Kim Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Dedication

  Begin Reading

  Summer

  Oryon: Change 2–Day 359

  Oryon: Change 2–Day 360

  Oryon: Change 2–Day 362

  Oryon: Change 2–Day 365

  Fall

  KIM: Change 3–Day 1

  Change 3–Day 2

  Change 3–Day 3

  Change 3–Day 5

  Change 3–Day 7

  Change 3–Day 11

  Change 3–Day 13

  Change 3–Day 15

  Change 3–Day 17

  Change 3–Day 18

  Change 3–Day 19

  Change 3–Day 28

  Winter

  Change 3–Day 73

  Change 3–Day 79

  Change 3–Day 81

  Change 3–Day 87

  Change 3–Day 89

  Change 3–Day 90

  Change 3–Day 91

  Change 3–Day 92

  Change 3–Day 93

  Change 3–Day 95

  Change 3–Day 96

  Change 3–Day 106

  Change 3–Day 108

  Change 3–Day 110

  Change 3–Day 113

  Change 3–Day 117

  Change 3–Day 117, Part Deux

  Change 3–Day 124

  Change 3–Day 125

  Change 3–Day 130

  Change 3–Day 143

  Change 3–Day 144

  Spring

  Change 3–Day 163

  Change 3–Day 164

  Change 3–Day 189

  Change 3–Day 191

  Change 3–Day 192

  Change 3–Day 193

  Change 3–Day 195

  Change 3–Day 201

  Abridged Glossary of Terms (Excerpted from the Changers Bible)

  Acknowledgments

  A Look Back: Changers Book One: Drew

  Also Available: Changers Book Two: Oryon

  About the Authors

  Copyright & Credits

  About Black Sheep and Akashic Books

  For anybody who has looked in the mirror

  and not recognized the person s/he sees.

  Before he became the one he was meant to be, before he lived through those four years called high school, those four years where everything he ever knew evaporated into air, where the ground dropped away, and he fell in love, and he lived through hate and violence and the loss of his best friend, and saved lives without even knowing how, and was rescued by a girl and a boy and words and music, and he did everything wrong until he got a few important things right, before he questioned what it meant to be special, what it meant to be anything, and harnessed his power, the power he didn’t believe he had, the power others tried to take, before that and a hundred other awful, wondrous, ruinous, magical things happened, he was just a kid in Tennessee named Oryon.

  Oryon

  Change 2–Day 359

  Is this working? ———?

  I’m not sure I remember how to do this anymore, after what? Four months’ hiatus from dutifully Chronicling every high school heartbreak and hangnail. (Not to mention all the useless thoughts and absurd fears that crossed my mind ever since being bestowed with the knowledge that I’m one of the rare, lucky Changers walking the planet.)

  Pshhhst.

  You want to know the biggest thing I’ve learned over the last two years? Everything is temporary.

  Every. Thing. Is. Temporary. Life, love, strep throat, dandruff, icebergs, me.

  I have one more week of being this thing Oryon, and then I’m going to be some other thing that turns up in my bed as mandated by the paperwork inside the packet that the Changers Council will drop off on that dreaded morning. Also known as: Change 3, Day 1. Not even a tiny bit psyched about that. Don’t want to think about it right now. So I’m not going to. Why bother anyway? Because hey, everything is temporary, yo. Which is another way of saying, you have no control over anything, ever, so stop fooling yourself and sweating something you can’t actually do anything about. Sounds comforting, right? In theory it should be. And yet in reality, I can’t seem to act like I’ve learned this vital lesson about the leaf-on-the-wind, transitory nature of existence. Because, shit still matters to me.

  Like, Audrey. Like, not being able to talk with Audrey since . . .

  . . . Well, since you know.

  We hooked up.

  (Still can’t believe that actually happened. I’ve played it over in my mind so many times it feels more like a scene from a favorite movie than my real life.)

  Audrey. Sweet, beautiful, lovely—and probably deeply (and rightfully) confused—Audrey.

  I still have no idea what happened after I disappeared on her. I’ve imagined every scenario in my mind. I know she was upset, like, jump-up-out-of-bed, gather-and-clutch-your-clothes-to-your-bare-chest-and-flee-the-apartment-before-running-haphazardly-into-moving-traffic upset. And she likely stayed that upset for a while. But did she ever try to contact to me when the rage dissipated? If it did dissipate. Which I wouldn’t blame her if it didn’t. I mean, she thinks I’m a psycho-liar-face-creeper who either bagged her best friend, or stalked them both, or some other stomach-churning combo of garbage-person scenarios.

  I didn’t reach out to her. Couldn’t. What with the abduction. Followed by four months of reprogramming lock-down at the Changers “Restoration and Rehabilitation Retreat” (RRR), which buried me deeper underground than the Titanic’s colon. Even in federal prison you get to go out in the yard for a couple hours a week, wait in line for the pay phone every now and again. Not so much at the Changers Secure Housing Unit, where you can’t even burp without someone checking a box on a clipboard, all under the guise of “restoring physical, mental, and emotional well-being to your many selves.” And okay, sure, after the trauma of the whole Abiders kidnapping ordeal, I probably needed it. But the one-two punch of loss of control and the shredding of my dignity, such as it was, well, let’s just say I now refer to that whole period of my putrid life as the “Tribulations.”

  That’s another thing I learned: it helps to name things.

  I wish I knew what to call my relationship with Audrey. I guess I don’t have one anymore. Beyond the one in my imagination. Audrey lives in Memory Town now. What a dick-move on my part­­­­­­­­­­—to make her believe I loved her. I mean, it was the truth that I loved her. Like I’ve never loved anything or anyone. I still love her. I guess the issue was who exactly was doing the loving. I told myself it didn’t matter. I let us both get swept up in the fever and just went with it like young people across millennia, continents, cultures, and galaxies do. Some guy named Anil and his girl Sujatha are probably curled up in the back of his dad’s car on a steamy dead-end street in the outskirts of Mumbai right now. And a girl named Michèle and her crush Sophie are running down the steps of the Paris metro holding hands, their pink and blue hair catching the breeze from a train blowing into the station down below. Audrey and I were no different.

  But I was. I was different. Am different. And I kept that to myself. What did I think was going to happen? What starts in a lie can only end in a lie. I set myself up to be the bad guy and poof, now I’m gone. For good. Never to be redeemed. Later, Oryon. Except for us Changers, there is no later.

  Audrey didn’t even get the pleasure of flipping me off in the hallways or watching her friends ice me out or having her missing-several-links brother splinter my tailbone one unsuspecting Friday after the football game. (Unless he was in fact one of my Abider kidnappers, but even then I can’t imagine Audrey knew. She couldn’t have. Could she?)

  Bottom line—if I really believed everything is temporary, I wouldn’t be obsessing right now, the first day I’m sprung from RRR. I wouldn’t be sitting here thinking
how horrible it must’ve felt (still feels?) for Audrey to have trusted me so completely and sincerely, only to discover me as a fraud. Or what she thinks indicates I’m a fraud. Which, I totally am the definition of.

  As Nana would say, “A pig’s ass is pork.” Lies for good reasons are still lies. Any way you cut it, it looks bad for Oryon, who, come Monday morning, will vaporize and be replaced by someone else, the who of which hardly matters, because it won’t be Oryon and Oryon is the boy Audrey loved.

  Great, now it feels like I’m about to hyperventilate. Breathe. Breathe. Man, I’m still so messed up. It’s crazy-making, this merry-go-round of thoughts and doubts and fears and what-ifs. Plus, I WAS FREAKING LOCKED IN A BASEMENT AND LEFT TO ROT WHILE MY BEST FRIEND DIED IN MY ARMS. Sorry, Changers Council, that ain’t a stain easily bleached away no matter how much brain retraining or “life is a series of never-ending stories” continuum crap you lay on me.

  Okay. I need to calm down. Get a grip already. Know what I can change and what I can’t. I can’t change how Audrey feels. I can’t change what happened to Chase.

  I can change how I respond right now. I can practice my “mindfulness meditation,” one thing I got out of RRR that isn’t the worst.

  I am simply being here and now. Let’s take inventory: I’m sitting on this old bed, in a new bedroom, in a new house, cardboard boxes filled with my familiar things all around me. Close my eyes. I’m simply breathing and sitting here on my bed, no big deal. In, out, in, out. I can hear the garbage truck rumbling on the street, birds tweeting in the branches outside the window, feel an itch stirring in the hairs on my forearm. I’m not going to scratch it. Just notice it’s there, along with all of the other sensations in my body that are going on right now, pleasant and unpleasant. (Mostly unpleasant.) The rapid breaths I can’t help, that come from somewhere in the center I can’t quite reach, have no dominion over me. My dry mouth, a slight soreness on the left side of my throat every time I swallow. Nothing I need to do right now except breathe and be. What’s that? Oh, it’s the toilet running, which in only a few short hours in my new room I’ve noticed struggles to partially refill the tank every five minutes. There must be a slow, tiny leak somewhere.

  Okay, so all that’s happening. And so much more. And yet, also, really nothing.

  I notice my breathing is slowing some now. Can’t do anything but pay attention to it. In, out, in, out, in, out. Just for these five minutes I’m allowing Oryon/myself to be let off the hook. For everything. Nothing I have to do now but pay attention to the breathing, the panic subsiding. My heart isn’t flip-flopping in my chest anymore. My crazy is chilling out. I’m the boss of my body. I am the captain now. Breathe: in, out, in, out.

  KNOCK-KNOCK, my door is opening. (An actual door. Not a symbolic, spiritual one.) It’s Mom, knock-knock-entering without waiting for a “Come in!” Per usual.

  “Hey, petunia, you okay?”

  Simply being is simply done. “Yep,” I answer.

  “Do you need anything?”

  “Nope.”

  I glance up, notice again how Mom looks older. The events of the past few months registering on her face as years. She doesn’t bother chiding me for the “Yep” or the “Nope.” She doesn’t bother with a lot of things like that anymore. The things that don’t really matter when it comes down to life and death.

  “Some ice water maybe?”

  I shake my head. Smile with my lips closed.

  “It’s weird to be back, huh?” she asks quietly.

  “But I’ve never been here.”

  “I know. I just mean back from the retreat,” she says, pulling my old stuffed animal Lamby-cakes out of a box and propping him on my desk, his neckless head flopping flat to his shoulder. “I know everything is hard right now. I’m just glad you’re home.”

  “It wasn’t a ‘retreat,’ but yeah, me too.”

  Which wasn’t entirely true. Because while I’m happy to be sprung from all of my former incarcerations, I would rather be navigating my way on the city bus to Audrey’s house right this minute, trying somehow to make things right with her before I change again, instead of doing deep-breathing exercises in my bed with my mommy checking in on me every five minutes.

  Sure, Mom’s being totally thoughtful and accepting and nonjudgmental, all the things we talked about in family counseling during the triple-R sessions. (Dad’s a different story, but whatever.) Thing is, I need a friend whose uterus I didn’t come out of. One I can tell everything, despite how much trouble that could bring for not just me and my family, but for my entire Changers race.

  “Want me to help you set up your room?” Mom asks, scrambling my decidedly non-Changer-approved fantasies of outing myself to Audrey. “It’ll go faster if there are two of us.”

  “I’m good.”

  Since the Tribulations, Mom’s been treating me like a hollowed-out eggshell. Intact, but with its gelatinous guts having been sucked away via two tiny pinholes.

  Or maybe that’s just how I envision myself.

  I know she’s doing her best, that she’s suffered perhaps the most through all of this, but I just want to be alone in this strange room, the fourth strange room in as many months. First the pitch-black Abider basement of doom. Then the impossibly bright urgent-care holding pen at Changers Central for the few days it took me to be rehydrated, renourished, and “stabilized” (ha!). Next it was the white, pristine “no triggers here, folks!” suite I shared with Elyse while we went through the RRR program together.

  And now this bedroom, in a new house somewhere in the anonymous, weedy outskirts of Nashville, because “it was decided” by the Council that our old apartment in Genesis was potentially compromised—by my bringing Audrey there, and her brother maybe seeing me chasing Audrey across the highway like a scene from Dog the Bounty Hunter.

  Yes, the Boggle board of my life has been jumbled yet again, this time more thoroughly, with everything about to settle into entirely new squares, spelling out entirely new words and stories. Starting with my name.

  (It helps to name things.)

  Miraculously, the Council didn’t decide to switch my school. That particular risk-reward analytic came out in my favor. So, I’ll get to see Audrey again. I will see her in a mere six days, even if it’s from afar—and from behind the mask of yet another new classmate whom she will not know and likely not want to get to know after the last new kid she opened herself up to totally shattered her heart. Still, it’ll be better than nothing at all. I can keep an eye on her, make sure Jason doesn’t do something horrible, never mind that Kyle guy who was harassing her in my vision. Even if I don’t find a way to tell her what happened to Oryon, the new me can stay by her side. Ride or die.

  “You’re going to need some school supplies,” Mom says, interrupting my scheming yet again. “Make a list of the colors and ones you want, and I can grab them next time I hit the shop.”

  School supplies. I used to care about those. I actually spent time picking out the folders and the pencil holders, as if having the right folder or pencil holder would communicate something relevant about me and smooth my way into school society. Which it probably did. Because most students still care about folders and pencil holders, and they notice when a kid has a generic red one from the cheap place, and another kid has one with rhinestones in the shape of a kitten, and they make assessments about said kids based on those items and choices (loser, winner, friend-able, undate-able, rebel), and they do this because they aren’t preoccupied with, I don’t know, changing into a completely different human, even though—spoiler alert—they are! Just not as obviously.

  How’s that for insight? Oh how the path to knowledge is strewn with large, bloody, severed chunks of ego. I am feeling just a tick pleased with myself. Warmed slightly by the irresistible cocktail of my cleverness and bitterness, and I absentmindedly decide I’ll call Chase because he would laugh harder than anyone at my school supply riff, would nod his head and say he knew exactly what I was getting at, then proba
bly ruin the moment by lecturing that I was finally “getting it” re: the hypocrisy of the Changer movement and the need for all of us to be out and proud and united and part of the fabric of daily life if we ever want to be completely 100 percent accepted and integrated into society, blah blah. The whole conversation plays out in my head in a matter of seconds, the way conversations with close friends always do. And it takes a beat before I’m reminded of the saddest thing of all. That from here on out, all my conversations with Chase will be in my head.

  “Whatever school supplies are fine, Mom,” I say.

  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.