by T Cooper
• Awaiting a much-anticipated yet ultimately aborted Facetime from Audrey, who texted in the middle of the night on July 4 that she was going to be able to escape her camp for an hour and wanted to connect, but then her call never came.
• DJ rolling by ReRunz to say goodbye to me before his mom drove him up to Connecticut for school, where he was enrolled in a special pre-college program and had a part-time campus job waiting for him. He was still sort of smarting from never getting to actually lay eyes on Destiny again, but I’m not worried about DJ—he’s going to thrive in the Ivy League. And Yale’s going to be better for having him there. Way better.
• Setting aside especially fly wardrobe selections that come through ReRunz for my future self, even though I have no idea what size, color, style, or vibe that might need to be. Much less gender. But then, I’ve kind of let go of the whole dressing-for-your-gender thing. What a racket that is.
• Stopping by the jewelry store to keep an eye on the charms they have available. It appears they have run out of the letters T, L, and X, so here’s to praying my new name isn’t going to be Tiger, Lola, or Xander.
• And finally, only last week, another peculiar tea with Tracy, and this time Mr. Crowell too, during which they announced they were going to have a baby, and before I could even have a reaction, Tracy immediately set in, assuring me (even though I didn’t need it) that newborn or no, she would never be distracted from her duties as my Touchstone, and that yes, technically Touchstones are supposed to hold off on reproducing until after their Changer charges have completed their Cycle, but that things went super-duper fast and they were so excited to get their lives started that they decided they could handle it, no problem. “So it was an accident?” I asked, while Tracy was horrified that I even knew how babies were made, and Mr. Crowell said, “Basically, yes.”
Kim
Change 3–Day 362
T-minus three days.
Approximately thirty hours until IT happens again. Woo.
The only cold comfort being that this is the last time I will have a night like the one coming up in three days, hardcore fretting over who the hell I’m going to be when I wake up the next morning.
Mom and Dad are walking around with permanent proud-of-me anticipatory faces, and I keep hearing rumblings about Dad beginning to enter the selection process to become an official member of the Changers Council. Fun times. As if I don’t already feel pressure to be the model Changer child.
We finally got Andy’s transcripts sent from New York, plus reluctant permission from his father, so he’s going to enroll at Central when I do, repeating his junior year which he never completed back home, seeing as he ran away.
But most of all: Audrey is back from camp, and said we can meet up on the day before school starts. I am ecstatic to see her.
Kim
Change 3–Day 365
“So you wake up and then find out who you are from your parents or something?” Audrey asks me over dip cones at the Freezo. “What happens exactly?”
“I don’t even really know,” I whisper through frozen lips, whipping my head around to make sure we’re not being watched by her brother or other Abider goons.
“Do you feel it when it’s happening?”
“Ish.”
“I’m getting a sense you don’t want to talk about it,” Audrey says, licking chocolate drips off the side of her cone.
“It’s, well, I’m not really supposed—”
“Cool, cool, I don’t need to pry.”
I lean back and eye Audrey, am reminded how I promised her honesty. And how there’s no such thing as half-honesty.
“Okay, so,” I start, realizing this is the first time I’ve talked about this process with a Static besides my mother. “The night before, well, tonight, before I go to sleep, I’ll feel kind of anxious—”
“Obviously!” Audrey breaks in.
“More anxious than usual,” I say. “And I’ll spare you the details of what races through my head, but I basically feel as if I’m coming down with a cold, and then once I finally do fall asleep, despite trying not to, so as to stave off the change—believe me, I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work—I sleep really, really deeply, and when I wake up I’m a new person.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, wow.”
“I mean, like, WOW.”
By now it seems somewhat “normal” to me, or at least my norm, but I realize staring into Audrey’s screwed-up-but-trying-to-remain-open face, it isn’t.
“So you, so, so . . .”
“Are you done with that?” I ask, pointing to the bottom, the best part, of her cone. She hands it over. “Remember the Bickersons song ‘The Bottom Is the Tastiest Bit’?”
I serenade Audrey, come to think of it, in the same booth Chase and I last sat in before he—well, died. What a trip this life is. These lives are. Each and every one of them. I kind of wish I believed in the whole dead-people-watching-us-thing. Wonder what Chase would be thinking. If he’d be proud of me. Maybe. Probably not.
“Do you sleep naked?” Audrey blurts.
“That’s personal,” I say, feigning modesty. “But no.”
“Me neither.”
Audrey giggles, and I join in. After the ice cream is gone, she glances at her phone for about the fourth time.
“Got somewhere to be?” I ask. “I can drop you on the scooter.”
“No, that’s good. I’m waiting for a ride.” Her demeanor has changed. And I recognize it.
“Who’s coming to get you?”
She cuts her eyes in my direction.
“I thought he was going to college,” I whine.
She shakes her head, stares at the ground. “He deferred because of his knee. He’s staying here and assistant-coaching the football team while he rehabs.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I thought we’d finally be free of the wrath of Jason, the trapped hair in the drain no one wants to pick out.
“Neat,” I say with maximum sarcasm.
“Yeah, neat,” Audrey echoes, checking her phone again. “I got my license this summer, but I need a job to pay for a car.”
I decide I’m not going to waste the last seconds I have with Audrey talking about her missing-link brother.
“Whatever, we will persevere!” I announce. “But this means you have to go? I was hoping we could take a walk down by the river.”
I wink, but Audrey’s not having it. I go around and sit next to her in the booth, put my arm around her. I don’t care who sees. She feels smaller than usual, but I scoot in close, push the hair behind her ear, and give her a kiss on the cheek.
“I will always love you,” I sing, Dolly-style.
At that Audrey’s cheeks flush pink, and she grins. I want to kiss her so bad, like really kiss her, but already the parents of the Lands’ End catalog–model family in the booth across from us are shifting in their seats, distracting the kids from glancing our way with whatever’s flashing on the iPad propped on the table. Talk about family values.
The familiar Mustang horn sounds out front, jarring us both, and I immediately spot Jason through the window, wearing his old Central jersey with the sleeves cut off. And he spots me. I smile right at him.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” I say to Audrey, and watch her go for the last time with Kim’s eyes.
———
Change 4–Day 1
I’m scared. Really scared.
I lied to everybody today.
Mom, Dad, Tracy, they all think I enrolled at Central like usual, obediently went off to school like a good Y-4 Changer.
Andy thinks that too, although he was a little suspicious when I begged off before we got to campus this morning, saying I’d catch up with him at lunch. Which I never did. Because I never went to campus.
I’m seriously thinking of driving to one of the Cumberland River bridges and jumping off. But I’m afraid it wouldn’t kill me. This body would survive it.
Okay. Back
up.
I know all this sounds dramatic, but I don’t know what to do. Don’t know how else to stop the future from happening.
I’m the Titanic’s captain; I can see the iceberg way up ahead in the distance, and it seems like there’s ample time to avoid it, to switch directions, but in fact geometry and physics and gravity are all conspiring to keep me headed straight for the massive frozen behemoth in my path. The time-space continuum won’t allow me to change course. What am I going to do? Stand by the wheel and wait for the inevitable slow-speed deadly collision with destiny? Or blow up the whole damn cursed ship before it has the chance to collide?
Okay, I need to think.
I ride and ride my scooter until I find a coffee shop I’ve never been to, in East Nashville. There’s no chance of running into anybody I know. Not that they’d recognize me.
Think, think.
There’s a bridge a five-minute walk from here. If I had enough courage, I’d do it. Chase sacrificed for me. Why shouldn’t I for Audrey?
I should probably rewind: When I woke up this morning, I had a Destiny moment. As in, waking up in a body and as a person the whole world will, if not love, give a cultural privilege pass to, finally. FINALLY.
When Andy came in to use the bathroom, he caught me hoisting my shirt and staring at my abs in the full-length mirror behind the door.
“Holy shit, man,” he said, his pupils wide as dinner plates.
“I know.” I dropped the shirt back over my ripped stomach.
“I mean, this is some weird science up in here. Talk about before-and-after pictures.”
“I can’t really digest it myself,” I said, awed.
“I suggest quitting high school and moving to Europe to model.”
“So I’m Zoolander now?” I asked.
“You’re not not Zoolander, bro.”
I couldn’t stop double-checking myself in the mirror. I was basically the missing Hemsworth brother. About six feet, muscles for days, bright-blue eyes, a killer smile, perfect floppy sandy-blond hair (but not too floppy), high cheekbones, thick brows.
“Does this mean you’re going to be stuffing me into lockers and dumpsters now?” Andy asked, dropping trou and stepping into the steamy shower. (Something, by the way, he NEVER would’ve done merely the night before, when I was Kim and we were sharing the same tiny bathroom. How quickly behavior changes when gender does.)
As soon as I returned to my bedroom, Mom came in. She peered UP at me, as in way up, craning her neck (maybe I’m taller than six feet), and couldn’t contain her smile. I hugged her, her head barely hitting my pecs. My considerable, ridiculous pecs.
“Well, this is going to be quite a year,” she pronounced, stepping back and taking a long gander at me, eyes boggling like Andy’s had. “Lot of facial symmetry going on.” (Mom’s way of calling me conventionally attractive without betraying her feminist roots.)
Then my dad poked his head in, followed by Snoopy. The room felt crowded. “Nice one,” Dad said, fist-bumping me. He couldn’t contain his pride, even though he was officially supposed to. All V’s are viewed as equal in The Changers Bible. Not in the real world, of course. Or even in this bedroom, apparently.
“Take that, Abiders!” he shouted, meaning, presumably, that I was finally a worthy adversary to our mortal enemies.
Mom threw the new V packet from the Changers Council on my bed. “Tracy’s stopping by in a few; tell Andy breakfast will be ready when he gets out of the shower.”
After a few more lingering appraisals, Mom and Dad left, and I was alone in my room, Andy singing Led Zeppelin in the shower, loud enough for me to hear: “In the days of my youth I was told what it means to be a man . . .” He was really pouring it on thick and rich.
Idling there on my own, except for Snoopy (who even seemed like a smaller dog to me now), I was almost nervous being around myself. The way I always get nervous around really attractive people. Except this time I was the really attractive person. This was going to take some getting used to. Not that I was complaining.
Reminded that there was a backstory to this guy I was abruptly inhabiting, that he has some insides in addition to these outsides, I picked up the packet, unstrung the fastener, and slid out the thick file.
Right across the top, in bold black and white . . . my name.
My NAME?
I can’t even say it. Can’t even think it.
——
KYLE.
Kyle
Change 4–Day 1, Part Two
I find myself perched on the bridge, a couple feet east of the center. Downtown to the right, East Nashville to my left. I put both hands on the guardrail, lean way over the edge, and crane almost under the bridge. It seems farther down than I thought it would. The water is brown and dirty, way less scenic than upriver where Audrey and I . . . Oh god.
Kyle.
Kyle. Kyle. Kyle.
This can’t be happening.
I’m the guy from the vision. The kiss vision I had with Audrey.
I’m the guy I’ve been paranoid about, keeping my eye out for ever since Audrey and I kissed on the dance floor at prom freshman year, when Audrey surprised the crap out of me and in the presence of every single person at prom leaned in and planted one on me with her perfect soft lips—and the world disappeared for a few seconds.
Until the flash of Audrey’s future. Audrey sitting in a car screaming, enraged to the point of tears, her face red and damp. Fighting with a big, athletic, movie star–looking guy leaning through the window. Kyle. Me.
In the vision, he’s (I’m?) grabbing her arm, trying to snatch the key so she can’t drive off, but Audrey pushes him/me away and yells, “I hate you, Kyle!” before punching the gas and speeding off . . . And then a distant CRASH.
In the vision I can see it unfold in slow motion, Audrey T-boned by that speeding delivery truck in the distance. There is smoke, the beginnings of flames, the horn blowing nonstop, like something—or someone—is lying across it.
Then the vision ends.
I feel my leg twitch, and without me really even controlling what’s happening, I feel it lift up onto the lower rail and I begin an instinctive climb that feels almost like second nature to this body. My hands squeeze the railing, sweating on the hot metal. I have no control over my muscles, and I’m not sure I want to . . . but—
“Hey!”
—
“Hey!” It’s a lady’s voice coming from somewhere behind me. “Sir, are you okay?”
I glance right, where an old cream-colored Volvo is pulled to the side of the bridge, hazard lights on, the passenger door flung open. The driver, a middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair and wearing yoga garb, is walking toward me with a sense of urgency. I still don’t know exactly what I’m doing, why she’s coming toward me with her hands outstretched.
“Can you do me a favor, son?” she says calmly, arriving right behind me, but keeping her distance. “Can you step down off that railing and talk to me for a little bit? I won’t take much of your time.”
She has the most homey Southern drawl you’ve ever heard, right out of a Hallmark movie. Except it feels genuine.
Something clicks in my brain, and I’m newly aware of both my feet on the lower rail, my hands on the upper, me bent in half, stretching toward the water below. I could release at any time, and I’d be free-falling in a blink.
“Son, I really could use your help with something down here,” she says.
I inch back and instantly feel the woman’s hands on my calves, guiding my feet to the concrete. Once they’re firmly on the ground, I turn. Her eyes are kind, with wrinkles fanning the edges.
“Thank you,” she says, taking my hand.
I can’t say anything.
“Let’s you and me go have a seat in the car over here,” she suggests, and starts walking, gently tugging me by the wrist.
I follow her lead like a toddler. She sits me down in the passenger side of her double-parked Volvo, my feet on the curb o
f the bridge.
“Is this okay?” she asks.
“I think so,” I manage. A car honks at us, speeds around us. I stare at my palms. They’re red, scorched from the sizzling metal of the railing.
“What say you breathe with me? Let’s take three deep breaths in and out together.” She takes one herself, demonstrating for me. Then counts out as I join her.
After the third deep breath, my chest feels looser.
“Now, of course I’m not in your shoes,” she says then, matter-of-fact-like. “But to my thinking, there’s almost nothing that can’t be figured out somehow, over time.”
“I don’t think I was really going to do anything,” I say, suddenly flooded with first, recognition, and then, the shame of what this must look like.
“If you were or you weren’t, that was then,” she says, with absolutely no judgment in her voice. “And this is now, and I’m glad you’re here with me now, for however long or short that lasts.”
Her words make me want to curl into a ball at her feet. To spill everything about how I’m not really depressed and suicidal, that (for once) I don’t hate myself or feel hopeless or just want the pain to stop. Rather, it’s that if I don’t kill myself, then I will likely cause the death of somebody I love more than myself. Her kindness makes me almost believe I could tell her the truth: that I’d seen the future and I’m a murderous asshole in it.
“I think I might be a bad person,” I mumble after a while.
“Oh, honey, join the club,” she says, waving her hand in the air. “Anyone with half a brain thinks they’re awful sometimes. It’s the people who don’t that you’ve got to worry about.”
I offer a thin smile.
She catches my eye. “I teach yoga at the local prison. You know who’s in my class? Whole lotta men who hate themselves but can’t say it. They’re drinking poison and praying everyone else gets sick. I get it. But it’s no long-term strategy.”
I nod absently, trying to make sense of everything, of myself. Maybe I do hate myself and feel hopeless and just want the pain to stop.
