Kim

by T Cooper

  “Wow, somebody turned into a major dick.”

  It was a stare-off. And then Destiny silently climbed off the bed and left.

  Just like that.

  I get it. Nothing’s much more pathetic and disappointing than a martyr. The biggest turn-off there is. Taking something ugly and making it even uglier.

  And yet I can’t stop feeling certain it’s the cards I’ve been dealt that are the problem here. It’s not me. It’s not my fault. Why can’t anybody see that but me?

  Change 3–Day 124

  Nobody would ever call RaChas HQ boring. The Radical Changers are definitely bucking the usual sit-around-in-smelly-packs-in-the-park-with-your-mangy-dog-on-a-rope-and-ask-for-a-dollar-anarchist-slash-gutterpunk routine. I mean, something’s always going on here, whether it’s making sure Changers who are still completing their Cycles are keeping up with work and staying in their various schools (or are getting an equivalent legal education, like when Chase’s parents let him homeschool); or doing Abider research and recon in case the Council isn’t; or Dumpster-diving items that can be sold on eBay to raise funds. RaChas are some busy little beavers. (Contrary to the Changers Council propaganda that they’re nothing but a bunch of layabout, unrealistic rabble-rousers.)

  When I come home from school today, and there’s a ginormous flurry of activity around the back table, which was covered with files, old books, photographs, etc., I don’t think much of it. Benedict is deep into some paperwork when he suddenly slaps the table, hard, immediately quieting everybody in the loft.

  People seem stressed, kind of rattled. Confused. But I can’t engage because I have an essay to write and craptastic trigonometry to do, and am coming off yet another blah day at school. I shuffle down the hall to my bed, figuring I’ll try to get some work done there before it’s time to help prep dinner.

  After about an hour, Benedict comes in, plops down on a chair between the bunks.

  “Can you believe all this?” he asks me.

  “What?”

  “This eugenics stuff,” he says.

  I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I’ve been getting used to Benedict slipping into self-righteous, pissed-at-the-world jags like Chase used to, so I just close my pencil in my notebook and wait.

  “Haven’t you been even a little curious about what we’ve been working on this week?” he asks.

  “I, I—” I start. Because I don’t know. Am I curious? Not really. I’m trying to be the kid in the bubble, plod through my days, and “just do me,” as Benedict keeps saying I should.

  “Do you know about eugenics?” he says, impatient.

  “Isn’t that what the Nazis did?”

  “Yeah, but it was first coined in the UK, before them, by one of Charles Darwin’s cousins, whom we have reason to believe was a Changer.”

  “Wow. Is he in the book?”

  “What book?”

  “The book of famous Changers in history.”

  Benedict laughs. “I don’t think there’s such a thing.”

  I feel dumb, so I keep quiet. Was Tracy just messing with me? Because that’s not like her . . .

  “Anyway, he’s the guy who invented the whole concept of ‘nature vs. nurture.’ He also conducted all this research into genetics, and was a proponent of the wealthy classes reproducing amongst themselves, to pass on the best genes to improve the overall quality of British society.”

  “That’s kind of messed up.”

  “Yeah. I mean, by all accounts, the dude was brilliant,” Benedict says, leaning back in the chair and tipping it onto two legs, “but obviously the implications were pretty scary.”

  After about thirty seconds of mulling it over, I say, “Isn’t that kind of what the Changers Council is doing, though? But in reverse? Intentionally muddying the gene pool? Making it so that eventually, in thousands and thousands of years, everybody will be a Changer?”

  “Pretty much,” Benedict says. “There’s a good and bad application of almost every discovery.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “What we’re worried about is, well, we just hacked into a new area of the Changers mainframe and found evidence of gene-selection research they’re doing over there . . . And it’s starting to worry me that all of this could tip into the bad application again, as far as what that ultimate population is going to look and be like.”

  “Hmm,” I say, because—see above—I don’t really want to get into all that. I’m just trying to decipher the cosine law here for the trig quiz tomorrow.

  Benedict pitches forward on the chair and stares at me, his orange mess of bangs flopping into his eyes. “Chase always said you were like this.”

  Ouch. The Chase card. “Like what, exactly?”

  “Unwilling to engage,” he clarifies nonchalantly. “He believed you definitely have the smarts, but not necessarily the fire.”

  I can’t believe this shizz is happening right now. I mean, I appreciate Benedict’s taking me in, and what he’s doing for a lot of Changers. But I don’t need to be hearing about Chase’s disappointment in me FROM THE GRAVE. Nor do I need yet another parental figure beefing with me about my failing them all the time.

  “I didn’t realize being politically active was a prerequisite for crashing here,” I snip.

  “It’s not,” Benedict says, somewhat defensively. “But at some point this stuff has got to get you pissed off.”

  “Oh, believe me, I’m pissed off.”

  Benedict stands up, sits down again. Then stands up, lightly punches the side of my mattress, and turns like he’s about to walk away. But he stops himself. Says with his back to me, “I wanted to wait for the right time to tell you this, but what is the right time, when it comes down to it?”

  “Tell me what?” For some reason I feel sick to my stomach.

  And then Benedict turns around and proceeds to reveal precisely what went down with Chase and the Tribulations last year. And my bubble explodes as if hit by a surface-to-air missile.

  Change 3–Day 125

  There is no ignoring the truth once you hear it. No matter how hard we humans might try, distracting ourselves with alcohol, drugs, sex, ice cream, reality television, or whatever denial-abetter of choice.

  I failed my trig quiz this morning. After Benedict prepared a giant overstuffed truth burrito and force-fed me the entire thing in one sitting last night, pretty much everything else evacuated my cerebral matter. First and foremost the sine and cosine laws.

  Let’s see if I can recap.

  I had sex with Audrey. I being Oryon, and the sex being last year, because—let’s be clear—there is no way Audrey is having sex with Kim Cruz. Enough said.

  Anyway, afterward, as has been not only Chronicled, but also played over and over in my head no less than a thousand times, Aud found the bracelet she’d given Drew, freaked out, and fled my apartment. She called or texted Jason on the way, because while I’m sure he was the last person she wanted to see then, he was the only one who could come rescue her, since there was no way she was asking her parents to pick her up from her traumatic first (post)sexual experience with the black kid she made them invite over for dinner a couple months prior.

  Jason obviously DID spot me when Audrey got in his car, because, as Benedict explained, Jason and Audrey’s church and camp are part of the main nest that the RaChas have been tracking and investigating over the last couple years. Jason, now knowing generally where I lived, probably tipped off his church elders about my whereabouts. While Jason might’ve just been trying to “teach me a lesson” for messing around with his sister, the elders in his church are—unbeknownst to many of the congregants—affiliated with the Abiders movement, and thus quietly recruiting the younger members, grooming them into cells to do their bidding.

  In her vulnerable state, Audrey might’ve blurted something to Jason about Oryon being somehow related to Drew, or at the very least that Oryon might’ve lied to Audrey in order to get her in bed, so he had no problem turning me
over to the rest of his youth group at the church, who, with the encouragement of the elders, assembled a trio of thugs, jumped in a pickup truck (not much good happens when a mud-splattered 4x4 chases anyone/thing), and staked out where Jason had picked up Audrey the night before, hoping for me to come by, which I obviously did when taking Snoopy out for his morning walk. Walked right into their trap.

  Chase, Benedict, and a couple other RaChas were taking turns monitoring online church communications that day (as they had been for some time), and something about the situation that Jason and his buddies were opaquely joking about online made Chase think that it could possibly be me who was just picked up, to be taught a “lesson about dating our women.”

  Chase went ballistic and was about to storm into Central High and pound Jason to a pulp himself (again), but after Benedict convinced him that Jason probably didn’t know much beyond his small role in the kidnapping, and it wasn’t worth getting arrested for just yet, Chase instead funneled his rage into two days straight of twenty-four-hour recon, eventually figuring out a way to break into the Changers mainframe. Chase apparently used keyword searches of personal details he knew about my life and somehow managed to decrypt some of my Chronicles, then read my desperate, by-the-minute communications about where we were being held.

  It wasn’t so much my paltry Chronicled details about the angle of sunlight, and the hallway and cinder-block walls, that led Chase to me, but more that he was now certain of the connection between Jason’s church and the Abiders. So, with another day of scouring real estate records, Benedict and Chase were able to find evidence of a handful of church property holdings in the countryside, where we were likely being imprisoned.

  At that point, Chase and Benedict contacted the Council, turning over all of this information. They naively hoped, Benedict explained, that the Council would act immediately and make use of their deep connections in law enforcement to rescue the three Changers who were hostages in an Abiders cell.

  Now here’s the hard part to swallow. I can barely think it, much less Chronicle it, because it seems so unbelievable. The Council thanked Chase for all of his hard work, told Benedict and him that they would “take it from here.”

  And then: nothing.

  As in, while the three of us were locked away in the dark, eating stale bread crusts and generally being terrified of imminent execution, the Changers Council not only knew about it, but didn’t think it necessary to notify our beside-themselves parents and loved ones, while they were supposedly “completing additional research and determining the prudent course of action.”

  Another day went by. Nothing from Turner or the Council brass. In fact, when Benedict and Chase tried to go back to Changers Central to force another meeting, they were denied access unless they promised to provide detailed information about how Chase broke into their system. Which, Chase gave up immediately, over Benedict’s protests.

  And yet the Council did not keep their word. The RaChas remained locked out.

  “I’m going public with the fact that you know where they are,” Chase threatened loudly outside Changers Central.

  The Council’s hand forced, a plan was finally hatched. Chase was given a GPS device, a smoke bomb, and instructions on how to put himself in a situation where he knew he’d be kidnapped by the Abiders. After which, the Council tactical team would storm the nest and free us all.

  Problem was, no one realized how badly the Abiders would beat Chase before tossing him into the basement with us. Maybe the Abiders knew who he was, or suspected what he was doing. Or maybe his size and strength made the goons especially brutal. Knowing Chase, he probably egged them on. He was never one to back down from a fight.

  Benedict never found out exactly how Chase got himself abducted, but it was the blip on the GPS from his tracker that enabled the Changers tactical team to launch a surprise attack and at last bust us out.

  Benedict also said that he tried to find out what exactly happened to Chase, but that in all the commotion and chaos in the weeks following the incident, his body disappeared, and Benedict never could get the true, full story. There was nothing beyond the official Council obituary, which said that Chase suffered bleeding in the brain and died en route to the hospital, after the brave act of saving his fellow Changers during an unfortunate incident of Abiders-related activity, which had been, dismayingly, occurring more frequently across the world in recent months.

  I had only one question for Benedict once he stopped talking: “So, if Chase hadn’t threatened them and been willing to get himself kidnapped, the Council wouldn’t have done anything to save us?”

  He didn’t seem to want to answer me. With all the politicalization, there was still kindness in his heart. But since honesty is the kindest act of all, he eventually answered softly, “In their defense, they didn’t know for sure you would be killed. But, yeah, I think they were ready to sacrifice the few to save the many from possible exposure.”

  And that was all I needed to hear.

  Change 3–Day 130

  My mind won’t stop processing. Chewing over the facts. The consequences. The lies.

  Chase really did sacrifice himself for me. More than I even dared suspect.

  And he read some of my Chronicles. Did he see how I felt about him before he died? Was I a jerk in them? People are always jerks in their diaries. Could he read between the lines?

  If I want anything in this world, I want him to know how much I loved him before he died. Isn’t that what people always say? Make sure you tell them you love them; you never know what could happen.

  Morbid. But not wrong.

  I wish he could read me now.

  I love you, Chase. You are the family I wish I had. My twin. You made me feel everything. Even when I didn’t want to. You believed in me. I didn’t deserve it. Not any of it.

  How do you thank someone for saving your life? Chewbacca became Han Solo’s forever first mate in Star Wars, but I’m not going to have the luxury of serving Chase forevermore.

  I would if I could, Chase. If I ever meet you again, I will. You won’t shake me next time. And know this too: I will make this right. Your life won’t have been lost for no reason. I see now what I need to do. I see it all.

  Change 3–Day 143

  Tonight was the Polar Ice Ball. Because my life is nothing if not careening all over the spectrum.

  “More like polar-izing,” Kris quipped when none other than Jason and Chloe were elected king and queen of . . . I never know what. The night? The other students at the dance? The high school social universe? Chipotle?

  “Now she actually is an ice queen,” Kris snarked as he, Michelle, and I stood in a huddle watching King Jason and Queen Chloe peacock up and take their place onstage under fake-snow bunting and sheets of twinkly lights. Jason couldn’t help yelling, “Oy! Oy! Oy!” and flexing his bicep when the student council president draped his sash over his suit, his homies in the crowd “Oy-oying” right back at him.

  For her part, Chloe flashed her newly whitened teeth and held her posture pageant-straight, getting swathed with sashes nothing unusual to her. She even discretely shimmied a shoulder just enough to hitch the sash into a more flattering angle. You had to hand it to her—girl was a pro.

  “And now our king and queen, along with their court, will take the floor for the first dance of the ball!” the emcee announced, as the first bars of “Crazy” by Aerosmith began to play over the loudspeakers.

  I guess we were all supposed to circle and watch them like it was a wedding or something, which feels like the wrong message to send to teenagers, but what do I know?

  “This song,” Michelle moaned.

  “Mama’s nerves,” Kris shuddered.“I’m going to go force the deejay to play some Pussy Riot or Prince.”

  “I’m going to go find a sandwich,” Michelle added, as the two left me alone.

  I couldn’t stop studying Jason since he took the floor. Of course he couldn’t dance like a normal human. For a guy like Jaso
n, dancing would always represent some assault on his masculinity, so instead he hurled himself around like he was at a punk show, ramming into other kids and generally being the giant a-hole we know and despise. Or I do, anyway. The rest of the student body has more tolerance for his agro-macho crap, most of them cowed by his hostility and alpha-male posturing, afraid not to at least pretend to like him. I wonder how long that particular magic trick will work. Probably a long time, if corporate America is any indication.

  I watch Chloe trying vainly to catch Jason’s attention. This is supposed to be their shining moment; there are even spotlights dipping in and out, illuminating their faces. But he won’t play along, so she just kind of sways in circles in his orbit, trying not to get snapped like a sapling tree. Soon enough Jason inexplicably bails from the dance floor altogether, and my eyes follow him with laser focus as he struts to a dark corner of the auditorium, takes something from his jacket pocket, and drops it into a drink.

  Did he really just do that?

  He sniffs the cup, taking care not to put his mouth too close, then grins. It seems our rapey jackhole has graduated from assault to drugging. I give a quick survey of the scene, hoping to spot Kris or Michelle, or even Mr. Crowell (who was chaperoning), but I can’t find any of them. I feel sweat beading down my back as I continue to track Jason. He’s heading right toward Chloe, who has also exited the dance floor and is sitting sloppily cross-legged on a folding chair, trying to keep her sash from falling off.

  I don’t have a plan, but I make a beeline for Chloe, and as I do, I notice Audrey is doing the same from another side of the room. We arrive at Chloe’s chair at the exact same time, Jason lagging a few steps behind, stopping to take selfies with a gaggle of sophomore admirers.

  “What the eff are you even doing here?” Chloe snorts, eyeballing me and my ensemble—a full-length black velvet dress from the thrift store, and my Doc Martens. “Huh, Fat Elvira?”

  “Hey Chlo,” Audrey steps in, “let’s go freshen up in the ladies’.”