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 press 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.)