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

than the walls. Why would anyone do that? I wondered. To purposefully make a place dreary.

“I feel strange,” I told her. My head pounded, my vision blurred, and a slick pit of nausea pooled in the back of my throat. I grappled for the plastic bin next to the bed, but I was too weak to hold it. My mother took the bin from my trembling hands and positioned it under me just before I vomited. The taste in my mouth was unfamiliar. What and when had I last eaten? I had no idea.

I didn’t remember anything.

My mother smoothed a strand of sweaty hair against my temple. I looked down. The sheets were gray. The pillows were gray. The blanket, blood red. I was wearing a hospital gown, the strings tied securely at my back.

“Where am I?” My voice was thick.

“You’re in the hospital,” my mother said. “You’re safe here.”

“I want to go home.”

“Soon. In just a few days.”

She handed me a plastic cup of water with a straw poking out of it. I sipped. The water was so cold it stung the inside of my mouth. My stomach turned.

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

My mother’s face registered worry. “Can you hold it for a little bit? They’ll be here any minute.”

“Who?”

“The police.”

I didn’t allow myself to absorb that information. I was focused on my piercing headache, the dizziness, the fabric of the hospital gown that I did not recognize and could not remember putting on. I wanted to be in my own pajamas and in my own bed.

“I really have to go.”

Resigned, my mother helped me scoot to the edge of the mattress. My hips hurt. My muscles felt sore all over. My throat was raw, as if I’d been screaming.

Together, we worked my feet into a pair of slippers.

“The bathroom’s in the hall,” my mother said, gently pulling me up to stand. “You can lean on me.”

The hallway was bright, painted dove gray and blasted with fluorescent light. It held about a dozen rooms and, at the end, a nurses’ station. The bathroom was two doors away from my room.

“I’ll wait out here,” she added. “Unless you want me to come in.”

I shook my head and limped into the bathroom, closing the door on my mother’s anxious face.

Once I was locked inside, I shambled to the toilet. When I peed, it burned. I rose wearily and flushed, then washed my hands with pink soap I worked into a violent foam. Finally, I raised my eyes to the mirror.

My face looked puffy. I touched my fingertips under my chin, just like my mother had the time my lymph nodes were swollen from strep throat. I leaned closer. My pupils were dilated, and my eyes appeared blank with an odd sheen, as if someone had scrubbed them clean. How badly I wanted to be in my own bedroom, gazing instead into the full-length mirror my father and I had installed next to the closet. This bathroom mirror was hung at an angle, the top tipping forward drunkenly to provide a full-body view.

Slowly, I untied the strings of my hospital gown and let it fall away.

My body was covered with bruises.

A kaleidoscope of contusions, from black to muddy brown to sickly yellow, anointed my upper arms, my ribs, my thighs. Acorn-sized bruises lined my shoulders, plums and grapes and currants scattered up and down my torso. A delicate bracelet of bruising along my right wrist carried the faint imprint of someone’s fingers.

Some of the bruises partially concealed my markings. This was the case on my left side, for the prediction about Miles—the pattern was obscured, altered, temporarily unreadable.

I stared at my damaged skin in the mirror for a long time. I stared until a realization struggled to the surface, kicking, to illuminate my new reality: I was no longer a changeling. No longer did I have a faint glow, that magnetic dazzling pull. I had been gone long enough for the transformation to complete itself, and now I was a regular young woman. No special allure, no heightened senses, no outrageous beauty.

I gathered my hospital gown and put it on. As I tied the strings behind my back, I caught sight of a brochure waiting on the side table, next to the extra toilet paper and a bottle of crusted-over hand lotion. Strategies for Reintegration. A photograph of a depressed-looking teenage girl appeared below the title.

My mother knocked on the door. “Are you okay?”

With shaking fingers, I added another knot to my hospital gown. I couldn’t be in the place that brochure described—it was impossible. If I could only remember what had led me here.

I’d gone to a party with Cassandra—that was certain. I remembered the bottle spinning on the floor, the boys, the closet. Rose sherry, the smell of pine, the inside of an interpreter’s storefront. A girl in lavender serving me tea. A man on the couch, his hand hot on my thigh. My brother pushing me into an alley. Two men holding me up.

After that, my memory was blank.

My mother knocked again. When I opened the door, I saw the gray space behind her with new eyes: I was in the Reintegration Wing of the hospital, where abducted changelings were sent once they were returned. I could no longer pretend otherwise.

“Come along,” my mother said, taking my arm. “We don’t have much time.”

I walked as if in a daze. “I can refuse the exam. I’ll say I don’t need it.”

We reached my tiny gray room again. I dragged myself into bed.

“You have bruises, Celeste.” My mother’s face was strained. “Injuries. Nothing that won’t heal, but you needed medical attention. They examined you when you were first brought to the hospital.”

“While I was asleep?”

She held up her hands, an apology. “They did it before I made it here. We got the call that you were returned, and we rushed right over, but they’d already gone through with it. We couldn’t prevent an exam, anyway. You were gone for