Changers Book Four Read online

  “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.”

  Kim

  Change 3–Day 203

  “What the Charles Dickens were you thinking?” Touchstone Tracy, cooking up a bitter broth of panic and judgment, per her usual. “Protesting? Outing yourself? Outing US? Have you lost your mind?”

  Tracy is pacing my room, paying me a home visit, courtesy of Turner the Lives Coach, who the minute he got wind of the RaChas action, dispatched every local Touchstone to dress down their designated Changer, before a dozen mini rebellions could ignite from a single protest, even if the initial action so far had little measurable consequence beyond the viral video of Destiny coldcocking Jason.

  “Have you even thought about what this could mean for our kind?” Tracy whisper-talks, like we’re exchanging spy secrets in a dark parking garage.

  “Yes. That’s why I did it,” I say. “Hiding in the shadows is bullshit.”

  “You sound like that no-good Benedict Arnold,” she spits.

  “It’s fine if you like being closeted, but I don’t.”

  “We’re not hiding. We’re making calculated choices,” she says sharply, prompting Snoopy to jump off my bed.

  “For whom?” I ask snottily.

  “For everyone. For mankind. Mercy, Kim. Have you lost the plot entirely? I thought you’d grown more than this.”

  I silently watch Snoopy nose the door ajar and slink out, not enjoying the tense energy swirling in the room between me and Tracy.

  She presses on as if reading from an official statement: “Our very reason for being is to spread empathy and tolerance, to better ourselves so we can be examples, find Static partners, and make more Changers, so eventually there will be no one left to fear. Changers bleed all souls together, while preserving and honoring all of our differences. We are here to eliminate the concept of otherness.”

  “Love and light, right?” I snap sarcastically.

  “Don’t belittle the mission. You’re smarter than that.”

  “Trace? Do you really believe the only way to make change is by flying under the radar? Going along to get along? Tricking people into discovering their better natures? I don’t know if you’ve looked around lately, but the world isn’t exactly brimming with better natures. Abiders are on the rise, becoming more violent, more brazen than ever. They’re networking, metastasizing.”

  “Kim, when power is threatened, those in power act out. For our safety, we need to stick to the plan. Stay together. In the many we are one.”

  “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

  At that Tracy’s eyes snap shut like she’s going to her happy place, a.k.a. a world without me in it. “Oh, for Christmas sake,” she says after a beat, eyes jerking back open.

  I feel bad for her. In coming here she was trying to do her job, execute orders she believed were right. Tracy is a good soldier, for sure, but she is also a good person. And I am once again making her life a unique hell.

  “I know you want the best for me,” I start, but she cuts me off.

  “For three long years I have done everything I can do for you. Tried to show you the value of others, of your purpose. Our shared purpose. And you have chosen your own needs at every turn—”

  “Wait a second, that’s not fair.”

  “I never thought I’d say this, but Chase was right about you.”

  “Keep his name out of your mouth!” I scream, surprised by the break in my voice.

  “You don’t give a single hoot about anything but your own desires in the moment,” she continues.

  “Enough.”

  “You’re right, Kim. Enough. I’ve failed. You want to tell the world about us, put everyone and everything we stand for at risk, that’s on you. But I won’t be a part of it.”

  And with that, Tracy marched out, chin forward, back rod-straight. I could practically smell her indignation as she passed by me.

  * * *

  I should be more invested, but in what’s becoming something of a theme in my life—I’m kind of not. I didn’t ask for any of this. Why is it my job to teach idiots that they should care about other people? News flash: dolts like Jason will never, ever care about freaks like me. Certain people will always hate “the gays” and “the blacks” and “the Jews” and “the Muslims” and “the foreigners” and “the feminists” and “the poor” and “the differently abled” and any other group that seems to pose a threat to their fragile house of dominance cards. Jason and his Abider-leaning goons are not going to wake up one day and realize they’ve been stunted zealots their whole lives and start driving for Meals on Wheels or working shifts on the LGBTQ suicide hotline.

  If my year as Kim has shown me anything, it’s that the appetite for cruelty among certain people is never sated. Queen beyotch Chloe could never get past the way I appear. My size alone was enough for her to assign me to a box and duct-tape the lid shut. Okay, sure, being Kim helped me. I grew. (Ha ha, did I.) But so what? Was I such a jerk before? According to Tracy, I’m a bigger jerk today. So maybe, hear me out, this whole Changer thing is an epic, outdated fail, especially in these times. And if it is, then why in the hell would I stick with the
program?

  I don’t care if the Council is monitoring these Chronicles. I’m going rogue. Full stop. And the best part of that is that I am going to meet up with Audrey, and I am going to walk her through the whole twisted shebang, and I know—I know—she is going to finally see how she is my person.

  What else could possibly happen?

  Kim

  Change 3–Day 205

  I heard about the fire from Andy first. He showed up at the door of my house, duffel bag in hand, trying to act like he was still pissed at me, but so obviously scared and lost he couldn’t hold his bitch face.

  “It’s gone,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The whole place, RaChas HQ. Torched to ash. Apocalypse-level stuff.”

  “What? How?”

  “Abiders, probably. Maybe they were tipped off after the coming-out march,” he said.

  “Jesus. Was anybody hurt?” I asked, flashing on Benedict and some of my other RaChas roommates from when I lived at HQ during my depression.

  “No. Benedict had pretty much cleared everybody out while he was ‘reestablishing healthy boundaries’ and ‘reinstituting his self-care regime.’”

  Of course he was.

  “Most of the RaChas were squatting with friends or in shelters, except me and Zeke and Layla. Layla was actually sleeping when the fire started, and she tried to grab some equipment, but as it was, she barely got out of there herself.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I was helping Benedict load up his car for what he called his ‘journey to me’ road trip.”

  “Sounds like a book my mother would recommend to her single-mom clients,” I said.

  “We’d gone to get the tires pumped when we heard the sirens. By the time we made it back, the whole building was in flames.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Come in. We’ll figure something out.”

  I had no idea what I was going to say to my parents. Bringing in a Static from your pre-Changer past was well outside of protocol. I knew my dad would crap a Changer brick, especially with his ever-increasing role at Changers Central. But this was Andy. My first friend.

  I figured I could count on Mom to see past the rules to the person. Andy was a refugee who needed harboring. He had no place left to go. And he figured out the Changers thing all by himself, more or less. Benedict leaked the deets. Not me. I would NEVER break Changer Rule Number One.

  At least that’s how I spun it to Mom, after I swear I saw sparks shoot from her brain through her ears when Andy walked in and dropped his bag on the carpet.

  She kept it together as well as she could, rushing over and smothering him in a full mom-style hug, peppering him with a million questions about where he’s been, how he found us, when his voice grew so deep, and of course if he wanted a chicken-and-chili-cheese burrito.

  Andy seemed grateful, if a bit embarrassed. After a few minutes he excused himself to go to the bathroom, and that’s when Mom turned to me and made the gritted-teeth emoticon face.

  “Your father is going to freak,” she says flatly, soon as Andy’s out of earshot.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know what else to do,” I reply. “His dad kicked him out.”

  “I’ll handle Dad,” she whispers.

  I practically leap into her arms. “Thanks, Mom. I swear I didn’t plan on this—he showed up unannounced at RaChas HQ.”

  “We can talk about all that later. But bottom line is, we can’t turn him out on the streets. I suspect your father and I will want to tell his parents he’s alive.”

  “I’m not sure they care,” I say.

  “Of course they do.”

  I drop the argument, for now. The important thing is Andy has a temporary home. And I have a chance to make it right with him again.

  “I can’t believe they burned down HQ. What if you were still living there?” Mom asks then, shoulders giving a small shiver.

  “There are some really messed-up people in this world, Mom. People who want us dead and gone. People who’d rather us burn alive than open their hearts to something different.”

  “I know that, sweet pea. History is rife with cruelty.”

  It seems like she could cry. I sense a part of her is as skeptical as I am of the Changer mission’s ability to right the wrongs of the past. If anyone understands the limits of human growth, it’s a shrink.

  “Change never comes as fast as we want it to,” she acknowledges. “But the arc of progress bends toward the light.”

  “Okay, Turner Lives Coach.”

  “I’m serious,” she persists, ignoring my sass. “And the brighter that light gets, the harder the dark forces try to extinguish it. In some ways, the rise of the Abiders, the escalation of their violence, proves that Changers are winning the war. The Abiders are scared. They feel their obsolescence coming like a hard, cleansing rain.”

  “You sound like an end-times movie preview,” I joke, assuming the deep baritone of the omnipresent film-trailer narrator: “In a world filled with pain and hate, an unlikely hero emerges . . .”

  “. . . A hero like none other, one the forces of evil did not see coming,” Mom chimes in, in the same cheesy deep voice.

  “A girl! Of size! Who likes other girls! Can you believe that shit?” I intone, doing the last bit in my best Aziz Ansari voice.

  We both fall out laughing. Mom kisses me on the cheek, tells me in the movie voice that I should check on Andy “before it’s too late.”

  Sitting on my bed, I think about what she said. I want to trust that the world is moving toward tolerance and a widening circle of what it means to be a human in all its myriad forms and permutations. I want to know that kids like me, and Kris, and Michelle Hu, and even Audrey for that matter, will not have to grow up afraid of having to live in some oppressive Handmaid’s Tale nightmare, but from what I can see, from what I have lived in all my lives so far, that sounds like the stuff of fantasy. The Jasons of the world don’t seem scared to me. They don’t suffer. They don’t have to look over their shoulder when they walk down the street. They seem more brazen and confident in their beliefs than ever.

  Andy knocks at the door, interrupting my doom spiral. “Cool if I come in?”

  “Duh, dummy.”

  He enters slowly, eyes darting around like he’s searching for something specific. Evidence of Ethan, I guess.

  “Nice space,” he says.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “This is as awkward as a plane fart.” He grimaces.

  “Yeah. But it doesn’t have to suck.” I’m trying to see Kim through his POV. Wondering what he thinks of her. What he would think of her if he didn’t know it was me.

  “It doesn’t?” he asks.

  “Would you rather I was Destiny?” I give him a seductive shimmy.

  “Oh, man. Don’t do that.”

  “Don’t you think I’m sexxxy? I’m too sexy for my cat, too sexy for my blouse, too sexy for my car,” I start singing.

  “Dude, those are not the words.”

  “Too sexy for my sandwich, too sexy for my jeans—”

  “I’m begging you to stop!” Andy lets out a goofy moan of despair. It feels a little like old times, me and Andy acting like idiots.

  I stand up, dance the robot. “I’m too sexy for my external hard drive, for my animatronic limbs.”

  Andy hops up, starts dancing too, both of us executing the lamest pop-and-lock-routine on record.

  “Too sexy for my empty, cavernous soul, too sexy for Sylvia Plath, too sexy for Kid Rock, I mean Robert Ritchie,” I sing, Andy laughing louder and harder until we both tire out, collapsing, breathing heavy, side by side on my bed.

  I turn my head, stare right into his eyes, get a thought but hold it in—because Andy will think it’s weird. But then I can’t help it and it just blurts out: “I’ve kind of missed you. It’s been hard, doing this on my own, when nobody knows me like you do.”

  Andy jerks his chin toward the ceiling, breaking my gaze, but I pres
s on: “I get that this is bonkers, that it feels like a sick joke. But I didn’t ask for it. And I never wanted to leave you behind. I needed you.”

  “Sure you did,” Andy chokes out, swiveling his head even farther away from mine.

  “I did. I always did. Because Ethan doesn’t exist without you.”

  Andy sits up, heads toward the door like he’s leaving, then freezes. “Well, the Ethan I knew,” he starts stiffly, still facing away, as I feel my skin prick with tension, “was a terrible, terrible . . . singer.”

  “Suck it,” I say.

  “And an even worse dancer. So it seems to me like he is more or less still in the picture.”

  In an instant, I feel years of shame dissolve. I try and keep it together so as not to spoil the moment. “Like you’re Travis freaking Wall.”

  “Who the hell is Travis Wall?” he asks. “Is that a chick thing?”

  “Piss off. And, totally.”

  “You want a Coke, spazmatron?” he asks.

  “I’m too sexy for a Coke, too sexy for a clichéd version of sexxxxxy,” I shoot back, as Andy spins around and moonwalks down the hall toward the kitchen.

  * * *

  The rest of the night we didn’t talk about anything but graphic novel Harley Quinn versus movie Harley Quinn, and whether men’s soccer is better than women’s soccer (it isn’t), and how we’d both 1,000 percent have sex with Jennifer Lopez even though she’s older than our moms. Then we watched serial killer documentaries on Netflix, ate nachos and cinnamon toast, and used Twizzlers as straws in our Cokes.

  We said nothing about anything that mattered. (Something that mattered more to me than I can say.)

  Kim

  Change 3–Day 207

  “Ethan didn’t care about outfits, dude,” Andy says from my bed, where he’s playing vintage GTA like we used to.

  “No, seriously, which one?” I ask, holding up two shirts in front of my chest.

  “The one on the left,” he mumbles.

  “You’re not even looking!” I whine, throwing the white Ramones T-shirt on the floor and opting to go with a plain black one.

  “Do you think Destiny would go out with me?” Andy asks for the 147th time since meeting her.