   *

I returned to my room and tossed the tarot deck onto the nightstand next to The Mountain School: An Origin Myth. For a long time, I sat staring at those two items on the nightstand. One fairy tale and one horror story. Fantasies, both. Finally, I reached past the origin myth and picked up the tarot. I wrapped my fingers around its weight and told myself I could survive whatever I found there. I had to. Surviving was all I knew.

I fanned the cards on my bed, flipping past each girl quickly. I didn’t want to see these girls, didn’t want to participate in their exploitation. We had a whole class devoted to this matter on the mountain, where we learned that purchasing, possessing, sharing, or even casually viewing stolen markings contributed to the suffering of those girls. How we could refuse to participate in the systems that surrounded us.

I shuffled through the cards in a rapid blur until I felt a tingling in my fingertips, a desperate zip of alarm as if my body recognized my own card before I did. I steeled myself, and then I looked.

The image was stunning. The card featured a midnight-blue background with a border of gold stars. I stood facing forward but turned, slightly, to the side. My left hand reached to partially cover my right breast while the other arm trailed back in a graceful arc. My hair—my normal, everyday brown hair—was idealized, made to be long and thick and wavy, the curls cascading in gorgeous spirals. And yes, there was my body, my nakedness.

Ace of Stars, the card read at the bottom. A mere three words of text. Otherwise, my tarot-self existed purely as skin, limbs, future.

I brought the card closer. How strange, to see my markings illuminated in gold ink on my skin. They were minute and delicate, little needlesticks of gold. I had to squint to make it out, but I could, just barely: the markings on my left side. The pattern was readable even without a magnifying glass. If my parents came across this card—my parents, whom I had abandoned for the mountain to pretend this tragedy would not play out—they would finally know.

The tarot had a way of traveling, of ending up in the hands of more than just immoral men. Collectors, art enthusiasts, interpreters who claimed erotic cards were powerful, and regular people who bought the cards as gifts or gags or even romantic gestures. Some women bought erotic decks to honor the girls pictured there, to celebrate their beauty and their loss. Such tangled, misguided intentions.

My parents had never discussed the tarot with me, but that didn’t mean they weren’t looking. Perhaps my mother, off on a humanitarian mission, might hear about the newest edition. I could picture her scanning the deck with a hard-beating heart as she searched for her own daughter. It was too dreadful to imagine my father doing the same, that he would allow his eyes to rest on my naked body once more, but I couldn’t dismiss it. By then I knew not to discount any possibility, no matter how unsettling.

I spread the crocheted blanket across my lap, as if it could protect me. Officially, my mother’s humanitarian job dispatched her to foreign nations to meet with vulnerable populations of girls whose own governments failed to support them. But I learned on the mountain that humanitarians also worked within our own nation. It seemed at-risk girls could be found everywhere, the world churning with female oppression. In extreme cases, humanitarians were sent to help girls who felt so trapped they turned to self-harm. These girls might tattoo over their markings or dye their skin in an attempt to escape their predicted futures. One girl in a neighboring nation reportedly poured battery acid on her arms to obscure her predictions. Another girl lit herself on fire.

My mother negotiated with local leadership to encourage improved policies. She also provided domestic art therapy for the girls, such as crocheting, beadwork, weaving, and fabric dyeing—creative outlets that instilled a sense of autonomy. The single time my mother was able to visit me on the mountain, she brought me a gorgeous silk dress, its color an ocean of blues. A girl had made it while recovering from the burns she suffered when she tried to bleach the markings off her skin.

“How awful,” I’d told my mother. I tried to give her the dress back, thinking the girl who made it could use the beauty in her own life. But