Kim

by T Cooper

  “Were you scared?”

  Of course, moron.

  “What did you do to pass the time?”

  Oh, you know, played Connect Four and Apples to Apples.

  “Where did you go to the bathroom?”

  There was a heated, gold-plated toilet behind a privacy screen in the corner of the basement . . . IN A GODDAMN BUCKET, WHERE DO YOU THINK??

  “Did you ever think about telling them you weren’t a Changer so they would let you go?”

  They knew. Somehow they knew.

  “What did it feel like thinking you were going to die?”

  . . .

  “Okay, okay,” I heard Tracy breaking in at the podium after this last one, interrupting the Q&A period, and also my zone-out. Alex-now-Theo looked like he was about to burst into tears at this point. Even Destiny seemed rattled. “I think that’s about all the time we have for Q&A,” Tracy said into the mic. “Why don’t we give these brave heroes a nice round of applause, and then y’all can move on to the breakout sessions.”

  There was an awkward silence as that final question hung in the air before people gradually started to take Tracy’s suggestion by tentatively starting to clap for the three of us. Tracy took the other mic from Destiny, shut it off, crossed directly to me, and whispered, “You okay?”

  “No,” I heard myself speaking the truth. “This is not okay at all. It’s actually quite effed up when you think about it.”

  Dad came up then, put an arm half around me, and tried to pull me into a hug. Like he was performing the gesture for the sake of the audience. “Proud of you,” he said stiffly. “It’s difficult but important work you’re doing.”

  I didn’t know how to deal with him. Mom came up then too, while people were talking to Destiny and Theo on the side, asking private questions. I stood there looking at them, looking at Mom, Dad, Tracy, and just thought to myself, What is wrong with me?

  “Are you okay, petunia?” Mom asked, sensing trouble.

  “I just want to leave,” I said.

  “No,” Dad muttered tight through his teeth, clearly hoping only I could hear. “You need to stay right here, to make yourself available for others who might need you in this moment.”

  “What about what I need in this moment?” I screamed, loud enough so that the single mic that was still live broadcast my outburst to every lingering Changer in the room. They all whipped around and eyeballed me. Destiny and Theo too, and their Touchstones. Even Turner, who was way, way in the back of the auditorium, chatting up some new Y-1 parents with that phony, placid expression he’s always working. Clearly, I had projected to the back of the house. Mr. Wood would have been proud.

  “Shut up,” Dad hissed in my ear, grabbing my arm and pulling me toward the backstage curtains.

  “William,” Mom stepped between us, “what the hell are you doing?”

  He let go of my arm, and I beelined backstage, Tracy, Mom, and Dad in hot pursuit. I could hear Destiny trying to excuse herself from an audience member who wanted to meet her.

  “I need to be alone,” I said, pushing through the curtains into the muffled quiet of the side stage.

  For a second it was just me, but then Dad poked through, followed by Mom, whom I could hear telling Tracy and Destiny (I’m assuming), “It’s fine, let us handle this.”

  Then it was the three of us, the happy nuclear family in the quiet room, them studying me for a clue as to what my damage was. As if it weren’t obvious.

  Mom hugged me. “I know that had to be excruciating, honey.” My tears started. “Maybe this is just all too soon.”

  “Too soon?” Dad bellowed, almost mocking what Mom was saying. Mocking my feelings. Mocking me.

  “Later, Will,” Mom shushed him fiercely.

  “No. This is happening now. We’re here today, she has something to offer others that might actually help them, might actually help all of us, mind you, and she’s acting like a whiny baby. It’s embarrassing.”

  I could feel Mom starting to shake as she held me. So I started actually holding onto her. But after a few seconds of this, she let go, and slowly pivoted toward Dad, keeping her distance from him like she was trying not to launch over and wrap her hands around his neck. I don’t think I’d ever seen her so angry at him. So angry at anybody.

  “You have lost your damn mind,” she said.

  Dad just shrugged, like he wasn’t getting it.

  “Don’t you pull that nonsense with me,” Mom went on. “You know exactly what you’re doing, and I’m not going to stand here and watch you do it.”

  “Individual feelings are not more important than the collective mission,” he said calmly. “This is a battle, and there will be casualties. She’s a big girl.”

  Mom inhaled deeply. Exhaled slowly. Her jaw set. Inhaled/exhaled again, and then: “Perhaps, but abandoning your actual family for the larger Changer one—”

  “Honey,” he interrupted, “there is only one—”

  “Let. Me. Finish,” Mom shut him down.

  He shifted his gaze from one set of curtains to the other, then looked directly at Mom. But she didn’t continue. “What?” he asked curtly after a few seconds.

  “Be careful what you choose,” Mom said, “because you’re in danger of losing what matters the most.”

  Needless to say, it was a silent ride home.

  * * *

  It’s three hours after we got back from the mixer. I’ve been holed up in my room, binge-watching old Twilight Zone episodes, which always make me feel better. Mom and Dad haven’t spoken since we were backstage. Over dinner they would talk to me, but not to each another. It was freaking strange. Twilight Zone-y, in fact.

  Like Chase. His absence. The negative space of Chase. How different things would be if he were still around. How different that mixer would’ve been. How different I would be.

  Chase saved me. More than once. And now I’m supposed to help (and save?) others. But what about people who don’t need saving? Or, more to the point, who don’t deserve saving? Maybe there are just a few individuals out there in the world who warrant rescue, and the rest should be left on their own, to their own devices. Women and children first. The lifeboats can’t float everybody. Choices have to be made. Who’s putting—for instance—Jason in the raft? Not me. I’m not even sure I’d put Chloe in.

  I guess that makes me an a-hole.

  The Changers Bible tells me: Those most resistant to change are the very individuals who most need to change. Those who fight hardest to win have the most to gain by losing. (Don’t see that one on many T-shirts.)

  I Skyped briefly with Destiny when she got home. She wanted to check in, see how I was doing after my anxiety meltdown at the mixer. She listened, completely understood why I had to get out of Dodge. But she also described how this feeling had come over her earlier when she was onstage. This thing she couldn’t quite name. It was a complete transfer of focus off herself and onto the others in the room who were looking up at her. And she said all her cynicism and skepticism and annoyance at having to be there essentially evaporated. How the minute she started sharing, she was overcome with this enormous urge to help. Even if it was just one person in that room. Could have been the vaping, maybe.

  I don’t know. I suck, I guess. Clearly I had no such spiritual epiphany. #Changerfail. More like #Changerfailing, because I still don’t care. Not really. Dad was right to be disappointed in me. It’s just, I don’t know how I’m supposed to save anybody else when it’s beyond evident I can’t even save myself.

  Change 3–Day 73

  “What a lovely little lady you are,” Nana says to me as I roll her into the living room and set the brake on the gray rubber wheel of her chair. From her tone, I’m 98 percent certain she doesn’t know exactly who I am.

  “That’s Kim, Ma!” Dad yells in from behind us, where he’s schlepping Nana’s overstuffed suitcases, a hat box clamped under one arm, a bronze and glass antique lamp under the other. “Ethan, Drew, Oryon? Remember?” />
  “I know who she is!” Nana scolds him. “I may be an old woman but I’m not brain dead.”

  “Just reminding you,” Dad says, wounded, almost like a teenager, as he shoots me a look like, She probably doesn’t actually know, but just roll with it, as he disappears into the garage to store Nana’s belongings. Ever since her accident in the shower, Dad’s wanted to move Nana in with us, and now, silver-lining alert, thanks to us having to relocate to a new house after the Tribulations, we finally have the space. I for one am glad. Someone else for my folks to focus their concern and anxiety on (especially during the holidays, which is the super-plus-ultra of anxiety for pretty much every family I know). Plus, I just feel better when Nana’s around.

  “Kimberly, you sit down here and tell me what you’ve been up to,” Nana says, her tone kind again as she pats the couch cushion beside her wheelchair. “Such a beauty. You remind me of someone I used to know.”

  “I’m . . .” I start, taking a seat.

  “What?” she yells.

  I raise my voice a notch, trying not to sound condescending: “I said, school is on a break, so I haven’t really been doing much.”

  “Everybody’s always up to something,” Nana replies with a wink. “You’ve lived what? Three, three and a half lives at this point? That’s not nothing.” Maybe she remembers more than we think. “Tell me about your friends.”

  “Well, there’s Destiny, but I’m not in school with her, so I don’t see her as much as I want to. She’s probably my best friend.”

  “Destiny. That’s a pretty name. Fraught, but pretty.”

  “Yeah, you should see the face and body that goes with the name.” I can scarcely contain the jealousy in my tone. “She’s a Changer. And she’s way living it up with this V. Embracing every gift the gods gave her.”

  “Not the worst notion.”

  “Yeah. But she’s staying nice. The one V where she could really get away with being a grade-A jerk, and she’s staying grounded. It’s all super unnatural. And annoying. But I love her for it.”

  “Destiny sounds like a keeper,” Nana says. “What about friends at school?”

  “Well, there is this one guy, Kris.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  I snort, shake my head vigorously. “Ah. No.”

  “Pretty girl like you . . .”

  “That’s just it. Kris thinks he might want to be a girl.”

  “So he’s one of us?” Nana leans in. “Tell me the name again.”

  “Kris. Kris Arnold. And not exactly.”

  Nana furrows her brow. “Either he is or he isn’t.”

  “He’s like, you know, exploring the limits of what it means to be a boy, what it means to be a girl. You know, sometimes he’s comfortable with people treating him like a guy, whatever that means, but some days it makes him feel really wrong when people call him he, and he prefers she and it gets a little muddy and all, so I guess—”

  “Oh, so he’s a transgender,” Nana interrupts my rambling.

  And . . . I about fall off the couch.

  “I listen to NPR,” she says, as Mom rolls up with a cup of Taster’s Choice, Nana’s favorite instant coffee.

  “It’s transgender, Nana. Not a transgender,” Mom clarifies gently. “Will is setting up your room, and as soon as he gets out of there, I’ll make your bed so you can get some rest. I know it’s probably been a disorienting day all around.”

  Nana swallows a frown at the word disorienting. “I’m fine,” she insists, shooing Mom with a veiny hand. “I don’t know why everybody is making such a fuss over me. Now, where were we . . . ?”

  “Kim.”

  “Kim! Of course. Noble. Brave. A leader,” she says, smiling and squinting her eyes at me as if I were the most spectacular person in the world. “The other day they were playing a story on the radio about this little girl who was starting at her school as a boy. Such a thing to hear, these parents doing that. Confused the heck out of everyone, and yet it made sense to the child. Which is all that matters in the end, don’t you think?”

  I nod.

  “So much fuss about the bathrooms,” Nana says, shrugging. “Still. Different times. Better, I think.”

  I want to agree. But I don’t.

  “What about the other one?” she asks.

  “The other what?”

  “The girl? From last year?”

  “Oh. Audrey?” I say, shocked that Nana remembers. “Yeah. She’s . . . different this year.”

  “She is? Or you are?” She begins coughing, quiet and dry at first, but the hacking grows deeper. “Can you pass me my coffee please, cutie pie?”

  I do as asked, and Nana takes it, her hand clattering the cup against its saucer loudly, as I’m thinking to myself, It’s surely Audrey who’s different. Or maybe she’s been that way all along, and I never noticed before. No, can’t be . . .

  Nana takes a sip of her coffee, and I watch as a tiny brown drip at the corner of her mouth slides off the side of her wrinkly chin. Something about it makes me want to cry.

  Outside, dark clouds skim across a light gray sky. The trees have lost most of their leaves, making them appear skinny, malnourished, half-alive, half-dead. I know there’s always life in the core, biding its time even when they’re bare and frozen, but looking at them now, all I can sense is loss.

  I try to distract myself, to stop from tipping into an unsolicited depression. Kites. Airplanes. Birds. Not working. Uh, Mazda, Toyota, Kia. Shovel, ladder, gutter. Asphalt roof shingles. That’s a little better. Oh yay, a fat squirrel is fretting over a nut, manically digging in the dirt where the sidewalk ends. Why are they always so frantic and twitchy? What is their massive hurry anyway? So busy all the damn time. You’re a squirrel, you aren’t running a Fortune 500 company. You aren’t even running a taco truck.

  “What about that Chase boy?” Nana asks out of nowhere.

  My heart bottoms out. My eyes well up all over again. Great. “I thought, I guess I thought you knew,” I stutter. “He’s, he’s—gone.”

  “Oh, honey, I wouldn’t count on it,” Nana says, smiling at me knowingly, but then her coughing cranks up again, even more intensely than before. She hands the cup back, which I take, but she drops the saucer before I can completely grab hold of it, and it bounces off the couch, shattering on the wood floor.

  “I’m—” cough-cough “—sorry,” she warbles.

  “No, I’m sorry,” I say, kneeling to pick up the ceramic shards. “I should have caught it.”

  Mom rushes in from fixing up Nana’s room. “What happened? Are you two okay?”

  “I just dropped the saucer,” I say, and look up at Nana, who has suddenly fallen silent, her eyes flat, reeled back into one of her spells that seem to last longer and longer these days.

  “That’s okay,” Mom says calmly.

  “Nana?” I ask, but there’s no answer.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Mom soothes, gently rubbing Nana’s shoulder. “It’s been a big day. We’re going to get Nana to bed. Don’t worry about that, I’ll clean it up later.”

  Mom unlocks the brake and nimbly backs Nana up. As she wheels her toward the back bedroom, I think about how Mom handles things like she’s pretty much the pro of every situation. I can’t imagine ever having my shit together like that. Not even to pretend.

  * * *

  Needless to say, Thanksgiving dinner was low-key. Since Nana wasn’t feeling well enough to sit at the table with us, we decided to keep it super simple, and I was more than happy to eat my pain and gobble up slices of Hawaiian pizza while watching The Wiz (for the hundredth time) on DVD, with Mom, Dad, and Snoopy on the couch. It was almost like old times. That is, old times before the Tribulations, when Dad was less burdened by the world, and Mom was less burdened by how Dad was handling the burdens. And I was straight-up less of a burden.

  As I ate, I ruminated on what Nana said before she mentally checked out today: Chase not really being gone.

  Before dinner, I dug my memento
box out of the back of my closet and opened it up. There, under a few old snapshots of me and Andy—well, Ethan and Andy—and the bracelet Audrey gave me, was the letter Nana wrote to me when I was Drew. I read it again, her telling me about being a boy in the fifties, working the docks down in Florida, eating boiled shrimp salt-and-peppered right off the boats. I scrutinized the fuzzy black-and-white photograph she included—a faraway shot of a handsome, wiry-muscled boy in overalls, flexing beside the shore, with the inscription on the back: To Chase, the boy of my dreams . . .

  I wanted to ask Nana what she knows about Chase—hers, mine—but I knew it wasn’t the right time. And she might not even remember . . . But still. When I put the box away, I felt an unexpected rush of gratitude.

  I feel the same now, feeding Snoopy my leftover crusts, watching The Wiz scene in the sweatshop where Evilene is yelling at all of her slaves to WORK! It thrills me every time Dorothy and the gang burst in with the Flying Monkeys, and the fire sprinklers get tripped, and Evilene melts, dying on her giant, bejeweled toilet-throne. As soon as she’s gone, all of the sweatshop slaves realize they’re finally free, and unzip their heavy brown leather bodysuits, which fall to the floor in hideous clumps and burst into flames, revealing these gorgeous bodies and souls underneath. And then everybody just starts dancing and singing like life is wonderful.

  Can you feel the brand-new day?