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

your markings?” he asked. “I learned something new in class I’d like to practice.”

He loomed in the doorway, waiting. He had grown so much in the past year that sometimes I didn’t recognize him.

“All right,” I said. “But make it quick.”

I sat still as Miles took my upper arm in his hands. This I was used to. When it came to my brother, I was his subject, his practice ground, his key to the language of interpretation. This was our oldest and most familiar way of interacting with each other.

While he worked, I stared at the walls my father had recently helped me paint. The hardware store sold gallons of returned premixed paint at a discount, which was how I ended up with a creamy blue color so pale it was nearly white. We spackled over the nail holes, sanded and cleaned the walls, and finally painted. After the second coat dried, I hung my posters: an enlarged diagram from Mapping the Future that predicted a life filled with joy, a panoramic landscape of mountains, and a painting of a woman reclining among flowers and jewels. As a finishing touch, I applied a set of tiny sharp stars that glowed in the dark, pasting them on the ceiling above the bed in no particular constellation. I liked to look at them at night and know they were only stars and nothing more.

When Miles finished with my right arm, he came around to my left side.

“If you put the effort in,” he said, in an offhanded way, “I think you could be really good at interpretation.”

I sighed. This was a mild but long-standing point of contention between us: Miles wanted me to study interpretation with him, and I had no interest in doing so.

“It’s not for me. You know that,” I said. “Besides, Julia’s not like other interpreters. You should have heard what she was saying about a tree, and how our actions can change the future.”

“Nothing we do can outright change what has been fated. Influence uncertain outcomes a bit, maybe. Give them a different flavor. That’s all she means.”

“It’s still an odd way to think. I like her, I do, but what she said seems off.” I watched as Miles consulted the index in Mapping the Future. “What about you—do you trust her?”

He didn’t look up. “With my life.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“Are you almost done?” I asked instead. “I need to finish my homework.”

“Soon.” He scrutinized my left elbow. “Besides, your markings have always indicated that you’re a strong student.”

“Yes, but not if I stop studying.” As I spoke, I heard an echo of what Julia had said about the tree, about incremental change. I shook my arm away.

Miles looked up. “You should appreciate what you have. I’d give anything to be marked like a girl.”

His words reminded me of how I used to sit on my father’s lap and locate the mole on his neck so I could marvel at its meaninglessness. I drove myself half delirious trying to grasp that it was simply a mole, nothing more, and that in fact male markings were not arranged in patterns as they were on women’s bodies. They were scattershot, random. Unreadable.

“Deirdre’s going back to school tomorrow, you know,” he added. His voice took on a practiced, casual tone—so this was his real reason for coming into my room. Once again, he had concealed his motivations. “Since you two have classes in the same part of the building, I thought you might keep an eye on her this week.”

“I barely know her.” Deirdre was a third-year, a year above me. We did not socialize.

“Just look out for her,” Miles said. “Please. My schedule doesn’t align with hers, but you’ll at least have a chance of seeing her.”

He looked so serious, like he had aged many years that afternoon. Maybe he had a crush on Deirdre. Maybe, I thought, all of this was no more than teenage attraction.

“All right. But she’ll be fine.”

“Thanks, Celeste. I owe you.”

He reached into his sweatshirt pocket and pulled out a handful of wild strawberries, which he shook loose on my desk.

“We forgot to pick them this summer, but there’s still some left.” He shrugged. “I thought you’d like them.”

My brother could do that—disarm me in an instant by conjuring our shared past. When we were children, he and I picked the wild strawberries that grew along the side of our house. Once, we set up a strawberry stand in the front yard, where we divvied the berries into tiny paper cups marked fifty cents each. We didn’t make a single sale. At the end of the day, we ate as many of the remaining berries as we could and then smashed the rest onto our arms. Like we were driven to destroy what we couldn’t consume.

Once Miles left my room, I popped the strawberries one by one into my mouth. In each berry I felt the slip of dozens of tiny seeds skimming the surface of the pink flesh, just waiting for the chance to come to life.

Mapping the Future: An Interpretive Guide to Women and Girls

Category—Career

Location—Hip, right

Cluster A: Specifies individuals involved in the subject’s future career. A1 identifies an older sibling, while the position and size of A2 denotes either a parental figure or mentor.

Cluster B: The downward slant in this classic four-marking career cluster indicates a profession involving intricate work.

Marking 0: As an outlier, this marking suggests the subject will work alone. [See Appendix C: Contradictions.]

3

When my brother made me a promise, he kept it, and I did the same for him. That was our history, and I believed it was our future, too. But fulfilling my promise to look out for Deirdre proved difficult. Deirdre was elusive, unpredictable, a phantom girl slipping from my grasp. I searched for her in the halls after homeroom and again after the first two classes that next morning, but she never appeared. Once I swore I