“Yeah. What was that about?” Audrey asks, her eyebrows knit tightly like she’s solving a riddle.
I decide to come out with it: “Before I was Drew, I was a guy named Ethan.”
“Wait, what? Meaning, you transitioned?” Audrey leans back on the bench, her head swiveling back and forth, bewildered and unable to do the math, which, who could, really? “More than once?”
“Yes and no.” I sigh. “Bear with me. This gets real convoluted, real quick.”
“You could say that.”
I watch Audrey’s face as she turns toward the river, my skin growing hot, self-loathing lighting me up from inside.
“So Oryon?” she prods.
“I’m Oryon.”
“I thought you were Drew.”
“I’m Drew too. Also.”
Audrey exhales, steals another glance at the bracelet she gave Drew on the last day of freshman year. “Tell me something only Drew would know.”
“Uh, okay,” I begin, not certain where this might end up. “Well, okay. Our kiss at the school dance—”
“As I recall, Drew—uh, you—weren’t so into that,” Audrey says, blushing.
“Are you kidding?”
“I guess it was a pretty public first kiss,” she adds.
“Yes, yes, it was,” I agree, laughing. “Our big rom-com finale.” Was she flirting with me a little? Focus, Kim. “Well, actually, here’s something nobody but you and I would know. We were ABOUT to kiss two times before that. In Mr. Crowell’s class when we performed that scene from Romeo and Juliet, and then in your bedroom that night I slept over, when you wanted to practice—”
“But Jason burst in on us,” she interrupts. “Acting like Cujo on two legs. And you, I mean Drew, stood up to him. Kim, I mean you, do that too.” Audrey shyly drops her chin toward her feet.
“You can just say you. Don’t worry about all the versions. They’re all me.”
“God, I feel like my brain is made of cottage cheese.”
“Did you have a crush on me then? As Drew?” I ask, not completely sure I want the answer.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she says, blushing.
Man, I really want to kiss her.
But I don’t.
We fall into an uncomfortable silence. I catch myself thinking of the night we slept together, how she seemed so into Oryon, so trusting and calm in my arms. I swallow a million questions I am dying to ask. Like, who did she care for most? Who was she most attracted to? Which version of me captured her heart? These are selfish questions, and I know it. This isn’t about her making me feel better. It’s about me making her feel less insane. And more safe.
A boat motors by with a large caramel-colored poodle on the bow, barking into the wind. Audrey suggests we resume walking then, but before we get up, I turn and put a hand on her shoulder, and ask her to swear never to tell anybody about the information I’m giving her. That there are potential life-and-death consequences, that people have been killed as a result of what I’m sharing, and it isn’t pretty, and it hurts, and it could change things irrevocably, and so it is to be taken seriously.
“You’re scaring me,” she whispers.
“I trust you,” I say. Then I open the floodgates. About the new V each year of high school. About my Touchstone Tracy, and how every Changer gets a mentor like that, someone who is also a Changer. How the Council arranges everything logistically with schools and housing. Rules about parents coming to campus, the feints we are given to explain where kids disappear to after each year of school. I can see her eyes widen with each revelation.
“And at the end of the Cycle, we pick one of our four V’s to live as forever; there’s even a special ceremony right after graduation,” I finish.
“So you’re going to be a whole new person next year?”
I nod my head slowly.
“Who?”
“No freaking idea,” I admit, and I can tell she doesn’t necessarily love that part either.
“Can you go back to Ethan?”
“No.”
“Wow. Never?”
“Never,” I say.
“Why not?”
“We can never go back to who we were before the changes.”
Audrey falls silent for a few moments. Then says, “That must be so terrible for your mom.”
If there was ever a Static who doesn’t need empathy lessons, it’s Audrey.
“I think she’s o-okay,” I stammer. “For the most part. How about you? Are you okay?”
She nods, half-smiles. “For the most part.”
Encouraged, I continue, deciding to take Audrey even deeper through the labyrinth of Changers rules. She listens quietly, nodding her head, sometimes cocking it to the left in that cute way she does when things seem particularly confounding.
“Why can’t Changers get with other Changers?” she asks.
“Counter to the mission. I guess it’s kind of like dating someone in your own family.”
“What ever happened to that Chase guy from your Bickersons band?” she asks randomly, like she just remembered him. “The one who beat Jason to a pulp after he tried to . . .”
And like that, a switch flips, and the tears pour down my face. I try, but I can’t say anything else, cannot get words out. And if I could, what words would they be? That Chase died so I could live?
Audrey leans in, embraces me for longer than I ever thought would be possible again. “I’m so sorry,” she says.
“It’s not your fault,” I manage, loving the way her arms feel around me.
We fall silent again.
“Can I ask if your mom or dad is the Changer?” Audrey eventually asks.
“My dad.”
“How did your mom find out?”
“I don’t really know,” I realize, hardly believing I’ve never asked them the details of their courtship, or the big reveal of when Dad told Mom he was a Changer, what she said, how she reacted. Maybe if I had, I would be doing this better. Though Audrey seems to be handling it well enough.
* * *
The setting sun throws a veil of pink across the river’s glassy surface as Audrey and I finally start walking back. I sense something in her has softened. After a few steps, I take her hand in mine. At first she flinches, but she doesn’t pull away entirely. So I squeeze a little harder, and she lets me thread my fingers between hers.
We walk like that in silence until we get to the bridge. And it is there that I decide there’s one last disclosure I need to make. I have to tell her about Oryon. What happened to him that night. Why I abandoned her. Only, I need to do it in a way that leaves her brother out of it. I can’t be the one who makes him potentially complicit in my kidnapping or in Chase’s beating and the death that came from it, especially since the Council has no hard evidence that Jason was even in the gang that jumped me. Not yet, anyway.
Jason is a monster in a thousand