Читать книгу Changers Book Four - T Cooper - Страница 8

Kim

Change 3–Day 202

Okay, so.

Audrey knows.

Everything.

Well, not everything. But she knows about me. About all the me’s. Or at least that there are multiple me’s. But that they are all the same me. More or less. She’ll figure the rest out. I’ll help her. I’ll explain, and she’ll understand, and the puzzle pieces will fall into alignment, and the whole grand picture will reveal itself in all its satisfying completion. I have faith. At long last, I’m a believer!

Yesterday’s RaChas visibility march devolved into a crap show of the highest order after Audrey spotted me wearing the one-of-a-kind bracelet she’d given me—well, given Drew, freshman year. The same bracelet she found in Oryon’s bedroom sophomore year after we had sex. I could see the recognition click in, snap like a seat belt right as she whispered, “Drew?” in a voice both frightened and relieved. (I may be projecting the relieved part.)

I can’t remember if I nodded or smiled or shrugged or all three, but I do know that for a full minute her eyes never left mine, and it felt, finally, like old times, when we were best friends who counted on each other more than anyone else in the world.

Audrey began to shake, and I felt the urge to embrace her, but of course, before I could, I spotted her brother tramping toward us, his puka choker straining against the engorged veins lining his neck. Jason was not having any part of the “Change is not strange!” message we were proclaiming in the streets, much less his sister rubbing elbows with any of the alterna-weirdos holding signs and screaming slogans in support of our right to be different than his version of “normal.”

At his heels was Destiny (ever my protector in Chase’s absence), who had stopped marching and was beelining to my side to head off Jason before he could detonate the sulfur bomb of his toxic white male privilege in my face.

As I watched Jason and Destiny both barreling our way, Audrey grabbed my forearm, flipped it over, and hooked a finger under the bracelet, getting a real good look at it. Yep, same one she gave Drew. Same one Oryon somehow had. And now Kim. She lifted her face to mine again, tears welling, as Jason and Destiny arrived at our respective sides, sandwiching Audrey and me.

“Of course, if a freak flag is waving within a hundred-mile radius, this heifer is going to show up for it,” Jason barks in my direction.

“Fascist say what?” Destiny seethes, shoulder-checking Jason surprisingly hard, spinning him around.

Jason quickly recovers his balance, then laughs in Destiny’s face. “You people sure are feisty,” he says, licking his lips.

At that Destiny does what Destiny is going to do: she winds up and punches Jason square in the jaw so hard he falls on his ass. Audrey gasps. I glance around and notice several people filming the whole incident with their phones. I tug at Destiny’s hip, pull her back.

“Walk away,” I whisper. “This could get ugly.”

“It already is ugly,” she says, glaring at Jason, who is eyeballing her from the pavement with palpable rage.

By this time the whole Radical Changers crowd has stopped marching and chanting. Benedict has fallen oddly silent, cutting short his lecture to the TV reporter, the camera having moved on to the simmering brouhaha between Jason and Destiny. Meanwhile, Audrey is still clinging to my arm, her fingers tight around my wrist.

“Aud, I wanted to tell you,” I start to mumble. “I’ve never not wanted to tell you—”

Without warning, Jason leaps up, shoving Audrey aside, launching her into the crowd as he surges toward Destiny. He reaches for Destiny’s face, his hand smooshing her nose and chin like he’s blocking a tackle. Behind him, Andy bursts into the melee, screaming, “Don’t lay a finger on her!” and jumping onto Jason’s back, the two spinning a full rotation before dropping to the ground where they begin frantically rolling and punching each other in the side of the head, the news camera trained on them the whole time.

Benedict sprints over, horrified his carefully choreographed message in support of peace and embracing difference has devolved into a bloody street brawl. “You’re not even supposed to be here!” he yells at Andy, trying to break them up, but getting dragged into the fight himself.

Now it’s the three of them—Benedict the king of the RaChas, Andy the rogue RaChas ally, and Jason the fledgling Abider—wrestling around on the blazing-hot asphalt, tiny rocks embedding into their elbows and knees while Destiny kicks at Jason’s thighs, egging Andy on.

The few police officers who had been monitoring the march charge in, unsheathing their batons as they do. At this, Benedict extracts himself, wanting no part of the wrong side of the law (been there, done that). He bolts, expertly threading through the crowd and out of sight. The officers turn their batons on Jason and Andy, who refuse to stop fighting, the cracks of wood on bone echoing throughout the gathered crowd. After a few swings of the baton, both Andy and Jason relent, Jason yowling and grabbing his right knee in agony.

“Get up!” the cop yells at him, but Jason collapses when he tries to place any weight on his kneecap. “We don’t tolerate anarchists around here.”

“I’m not one of them!” Jason screams, as he and Andy are secured with plastic zip-tie handcuffs. “I have a football scholarship!”

I try to find Audrey in the chaos, finally spotting her off to one side, stunned. I jump up and down waving my arms. She sees me, starts pushing through the throng in my direction. We wade toward each other, arms outstretched. Before we connect, her mother cuts her off, snatching her by the collar of her shirt.

“Promise you’ll let me explain in person!” I yell, as she is dragged backward, stumbling over bystanders. “If you never want to talk to me again after that, I’ll leave you alone, I swear!”

Audrey nods her head, trying to maintain eye contact with me as her mother wrenches her farther and farther away, until I can’t see her face anymore between the mass of bodies undulating in the chaos.

Beside me Destiny is hopping on the balls of her feet like a boxer who just won a bout. The few remaining RaChas disperse as Jason’s head is pushed into the backseat of a police car.

Andy is shoved into a different cruiser, and it hits me that I’m going to need to find a way to bail him out, with no one in town even aware of who he is, and our fearless leader Benedict bolting gods know where.

“Well, that’s a sight you don’t see every day,” Destiny says, nodding toward the two white dudes being driven to the police station, sirens blaring. “I say we celebrate this small victory!”

I smile, but I’m distracted, unmoored. I want to celebrate my own small victory. I came out. And while it got messy AF, my world didn’t end. On the contrary. It feels like it’s finally beginning.

* * *

Here’s the thing about coming clean: once you start, it’s kind of hard to stop.

After I revealed myself to Audrey, I realized I had a whole long list of people I wanted to let in on my secret. This is—duh—verboten for Changers. The first rule of Changers being you don’t talk about Changers. I’m sure my touchstone Tracy would want to strangle me with a canary-yellow Tory Burch belt if she found out I betrayed Changer nation. But . . . I kinda don’t care anymore.

I mean, Benedict already put us all on blast. The clip of Destiny sucker-punching Jason is going viral on social media. People even started putting music to it, my favorite being the one that timed the punch to when the drums kick in on Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” Watching that punch land on Jason’s thick head is some schadenfreude deliciousness right there. (He most def did not “feel it coming in the air,” ahem.)

I’m sure the Council can’t be happy about any of the exposure. Powerful as they may be, even they can’t staunch the wildfire spread of Snapchat and Instagram and YouTube. There’s no chapter in The Changers Bible about secret-keeping in the age of social media. Maybe Tracy can make an addendum with charts and graphs about how to manage the unmanageable. Charts and graphs are her reason for breathing.

Not that the exposure has amounted to that much so far. Everyone in the world is so self-obsessed these days, it barely caused a ripple in the social fabric for more than a hot second. Either people don’t grasp what Changers are (likely, as Benedict intentionally encouraged vagueness in our slogans and chants), or they don’t give a rat’s furry butt (more likely) unless it directly interferes with or affects their own lives in some tangible way. Which brings me to Andy.

Poor, pitiful Andy. He has really gotten the booty end of the Changers stick. Falling for a Changer who left him behind, currently mooning over Destiny, as if Destiny would ever go for a guy like Andy who, let’s face it, lacks swag, and not in the adorable Jon Cryer–Duckie nerdscape way. Never mind that he lost his best friend to the Changer grind too. And he had no idea. Until now.

Yeah, that’s right. (See above, the part about coming clean.)

It happened after Andy and the Alt-Wrong menace that is Jason were released from jail. They were sprung mere hours after being arrested, let go with a warning about disturbing the peace. (A courtesy you can bet would never have been extended to Oryon, DJ, or Destiny, I can say from experience, and because I have, like, eyes.)

Jason’s parents were already at the station, making a ruckus about his injured knee and threatening to sue the city for lost future income if he can’t play football, when Destiny and I rolled up to fetch Andy. (No sign of Audrey, who was probably at home furiously googling shape-shifters and genetic mutants in hopes of figuring out what the eff Drew, Oryon, and Kim even are.)

“Looking good there, Conor McGregor,” Destiny teases Andy through the open window when we spy him on the steps of the police station, spirit deflated. “I think you have some road kill on your face.”

“Is that your Yubaba cosplay mask?” I add, wincing at the sight.

“Screw you both,” Andy mumbles, gingerly climbing into the backseat of Destiny’s car and immediately lying down flat.

“Welcome to Fight Club,” Destiny says, turning to pat Andy on the knee. He huffs, pulls away.

“You should take some Advil and ice what’s left of your head,” I say.

“Edibles wouldn’t hurt either,” Destiny jokes, shifting the car into gear and peeling out past Jason climbing into his folks’ black sedan, taking care to thrust her hand, middle finger extended loud and proud, out the window in his direction.

“Who even is that guy?” Andy whinges from the backseat.

“D-bag times a thousand,” Destiny says.

“Hair gel in human form,” I say.

“Walking abstinence advertisement.”

“Week-old clam chowder in a skin suit—”

“Okay, okay, got the picture,” Andy interrupts.

“Kim hit him once too,” Destiny volunteers, as I eye-check her to maybe stop with the oversharing. She ignores me. “Aaannd she had sex with his sister last year.”

“Andy doesn’t care about any of that,” I say loudly, trying to shut the Destiny chatter train down.

“The human hair gel’s sister is a lesbian?” Andy asks, suddenly feeling well enough to sit up in the backseat.

Destiny starts giggling, smiles her mega-wattage, I’m-too-fine-to-be-told-what-to-do smile, and launches into my entire three-year, sordid Changer history with Audrey, starting with the Drew year, as besties in love; to Oryon and the ill-fated sex-capade that landed me in an Abider prison cell (“Silver lining: that’s where we met!” Destiny footnotes); to Kim, the queer theater groupie who “is full-stop Audrey’s family’s worst nightmare! Fat, femme, and Asian!”

Destiny begins singing the Kim Chi song—“Every generation, Beyoncé, Madonna, got nothing on this triple threat, do the fat, femme, and Asian”—dissolving into hysterical laughter. But I notice Andy is quiet, hanging on every word, trying to follow my multiple-lives story with his Changer-traumatized Static brain.

“So who were you first?” he asks.

“Drew,” Destiny answers for me.

“No. I mean before.”

“Destiny, pull the car over,” I say.

“The hell, Kim?”

“Do it.”

And so, parked on the narrow shoulder of I-75, cars whizzing past, the drone of the freeway ringing in our ears, I tell Andy who I was “first.” Which is to say, right there in front of Destiny and not a small number of drivers speeding off to wherever drivers speed off to, I tell him I am his long-lost friend Ethan, the guy who trick-or-treated with him in matching Batman costumes, the guy who learned to ollie at his side, the guy who used to have farting contests with him on his parents’ leather couch, the guy he trusted to always be there for him, to have his back, the brother from another mother who abruptly moved away before freshman year and ghosted him entirely shortly after that.

When it seems like he doesn’t believe me, I say again clearly that I was Ethan, and that I never meant to hurt him, that there are rules, and I followed them back then, but I am done following them, and I hope he can understand, and even if he can’t, I hope he can forgive.

Andy says nothing the whole time I’m rambling on. He avoids my gaze, while Destiny vapes out the window, pretending she isn’t listening.

Andy gives me nothing but deafening silence after I trail off, me whipping out the old “You wouldn’t understand” chestnut, which is the last thing anyone wants to hear, ever.

After another full minute or two (which doesn’t sound like long, but trust me, it’s excruciatingly long when you are marinating in a pool of confessional flop sweat on the side of a busy interstate): “I came to Tennessee trying to find you,” Andy admits quietly. “Well, Ethan.”

“I know,” I say.

Andy chews on his puffy lip. Shrugs. “Mission accomplished, I guess.”

“Yay?” I crack sarcastically, fully aware Kim is nothing like the person Andy was searching for. “Ethan is still here.”

“Yeah, where?” Andy shoots back, even more wrecked than when we first picked him up.

“Can we get going?” Destiny breaks in. “I’m getting high on gasoline fumes and not in a good way.”

I nod. Then Andy and I ride in silence until we reach RaCha’s HQ. Before Destiny cuts the engine, I try to turn around and tell Andy I’m sorry again, but he heaves himself from the car and heads up the sidewalk to the warehouse without a word or even a glance behind.

“Farting contests?” Destiny says, lifting an eyebrow. “Bet you won every time.”

“You want to have one right now?” I ask, watching Andy through the windshield.

“Girl, you know I don’t fart in this V. I’m pure perfection.”

“You’re pure something.”

“What are you going to do about him?” she asks, serious.

“I don’t know,” I say, and I don’t.

“He’ll come around. Maybe.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“You’ll be someone else in a few months,” she reminds me.

And there it was—how had I forgotten? All this coming-

clean, coming-out, see-me-love-me stuff wasn’t going to mean anything if I didn’t do it all over again when I changed into my final V.

My final V.

This was all going to end soon. And I would at last have the power to choose who I want to be forever. The realization was both thrilling and paralyzing. It felt a bit like that game people play: If you could only eat one meal the rest of your life, what would it be? There’s no right answer. Even the best meal of your life gets old after eating it a couple dozen times. You think you want pizza, then you eat pizza ten times in a row, and pizza officially becomes a form of torture.

What if I transform into someone horrible? What if my last year is the worst of all, and I don’t want Audrey to know who I am? What if the Council feels the need to school me next year for my sins, and assigns me a “challenging” V? What if? What if? What if?

“Hey! Anxiety junkie, you’re home,” Destiny says, giving me a light flick on the ear.

“Sorry, I . . .” Spaced out.

Destiny puts the car in park, leans in, hugs me tight. “It’s all going to be okay,” she whispers, holding up her bruised fist for me to bump. “Damn, I punched a neo-Nazi. I’m the black Indiana Jones!” Then: “To Nazi punching.”

“To Nazi punching,” I answer back, tapping her knuckles to mine.

“Ouch,” she winces.

“I love you, Destiny.”

“I love you too, loser. Now get your stank butt out of my damn car.”