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.” I tried to smile down at him, but it came out more like a frown; I could not control my expression. I felt everything inside of me was roiling, uncontainable. “There was always something different about you, Miles, ever since we were kids. You were beyond your years, beyond your gender, beyond yourself.”
“No.” Miles clapped Mapping the Future shut and looked up at me. “I was never the one who was different. It was you.”
“I refuse—” I began, but then I stopped. His death could not be refused, my body’s predictions could not be refused, our history and our future could not be refused. I knew this. Miles had known it already for years.
How unbelievable the future was, how vast. One moment I was gathering wild strawberries and the next I was allowing my brother to read my childhood markings. I was gazing with wonder at my newly changed body and I was riding a train into the mountains. I was holding a MISSING GIRL poster and I was being led into a dark basement. I was a girl and then I was a changeling. I was a sister and then I was not.
“Celeste.” He waved a hand in front of my face. “Where’d you go?”
I blinked. Miles was still sitting on the couch, still studying me. Still alive.
“Please don’t do that again,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Abandon me. It’s like you disappeared, even though you’re standing right there.” He balanced Mapping the Future in his hands, as if testing the weight of all the future, of every last possibility in the world.
The doorbell rang. We both glanced toward the entryway.
“It must be another girl for a reading,” I said. “You should go upstairs, just in case.”
We never knew when the Office of the Future might send someone else. We had to protect ourselves and our work. That meant my brother could never answer the door. He had to hide, which meant he had to leave me, again and again.
With some reluctance, he stood and headed upstairs. Once he was gone, I went to the front door and pulled it open to stare into the face of a girl so young and frightened she reminded me of myself.
I was forced to send the girl away that night. Accepting clients after hours could raise suspicion; the neighbors would notice if girls were coming and leaving after normal business hours, especially in the dark when changelings were not meant to be out.
Fortunately, this girl was local and could easily return another time. Sometimes, girls showed up late at night after traveling for days. It was too risky for us to host them, so we made a list of sympathizers who might help. Marie’s mother was at the top of the list. She’d hosted three girls so far, giving them a safe place to stay while they attended our classes. She also remained true to her word by sending Marie our way once she was back.
Marie had arrived on her own the first time. When I entered the parlor and saw her, I could only stop and stare. She was different. She had passed to adulthood and was no longer the girl I remembered but a young woman, her future unfamiliar to me. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked if I could touch the constellation of markings at her throat.
“If you’d like,” Marie had said.
I came closer, my fingertips grazing her neck. The pattern there foretold of a temperament that would remain steady, honest, and kind.
“I don’t need these markings to know who you are,” I told her. “Even if we weren’t friends it would be clear. Even if you were a stranger.”
“But we are friends.” She gently pulled away. “And we’ll never be strangers, Celeste.”
With time, Marie began bringing Louise with her, a slight girl who’d earned a full scholarship to study history. She and Marie had met the year before, during a university visit. Louise proved herself to be trustworthy, a calming presence for the most anxious girls, so she joined in on our studies. We were Miles’s pupils, a small circle of women he could trust. We had to study in the evening, after hours, sometimes breaking our own rule by asking one or two girls to stay behind so we could read them.
On a humid August night, we all gathered in the examination room. Two girls waited there for us: one from my Support and Action class, and another who took the Body and Mind class. One marked for abduction, one not.
Miles looked at the two girls with disappointment. “This isn’t a large enough sample size.”
“We have no way of knowing whether we’re being watched,” Julia told him. “Keeping even two girls late is enough of a risk.”
My brother was holding a copy of the new addendum, which he rolled into a tight tube. “The whole point of this is to train others to read. It’s going to take forever at this rate, and we’re running out of time. My birthday is six weeks away.” He turned to me when he said this. We shared the same birthday. We operated on the same clock, our bodies ticking in the same rhythms.
“Better slow than not at all,” Julia said.
“Then we need to widen our reach and teach others,” he countered. “As many as possible.”
At the time, Julia and I were Miles’s best students. Our mother, Marie, and Louise were also making progress. Angel, meanwhile, was exploring other roles in Julia’s business. Only days after Angel had passed out of her changeling period that summer, Chloe died, alone and in the middle of the night in the hospital. In the wake of Chloe’s death, Angel’s interest in interpretation waned, and she gravitated instead to the behind-the-scenes work. She made appointments, arranged our schedule, and kept our records in order in case we were audited. Julia told Miles not to push her, not to push any of us—that we each had a role to play.
“We’re wasting time by arguing.” I gestured to the examination table, where the girls waited. “Let’s get started.”
I began by reading the markings of the girl predicted to be taken. As usual, I felt compelled to close my eyes during the reading, as if I had to cut off one sense in order to bring the others fully to life. When I did open my eyes for a moment, I marveled that Miles was there, alive and next to me, and that we were working together as my juvenile markings had predicted. It seemed as impossible as the fact that our partnership, so newly formed, was already approaching an end.
“You’re doing well,” Miles said, glancing my way. “I know this isn’t easy.”
The abduction prediction was a complicated, subtle pattern with range. When I read juvenile girls, I waited to feel or not feel that tingling sensation. I waited for the hairs on my arms to stand up, for my breath to catch in my throat, but really I was waiting for the absence of these things, because I never wanted a girl to be marked to be taken.
What I wanted, instead, was for the chart in Julia’s office to continue expanding as it had been for weeks: negative, negative, negative, over and over. In the last few months, we’d only found three additional girls marked to be taken while the negatives bloomed faster and faster. We attached new sheets to the chart every few weeks, taping it together until the data started running off the wall and onto the floor.
Meanwhile, the summer turned over into September. Cassandra surprised me by sending a letter relaying her first week at university. “I hear you’re doing important work,” she wrote near the end, her only cryptic reference to why I might have returned home. I accepted this opening and replied at once, and soon we struck up a correspondence in which I revealed to her what Miles and I were up to.
“I’m not surprised,” she wrote in another letter. “You always were made for great things, Celeste.”
It felt good to have Cassandra back, especially as I was about to lose Marie and Louise as they prepared to depart for university. At their joint farewell party, Marie’s mother gave us each a handmade bracelet—to maintain our connection, she said. My bracelet was made of thin, soft strips of braided red and brown leather. I wore it on my wrist not only in honor of my friendships but as a reminder that Marie’s mother was not quite the person I’d expected. While she was well versed in the domestic arts and could make bracelets and her own clothing and five-course meals, she also had a subversive streak. She sent her daughter off to university with a girlfriend. She looked for ways to help Julia, Miles, and me. She was so much more than I’d ever imagined.
Once my friends had left to further their educations, I remained behind with Julia and Miles. I conducted readings. I continued teaching behind the double glass doors. The days were ticking by, the sun rising and falling again, and October crept ever closer. October, the month of dropping leaves, wood smoke, decay. The month that would bring my brother’s final birthday.
Course: Body and Mind
Assignment: Fill-in-the-Blank & Short Essay Instructor: Celeste Morton
Label the diagrams below with the appropriate prediction groups as outlined in Mapping the Future. Next, select no fewer than three (3) of these Mapping the Future. For every negative prediction, consider its positive. For every positive, consider its potential complications. Be creative. Consider not just what is marked on your skin, but what alternative interpretations might be possible. Imagine what it might be like if your body was not beholden to the future. Points awarded for creativity and imaginative display.
1. ____________________________________________
2. ____________________________________________
3. ____________________________________________