Oryon

by T Cooper

  “You may be asleep, my friend,” he says. “But I’m wide-a-freaking-wake.”

  “To what? You know, you have all these huge problems with the authority of the Council, but the way you talk about Benedict is pretty much the same thing. You’re still being controlled and used.”

  Chase takes another long drag of the cigarette. Exhales through his nose and lips. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe not. But I know a narcissist when I meet one, and Benedict—”

  “Benedict,” he cuts me off, sharp. “Has my back. He has all our backs. Even your sorry back, which seems to be missing its spine.”

  Errrrrrk—the door cracks and a beam of sun cuts across Chase’s face. He hops up just as everybody’s favorite Lives Coach comes in, hoisting his white robes so they don’t drag across the dirty cement floor.

  “Extinguish that cigarette, please,” Turner says. “Changers HQ is a nonsmoking environment.”

  Chase defiantly takes one more pull and then stubs the cigarette out on the metal handrail.

  “When can we expect you souls to be joining us at the festivities?” Turner asks, placidly glancing between Chase and me, ignoring the mini-rebellion.

  “In a few minutes,” I reply. “Just catching up with an old friend.”

  Chase doesn’t answer. Turner holds the door open for a few more seconds before saying, “I look forward to seeing you both there,” and releasing it with a chill-inducing scrape.

  It’s dark again. And quiet.

  “What a phony,” Chase says, craning his neck up and down as if looking for spy cameras. “We shouldn’t talk about this stuff here anyway.”

  “Or anywhere,” I say, tracking his sightline and spotting nothing but cobwebs and the odd gray industrial smudge. Paranoid.

  “Benedict says they scan the Chronicles for certain words and phrases,” he whispers.

  “I’m going to find my parents.”

  “You do that,” he shoots back.

  “What exactly is your beef with me?” I ask suddenly.

  “I don’t have beef with you.”

  “It’s a full-on cattle ranch up in here, dude.”

  “We’re just on different paths,” he says, shrugging with palpable disappointment. “You’re a good person. I just want more for you sometimes. I want you to want more for you.”

  “Later, Chase,” I say, done now with his B.S. and his judgment and his more-radical-than-thou assessments of my character flaws. It’s rich, really, given he’s been a privileged white male two Vs in a row. Sure is easy to grouse from the power seat when you’re literally risking nothing.

  I stormed out, as well as one can on crutches, and limped across the courtyard, found my parents, inhaled a barbecue-tofu sub, and played one round of squirt-water-in-the-clown’s-mouth-to-blow-up-a-balloon before we took off. I pumped and pumped, wanting nothing more than for that balloon to explode in the clown’s dumb, laughing face. It never did.

  CHANGE 2–DAY 42

  “Someone’s in a good mood," Mom observes, as I’m silly-dancing around the house. “Anything you want to let me in on?”

  “I have a date,” I say, just wanting to share it with somebody.

  Mom, startled by my sudden honesty, slides into a chair and pats the one next to her for me to join her. “Really? With whom?”

  I electric slide over to her, grinning. “Just a girl at school,” I say. (I won’t be giving Audrey’s name and hearing what I know will come next, especially after the Mixer.)

  Mom seems genuinely surprised. “Well, that’s lovely, sweetie.”

  “What, you didn’t think I have game?”

  “No, I know you have game,” she says. “Somebody has a date,” she announces when Dad comes in for some water.

  “Way to go,” he says. Probably because he doesn’t know what else to say.

  * * *

  After dinner and watching a leg of The Amazing Race on TV with my parents, I head to my room to plan what I intend to be the date of Audrey’s lifetime. Man, I wish I could drive so we could go into Nashville and not have to be limited to the offerings in Genesis. I’ve got to think of the best place to take her after the movie. Something fun and different, like Elks Lodge bingo. Or maybe I’ll go classic, the Freezo for milkshakes and watching the planes take off and land by the regional airport. It needs to be perfect.

  I’m researching movie times and restaurants and other fun things to do when Dad knocks on my bedroom door, pops his head in, and says somebody is here to see me. I shut my laptop, push it back on my desk, turn around to see Tracy looking far less chipper than she has been. I wonder if something happened between her and Mr. Crowell.

  “Hey,” I say, swiveling around in my chair.

  She comes in, Dad closing the door behind her, and perches on the side of my bed.

  “Looks like you were really mixing it up at the mixer,” I say.

  “We need to talk.”

  Which instantly freaks me out. “What?”

  “I need you to stop communicating with Audrey.”

  “What the hell? No way,” I say immediately. “I see her every day.”

  “YOU can see her,” she says. “But not Drew.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, knowing exactly what she means.

  Trace screws up her mouth like she’s disappointed in me. Which feels almost as bad as having my tendons torn from my ankle by Baron’s cleat.

  “What?” I snap, defiant now.

  “We might need to go over that chapter in the CB together again,” she says, “because maybe you missed it: you’re not supposed to stay in touch with anybody as your previous V.”

  “I know,” I respond, practically daring her to tell me I’m lying.

  “Especially Audrey,” she says. “The Council is still worried about her family’s ties.”

  “You know Audrey’s not an Abider!” I yell.

  “I know that,” she says, willing me to calm down. “But it’s just one of those rules, I don’t know what to say. And you know you can’t date her or be anything more than friends, if that’s where things are headed.”

  “What are you talking about?” I whine, my voice getting squeakier and squeakier, fending off tears. I feel so trapped and persecuted, like one of those nutso people in a movie who ends up screaming, One day you’ll all see the truth! while being wheeled away in a straitjacket.

  “Well, you were sort of together last year—”

  “NO WE WEREN’T!”

  Tracy purses her lips into a thin line. “Listen, just cut out the contact with her as Drew. It’s not cricket, okay?”

  “How do you know if I’m—”

  “Just cut it out, okay?”

  How does she know? Is the Council monitoring our every move, online and in person, just like Chase and Benedict say they are? Did getting caught hanging out with Chase get me put on some special list? Are they reading my Chronicles? Literally thought-policing? I mean, whatthehell is going on right now?

  “I know you had the vision with her,” Tracy adds somberly.

  “So?”

  “So . . . just don’t push it,” she says.

  “We’re just going out as friends.” I’m not sure this sounds particularly credible, especially now.

  “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but trust me, I’m on your side,” she says.

  I don’t want to tell her anything else because I feel betrayed. It seems like the only person who’s truly there for me and always has been is Audrey, the very person I’m forbidden to be with.

  Tracy hovers like there’s more she wants to say until I sort of roll my eyes and she pats me on the knee, says, “Sorry,” then leaves.

  I can hear her whispering with my folks on the way out, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. I can’t even tell whether my folks are in on it, or if Tracy has said it’s Touchstone-Changer business or some ridiculousness. I hope it’s the latter, because I can’t deal with them all up in my personal lif
e too. I wait, tense. But no one else comes to the door.

  I open my laptop and log in as Drew. Wrong user name/password.

  I retype it the same way. Denied again.

  I do this about ten more times before the system locks me out.

  CHANGE 2–DAY 43

  Dear Chronicles,

  Today I hijacked the Central High PA system and made an impromptu broadcast to the whole school before the principal barged in, yanked away the microphone, and tossed me out of the booth. The speech went a little something like this:

  Calling all the basic bitches . . . I have an announcement. You’re basic.

  Also, there’s this secret, ancient race of kids called Changers who transform into four different people during each of their four years of high school. Look around, kids! See that stud on the lacrosse team? He was that scrawny Puerto Rican kid whose harelip you made fun of last year. What about that girl you got to third base with this weekend behind the Yogli Mogli? She was a dude last year, a really hairy one! Oh, who am I? I’m Little Orphan Oryon, and I’m one of the Changer freaks who walk among you. I was that cheerleader girl Drew who your quarterback sexually assaulted last year! And then you decided I was a slut who asked for it. Hope everyone feels awesome about that because I know I totally did.

  Anyway, I just wanted you all to get the memo that your lives are puny and simple and we Changers are fundamentally better than the whole lot of you, but don’t worry, we’re here to walk you to your best selves, Oprah style, and lead you down the path of empathy and enlightenment.

  P.S. For all you Changers in the audience right now, I’m totally going out with Chase. We are in love and getting married and getting it on ALL THE TIME. That’s right. Changer-on-Changer action. Feel me? Oh, also, Audrey? You listening? I know you think I’m your potential new boyfriend, but I’m also your BFF from last year. Go ahead, quiz me. I’m Drew! And Oryon! I’m both! Best of both worlds, baby. And I’ve been lying to you since we met! Sorry. But them’s the rules.

  Oh yeah, and one more thing. Turner? You look stupid in those robes. In the many, we are . . . Who gives a shit? EMPATHY SUCKS!

  [Sound of mic dropping.]

  CHANGE 2–DAY 44

  And . . . twenty-four hours later, nothing happened.

  After my last entry, neither Turner nor a representative of the Council nor Tracy, not even my parents, burst into my room flanked by a Changers SWAT team assembled to whisk me away to Changers jail for breaking every rule in the CB.

  Maybe they aren’t eavesdropping on my dear diary after all? I don’t know precisely what’s what, but I care less and less because in a matter of hours I have a date with Audrey. And being a Changer is the least of my worries.

  Right now I just want to be a boy in love with a girl.

  As simple and as complicated as that.

  CHANGE 2–DAY 47

  The love songs are right. Dreams do come true. They really, really, really do.

  Take tonight. An enchanted, charmed night, where everything I’ve ever wished in my imagination would happen did happen, only better, because it was live and in person, and I was lifted so high and carried along so fast that gravity seemed somehow optional, and I swore my lungs were expanding in my chest to take in more air, more atmosphere, more everything, the world around me now so suddenly, completely, irreversibly wonderful that my body longed for nothing more than a way to inhale the entire thing.

  In other words: it was my first real date with Audrey.

  We talked about everything. Okay, not everything. But sharing with her came so naturally, and I don’t think it’s because I’ve known her more than a year. I think it’s because we are good together. We fit. Boy, do we fit.

  This is made irrefutable when, after dinner, we decide to bail on the movie so we can keep hanging out, and we walk to the outskirts of the community airport to watch the small planes take off and land. Audrey shoots me a look when I unroll a blanket, sort of bow saying, “M’lady,” and gesture for her to make herself comfortable.

  “Isn’t this place called the kiss-and-cry?” she asks, head cocked.

  “That’s only when you are actually boarding a plane and flying away into the sunset forever. Which is not in the plans. At least not yet.”

  She laughs. “I just don’t want you to get any ideas.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I have no ideas at all. I am literally bereft of even the hint of an idea. Dr Pepper?” I ask, rooting around in my backpack for a can and the two cups I packed. Aud nods and I pour her a drink. “Here’s to traveling to unexpected places.” I lift my cup toward her.

  “You sure like a toast,” she says, tapping the lip of her cup to mine.

  “Eye contact!” I chide. “No eye contact while toasting means bad sex for the next ten years!”

  “I thought you said you didn’t have any ideas.”

  I just grin and pop the dimples and try to look harmless and irresistible at the same time. “So, tell me about yourself. Are you an introvert? Do you like punk rock? Have you ever been in love?”

  Audrey is quiet, then leans back on her elbows, almost completely prone, her hair hanging loose at the base of her neck, blowing side to side in the wind.

  “Sometimes. Sometimes. Once, maybe.”

  “Wait, once to being in love?”

  Another beat. “Yes.”

  “Who was he?” (I know, I’m an ogre.)

  “It was a she,” Audrey corrects, her skin pricking pink, I can see, even in the dusk.

  “And what happened?”

  “That’s your only question?”

  “What other question should there be?”

  Aud rolls over onto her side, lowers her elbow, and at last relaxes. “You’re all right, Oryon,” she says.

  “You’re all right too, Audrey,” I reply, but before I can finish the thought, she leans in and plants a kiss on my mouth—technically our third, but it feels like our first, so markedly different from the fumbling, desperate, insecure kisses we shared when I was Drew.

  She pulls back quickly, looks into the sky.

  I swallow hard, clear my throat. “I lied,” I murmur.

  She turns her face back to mine, stern.

  “I do have an idea.” I gently grab her shirt collar and pull her toward me, cupping her cheek with my other hand until our lips meet again, soft and lingering, just barely overlapping, like clouds.

  And there we stay. Connected. Together. No Changer vision haunting me. No audience at all beyond the odd tiny airplane circling above in the blue oblivion. I feel right. And happy. Nothing else. And I wonder how any of this could be wrong in any universe—mine, hers, the Changers Council’s, even Michelle Hu’s multitudes.

  “This is weird,” Audrey says after about ten minutes of kissing (not crying).

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s weird because it’s not weird, you know?”

  And I do know. I feel exactly the same way. And I tell her as much, and we kiss some more, and then, only after the sky darkens and the blue bleeds to black, do we finally roll up the blanket and gather our cups and walk slowly away from the airfield, our fingers linked at the pinkies, arms swaying as if weightless.

  After her father picked her up from the front of the cinema, where he assumed we’d been for the last couple hours, I flew home, actually flew, on the wings of freaking love, and called Chase to tell him I’d broken the rules, gotten romantic with Audrey again.

  “And?” he half-groans.

  “I’m worried. Won’t I get in trouble?”

  “For what? Being human?” he laughs it off. “Screw the Council. They are trying to hold sand in their fists. You can’t control people, or feelings, or desire.”

  No kidding.

  “They say they’re protecting the Statics. But they’re really protecting themselves and their agenda, whatever that is. I say good for you, you little rebel.”

  “It wasn’t about any of that,” I try.

  “Every action has consequences, Dre
w-ryon.”

  And I think, He’s probably right. And then I realize, I don’t care.

  If the world ends tomorrow, it will have been worth it. To know she loved me once.

  To hope she might love me again.

  CHANGE 2–DAY 125

  “Love,” Mr. Crowell intones. Then falls silent. Like, for a long time. As in, everybody (even Chloe, working her best RBF) starts fidgeting anxiously.

  “Hard to sit with the concept when it’s right in your face, isn’t it?” Mr. Crowell continues after (I swear!) two full minutes of silently staring down each of us on the editorial board. “What is love?” he asks, pointing directly at Aaron, then at me, then Audrey, then Amanda (who is rocking an awesome gold-and-silver handmade duct-tape headband, btw). “Thoughts?”

  Chloe thrusts up a hand, starts talking before Mr. Crowell manages to call on her: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “If you can’t love yourself, how are you going to love anybody else?” she interrupts.

  Aaron laughs, practically choking on the cinnamon toothpick he’s chewing.

  “I’m thinking less cliché, more soul, more depth. What does it mean to love and be loved?” Mr. Crowell poses, gently redirecting Chloe. (Sometimes I think he might be the most generous, patient person on the planet.) Then he goes on: “I don’t expect you to give me an answer right away. I mean, you’re all just barely starting down this path of life, which, by the way, I hope will be filled with great and varied loves.” Which sounds vaguely Changers speak, if you ask me. Maybe he and Tracy have been reading chapters of The Changers Bible back and forth to each other over tea and crumpets.

  “Above all else, love and our capacity to love is what makes us human,” he says, a slight crack in his voice. “That’s why the theme for the Spring issue of the Peregrine Review is going to be love.”

  Chloe perks up in her chair, saucily uncrosses and then crosses her legs, trying to get Mr. Crowell’s attention. He doesn’t register her. Aaron, I notice, is (like me) staring straight ahead at the blank chalkboard. If I were a betting man, I’d say the image of Danny hanging out in Atlanta with every cute guy under the age of twenty-five is flashing through Aaron’s head, though he doesn’t betray anything. I’m trying to appear even half as cool when Audrey calmly, slowly swivels her head around like a meerkat popping out of its hole and bores her captivating, round, glimmery eyes into my soul.