Change 4–Day 241, Part Two

So, except for the kitchen and living room, which were set up impeccably for the party, Mr. Crowell and Tracy were still only half moved in to the rest of the house, boxes and suitcases everywhere, piles of clothes on hangers slung over chairs, newspaper and bubble wrap strewn about. (Mr. Crowell’s stuff, I’m certain. Tracy does not abide disorder.) In the bedroom, I spotted a flicker of light off a mirrored jewel box on the dresser, and upon closer examination, I saw that it had the Changers emblem etched into the glass on top. For some reason, I felt drawn to peek inside. I know, not cool, and Tracy would freak the eff out if she knew I was messing with her private things, but that’s what I did. (She might want to get used to no privacy if she’s about to have a child, but whatever.)

I flipped open the top of the box and looked inside. At first it seemed to be filled with a bunch of pins that the Council had given Tracy for various levels of service to the Changers cause, almost like Girl Scout badges or something, but then I saw it: that Barbie-sized little flashlight-y doodad. The fob that Tracy used each year to reboot and initialize my Chronicling chip on the morning of each new V—which triggers the Chronicling for the new year.

I picked up the thingamabob, and it beeped twice, then flashed blue. I glanced around to make sure nobody heard the beeping. And that’s when the idea popped into my head. Maybe from watching too many intricately orchestrated heist movies, where some nerd with a personality disorder always had to devise a way to jam a signal temporarily so that the vaguely psychopathic but good-at-their-job crooks can breach some sort of security laser beam between them and their intended target.

Why not try that on myself? Redirect the future. Turn it off while I’m Kyle, get it back up and running soon as the danger’s past.

So I stuck my thumb over the tip of the fob like I’d seen Tracy do four times before; it beeped again, flashed red a few times, and then I held it over the skin on the back of my neck where my Chronicling chip is implanted.

Exactly like those mornings of C1–D1, C2–D1, C3–D1, and C4–D1, it beeped once more, and then I felt a slight click and a whirr at the base of my skull, and then whoosh. Something was immediately different. Maybe not different, more like back to normal again, as in back when I was Ethan (and didn’t have a rice-sized electronic chip implanted in the flesh at base of my neck!). So I tried thinking something to Chronicle, but after waving that fob over the chip, it didn’t happen. Like that muscle stopped working or something.

I was offline. It felt free.

Thinking back, I vaguely remember Benedict talking about something like this, a hack on our Chronicling chips that some of the RaChas who went AWOL from their families would do, hoping to avoid Chronicling, but also to gum up the processes going on inside our bodies when gearing up for the next change, to try to stave it off. I never heard of it working, but Benedict did say that he knew one Changer a few years ago who managed to remove his chip himself. Sounds gruesome, sure, but at that point I understood the impulse. I would try anything to be able to unplug and live under the radar and basically not be a Changer who’s beholden to Changers rules and life processes for the rest of Y-4, so I could be with Audrey and not have to worry about a vision that was part of Changers world, and not the real one.

Then I heard what I thought was somebody coming down the hall into the bedroom, so I quickly tucked the fob back into the little box, closed the lid, and shoved my hands in my pockets like I was admiring the new master bedroom with en suite bath—right in time for Mr. Crowell to pop his head in and say, “Hey, buddy, we’re doing the cake,” a little confused as to why I might be creeping around his bedroom solo.

“This is a dope house,” I chirped, “love that vintage tile in the shower.”

“Cool, thanks,” he replied, jovial and floppy-haired as ever, as we went back down the hall and cut the Congratulations cake with the rest of the party.

And then I went home. Things felt a shade different. I can’t describe how. But I wanted to test myself, beyond the not-Chronicling thing. I know it sounds crazy, and rather drastic, and anybody monitoring this might call the mental health authorities, but this was how desperately I wanted to escape the reality of who I was in that moment. I took my Swiss Army Knife, rubbed some alcohol on the blade, and cut into the skin on my thigh—to see how long the incision would take to heal: the usual one to two weeks it takes for Statics to heal from a cut like this, or the two to three days it takes a Changer. I figured once my Changer-ness was sort of jammed by my chip being turned off, then maybe my other Changer properties—like healing from injuries and illness quicker than Statics—would also get deactivated.

It was surprisingly easy to do, dragging that blade across the top of my thigh (I did it so my boxer briefs would cover the wound, so that my mom or Andy or anyone else wouldn’t ask about it). Watching the first line of blood emerge, my whole body involuntarily shivered, so I ended up cutting a slightly longer line than I’d planned, maybe it was two inches total. Not that deep. Nothing horror film worthy.

I went into the bathroom and pressed some gauze onto the cut, and when it stopped bleeding, I smushed a little antibiotic ointment inside and covered the wound with a couple Band-Aids.

Satisfied that my secret science experiment was underway, I called Audrey and made another date with her. And another and another and another.

From then on, the months were perfect and blissful and radiant, like we were falling in love all over again, only this time in the pages of a J.Crew catalog. We spent every free second with each other, went to hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Nashville, walked by the river where, unbeknownst to Audrey, we’d already had sex (Kim), and even started hanging out a little with Michelle and Kris. Building a “normal” high school life together as a couple.

One weekend Aud, Kris, and I all went to Dolly Parton Drag night at the Carousel (this being Tennessee, one might argue that every night is Dolly Parton Drag night at the Carousel). We danced naughtily with drag queens, drag kings, boys, girls, and every amazing place in between.

I kept all this from Tracy and my folks, of course. Tracy was in pregnancy zone, which for her meant enrolling in every prenatal class ever invented, keeping her preoccupied and out of my hair. My mom and dad (Dad mostly) seemed so fracking over the moon about big-man-on-campus Kyle that they gave me more rope than ever.

As Kyle I projected authority, or rather it was projected on me. People expected I was handling my business, because that’s what good-looking white guys do, right? It was peculiar, all this unwarranted benefit of the doubt, but I wasn’t about to turn it away. I soaked in that privilege like a sponge. What was the alternative? Lock myself in a box and seal the lid shut?

It wasn’t like I was becoming Jason, (the soggy piece of toast you can’t wash down the drain). Yes, I had power now. I was the top of the social food chain. But I knew power came with responsibilities. I’ve seen Spider-Man. I wasn’t throwing my dick around. Not even literally. Like, I wasn’t pushing Audrey to have sex with me. After the whole roofie incident with April and Jenny, and Audrey getting dragged into cleaning up Jason’s mess with me, sex was pretty much the last thing I wanted to bring into the mix. Plus, I’d had sex with her before, so that constant urge toward discovering somebody in that way had been satisfied (at least on my side). There were major make-out sessions. (I’m not a monk. Nor is Audrey.)

It turned out my cut took a good week to heal (kind of in between the Static and Changer healing rates, in my scientific conclusion about the experiment), so I posited that jamming my chip did in fact succeed in causing something to be “off” with my overall Changer-ness, and everything was so good between me and Audrey and life as Kyle in general that I used that one-week healing time to convince myself that I was practically a Static, inoculated against anything that could ever happen in Changerworld.

As if I needed more convincing, I took a hit in the second quarter of the championship football game a few weeks after Audrey and I started seeing one another. It wasn’t too monster of a hit, but when my helmet slammed onto the grass beneath two heavy defensive linemen, I immediately heard a pop, then ringing in my ears, and then the coaches reluctantly (honestly, their faces looked like they were at their grandpappy’s funeral or something) made me sit out the rest of the game because they thought I had a concussion.

I was so high on Audrey, and she was so high on me, that I didn’t even really care that we lost the championship game after I got benched, because my backup QB Darryl couldn’t pull off the win. There were some crushed faces in the stadium that night; Jason’s was probably the most devastated of all of them, like his dreams had been dashed anew, but through me. Sorry. Not sorry. Yeah, it sucked to lose after working all season long toward this one massive collective dream that didn’t get fulfilled. But it was not going to be the highlight of my life, and I knew it. I had bigger fish to fry.

On the way back to Genesis from the stadium in Knoxville where the championship game was played, Audrey and I held hands in the rear of Kris’s car. I rested my concussed head on Audrey’s shoulder as the lights flashed by on the highway. My head throbbed, in addition to the ringing. The on-site doctor said I needed to go see my regular doctor on Monday, because some signs of concussion don’t appear for up to a couple of days after an injury, though I’d decided I wasn’t going to tell my parents what happened unless it got worse. And every sign that I was hurting like a Static proved my stupid hypothesis that pulling out of Changerworld would prevent the inevitable from actually happening.

I could see a rectangle of light on Kris’s eyes in the rearview mirror as he drove. He kept switching back and forth between us and the road ahead. Then he turned down the eighties new wave mix he was playing on the stereo.

“Calling all you basic bitches, I have an announcement,” he said out of nowhere.

“You have a new boyfriend?” Audrey shot back.

“Girl, no. Bigger.”

“Bigger than booing up?” she said.

“I’m transitioning.”

“Oh my god!” Audrey screamed, bolting up beside me. “Yaaaaaasss!”

“Soon as I graduate and turn eighteen, I can get an appointment to see about hormones,” Kris explained.

“This is amazing, I’m so happy for you,” Audrey squealed, launching between the front seats and hugging Kris, making us swerve onto the shoulder of the road.

“That’s so cool,” I added, trying to tamp down the rush of feeling that raced through my heart for Kris. I was, of course, filled with pride because I knew he’d been struggling with this particular question and battling with his parents over it for a long time. But I was trying not let it show too blatantly. Because, of course, Kyle didn’t know any of this.

“Should we start using she now?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Kris said, sort of thrown by the question. Or maybe not by the question, but by the questioner.

“Well, we’ve got your back—in the bathroom, on the streets, whatever you want. Say the word,” I offered, as Audrey settled back into me and I put my arm around her.

After another mile or so of driving in the dark, Kris said, “Okay, we figured me out. Let’s figure you out.”

“Who, me?” I asked.

“Yeah, you.”

“What’s to figure out?” Audrey said, pecking my sweaty cheek. “Mmm, salty.”

“Why are you, cis poster child Aryan dream, driving back from the pinnacle of your high school career with a lifelong homo-soon-to-be-transgirl, and going out with a rumored lesbo?” he asked, smiling.

“Yeah, he really turned me into a hasbian, didn’t he?” Audrey joked.

“I’m serious,” Kris said. “Doesn’t this wig you out at all?”

“What?” I said.

“This. Me, the drag bar, all the queeny stuff.”

“Why would it wig me out?” I asked, knowing exactly why, if I’d been Kyle forever.

“Do you know any trans people?” Kris asked.

“He’s from Seattle,” Audrey interjected.

I understood Kris’s doubts and suspicions, his apprehension about me. I mean, guys who look like Kyle have essentially made his life hell since the minute he was a conscious person in the world.

“So none of this makes you uncomfortable?” Kris continued. “Just asking.”

“Well, you don’t have to be such a bitch while doing it,” Audrey said.

I liked her getting a little protective of me.

“Why would somebody being who they are make me uncomfortable?” I asked. “Cis white silence equals violence, right?”

Audrey beamed like a spotlight. At that, Kris shut up. I caught a glimpse of the corner of his mouth curling up in the rearview mirror, and then Audrey leaned close to my ear and whispered so only I could hear, “I love you.”

* * *

An orderly just stopped by to restock a drawer of electrode pads for the EKG machine. He smiled feebly the way you do at friends and family of a coma patient, and then ducked back out of the room pushing his little cart with the wobbly left-rear wheel.