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

by guest instructors to help students of nonconforming gender explore their questions in a place of acceptance and understanding.

Return and Support. A class offering confidential coping strategies for returned girls who suffered abduction.

International Theory. A survey course providing an overview of the laws and customs related to markings in other nations, and the implications for girls and women here.

Body and Mind. A course providing creative exercises to encourage girls and women to expand their worldviews beyond their predictions and to consider other possibilities or realities.

Education Completion. High-quality, accredited curriculum to allow returned girls to complete their education post-abduction.

28

By late that summer, I was the one standing behind the glass doors of Julia’s classroom. I was the one passing out textbooks, scrawling notes on a chalkboard, offering lectures in our newly created education program. In the beginning I taught girls exclusively, but soon my students included parents, then even some boys. In the confines of that classroom, our students were allowed to question the society that made them, to reconsider the taboo, and to ask: Who am I?

It was the same question I asked myself throughout those long summer months, especially during the Support and Action classes. A half dozen girls attended that class weekly, some traveling from as far as an hour away, to commiserate over the fact that they were each marked with the abduction pattern. I was constantly evaluating my role in helping these girls, trying to think of new methods to comfort, educate, and prepare them. Sometimes, the best I could do was roll up my sleeve to show my left elbow, how the skin there was free of markings in my adulthood. As if everything that had gone wrong for me was erased, scabbed over and healed.

“I know how painful it is to have your expectations for the future taken away from you,” I told my students. “I’d always wanted to be a psychologist. Or, I should say, I always believed I wanted to be a psychologist.” I paused. “I have a different path now. I get to be here, with you. I get to share what I’ve learned.”

The girls listened. They asked questions, they cried, and they grew angry and yelled at the cruelty of fate. Some were not convinced, not wholly, that the markings on their left arms meant anything at all. They entered my classroom with doubt and denial. Those who had told their families—and not all of them had—were met with skepticism. Any marking pattern that did not appear in Mapping the Future was subversive, uncertain, perhaps deceptive. That was what we had been taught.

“One day, that prediction will be official,” I promised. “Until then, we need to have faith.”

In reality, I didn’t believe in faith so much as I believed in connections, in covert operations, in my mother’s ability to quietly summon humanitarian ambassadors. Whenever an ambassador showed up, Miles and I supplied her with copies of our new addendum. The ambassador would ferry this addendum away and deposit it in a range of untraceable locations, such as in bookstores in the towns she passed through on her travels. If each addendum reached only one person, maybe that could make a difference.

During this time, I lived in a state of near-constant fear. I looked at the girls marked for abduction and waited with dread for them to pass to their adult markings. But I also felt the same fear when I imagined a wider acceptance of this prediction. Once people accepted that some girls were destined to be abducted, I worried about how those girls might be treated. Perhaps they would be cast out even earlier, as children, before they could pass into their adult markings and become women. Perhaps things would get worse for these girls before they got better.

I couldn’t say. I could only continue to work. So I showed up day after day in that classroom to stand behind a pair of glass doors that let in all the light, and all the darkness, of whatever was happening on the other side.

*   *   *

My mother had a marking on her stomach that denoted daughter. As a young girl I often studied this marking, marveling that the whole of my being had once been packed inside that tiny dot, like a miniature universe waiting to explode. Next to this marking was another that indicated an older sibling, a son. In this way my brother and I were born before our time, tied together in the body of our mother.

“Miles,” I said. We were alone in Julia’s parlor, long after the last girl had departed for the day. How difficult it was to be alone with him then, how easily I could imagine the time when he was no more and I was on my own. “Miles, when we were children, what did you see in my markings?”

My brother was on the couch, immersed in Mapping the Future. Perhaps he was envisioning how our addendum would look if it were ever to be published there. He couldn’t know that eventually it would have its place in the official guide; that revision was years away, long after his time.

“I saw what everyone sees,” he said. “The future.”

“No. I mean the markings on my left elbow.” I paused, remembering. The basement with its dirt floor. How his bedroom and mine were next to each other, how we shared a wall. How he studied my skin with a sense of awe, of reverence. “For as long as I can remember, you were fixated by that pattern. How early did you know what it meant?”

“I never knew, not for sure, not until you were taken. It didn’t seem like something that could be true.”

I wasn’t convinced. I walked over and stood in front of him, looming, feeling the power of my body. I was nearly eighteen years old. I was a woman. I had a future—I had proof of that on my very skin.

“You suspected it for a long time.”