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

“All right.” He looked hurt, or maybe irritated. “I suppose you always were more her daughter than mine.”

His words stung. I wanted to shake him, to make him see what I was really trying to say, what useless repetition ran in a loop in my head: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But I wouldn’t apologize to my father, not then and not in the future, either. I regretted hiding Miles’s fate, but as for the rest of it—the guilt and shame I’d carried from my abduction—I was done. It might take the rest of my life, but I was going to shed that burden, wash it off my skin. That was what I wished for: a metamorphosis, the ability to wake up restored and transformed.

Or maybe that wasn’t enough. What I truly wished for, what I could barely allow myself to imagine, was a full reckoning. To transfer the shame and responsibility from the girls who were harmed to where it belonged—to the men, and to everyone who defended those men in myriad ways. It was so much to want for the world, so much change and justice and mercy, that it hurt to dwell on it.

I left my father and went upstairs. In my bedroom, I groped around under the bed for the cardboard box sealed with thick silver tape. The tape had fibers inside, tough like tendons working to hold the whole thing together. I had to use all my strength to tear it apart.

A single piece of paper lay flat against the bottom of the box. It was my brother’s charcoal drawing of the man who’d abducted me. I hadn’t looked at it since I’d packed it away before running off to the mountain.

I held the paper at arm’s length. Back when I compelled Miles to create this drawing, part of me hoped it could lead to justice, that a sympathetic police officer might use it to track down my abductor. After my education on the mountain, I understood that it didn’t matter how compassionate any individual officer might be, or how unfair it was that perpetrators walked free while girls’ lives were ruined. The whole system, the entire structure of our society, was built around protecting men instead of girls.

This man, I told myself as I stared at the drawing, didn’t matter. He was one man, but he was also all of them, every last abductor who took liberties with a changeling. And I rejected them all. I wanted to tear this paper to pieces. I wanted to rip that man’s face and reduce him to a pile of scraps, to go on tearing and tearing until I tasted only smoke, ember, rage.

But I couldn’t do it. With shaking hands, I replaced the drawing in the box and sealed it up again. Even if no one believed me, this was my only bit of evidence. Holding on to it gave me hope that one day, things could be different. With enough time and analysis, maybe that chart in Julia’s office would reveal a different kind of future for girls. Maybe, in the wildest version of the world to come, it could even open a new future for me.

*   *   *

I dreamed about my mother all that night. In the morning, I went downstairs to find my father making breakfast: pancakes, scrambled eggs, toast sliced on the diagonal.

“Thanks.” I poured a stream of syrup on my pancakes. “This is nice.”

He nodded. His eggs were slathered in hot sauce, a taste I’d never taken to. The plate looked bloody.

“Miles left early this morning,” he said. “He mentioned that he needed you.”

“Yes. We’re working on something.”

I waited for him to ask a follow-up question, but he merely opened the newspaper in front of his face, cutting me off. I felt hurt that he wasn’t curious, that he didn’t seem to care.

Or maybe he knew us better than I thought—that Miles and I were siblings bound together so tightly that there was no use trying to break his way in.

I washed my dishes and set out for Julia’s. As I walked, I listened to the sounds of the neighborhood—distant passing cars, a neighbor raking leaves—and tried to see everything through my younger eyes. There were the stone lions with their cracked-open mouths. There was the shop where Miles and I bought candy and gum. And there, if I turned left instead of right, was the street where Marie lived. I paused at that juncture, thinking of Marie, of Cassandra, of all we once shared and how we’d grown distant from one another. How I’d never told them the truth.

After a moment of consideration, I turned left instead of right and walked to Marie’s house. She and her mother lived in a squat ranch house on the corner. Their yard was overgrown with weeds, the crooked stone pathway leading me drunkenly to the front door. The door knocker was shaped like Pegasus with a chipped wing. I rapped three times, hard.

Marie’s mother opened the door. She wore a long, heavy skirt, a turtleneck with sleeves flaring like bells over her wrists, and delicate gloves. Her hair was wrapped in a pretty blue-and-white scarf. Not a single marking was visible.

“Celeste?” She took a step back, but then seemed to remember herself and came forward to hug me. “What a surprise. Wait right here. I just put some tea on.”

When she reappeared, she brought a china teapot and two matching cups to the rickety table set up in the corner of the porch. I lowered myself into a chair, wondering if I wasn’t welcome in their house because I’d been abducted. That didn’t seem likely, but then I didn’t know what to think about modest women.

“Marie’s not here, I’m afraid,” her mother said. “She’s off for the weekend with her girlfriend. Are you home for a visit?”

I let the word girlfriend hang in the air. Did she mean it in the way I was thinking?

“I just got back