Oryon

by T Cooper

  “I love you,” Mom says softly.

  “I love you too,” I respond, finally feeling a wave of sleepiness.

  “Let’s do something fun this weekend.” She pats my back twice and stands up. I hate when tickles are over.

  “Okay,” I say, doubting I know what fun even is anymore.

  “Sleep in,” she says, pulling the door shut.

  “Mom,” I call after her, though I hadn’t planned what more I was going to say.

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Thanks for believing me.”

  CHANGE 2–DAY 146

  On the way to school this morning, I skated by the “scene of the crime” to see if I could rescue the bowling shirts. Sure enough, there they were, lying in a grease puddle, squashed down by the force of a hundred tire treads into a revolting, flattened heap. I took a deep breath and picked them up by my fingertips, then carried them into the restroom of the Donut Shoppe next door, where I squirted some liquid soap and scrubbed the fabric together in the sink as best as I could, before wringing them out and sticking them in a plastic bag and stuffing them into my backpack.

  Audrey was not in homeroom, which I knew couldn’t be good news. Maybe she just came down with a cold. Or had a periodontist appointment. She wasn’t back for lunch either, though I kept double-checking where she normally sits, just in case she turned up. I wasn’t super keen on eating anyway. Neither was DJ, who was trying to organize a protest at the police station. (His mom never doubted his innocence either, having been raised in the South and experienced far worse in her youth.)

  “Straight profiling,” DJ spits, his rage palpable and infectious. “You think I’m an angry black man? Okay. I’ll be an angry black man. Right, O?”

  He nudges me and I nod in agreement, but say nothing. It’s not that I’m okay with what happened. It’s more that I’m disheartened the way I was after that Sunday at the dog park with Snoopy. People are going to see and believe what they want. So far in my experience, it seems prejudice withstands even the harshest onslaught of fact, and I don’t see how a protest at the police station is going to do anything but get us all arrested again.

  “I’m in,” Dashawn says.

  “Me too,” says Kenya.

  The bell rings, and I dash toward Audrey’s locker. I dial her combination, pry open the lock, pull out the still-damp bowling shirt from my backpack, and hang it inside her locker on the coat hook just as Audrey rounds the corner, her face swollen like she’s been crying for hours.

  I don’t know what to do or say, so I do nothing, just wait for her to notice the shirt. She turns to me, then her locker—the bottom hem of the shirt leaking a couple muddy drops onto some of her books—before falling into my arms.

  “I heard everything,” she says, suddenly squeezing me, breathless. “Jason told our parents you got arrested.”

  “How in the name of Kanye did he find out?” I ask, squeezing her back.

  She shrugs. “They said I can’t talk to you anymore. They took my phone, laptop, everything. They didn’t want to hear any details. They basically forbade us from being together.”

  “It’s okay, Audrey, it’s okay,” I say, doubtful.

  She pulls back, her face wet with tears. “How? How is it okay?”

  My mind spins, grasping and searching for something to offer that might comfort her before settling on the one remaining unassailable certainty I have left. “Because I love you, Audrey Stewart. And I have loved you since before you even knew who I was.”

  That much, at least, I know is the truth. One that nobody can take away.

  CHANGE 2–DAY 215

  Kenya was a ballerina. She moved so precisely, so effortlessly, with just the right amount of energy expended, not too much, not too little, a solo virtuoso performance that left a razor’s edge of space to clear each hurdle without grazing a single one. Her grace was a marvel to behold, a sharp contrast to the huffing-and-puffing theatrics of her competitors, who seemed ready to burst like shaken soda bottles.

  During the last race, Kenya was two full lengths ahead of the next runner when she cleared the final jump and tilted toward the finish. The crowd started with a low hum, but as soon as she ducked her head forward for that extra tenth of a second and crossed the line, everybody in the stands erupted in a full-fledged roar, even visiting families who’d come to see their kids from other schools compete in the Middle Tennessee regional track championship.

  Kenya’s time was projected on the scoreboard, the letters SR right next to it, meaning she’d just set a new state hurdle record. I wanted to jump up and down just like DJ and Dashawn and Kenya’s parents and some of the other kids behind the roped-off bench, but Mrs. Barnes-Wilson was tapping the mic to get our attention, and we had to start playing “Beat It” in celebration of Kenya’s record.

  I popped the rim of my snare, busted out my beat, and then everybody else came in, clarinets buzzing, trumpets blasting, trombones blowing, tom-toms holding us all up from below. It felt powerful being the heartbeat of a musical operation again, like when I played drums in The Bickersons last year. A few seats over Audrey was robot-dancing to our song, but soon enough the number was totally drowned out by the din of the crowd, which had gone full-on bananas. Back on the track, I saw Kenya had broken down, crying in her parents’ arms.

  She already had the scholarship to Florida on lock, but all this was just icing, and further proof that she was right on “track” (ha) to that vision of mine coming true. After our song faded out and Herr Conductor let us put down our instruments and chill for a beat (ha again), I tried to find Kenya to congratulate her, but I couldn’t make out where she’d gone off to. Left us all in the dust, I was thinking and chuckling to myself, when I felt a tug on my uniform sleeve and spun around to see my DL cheerleader love looking as alluring as ever.

  She snuck in for a quick kiss, which set the tall feather atop my hat trembling.

  “I miss my band-nerd boyfriend,” she said, shoving a folded note into my hand and closing my fingers around it.

  I couldn’t believe she was risking having her brother catch us and pummel me into a fine powder then grab her by the hair and drag her back to his car like his parents had essentially given him authority to do any time he saw his sister consorting with Public Enemy Number One.

  “We should really stop meeting like this,” I said, pocketing the note and passing one I’d written into her sweaty palm. “Where are you going to put this?”

  “I’ll find a place,” she said in a breathy Marilyn Monroe baby voice, miming slipping it into her bra.

  “This is killing me,” I said, meaning it.

  “I’ll see you in school Monday,” she said, then added, almost conspiratorially, “I think I found a way to get free Thursday night.”

  My knees buckled in my polyester maroon suit. I growled, grasped her by the waist.

  “Got to go!” she purred, then swiveled and practically sashayed back to the rest of her squad.

  I reached in my pocket to make sure her note was still there. We may have been thwarted by no electronic or auditory means of communication, but the haters can never stop the free flow of good, old-fashioned, pen-on-paper love letters. I couldn’t wait to get home and read this one in the privacy of my own room.

  Damn. How am I supposed to survive two nights and a full day before seeing her face again on Monday? Her note better be a good one. I know mine was. I even got a little saucier than usual. But that’s all I’m going to Chronicle about that—a gentleman never tells, right, Nana?

  CHANGE 2–DAY 216

  Luckily (I guess), three hours of the forty-eight I have to grit my teeth through until I can see Audrey again were munched up by the “engagement party” Mom insisted we throw at the apartment for Tracy and Mr. Crowell, who, Tracy notified us on a gilded card embellished with Swarovski crystals, were officially going to be married.

  As in Changer-Static married.

  As in, Mr. Crowell and his perpetually stained, mis-butt
oned thrift-store Oxford shirts had to go down to Changers HQ and attend Nondisclosure and personality-testing sessions with Tracy and Turner, the Lives Coach, as well as Marybell the Static-Union Coach, before signing a binding (and punitive, if the rumors are to be believed) contract as a forever-friendly Static, before they could be allowed to marry.

  The same Mr. Crowell from whom I have studiously hidden my relationship with Tracy for the past two years, lest he wonder how we know each other. And yet, the fourth wall was well and truly broken, like Humpty Dumpty–never-gonna-get-put-back-together-again style, when he came over tonight. He and Tracy just left, in fact, after gushing to all of us about their plans to marry this summer. (Wedding theme: Excalibur.)

  Now me and Unckie Crowell are inextricably linked for at least the next two and a half years that Tracy is my Touchstone—and probably much longer than that. Yeah, that’s going to be a little creepy. Not that I don’t like and respect Mr. Crowell. But the whole worlds-colliding thing is kind of freaking my Changer shizz out.

  “Tell me, Oryon,” Mr. Crowell inquires, innocently enough, when we’re left alone in the living room after Tracy went to get more hors d’oeuvres from the kitchen, raving about what a good cook Mom is (I didn’t have the heart to tell her Mom got them at Trader Joe’s), “where did you attend school last year?”

  Oh my god, she hasn’t told him everything.

  “Uh, Central,” I say.

  “Really? They do that?”

  “I was in your English class.”

  He toggles his head that way he does, some hair flopping from one side of his part to the other. I can tell he’s reeling back through the class rosters in his brain. Tick. Tick. Tick. Nada.

  “Drew?” I say after a few more seconds of this, my voice involuntarily raising, some sort of muscle memory in my vocal chords or something.

  “Drew!” he yells, louder than he probably meant it, which Tracy clearly hears from the kitchen, because she comes bounding over, mouth full of stuffed mushroom caps.

  “You didn’t tell him?” I ask sotto voce.

  “No,” she says. “That’s your story to tell.”

  “Well, I wish I’d known!”

  “I loved Drew,” Mr. Crowell says clumsily. “I mean, I, I mean, you know, as a student, she was—you were—such a great girl.”

  “It’ll take some getting used to,” Tracy says, brushing a crumb from her fiancé’s chin.

  “It was horrible what happened last year to her—you,” Mr. Crowell added. “I felt so helpless.”

  “But that you told him?” I glare at Tracy.

  “Of course not,” she says, popping another mushroom from her cocktail napkin.

  “Teachers know far more than you think we do,” Mr. Crowell offers. “I wanted to reach out to Drew, to you, but, you know, boundaries and legalities.”

  “Isn’t he the sweetest?” Tracy says, stretching up to kiss Mr. Crowell on the neck.

  Gross.

  “He’s okay.”

  Unckie Crowell smirks at me. “Well, it’s good to know in retrospect you were in such capable hands.” He gapes longingly at Tracy as if her face is the mystical map that holds the secrets to unlocking the hands of time. Tracy returns in kind, and now I’m watching a Nicolas Sparks movie minus the clotheslines and spontaneous rain showers. (OMG, is this what Audrey and I look like to other people?)

  “I should’ve done more for Drew,” Tracy says after they break their nauseating eye-lock. “From now on I’ll be more on top of it.”

  “You’ve been great, Trace,” I assure her. “Then and now.”

  “I’ve been a whittle bit distwacted,” she says, which makes Mr. Crowell flush, and me feel like I need to spend less time playing Minecraft and more time building a time machine so I can travel backward and erase these moments from my consciousness forever.

  “I’m going to get some more ginger ale,” I say, but they’ve already forgotten I exist.

  CHANGE 2–DAY 218

  Homeroom this morning: no Mr. Crowell.

  It’s hard not to get a little paranoid, like, now that HE KNOWS about me, and he learned ABOUT ME just over the weekend, and then for the first time in almost two years of school he misses homeroom and we have a hating-her-life substitute who’s taking attendance and failing miserably at keeping the room quiet. We can barely hear the school greetings over the speakers.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a special announcement today. A very, very proud moment for the Central community,” the principal begins. “To tell you about it is our very own Mr. Crowell . . .” And then there’s a nails-on-chalkboard feedback scream that makes all of us recoil in our seats and gasp in unison.

  “Uh, uh—good morning, Falcons!” the voice starts, more tremulous than usual.

  I look over and notice that Chloe is ferociously flipping through the brand-new issue of the Peregrine Review, which I’m not even sure how she got her mitts on until I spot a few large cardboard boxes behind Mr. Crowell’s desk, one of their tops ripped into like a rabid badger got a craving for something literary.

  Mr. Crowell continues: “I have the pleasure of announcing—I have the honor of announcing—that two of Central’s very own are being recognized by the Tennessee State Literary Leaders Council and awarded with the Excellence in Reporting Award at the high school level for their series of interviews on love in the spring issue of the Peregrine Review. It’s a first for Central High, and a first for these two talented students. So let’s all join in heartily congratulating . . . Miss Audrey Stewart and Mr. Oryon Small!”

  The hell, the what?

  “Woo-freaking-hoo,” Chloe immediately slurs, giving the world’s slowest hand clap, which is our first indicator that this isn’t a dream and is actually happening. A few of the other kids start to genuinely applaud and toss out an “All right!” or “Sweet!” and seem if not impressed, then at least sort of happy for Audrey and me (as we sink lower and lower into our chairs in embarrassment). Jerry raises the roof and whistles, which prompts Chloe to petulantly toss her copy of the Peregrine onto the floor and continue rolling her eyes so far up into her head that it seems like they might never come back to center.

  A few minutes later, Mr. Crowell slips back into class, giving the relieved sub a head nod, and proceeds to elaborate on our award, explaining that we’ll be featured in the Nashville Times newspaper—interviewed and photographed later this week.

  “What about me?” Chloe cuts in.

  “What about you?” Mr. Crowell asks back, brow knit.

  “What about my trophy for poetry?” Chloe presses, a lifetime of being told she is amazing at everything doing no favors to her worldview yet again.

  “Well, there isn’t an award for poetry,” Mr. Crowell responds, generously.

  Chloe snarls, her lip lifting in the right corner as if snagged by a fishhook.

  “Yeah, that’s why,” Jerry says, clapping me on the shoulder on the way back from collecting his copy of the magazine from Mr. Crowell’s desk where he is stacking copies.

  * * *

  Later, between classes, some Peregrine members set up tables to hand out the new issues. Aaron, Audrey, Chloe, Amanda, and I are stationed on the first floor hall. The announcement of our win caused a line, which felt cool and meant way more to me than I expected it would. DJ stopped by and snagged two copies, giving me a high five and Audrey a salacious appraising Hmmm mmm. “Literature is dope!” he shouted over his back as he passed by Jason, who was sidling up to the table.

  “Hey, faggots,” Jason opens, pretending to flip through a journal and winking at Chloe, who waves and then continues to just sit at the end of the table, stroking her bangs like a pillow pet.

  “Sudden interest in learning to read, Jason?” Audrey says, a familiar shadow darkening her face.

  “There are people waiting,” Aaron adds, standing up and squaring his shoulders to match Jason’s.

  “For what?” Jason sneers. “Love advice from my sexually confused sister and
her eggplant crush?”

  Aaron clenches his jaws, and I stand up when I realize I’m the eggplant.

  Jason leans across the table closer to Aaron, so close their noses almost touch. “Want to know a secret?” he hisses.

  Aaron is motionless, unblinking, silent.

  Jason runs his tongue over his front teeth. “I’m the captain now,” he barks in a mock–Somali pirate accent, then reels back and laughs, repeating, “I’m the captain now!”

  Chloe giggles conspicuously, while Audrey and I exhale, relieved no one is bleeding on top of our pile of journals. But then we notice Aaron isn’t budging. He’s still frozen in fight mode, the veins on his neck popped, every muscle tense, his breathing deep and steady behind the table.

  “Hey Jason,” he says, his voice firm, unafraid, “I have a secret too. Wanna hear it?”

  “Ooooh, scary,” Jason buffoons, wiggling his shoulders.

  “Whatever you’re doing, don’t,” Aud says softly to Aaron, wrapping her fingers around his rigid forearm, his palms pressed nearly white onto the folding table. The other students waiting in line take a few steps back, forming a haphazard semicircle behind Jason.

  “Come closer, I’ll tell you,” Aaron tells Jason. He is determined, his tone almost hypnotic now. Jason snaps to attention, never one to back down from a perceived threat.

  “Oh yeah? You got something to tell me, Oklahomo? Because that’s not exactly a secret,” Jason says loudly as he tilts forward toward Aaron’s face. “Are we gonna go?” he taunts.

  It’s at that precise moment that Aaron nods yes, says, “Oh, we’re going,” and, with everyone watching, bracing for an epic alpha football jock throw-down, flings his arms around Jason’s shoulders and kisses him full and wet on the mouth.

  Jason recoils, sputtering and spitting and pawing at his lips, trying to rub off the contact (like that can even be done, outside of cartoons), and then starts leaping around, pointing at Aaron, and shrieking to everyone in the hall, “Did you see that? I knew it! I knew it! Freaking fairy! Donut puncher! Knob jockey!” But no one is really listening, instead they are cracking up, jeering at Jason, who looks more the absurd clown than ever.