Body of Stars by Laura Walter (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📕

his suit as though nothing were wrong. I stood behind him to help brush the lint from the back of his jacket. This suit will have to last him, I thought when I touched the fabric. That was a surprise, to have words like my mother’s arriving unbidden in my head.

I wore my best dress: dark blue, tea-length, with a full skirt that flared out from my hips. Miles put on pressed khakis and a collared shirt. I watched him slick his hair down in the bathroom with a tub of product I didn’t recognize. I wanted to tease him for trying to look nice, but at the last second I lost my voice. That was how it was for me back then. One moment I’d be focused on something insignificant, like Cassandra’s party or Miles’s tentative pride in his appearance, and the next I was jarred by all that was wrong. Our father’s demotion. Deirdre lying broken in bed. My brother’s secrets and his impending sense of disaster.

My father knotted and reknotted his tie while waiting for my mother to finish getting ready. She wore an older dress, a red one that was too tight around the waist, but I told her she looked nice. My father didn’t offer any compliments. He just stood jangling his keys, waiting to leave.

We walked to the party as a family, crossing onto Cassandra’s property in the same order our names appeared on the invitation. Neil, Paulette, Miles, Celeste. An attendant directed us to follow a trail of rose petals into the backyard, where a pink-and-white-striped tent sheltered stations for fruit, appetizers, desserts, champagne, a butterscotch fountain, and the traditional rose sherry. Pink balloons bunched like grapes in the trees.

“This is obscene,” my father said.

“Look,” my mother murmured. “There’s Cassandra.”

My friend appeared like a mirage in a crisp white dress laced through with pink ribbons. Her eyes had a certain shine I attributed to the flute of rose sherry in her hand. Behind her, a group of boys and men gathered like a cloud.

When it came to changelings, men could not control themselves. That was what we were told. And yet not all men were monsters. My father, for example, would never hurt a changeling girl. Miles wouldn’t, either. I believed this to my core. Sometimes I studied men on the street and thought, would he? What about him? Who in this crowd would take advantage of a darkened sidewalk, the broken streetlamp, the girl out alone after dark?

Most days, I couldn’t imagine any man capable of such crimes. Other times, I viewed every man as a threat. Just as girls held within their bodies a great capacity for the future, men, I suspected, carried the curled beginnings of violence. In the right circumstances, maybe anyone could strike.

Cassandra was too busy greeting other guests to pay much attention to me. I sat at a party table sprinkled with pink flower petals. My mother got herself a glass of rose sherry and, as an afterthought, brought me one, too.

“It’s almost time for you, anyway,” she said.

I accepted the tulip-shaped glass and took a sip of the pink liquid. As I swallowed, I had to struggle not to make a face. Rose sherry did not taste as pretty and pale as it appeared—instead, it was a sharply sweet drink with a bite.

I turned to see my father tucked in the far corner of the yard with a few other neighborhood dads. Their eyes followed Cassandra wherever she went. Her own father was among them. After the divorce, he’d moved to the next town over with his new wife. Cassandra didn’t see much of him, especially not after her first stepsister was born, so it mattered that he’d shown up for the party. Later, I knew, he’d take Cassandra upstairs alone to inspect her markings. This father-daughter ritual was an honored tradition, but there at the party, it made me sick.

“Everyone wants to devour her,” I said to my mother. “It’s disgusting.”

My mother sipped her rose sherry. She was stoic at that party, so calm and in control. I’d later realize it was an act. She didn’t want to let on how afraid she was for me, how afraid all mothers were for their daughters.

“These parties are practice,” she said. “They show us how to maintain decorum even and especially in the face of what courses beneath the surface.”

As she talked, we watched a group of boys approach Cassandra. One boy reached for a ribbon on her dress while another touched her hair, an act that seemed to make him shiver.

Another boy backed out of the circle and stood to the side. I squinted and saw it was Anthony from my homeroom. I’d noticed him sitting in the shade earlier, glaring at the ground as if he could will the party to disappear. As I watched his strained face, I slowly grasped the source of his discomfort. He wasn’t interested in Cassandra, just as he wouldn’t be in any changeling girl, or at least not in the desperate sexual way the other boys were. Like me, he surely felt a pull toward Cassandra, wanted to envelop her in his arms, press his skin into hers. And yet boys of his age had an extra desperation in their desires, a telltale gleam. No matter how hard boys like Anthony tried, the lustful pull toward these girls could not be faked for long.

I felt an overwhelming sadness for him, a kind of grief. While boys like Anthony could go on to share their lives with male partners if they wished, they could never marry or receive partner benefits or full support from the government. It was perhaps even more difficult for girls—as it would be for Marie, I was starting to realize. The official stance in Mapping the Future asserted that her predictions of love and romance pertained to men, not women. It didn’t matter that the markings on her lower back indicated she’d one day live with