Kim

by T Cooper

  I’m realizing this is also the first time I’ve really thought about choosing my Mono. Probably because now there’s a tangible choice, two different V’s to choose between. I’m so sick of thinking and obsessing and being weighed down by my feelings, and yet I can’t seem to stop thinking, obsessing, and plotting the if-thens ahead of me. Life just makes me do that. Which I guess is the point. But sometimes I wish I were a single-celled organism or something, with nothing to do or consider or decide or learn. A basic fungus, hanging out among all other fungi, every one of our cells exactly the same. In the one I am done.

  Drew? That multicellular, multilayered V? I suppose I grew to love being her. Didn’t want to change from her, now that I’m remembering. But I can sort of maybe see myself picking Oryon as my Mono. Wouldn’t be the worst. Hey, perhaps when we’re all grown up and graduated, I’ll declare Oryon, and then go find Audrey—wherever she attends college, or on some crazy mission in South America that her family makes her do—so we can live happily ever after together. If she once had love for me, for Oryon, then maybe there could be love again.

  If I really think about it, this love I have for Aud is really just an extension of the love I first felt for her as Drew. And it’s probably the same for her too, whether or not she’s conscious of it. She’s got to sense it—like, a soul-connection or something. I mean, think about the greatest love stories of all time, when two people feel like they’ve known each other in previous lives. That’s exactly what it feels like with me and Audrey. Only of course with me there actually are different lives at play. Even though Audrey doesn’t recognize it.

  But you know what? One day I’m going tell her, and everything will suddenly snap into place and make perfect sense to both of us. Right?

  Meanwhile, tick-tock, tick-tock, I just keep checking the time on my phone, as every last second slips away on this death march toward Change 3. T minus 144 hours to execution day. No reprieve is coming for me from the governor, that I know for sure. May as well eat this overstuffed enchilada. The last one Oryon will ever enjoy. Extra guacamole, please!

  What else? I have all my school supplies. They’re just sitting there on my desk, taunting me by looking far more optimistic (even in all-business black) than I am about the start of the school year.

  Scratch scratch at the door. It’s Snoopy. Who, in truth, has been a little standoffish toward me since I got home from RRR. It’s almost as though he doesn’t remember who I am. Or more likely, as if he knows exactly who I am and how my stupidity is what almost got him his own seat on death row.

  He’s padding over to my bed, sniffing my comforter, eyeing me warily. I make the quintessential open-face, eagerly pat the bed, but Snoop doesn’t want to jump up. Instead, he mopes back over to an open cardboard box, sticks his head in and noses around, then wanders back out my bedroom door.

  Thank G for the little chip between his shoulder blades. Like the one in the base of my neck, come to think of it. Only his was a lifeline that brought my parents back from Nana’s when the pound called and said they had Snoopy in custody, and that it’s lucky he was microchipped, because as a pit bull, he wouldn’t last more than forty-eight hours before being put down. “As sweet as he is,” the animal-control officer had told Mom and Dad, “we just can’t keep them around, for obvious reasons.”

  Them. For obvious reasons. A year as Oryon sure tuned me in more than ever to the ways bigotry blares from the spaces in between, the way crabgrass busts through the asphalt. I know now how narrow the margin of error is for anyone (or any canine) of difference. How once people decide something—pit bulls = bad—no amount of actual fact seems to scrub that prejudice away. Changers are right about one thing: the power of an idea is stronger than just about anything. The power of an idea can save a nation. Or kill a dog.

  When I look at Snoopy now, I am filled with guilt and regret that I’m the reason he was within a few hours of being put down. My carelessness, my selfishness. The series of BS choices that nearly added up to total catastrophe. Sometimes, okay, often I get stuck in this obsessive mental loop. If this, then that. If not this, then not that. With Snoopy. With Chase. With Audrey.

  Like, what if Drew had been put in a different homeroom than Audrey freshmen year? We might never have met. At least not like that. She never would’ve pointed me to the “right” (girls’) bathroom in the hallway, never would’ve joked with me about Chloe’s wretchedness, nor would I ever have ironically tried out for cheerleading, which is where we got so close. Us against the world.

  And what if Mom and Dad hadn’t changed the contact number for Snoopy’s microchip when we left New York for Tennessee, and the shelter couldn’t get in touch with my parents to let them know he had been picked up by the side of the highway, sans leash or collar? What if Mom got a flat tire, or was in an accident on the way home from Florida, and she didn’t make it back by the deadline the shelter gave before Snoopy was going to be “terminated”?

  And what if they never chipped him in the first place? I mean, the call about Snoopy was the first thing that tipped Mom and Dad off that something was amiss back home. A few unanswered calls to your teenager? That’s expected, no need for panic at the disco. But when the shelter called, and they heard that Snoopy was found wandering free on the streets, they knew I never would’ve let that happen unless something was seriously wrong. I guess in a way, Snoopy being picked up by animal control was what helped the Council figure out that three of us Changers had gone missing. And . . .

  Chase.

  The ginormous elephant in the Chronicle I’m trying not to think about.

  Chase.

  Who is dead.

  Dead because of me.

  Even though nobody will put it that way. Nobody will come clean about the truth of what happened that day we got sprung from that basement. I couldn’t get a straight answer out of anybody during RRR. Not Tracy, not my parents, not a single Changers counselor. Turner the Lives Coach made it very clear that Elyse and I should “bask in gratitude” that we’d been saved, thanks to Chase’s brave actions, which was his “journey,” and not for us to mourn, but to “accept and celebrate.”

  I knew Chase. Chase was not about his “journey.” He was about fighting the fight. He was at the head of the parade, bearing the banner, representing for all of us other cowards too chicken to be honest. He wasn’t about dying either. He would have said that crap was for the movies.

  When I reflect on that time, on everything that happened, the rage fills me to my throat. Followed quickly by a sense of helplessness, a hobbling. So I shut it down. Put all the messiness in its respective boxes. Compartmentalize the eff out of my trauma. If I don’t, I can’t function. As evidenced by the first three weeks after the Tribulations when I lay in bed at Changers Central in a catatonic stupor, my mom and dad by my side, Elyse on the other side of the curtain, doing her own version of the same. Thank J for Battlestar Galactica. (Dad bought me the entire series on DVD, and I watched episodes back-to-back-to-back, breaking only for the bathroom and uncontrollable crying jags.)

  The Council has advised that Elyse and I, the survivors, focus solely on our rehabilitation, our emotional recovery, and not fret about what happened, or how they will find and punish (or not) the perpetrators. Shut up and be happy, basically. We survived, we’re conscious and up walking about, even if not everyone else got off so lucky. Look at what happened to poor Alex. Sure, the kidnappers didn’t technically put him in that coma. But whatever happened amidst the fracas of the rescue certainly did. Yeah, the kid’ll get another body come his Change 2, Day 1, but it worries me what’s happening inside his brain, to his essential self inside the Alex shell, while he lies there in that bed at Changers Central, hooked up to beeping machines while his folks sit helplessly stroking his hand.

  “Survivor’s remorse,” they called it at RRR. Told me I should abandon self-lacerating thought patterns because everything “is what it is, and is what it should be,” and no amount of my hating life, or hatin
g that I have lives to hate, is going to make reality different.

  But.

  They didn’t see Alex. He was so scared. So small. He reminded me of Ethan. I was small then. I was scared. I was nothing like Chase.

  Know-it-all Chase, always right about everything, always needing the last word.

  Ah, yes. There’s the irony. Which he would have loved, of course.

  No matter who I am, it’ll always remain imprinted on my brain. The first time I saw him at ReRunz. His smile curled at the corners. His confidence, unearned, but there nonetheless. I fell for him in that moment, before I knew he was a Changer, before I knew I was whatever I was. It was pure instinct, unfiltered, and that attraction deepened to love, and with love, respect; and before I knew it, Chase was my one true friend, the one who knew all the ugly about me and chose to love me anyway.

  The end will also always remain imprinted. That same wry smile, maybe a little more world-weary, and on a different face, sure, but somehow essentially the same. And the “Fancy meeting you here!” slurred through bloodied, swollen lips, his head in my lap as his heart sludged up, slowing to a stop. I put my ear to his chest, hearing only three weak beats, sounding so far away. And then. He wasn’t there.

  I think I called his name.

  I must have called his name.

  Seconds later there was loud banging in the hallway, a vague smell of electrical smoke. I can’t recall anything after that. Nor can Elyse. We’ve tried piecing it together, but neither of us can recollect much after Chase was thrown into the basement with us, bound and hooded. I try to concentrate. I meditate so hard, scanning the corners of my mind like some old, decommissioned hard drive. But all I can ever come up with is the door opening, the light searing into our pupils, noises, shouting, acrid, burning fog . . . and then waking up in a hospital gown at Changers Central, my alarmed parents pacing bedside, Turner the Lives Coach bending close to my eyes, the wooden prayer beads around his neck plunking on my chest like dropped marbles.

  “Chase?”

  Mom said it was the first word out of my mouth.

  “He’s awake!” she screeched, and immediately started weeping, draping herself over me like an emergency blanket as Dad jumped off a cot in the corner and raced around the other side of the bed.

  “Thank God,” Dad whispered into my neck. I think he was crying.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” I mumbled. I recall sounding so groggy to myself, my voice deeper than I remembered it sounding in my head before the Tribulations.

  “Well, now I might need to reconsider,” he said, laugh-crying. “Smart-ass.”

  “We were so worried,” Mom managed through her tears.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. My head was so sore. It was then I noticed the searing sensation where the IV stuck out of my arm.

  “Shhh, don’t even say that,” Mom said.

  “You guys aren’t angry?”

  “Angry? Why would we be angry?”

  But before I could formulate an answer, I nodded off again, too exhausted to press them about Chase, or Alex, or Elyse, or Snoopy’s well-being, or where the hell I was. Nothing. Because immediately after I learned that Mom and Dad weren’t upset with me, I was out cold again, for God knows how long.

  Oryon

  Change 2–Day 362

  T-minus three days and counting.

  Nothing to report beyond Mom remaining no farther than twenty feet from me at any moment, even checking on me when I’m in the bathroom for more than three whole minutes.

  “You’re constipating me, Ma!”

  “It’s only because I love you, Oryon.”

  Dad’s been gone at Changers Central all day, every day, and into the nights, heading up an anti-Abiders task force. Even though the Abiders have been fairly quiet—well, at least they were quiet up until the Tribulations—Dad’s terrified we’re in the early stages of a concerted surge of Abiders’ anti-Changers activities. But I think his obsession is solely because of what happened to me. You never really care about distant messiness until it floods your lawn like a ruptured sewer line. Either way, Dad is not standing for it, cannot just “move on,” and will not forget for even one minute of one single day that this consortium of hatred and intolerance is roiling somewhere out there, operating in the shadows of society, and that no matter how much preparation or organizing we Changers do, there is no way to stop the next action or transgression on their part.

  Despite all the talking and processing and counseling at the RRR, Dad just can’t be happy that I made it, that I’m alive and well in his house, staring at him over our cereal bowls every morning. So he leaves the house early, funneling all of his rage and indignation about the Tribulations into “fighting for change, instead of sitting around waiting for it to happen.” This morning I told him his ranting was starting to sound a little like Benedict and the rest of the RaChas, to which he replied that I didn’t know “what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks” I was talking about, then grabbed the car keys and headed out the door.

  I guess it’s hard for him to accept the facts of what we’re up against. It’s like he refuses to acknowledge it as a reality, as opposed to a theory—as though ignoring the facts might actually make them not so. I think Dad thought it would be different by now, that there would be more acceptance in the world, and that at the very least, more progress would have been made in the years since he was going through his Cycle of V’s. And yet here I am, living proof it hasn’t. Maybe this whole Changers mission is a waste of time. Maybe Statics are getting worse on the whole, not better.

  “Your father doesn’t know what to do with his frustration,” Mom says kindly as soon as we hear Dad’s car pull out of the garage.

  “He doesn’t know what to do with the truth,” I snap back.

  “No, I suppose he doesn’t,” she concedes. “But not many people do.”

  Last week, Dad decided to take leave from work and assume a part-time position with the Council. He’s not allowed to actually join the Council, as Changers by-laws state that nobody with a child who’s still completing his/her Cycle is eligible to run. So many rules and procedures, I can’t keep track. I’m even starting to forget the overarching mission of our existence. Mostly I just try to get through each day, like a simple bacteria just going through the motions until my brief time on this planet is up.

  I kind of wish Mom would get busy with something too. I see her poking her head into my room in the night when I’m supposed to be sleeping. What does she think? Those Abider nut jobs are going to hunt me down, bust into our house, get past Snoopy, Dad’s Taser (newly purchased), and scoop me up from my bedroom in the middle of the night?

  Yes. That’s exactly what she thinks.

  I get it. But the Council assures us that whomever took me, Elyse, and Alex are so long gone by now, nobody’s going to hear from them again. At least not in our neck of the Changer woods.

  * * *

  “All good in there?” Mom asks through the door for the forty-seventh time today.

  “Yep,” I murmur, trying not to sound as annoyed as I am.

  “You know I hate the Yep,” she chides weakly, her heart still not in it.

  At least she’s trying. Mom wants life to normalize. Like that’s even a thing.

  Oryon

  Change 2–Day 365

  So here I am, standing in my bathroom in boxers, shirt off, staring at Oryon in the mirror. Flexing my biceps, leaning in and inspecting the hairs on my chin. It’ll all be gone tomorrow. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll change into some 1960s-looking dude with a full beard and mutton chops. Or maybe I’ll change into a hipster girl with a bleached pixie cut and a walk like a giraffe. Maybe I’ll change into the hottest dude in class.

  Part of me still wishes I could simply stay Oryon. Oryon was cool enough. And cool enough is way better than gambling on what comes next. You know how people will stay with a boyfriend or girlfriend who’s fine and all, but in the back of their heads they harbor lingering doubts, thinki
ng maybe they could do better? (Memo to humanity: most of us can’t.) Like that hippie song goes, “Love the one you’re with.” Not the worst advice. But I can’t love Oryon enough to make him stay, or love myself enough not to care if he leaves. I’m an identity way station, and the next vessel is about to pull in.

  On the eve of Oryon’s dematerialization, I’m appreciating things about him as though I’m not him, but rather something else entirely, a creature stuck on the inside of the mirror looking out at him. His tightly curled hair, the distance between his eyebrows and hairline. His intense eyes, the warm color and smoothness of his skin. His famous lady-killing smile, which got him so many places. The way he walks through a room, the hint of rasp in his voice. I’m kind of loving it all right now, digging it so much more than I ever did because I know it’ll be gone tomorrow. You don’t miss water till the well runs dry. Or in this case, you don’t miss your corporeal form until it’s reassembled in some cosmic mixing bowl into something else entirely.

  I guess it makes me think about appreciating stuff (well, people) more while you still can. Take Nana. She’s still with us, but barely. I’m really happy Mom and Dad brought her back from Florida so she’s closer, but because she’s kind of out of it most of the time, it makes me feel horrible that I didn’t spend more time with her when she was lucid. She knows so much, has been through so much. I took her for granted. Just like I did with somebody else . . .

  God, I miss him. A part of me refuses to accept he’s really gone. So what if I’m stuck in the denial stage of grief? Not that those stages seem like anything more than BS made up to sell self-help books. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression. I got them all. No start or finish. No checked-off box. Life’s untidy that way. And I don’t care if I ever get to the “final” Acceptance stage of grieving him. What am I accepting anyway?