Changers Book Four

by T Cooper

  She is thinking about it.

  “What do you say?” I prompt.

  After a little longer: “All righty.”

  She seems satisfied . . . enough.

  We get dressed. I grab my wallet, keys to the house. “Meet you at the car,” I say, hitting the bathroom to quickly brush my teeth. I assume she knows I mean her parents’ car, which she’d driven over the night before and parked on the street. Not my parents’ car, which she probably thought was in the garage. Which it wasn’t. It was with my dad, who drove it to the Changers compound after dropping Mom at the airport.

  But Audrey went to the garage anyway.

  When I come out of the bathroom, I expect to feel stillness in the house, but there is a presence, and I sense it. Audrey is not waiting for me in her car. She is still inside. Her face white.

  “Whose old scooter is that?” she asks when I turn the hallway corner.

  “Mine,” I say.

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Uh, what do you mean?”

  “Where did you get that scooter?” she asks again, her voice trembling.

  “I—”

  “Where?”

  “I bought it off this girl on Craigslist last year,” is the first thing I can think of.

  “What girl?”

  “I don’t know, this nice Asian girl, I don’t remember her name,” I stammer.

  “I knew it, I knew it. I knew, I knew, I knew.” She pounds a closed fist against the wall in time with her words.

  “Aud, let me—”

  “I knew that was the same scar he had, but I thought it was from a skateboarding accident. And yours isn’t from baseball. I KNEW it. Why are you lying to me? WHY?”

  “Audrey, please, let me ex—”

  “You promised you wouldn’t lie to me. You, Kim, you promised me. You said you’d tell me on the first day of school, and you didn’t. You LIED to me over and over and over again!” She is pretty much screaming, heading back toward my bedroom. “And why is there a dog bowl in the kitchen if there’s no goddamn dog living here?”

  The door to my bedroom slams.

  There I am, watching everything unravel, but I refuse to believe this is actually happening again. My personal Groundhog Day from hell. I take a deep breath, remind myself I am in control of what happens and, more importantly, what doesn’t happen. Put on the brakes, Kyle.

  I creep, listen at my door. I can hear rustling, jingling, a few footsteps on the rug. I realize she’s packing up her stuff. So I take three more deep breaths, in and out, steady, long, centering. This will not turn into a fight. Keep her in the house.

  I knock gently.

  “No!”

  “Audrey, please.”

  “Go away!”

  “Please, please let me say a few things,” I say calmly, “and then you can go.”

  The door opens. “What could you possibly have to say that I would ever believe again? You’re a liar, Kyle. Kim, Oryon, Drew—whoever the hell you are. You are ALL liars.”

  She tries to slam the door again, but I block it with my hand. “Just hear me out, let me explain why I didn’t tell you everything.”

  “You mean why you LIED?” Audrey says, gripping her keys between her fingers like a weapon.

  “Five minutes.”

  “Fine.”

  “Do you want to sit down?”

  “You have four minutes and fifty-five seconds left,” she says, still standing.

  “Okay.” I take a seat on the messed-up bed. “Okay.”

  “Four minutes and fifty seconds.”

  “Yes. I am Drew, Oryon, and Kim, that’s 100 percent true,” I start. “But when I woke up as Kyle that first morning of school, I realized you were in danger, and I couldn’t tell you I was Kyle, because I had to protect you from that danger.”

  “You mean you saw who you were, and what you looked like, and didn’t want to be stuck from the jump with a girlfriend?” she seethes. “I can’t believe I fell for this. I can’t believe I fell for YOU.”

  “Come on, Audrey. It’s always been you. It’ll always be you.”

  “I don’t believe you. Why would I believe you?”

  “I’m telling you, it was too dangerous to reveal myself,” I say, my voice rising.

  “Dangerous how?”

  I’m not sure how to answer. I need to keep her from freaking out completely.

  “So this supposed danger suddenly went away when you took me out on that first date?” she presses.

  “No, it’s still there.” I realize how flaky this all sounds. “I was trying to stay away from you so this thing wouldn’t happen, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t handle not being with you.”

  “You sound like you’re auditioning for a telenovela.”

  “Hear me out. Changers, like I told you before, aren’t supposed to be with other Changers. We are supposed to be with sympathetic Statics, non-Changers like you. It’s the whole mission.”

  “Mission?”

  “Honestly? Yes. And then when a Changer-Static couple has a kid, that kid will most likely be a Changer. The idea being, eventually, centuries into the future, there will enough people on this planet who have lived multiple lives, who will have empathy and wisdom, that bigotry and fear of otherness will fade into oblivion.”

  “How’s that working out for you so far?” Audrey asks bluntly.

  “It’s an imperfect system. But I have seen it work. It’s real hard to hate people whose life experiences you share.”

  “What about gay people?” she asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How are same-sex Changers and Statics supposed to have kids?” she asks, thinking it through and calming down a notch as a result.

  “Oh, well,” I say, a little taken aback, but relieved at a question. “All Changers are kind of postgay and postgender. But as far as how they want to present, the various Changers Councils arrange for donors and surrogates. It’s all thought out, however people want to live their lives.”

  “I see,” Audrey says, at last slumping into my desk chair.

  Whew.

  We stop talking for a beat, me eyeing her, reading the signs for imminent disaster. Even stressed and embattled, Audrey is somehow ethereal, hair mussed from bed, cheeks flushed. I wish I could go to her and kiss her and we could get back into bed and lie there for the next hundred years.

  “I think you’re my Static,” I say softly.

  She doesn’t respond. I can see her eyes are glassy.

  “But we’re not supposed to think about Static mates until our Cycles are complete,” I continue. “Because, I mean, obviously, we change so much, and they don’t want us basing our decisions on who our partners might prefer us to be. Or to burden Statics with all our baggage until we are who we are. Also, we’re young, so . . .”

  “That makes sense,” she says.

  I approach her slowly; she doesn’t back away this time. I reach out to hug her, and she relents.

  “But I know you’re my One,” I whisper into the top of her hair. And I hold her like that, close and tight, the morning sun beaming through the gaps in my curtains.

  See? I can slam the brakes at any time.

  “I think you may be my One too,” she says, but then starts weeping.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “It’s all so much. So confusing. It’s just a lot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And now, here you are doing it again, making me believe in you, in this. I must seem like such a sucker to you.” She pulls back. “You’re only coming clean about everything because you got caught.”

  I put my head in my hands to cover my face. Feel my patience slipping. “I told you why: I was protecting you.”

  “From what?” she asks louder. “If I’m your Static, I’m your One, then tell me what you’re protecting me from.”

  “I’m afraid to!”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s ME!”

  Audrey’s eyes fl
ash with fear. “What do you mean? How? Are you dangerous?”

  “No. I’m not. Mostly. It’s a Changer thing.” I’m losing the plot.

  “Changers are dangerous?”

  I can tell she’s scared. Why wouldn’t she be? All she knows about Changers she learned from me, and now I’m not to be trusted. Everything I’ve ever said to her could be a lie. Changers could be a race of serial killers for all she knows. I could be harvesting her ovaries while she sleeps. I see her brain clicking, logic fighting with her feelings, dismantling every happy memory, one by one.

  “Changers aren’t dangerous. It’s me. I saw something in my head,” I say.

  “If you knew you were dangerous somehow, why would you come near me? If you have some thing, why would you put me at risk? Is that love to you?”

  “Please, Audrey.” But I can feel it is too late.

  “I need to go,” she says curtly. She stands up from the desk. I move to stop her and she flinches. “Don’t come near me.”

  At that, my brain snaps into some other mode. I see red, a cliché I never understood until I watched blood-colored explosions flash across my line of vision.

  “What do YOU know about LOVE?” I spit, unable to stop the words from tumbling out. “You’re the one who threw me over the minute Kyle showed up! You were supposed to be waiting for me. But I saw you. The first day you met Kyle you wanted him. I didn’t see you pining away for Kim.”

  “Get out of my way!” she screams, trying to exit, but I block the door.

  “And what about how you treated Kim during junior year? Was it because I was fat and uncool? Because Chloe didn’t approve of me? Were you being such a good person then, Aud? Poor little Audrey. Torn between popularity and basic decency. Is that love to YOU?”

  “How can you say all this?” she asks, truly wounded. “I liked Kim.”

  “Not the way you liked Kyle.”

  “This is so insane, what are you saying? You ARE Kyle! You’re the same freaking person!”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t know that. You’re such bullshit, Audrey.”

  “You know what? I can’t, I can’t,” she says, wheeling around me. “I can’t deal with you, I can’t deal with this. You’re talking nonsense. This is never happening again.”

  “Wait.” I grab her wrist, hard, and she winces, but yanks free.

  And our fate is sealed.

  * * *

  I followed her outside.

  And it unfolded exactly as it was foreshadowed.

  Audrey was starting her car, the window rolled down for the heat.

  I ran over, began arguing more through the window.

  She screamed. I screamed back.

  She reached for the key to crank the ignition. I grabbed her arm.

  The car started anyway.

  I tried reaching through the steering wheel and around the post to cut the engine.

  “I hate you, Kyle!”

  And then she hit the accelerator. Sped down the block.

  A screech, followed by a loud CRASH I could feel through the pavement, vibrating into my feet, my knees.

  Immediate smoke, then flames. A horn nonstop blasting.

  I ran toward it.

  Audrey’s side of the car was impossibly twisted around the front of a massive delivery truck. She was leaning across the horn, the airbag failing to inflate, flames licking her windshield. The driver of the truck wandering around, dazed.

  I pried the passenger-side door open. The heat and smell almost unbearable. I put my arms around Audrey’s limp body, and the horn stopped. Then I pulled her across the console, and out onto the sidewalk. Then picked her up and laid her on somebody’s lawn, far enough away from her car to be sheltered when it blew. Which it did, as I covered her body with mine until the pieces of car stopped falling out of the sky around us.

  And then I heard sirens in the distance.

  Change 4–Day 242

  I was roused by the last voice you ever want to hear waking you up.

  “Dude, you gotta get out of here,” Jason said, jerking me vigorously.

  At first I didn’t remember where I was, but then I heard the sound of Audrey’s ventilator, and realized I must’ve fallen asleep in the chair next to her hospital bed.

  “Dude, my dad is going to go ham if he sees you in here,” Jason warned.

  But it was too late.

  Audrey’s father came into the room and, as Jason suspected, went “ham” on me and everybody else in there, screaming about how could they let me in here, when Audrey wouldn’t have been in an accident if she hadn’t snuck off to be with me that night in the first place.

  Jason held his father back from coming after me, while the nurse pled, “Please, sir, this is incredibly delicate equipment. You could harm your daughter.”

  I couldn’t believe he was doing this while Audrey was lying there. Who knew how much she was absorbing, and worse, how confusing it must be to hear all these people in her life at odds in the room around her. I didn’t want to prolong the drama, so I quickly grabbed my backpack and split before it could get any worse.

  “And don’t come back!” Audrey’s dad hollered after me, while staff whipped heads around toward the ruckus, clearly uncomfortable with this guy shattering the delicate hush of all the sick people with their grieving loved ones gathered around them.

  It made me want to turn around and give him some perspective on all of the ways I knew he wasn’t able to be there for his daughter over the last four years. But I thought better of it, and went home, where my parents were waiting, begrudgingly accepting my choice to drop-kick my life so I could hold vigil at Audrey’s side.

  The worst had happened and I was to blame. There was no punishment they or the Council could hand down that I would give a crap about. And they knew it.

  Change 4–Day 244

  My nurse ally was on the overnight shift, so she let me sit by Audrey’s side again. She said Audrey’s vitals improved ever so slightly when I was around. Maybe she was telling me that to make me feel better.

  This time I set the alarm on my phone to make sure I was up by the time official visiting hours started.

  I don’t go to school anymore.

  Change 4–Day 245

  This morning they took Audrey off the ventilator.

  She can breathe on her own.

  Her external wounds are healing.

  But she hasn’t regained consciousness.

  No one knows what will happen if and when she does. We’ve been told not to have expectations.

  Change 4–Day 246

  Went to see Audrey overnight, as has become my routine.

  Without the tube, and through a clear oxygen mask, Audrey looked more like herself. It also helped that a nurse had untaped her eyelids, because they were starting to flutter unconsciously, even open sometimes.

  I kissed her on the cheek when we were alone.

  One of her fingers moved.

  Change 4–Day 247

  Last night I cried in front of Audrey for the first time since she landed in the hospital.

  What happened was I finally said, “I’m sorry.”

  Sorry for chasing her from the house. For saying she didn’t love me right. For putting her in the hospital. For wanting what I wanted when I wanted it.

  Sorry that I never reported Jason to the police for sexual predation. That I didn’t call him on his crime. That I didn’t use my power for good. That I did the easy thing instead of the right thing.

  Sorry that I’d let myself believe what the culture was reflecting back at me: that I was untouchable. That nothing bad could befall me. That tragedy was for other people. That I deserved whatever I decided I deserved. That this world and everything in it was mine for the taking.

  The more I talked, the more I was filled with such relief and gratitude that there was even an Audrey to apologize to, the tears came and came and came. I rested my forehead gently beside her hip until my sobbing finally wound down. The blanket was soaked.
r />   “I’m so, so sorry, Audrey,” I wailed.

  I felt something on my hair. She was touching me with her hand.

  “Kyle,” she rasped.

  Change 4–Day 253

  Audrey was released from the hospital a few days ago, and while I didn’t want to show my face, I had to go to school today to collect the makeup assignments for her. Because of the coma, and massive, soul-destroying guilt, I’ve missed so many days of classes that Mr. Crowell strong-armed me into his homeroom between periods to give me a talking-to.

  “You’re in danger of not getting out of here if you miss any more days of school,” he said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “You may not, but I know a lot of folks who do.”

  I grunted. “I’m not going to stand by and watch Audrey miss graduation because of this.”

  “That’s admirable, but what about your graduation?” he asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders. Honestly, how anyone could care about this ritual in the wake of real tragedy, I’ll never comprehend.

  “How’s she doing?” he asked then, relenting from Mr. Hardass.

  “Better,” I said. “It’s slow going, but . . .”

  “How are you doing? We haven’t seen you much since, well, right after it happened.”

  (Ah yes, when I randomly stopped by the Crowell household ostensibly to “see the new baby,” but really to sneak back into Tracy’s mirrored box and use the fob to reactivate my Chronicling chip. After my attempted Changer-hack failed, I needed to make sure I was going to be able to escape the hell that had become my Cycle. I didn’t want anything sabotaging my Forever Ceremony.)

  “I’m fine,” I said, not wanting to talk about it. “I’m assuming Tracy has kept you up to speed on everything?”

  He nodded his head. “Terrible business.”

  “Well, I pulled the pin on the grenade.”

  “Not from what I understand. The predestined vision snafu,” he offered.

  “Can’t say I didn’t see it coming,” I tried, gallows-humoring it up.

  Mr. Crowell seemed genuinely concerned about me. He’d seen how shattered I’d been. A ghost, Tracy remarked the last time I saw her. I was such a mess after the accident—dropping fifteen pounds, never sleeping, resembling your basic twitchy dopehead—she didn’t even try to guide or educate me, only said, I can’t imagine what you’re going through. I knew I’d put her in the shite again, hooking up with Audrey against direct orders. But maybe the baby had softened Tracy. Or made her so sleep-deprived she had no lectures left to give.