Changers Book Three. T Cooper
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