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Oryon

Change 2–Day 360

This must be what death row is like. Actually knowing the day you’re going to cease to exist. You sit there as every minute, every second, every breath siphons away, aware this is the last time you will eat frozen chicken nuggets, a slice of terrible pizza, canned pear cubes in syrup; the last time you will do fifty push-ups; the last time you will have a headache; the last time you will dream about being a child at the park and holding your father’s hand.

I know I shouldn’t be so scream-queen dramatic, because unlike guys on death row (and they are like 99.9 percent guys—not exactly a ringing endorsement for the male persuasion), I get to have another life after this one ends. And then another one after that. And then I get back one of the four I’ve had over the previous four years. Some Changers and Touchstones I’ve met (Tracy!) are hella psyched about this whole process. #Blessed. What a unique life opportunity to embrace! Sorry, lives opportunities. “In the many we are one.” Blurgh.

When I was Ethan, I didn’t know I was a Changer yet, that in a matter of years, Ethan would be basically DOA. There was no goodbye. No processing. Maybe that was easier. Rip that identity off like the Band-Aid it was. Bye, Oryon/Drew/Ethan.

Wow, this is the first time I’ve thought about Ethan in like, I don’t know exactly. I nipped that in the nuts, didn’t I? I mean, why think about him, about ever seeing him again, if I can never be him? At least on the outside.

Everybody—Tracy, my parents, my incarceration buddy Elyse—keeps telling me Ethan will always be with me, will always be a part of me. Is me. But I just feel further and further away from him and his life. He’s a phantom. A guy I used to know. Maybe every kid feels this way. You get older, you see some stuff, and the person you used to be washes away like writing in the sand. Audrey probably doesn’t feel like the same girl she was two years ago either. Likely I had something to do with that, for better and worse.

I’m realizing this is also the first time I’ve really thought about choosing my Mono. Probably because now there’s a tangible choice, two different V’s to choose between. I’m so sick of thinking and obsessing and being weighed down by my feelings, and yet I can’t seem to stop thinking, obsessing, and plotting the if-thens ahead of me. Life just makes me do that. Which I guess is the point. But sometimes I wish I were a single-celled organism or something, with nothing to do or consider or decide or learn. A basic fungus, hanging out among all other fungi, every one of our cells exactly the same. In the one I am done.

Drew? That multicellular, multilayered V? I suppose I grew to love being her. Didn’t want to change from her, now that I’m remembering. But I can sort of maybe see myself picking Oryon as my Mono. Wouldn’t be the worst. Hey, perhaps when we’re all grown up and graduated, I’ll declare Oryon, and then go find Audrey—wherever she attends college, or on some crazy mission in South America that her family makes her do—so we can live happily ever after together. If she once had love for me, for Oryon, then maybe there could be love again.

If I really think about it, this love I have for Aud is really just an extension of the love I first felt for her as Drew. And it’s probably the same for her too, whether or not she’s conscious of it. She’s got to sense it—like, a soul-connection or something. I mean, think about the greatest love stories of all time, when two people feel like they’ve known each other in previous lives. That’s exactly what it feels like with me and Audrey. Only of course with me there actually are different lives at play. Even though Audrey doesn’t recognize it.

But you know what? One day I’m going tell her, and everything will suddenly snap into place and make perfect sense to both of us. Right?

Meanwhile, tick-tock, tick-tock, I just keep checking the time on my phone, as every last second slips away on this death march toward Change 3. T minus 144 hours to execution day. No reprieve is coming for me from the governor, that I know for sure. May as well eat this overstuffed enchilada. The last one Oryon will ever enjoy. Extra guacamole, please!

What else? I have all my school supplies. They’re just sitting there on my desk, taunting me by looking far more optimistic (even in all-business black) than I am about the start of the school year.

Scratch scratch at the door. It’s Snoopy. Who, in truth, has been a little standoffish toward me since I got home from RRR. It’s almost as though he doesn’t remember who I am. Or more likely, as if he knows exactly who I am and how my stupidity is what almost got him his own seat on death row.

He’s padding over to my bed, sniffing my comforter, eyeing me warily. I make the quintessential open-face, eagerly pat the bed, but Snoop doesn’t want to jump up. Instead, he mopes back over to an open cardboard box, sticks his head in and noses around, then wanders back out my bedroom door.

Thank G for the little chip between his shoulder blades. Like the one in the base of my neck, come to think of it. Only his was a lifeline that brought my parents back from Nana’s when the pound called and said they had Snoopy in custody, and that it’s lucky he was microchipped, because as a pit bull, he wouldn’t last more than forty-eight hours before being put down. “As sweet as he is,” the animal-control officer had told Mom and Dad, “we just can’t keep them around, for obvious reasons.”

Them. For obvious reasons. A year as Oryon sure tuned me in more than ever to the ways bigotry blares from the spaces in between, the way crabgrass busts through the asphalt. I know now how narrow the margin of error is for anyone (or any canine) of difference. How once people decide something—pit bulls = bad—no amount of actual fact seems to scrub that prejudice away. Changers are right about one thing: the power of an idea is stronger than just about anything. The power of an idea can save a nation. Or kill a dog.

When I look at Snoopy now, I am filled with guilt and regret that I’m the reason he was within a few hours of being put down. My carelessness, my selfishness. The series of BS choices that nearly added up to total catastrophe. Sometimes, okay, often I get stuck in this obsessive mental loop. If this, then that. If not this, then not that. With Snoopy. With Chase. With Audrey.

Like, what if Drew had been put in a different homeroom than Audrey freshmen year? We might never have met. At least not like that. She never would’ve pointed me to the “right” (girls’) bathroom in the hallway, never would’ve joked with me about Chloe’s wretchedness, nor would I ever have ironically tried out for cheerleading, which is where we got so close. Us against the world.

And what if Mom and Dad hadn’t changed the contact number for Snoopy’s microchip when we left New York for Tennessee, and the shelter couldn’t get in touch with my parents to let them know he had been picked up by the side of the highway, sans leash or collar? What if Mom got a flat tire, or was in an accident on the way home from Florida, and she didn’t make it back by the deadline the shelter gave before Snoopy was going to be “terminated”?

And what if they never chipped him in the first place? I mean, the call about Snoopy was the first thing that tipped Mom and Dad off that something was amiss back home. A few unanswered calls to your teenager? That’s expected, no need for panic at the disco. But when the shelter called, and they heard that Snoopy was found wandering free on the streets, they knew I never would’ve let that happen unless something was seriously wrong. I guess in a way, Snoopy being picked up by animal control was what helped the Council figure out that three of us Changers had gone missing. And . . .

Chase.

The ginormous elephant in the Chronicle I’m trying not to think about.

Chase.

Who is dead.

Dead because of me.

Even though nobody will put it that way. Nobody will come clean about the truth of what happened that day we got sprung from that basement. I couldn’t get a straight answer out of anybody during RRR. Not Tracy, not my parents, not a single Changers counselor. Turner the Lives Coach made it very clear that Elyse and I should “bask in gratitude” that we’d been saved, thanks to Chase’s brave actions, which was his “journey,” and not for us to mourn, but to “accept and celebrate.”

I knew Chase. Chase was not about his “journey.” He was about fighting the fight. He was at the head of the parade, bearing the banner, representing for all of us other cowards too chicken to be honest. He wasn’t about dying either. He would have said that crap was for the movies.

When I reflect on that time, on everything that happened, the rage fills me to my throat. Followed quickly by a sense of helplessness, a hobbling. So I shut it down. Put all the messiness in its respective boxes. Compartmentalize the eff out of my trauma. If I don’t, I can’t function. As evidenced by the first three weeks after the Tribulations when I lay in bed at Changers Central in a catatonic stupor, my mom and dad by my side, Elyse on the other side of the curtain, doing her own version of the same. Thank J for Battlestar Galactica. (Dad bought me the entire series on DVD, and I watched episodes back-to-back-to-back, breaking only for the bathroom and uncontrollable crying jags.)

The Council has advised that Elyse and I, the survivors, focus solely on our rehabilitation, our emotional recovery, and not fret about what happened, or how they will find and punish (or not) the perpetrators. Shut up and be happy, basically. We survived, we’re conscious and up walking about, even if not everyone else got off so lucky. Look at what happened to poor Alex. Sure, the kidnappers didn’t technically put him in that coma. But whatever happened amidst the fracas of the rescue certainly did. Yeah, the kid’ll get another body come his Change 2, Day 1, but it worries me what’s happening inside his brain, to his essential self inside the Alex shell, while he lies there in that bed at Changers Central, hooked up to beeping machines while his folks sit helplessly stroking his hand.

“Survivor’s remorse,” they called it at RRR. Told me I should abandon self-lacerating thought patterns because everything “is what it is, and is what it should be,” and no amount of my hating life, or hating that I have lives to hate, is going to make reality different.

But.

They didn’t see Alex. He was so scared. So small. He reminded me of Ethan. I was small then. I was scared. I was nothing like Chase.

Know-it-all Chase, always right about everything, always needing the last word.

Ah, yes. There’s the irony. Which he would have loved, of course.

No matter who I am, it’ll always remain imprinted on my brain. The first time I saw him at ReRunz. His smile curled at the corners. His confidence, unearned, but there nonetheless. I fell for him in that moment, before I knew he was a Changer, before I knew I was whatever I was. It was pure instinct, unfiltered, and that attraction deepened to love, and with love, respect; and before I knew it, Chase was my one true friend, the one who knew all the ugly about me and chose to love me anyway.

The end will also always remain imprinted. That same wry smile, maybe a little more world-weary, and on a different face, sure, but somehow essentially the same. And the “Fancy meeting you here!” slurred through bloodied, swollen lips, his head in my lap as his heart sludged up, slowing to a stop. I put my ear to his chest, hearing only three weak beats, sounding so far away. And then. He wasn’t there.

I think I called his name.

I must have called his name.

Seconds later there was loud banging in the hallway, a vague smell of electrical smoke. I can’t recall anything after that. Nor can Elyse. We’ve tried piecing it together, but neither of us can recollect much after Chase was thrown into the basement with us, bound and hooded. I try to concentrate. I meditate so hard, scanning the corners of my mind like some old, decommissioned hard drive. But all I can ever come up with is the door opening, the light searing into our pupils, noises, shouting, acrid, burning fog . . . and then waking up in a hospital gown at Changers Central, my alarmed parents pacing bedside, Turner the Lives Coach bending close to my eyes, the wooden prayer beads around his neck plunking on my chest like dropped marbles.

“Chase?”

Mom said it was the first word out of my mouth.

“He’s awake!” she screeched, and immediately started weeping, draping herself over me like an emergency blanket as Dad jumped off a cot in the corner and raced around the other side of the bed.

“Thank God,” Dad whispered into my neck. I think he was crying.

“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” I mumbled. I recall sounding so groggy to myself, my voice deeper than I remembered it sounding in my head before the Tribulations.

“Well, now I might need to reconsider,” he said, laugh-crying. “Smart-ass.”

“We were so worried,” Mom managed through her tears.

“I’m sorry,” I said. My head was so sore. It was then I noticed the searing sensation where the IV stuck out of my arm.

“Shhh, don’t even say that,” Mom said.

“You guys aren’t angry?”

“Angry? Why would we be angry?”

But before I could formulate an answer, I nodded off again, too exhausted to press them about Chase, or Alex, or Elyse, or Snoopy’s well-being, or where the hell I was. Nothing. Because immediately after I learned that Mom and Dad weren’t upset with me, I was out cold again, for God knows how long.