“Survivor’s remorse,” they called it at RRR. Told me I should abandon self-lacerating thought patterns because everything “is what it is, and is what it should be,” and no amount of my hating life, or hating that I have lives to hate, is going to make reality different.
But.
They didn’t see Alex. He was so scared. So small. He reminded me of Ethan. I was small then. I was scared. I was nothing like Chase.
Know-it-all Chase, always right about everything, always needing the last word.
Ah, yes. There’s the irony. Which he would have loved, of course.
No matter who I am, it’ll always remain imprinted on my brain. The first time I saw him at ReRunz. His smile curled at the corners. His confidence, unearned, but there nonetheless. I fell for him in that moment, before I knew he was a Changer, before I knew I was whatever I was. It was pure instinct, unfiltered, and that attraction deepened to love, and with love, respect; and before I knew it, Chase was my one true friend, the one who knew all the ugly about me and chose to love me anyway.
The end will also always remain imprinted. That same wry smile, maybe a little more world-weary, and on a different face, sure, but somehow essentially the same. And the “Fancy meeting you here!” slurred through bloodied, swollen lips, his head in my lap as his heart sludged up, slowing to a stop. I put my ear to his chest, hearing only three weak beats, sounding so far away. And then. He wasn’t there.
I think I called his name.
I must have called his name.
Seconds later there was loud banging in the hallway, a vague smell of electrical smoke. I can’t recall anything after that. Nor can Elyse. We’ve tried piecing it together, but neither of us can recollect much after Chase was thrown into the basement with us, bound and hooded. I try to concentrate. I meditate so hard, scanning the corners of my mind like some old, decommissioned hard drive. But all I can ever come up with is the door opening, the light searing into our pupils, noises, shouting, acrid, burning fog . . . and then waking up in a hospital gown at Changers Central, my alarmed parents pacing bedside, Turner the Lives Coach bending close to my eyes, the wooden prayer beads around his neck plunking on my chest like dropped marbles.
“Chase?”
Mom said it was the first word out of my mouth.
“He’s awake!” she screeched, and immediately started weeping, draping herself over me like an emergency blanket as Dad jumped off a cot in the corner and raced around the other side of the bed.
“Thank God,” Dad whispered into my neck. I think he was crying.
“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” I mumbled. I recall sounding so groggy to myself, my voice deeper than I remembered it sounding in my head before the Tribulations.
“Well, now I might need to reconsider,” he said, laugh-crying. “Smart-ass.”
“We were so worried,” Mom managed through her tears.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My head was so sore. It was then I noticed the searing sensation where the IV stuck out of my arm.
“Shhh, don’t even say that,” Mom said.
“You guys aren’t angry?”
“Angry? Why would we be angry?”
But before I could formulate an answer, I nodded off again, too exhausted to press them about Chase, or Alex, or Elyse, or Snoopy’s well-being, or where the hell I was. Nothing. Because immediately after I learned that Mom and Dad weren’t upset with me, I was out cold again, for God knows how long.
Oryon
Change 2–Day 362
T-minus three days and counting.
Nothing to report beyond Mom remaining no farther than twenty feet from me at any moment, even checking on me when I’m in the bathroom for more than three whole minutes.
“You’re constipating me, Ma!”
“It’s only because I love you, Oryon.”
Dad’s been gone at Changers Central all day, every day, and into the nights, heading up an anti-Abiders task force. Even though the Abiders have been fairly quiet—well, at least they were quiet up until the Tribulations—Dad’s terrified we’re in the early stages of a concerted surge of Abiders’ anti-Changers activities. But I think his obsession is solely because of what happened to me. You never really care about distant messiness until it floods your lawn like a ruptured sewer line. Either way, Dad is not standing for it, cannot just “move on,” and will not forget for even one minute of one single day that this consortium of hatred and intolerance is roiling somewhere out there, operating in the shadows of society, and that no matter how much preparation or organizing we Changers do, there is no way to stop the next action or transgression on their part.
Despite all the talking and processing and counseling at the RRR, Dad just can’t be happy that I made it, that I’m alive and well in his house, staring at him over our cereal bowls every morning. So he leaves the house early, funneling all of his rage and indignation about the Tribulations into “fighting for change, instead of sitting around waiting for it to happen.” This morning I told him his ranting was starting to sound a little like Benedict and the rest of the RaChas, to which he replied that I didn’t know “what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks” I was talking about, then grabbed the car keys and headed out the door.
I guess it’s hard for him to accept the facts of what we’re up against. It’s like he refuses to acknowledge it as a reality, as opposed to a theory—as though ignoring the facts might actually make them not so. I think Dad thought it would be different by now, that there would be more acceptance in the world, and that at the very least, more progress would have been made in the years since he was going through his Cycle of V’s. And yet here I am, living proof it hasn’t. Maybe this whole Changers mission is a waste of time. Maybe Statics are getting worse on the whole, not better.
“Your father doesn’t know what to do with his frustration,” Mom says kindly as soon as we hear Dad’s car pull out of the garage.
“He doesn’t know what to do with the truth,” I snap back.
“No, I suppose he doesn’t,” she concedes. “But not many people do.”
Last week, Dad decided to take leave from work and assume a part-time position with the Council. He’s not allowed to actually join the Council, as Changers by-laws state that nobody with a child who’s still completing his/her Cycle is eligible to run. So many rules and procedures, I can’t keep track. I’m even starting to forget the overarching mission of our existence. Mostly I just try to get through each day, like a simple bacteria just going through the motions until my brief time on this planet is up.
I kind of wish Mom would get busy with something too. I see her poking her head into my room in the night when I’m supposed to be sleeping. What does she think? Those Abider nut jobs are going to hunt me down, bust into our house, get past Snoopy, Dad’s Taser (newly purchased), and scoop me up from my bedroom in the middle of the night?
Yes. That’s exactly what she thinks.
I get it. But the Council assures us that whomever took me, Elyse, and Alex are so long gone by now, nobody’s going to hear from them again. At least not in our neck of the Changer woods.
* * *
“All good in there?” Mom asks through the door for the forty-seventh time today.
“Yep,” I murmur, trying not to sound as annoyed as I am.
“You know I hate the Yep,” she chides weakly, her heart still not in it.
At least she’s trying. Mom wants life to normalize. Like that’s even a thing.