Drew, p.3
Drew, page 3
Tracy stiffens at the sarcasm. This probably isn’t her best day either. Not that I care. Because I totally don’t.
“Soon you’ll realize that you’ve been put here to serve a much higher purpose,” she says, taking a few more steps before adding, “I know this is scary. I was scared too. But if you just trust me and give it a little time, everything will make sense in a way it never has before.” Her eyes dart around in every direction. “We need to find a private place.” She starts walking even faster.
“Listen,” I say, trailing, “it’s just, it feels like I’ve landed in the middle of Siberia, and everybody’s shouting at me in angry Russian.” As I talk, my eyes well up again. I try to concentrate on the ground and keeping my idiotic floppy shoes on.
“I know,” Tracy sighs, making what seems like a conscious decision to share something personal in return, like it probably says to do in the Touchstone Handbook companion to The Changers Bible. “I remember thinking my parents were acting so strange. My mom, especially, was a robot. She’s the Changer, my dad’s a Static.”
“My dad’s the Changer,” I offer somberly, then quickly add, “apparently,” because I don’t know what’s real anymore.
For the first time since I met her, Tracy lets some silence blossom in the air between us, and I start feeling like I should be a little nicer. Having determined which way we’re headed, she leads me past the Speed Queen Laundromat, a KenJo gas station, and a convenience mart. We cross the parking lot where I’d skated two days before while we were waiting for the moving van to show up. I can feel moisture building up beneath my jog bra, which is starting to itch.
“You’ll want to know about this place,” Tracy says, pointing out ReRunz, a used clothing store at the far corner of the plaza. “You can buy and sell there at the beginning and end of each year, and they always have current fashions for like, less than half of what you’d pay new.”
The two window displays on either side of the door are decorated in a back-to-school theme, and I spot a really nice, worked-in pair of brown Carhartts on the boys’ side of the display. But, I remember with dread, that is not the side of the display I’m supposed to be looking at anymore. There is nothing on the girls’ side that interests me, not a single stitch of clothing, not a belt, a shirt, nothing—except maybe the purple pair of Vans the broken mannequin is sporting. I didn’t even know they made girls’ Vans.
Tracy gets closer, whispers, “A couple of Changers in this region work there after school, it’s kind of an unofficial outfitter, if you will. Anyway, at your first mixer next month, you’ll see who’s there and then you’ll recognize each other from the meeting, and I bet they’ll hook you up with a discount.”
We continue around behind the building, a seemingly popular shortcut to school because there is a well-worn dirt trail snaking through the weeds and strewn with broken glass, crushed and faded Red Bull cans, splintered pens and pencils, a few cigarette butts.
“Over here,” she says, walking with purpose. “Do you have any questions you want to ask me before we get there?”
Any questions doesn’t cover it. “Uh, are you going to be in school with me?” I ask weakly.
“No. I graduated from Central two years ago—valedictorian!” she chirps.
No kidding.
“I could have gone to Yale, but I elected to stay on as a Touchstone. I work for the Council now,” she babbles on.
“Sounds fun.”
“I find it supremely rewarding. So you know, I changed into Tracy in the tenth grade, and let me tell you, the minute I opened my eyes on Change 2–Day 1, I knew she was going to be The One.”
“You mean the you that you’re supposed to pick after graduation?”
“Yeah, my Mono, which is the V you’re going to live as forever, after you’ve experienced all four,” she instructs. “I’ve heard other Changers say they felt something like that too, almost like a tingle along your spine or something. But don’t worry if you don’t feel it now, or ever—you’ll figure out your Mono when it’s time.”
I try to take in what she’s saying, but the out-of-control flutter in my chest is somewhat distracting. “So, to recap: you’re telling me I’m actually going to be this Drew person for just a year, and I can’t tell anybody, and can’t make any real friends because I can only know them for a year anyway—well, as far as they know. And then I’m just going to disappear and come back next year as some other random person, and essentially I have no choice in the matter? I’m just stuck here at the corner of Life and Sucks?”
The queasy, gonna-yak feeling in my stomach surges back.
“I guess you could see it that way,” Tracy answers, calmly. “But it’d be great if you in fact did make friends and embrace life to the fullest. Time is relative. You are only just entering the possibility of being.”
“And that means . . . ?”
“Don’t stress so hard. High school is tough for everyone. Just be yourself.”
“How the hell am I supposed to be myself if I don’t even know who myself is?”
“Release the story you are telling yourself,” she insists, sounding like the cult member she keeps insisting she’s not. “You know who you are.”
“No, I don’t,” I argue, stopping in my tracks just as the façade of the high school appears behind an abandoned Quonset hut with a crooked sign on it: Lube, Flush, A/C, Oil Change.
“You need to get enrolled, and you don’t want to be late,” she says, adjusting her tone and the subject. We hear a couple kids coming up the path behind us. “And there’s one last item we need to take care of before I let you go.” She glances toward the Quonset hut, then takes off toward it. When I don’t follow, she turns around and rapid-flaps her hand at me.
“For a fairy godmother, you’re bordering on lame,” I say, my voice cracking on the last word.
The kids pass behind me, and after an appropriate pause which I’m hoping makes a point, I plod toward Tracy, who’s just entering the hut. Once inside, it’s obvious from the vintage rusted car parts sitting around, the old garage hasn’t been used since the Bee Gees were getting laid.
Tracy removes her backpack and takes out a frilly looking handkerchief, carefully spreading it atop a dirty work bench. She proceeds to remove a few silver medical-looking instruments from her backpack, arranging them on the fabric. “Shut the door behind you.”
“What are you doing?”
“Just shut it,” she repeats, and now she’s snapping a rubber glove onto her left hand.
Before I nudge the broken door shut, I peek out and glimpse a few more kids mindlessly heading up the path that leads to school. Their biggest worries are finding the right classrooms and generally not making fools of themselves. I squeeze my eyes tight and wish I could go back to being one of them.
When I open my eyes, Tracy is straightening the instruments and checking her inventory, referring to a page of a small pamphlet.
“Okay, I don’t know what weirdness you’re doing,” I say, “but I have to get to class, so I guess I’ll just be seeing you around?” I put my hand on the door.
“The Council has one more requirement before you are allowed to proceed with this V.” She is sounding like an android now, and quite frankly, not that I couldn’t take her, because I totally could, but . . . she’s kind of scaring me.
Tracy picks up a small, high-tech pillbox-looking doo-hickey, presses the thumb of her right ungloved hand on the top of it, and it seems to scan her print, then beeps. The top flips open.
“I don’t want to be this . . . whatever it is!” I shout. My voice echoes in the cavernous shop.
She snaps on a second rubber glove, carefully extracts from the box a tiny piece of metal the size and shape of a grain of rice. She holds it aloft, pinched between thumb and forefinger, studies it closely. “Change happens to everyone, Drew. You might as well embrace it.”
“But I didn’t ask for this. It’s not fair!”
“Drew . . .” Tracy’s shoulders rise and fall as she inhales deeply and exhales slowly. “You’ve been chosen. Ours is not to wonder why, but to embrace the opportunity.” She picks up a large stainless-steel-syringe type of contraption and loads the rice grain into the top of it, inspects the tip, and looks squarely at me.
I’m not Drew is all that’s going through my head. I’m not Drew, I’m not Drew, I’m not Drew. I consider bolting, making a break for home, but I have a feeling my folks—not to mention “The Council”—would have a few things to say about my not accepting this important mission I’ve been blessed with. Why couldn’t this have been something simple, like being bitten by a radioactive spider that suddenly transforms me into a human-arachnid hybrid that can catch criminals and make chicks fall in love with me?
“Drew, as I’m trying to tell you, there’s one more key component of Change 1–Day 1.”
“Yes?”
“The Chronicles,” she says, screwing a capped needle onto the end of the syringe. My eyes must be popping, because Tracy adds, “You’ll barely feel it.”
“Uh-uh,” I say, backing away. “No ma’am.”
“All Changers are required to keep a journal through the course of every Change. At the end of your cycle, after graduation but before your Forever Ceremony, you’ll be given the Chronicles containing the entries you wrote during the four years of your lives—so you’ll be better informed before declaring your Mono.”
I back toward the wall, keeping my eyes on the needle.
“Chronicling is a crucial aspect of the process,” she rambles on. “It’s an essential human tendency to forget who we were on the way to becoming who we’re going to be.”
“Do you even hear yourself?” I’m sweating more now, wondering if I ran how soon my sneakers would fly off, and whether I could make it home anyway.
“Trust me, you’re going to want to remember every single thing you went through as your four V’s. Picking your Mono is the most important decision of your life. Well—” she stops, blushes.
“What?”
“I was just going to say, picking your Mono is the most important decision you’ll make—until it comes time to pick your Static mate,” she explains, and it’s clear she wants me to ask her about it. Which I will not do. “I’ve got my eye on someone kind of special—”
“I’m not good at keeping a diary,” I interrupt. “In seventh grade we had to write about our feelings for Human Development, and I forgot every week.”
“Well, the best part about Chronicling is that you don’t have to do anything but think,” she says, carefully unsheathing the needle. Which. Is. Enormous. Thick as a porcupine quill. I suddenly realize the rice grain is supposed to get pushed through that needle.
“You’re not sticking me with that thing,” I say.
“The technology is amazing,” she continues, ignoring my protests. “All you do is think what you want to say, and it gets recorded into your file and securely stored in the mainframe. Hold up your hair.”
I shake my head.
“Come on, Drew, stop being such a baby. Turn around.”
I slowly begin gathering my hair, but the strands are so weblike and wild, it feels like I’ll never be able to contain it all. I’m Medusa. If only, so I could turn this girl to stone and bail. Tracy nudges me with an elbow, and I slowly give her my back.
“The more relaxed you are, the less you’ll feel this,” she mumbles, ripping open something between her teeth and the fingers not wielding the giant syringe. I feel cool moisture at the base of my neck, where Tracy is rubbing really hard, scrubbing me raw with alcohol like I’m some dirty gutter punk. It smells like Dr. Reese’s office. “Just breathe. In and out, big deep breaths.”
I inhale and exhale for a few cycles while she futzes behind me, flips through the pamphlet some more. I’m getting light-headed.
“It can take as little as five minutes a day,” she says, placing a hand on my head. “Or it can take as long as you want. But every day, at some point, you need to put some time into thinking about who you are and what’s happening to you—just focus your attention on it and you’ll know when you’re recording. Lean your head forward a little.”
“Will it come out, like, complete sentences, or just thoughts, or fragments or—”
“Just think of it as recounting what happens to a really close friend, someone you don’t hide anything from. Or if it helps at first, imagine you’re capturing the story of this new person’s life, like a character. But the person is you. Okay, here goes. Really deep breath . . .”
After a few more seconds I feel the beginnings of what seems like a scalpel carving an incision into the base of my neck—this goes way beyond a “prick”—and soon after, the oddest sensation comes over me, almost like gears churning at the base of my brain. I can feel Tracy start to push the plunger in—it takes two thumbs for her to get it in there, and as she does, she whispers, “In the many, we are one,” and I’m holding my head up against her, and the pain is like nothing I’ve felt before. It’s not even pain, it’s something way past pain, and my head is whirring and feels like it will explode, but then I feel a click, the needle is out, and off in the distance, somewhere from a galaxy far, far away, I hear Tracy’s muffled voice trailing off.
There, that wasn’t so bad, was it . . . ?
DREW
CHANGE 1–DAY 1
Is this thing on?
Is it even working?
How do I know when it’s recording . . . ?
————?
Hello? Um, well, hi. So, I guess this is Ethan, or whatever, Drew, reporting in from, uh, to be honest, my private corner of hell. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be saying here, but Mom and Dad are making me sit here on my bed and quote “think about my day” unquote (do I have to “think” punctuation?), so I don’t really know what to—
Seriously, is this working? How do I get in touch with Tracy? She didn’t even give me her cell. I need to ask how to start using this thing. Maybe it’s in the bible guide I’m supposed to read. She told me I have to study that thing pretty much cover to cover, which I don’t really know how I’m supposed to do considering I have to do this journal every day, which I don’t even know if it’s recording, but anyway there’s that, plus homework, which three out of six teachers actually assigned today, on the first freaking day of school, and then I’m supposed to be glued to my CB the rest of the time. I guess I’m not really allowed to sleep.
Anyway, so, well, today sucked. And the back of my neck where Tracy stabbed me is still throbbing. There you have it. Not much else to say. So, I guess I’m done “Chronicling.”
Oh, wait, here’s something that happened. This creepy kid basically tried to molest me while I was walking by him to register for school. So that was great. And Tracy told me, “You haven’t been given anything that you cannot handle, and things are only going to make more and more sense as time goes on. Not less.” Which sounded like cheesy lines from a superhero movie, the kind delivered by some wrinkled old lady right before the superhero does something tragically stupid. You know, to learn his lesson. Hubris! Which I remember from eighth grade English class. Thinking you are all that just before you trip into a ditch or unleash some awfulness into the universe, and anyway, Tracy is clearly wrong, since I couldn’t handle a single thing from pretty much the second I opened my eyes this morning and thought I was looking at some hot girl who turned out to be my own reflection in the mirror.
I’m guessing not a lot of people can say that about their first day of high school.
I wonder what’s for dinner.
* * *
Mom and Dad just told me to go back in and do some more, that they timed me and I’d spent only three minutes Chronicling, so there was no way I could’ve actually gotten anything recorded. I told them I didn’t even know if it was working, and that I’ll just ask Tracy about it and catch up tomorrow, but that I’d done all I possibly could for the first night. They didn’t believe me, and said the early days of Chronicling are some of the most critical. Dad was in fact a little uppity about it, because he said they didn’t have this technology back when he was cycling through his V’s, and he had to actually sit down every night and write down what happened in a paper journal for his Chronicles requirement. With an actual pen! And ink! Ye Olden Days. So I’m supposed to be happy all I have to do is sit there and think everything I want to be recorded.
I told him I have no idea what to say, and he said I should try to Chronicle what makes the biggest impression on me.
Okay, fine.
So that guy at registration. I go into the office after Tracy said her schmaltzy thing to me and sent me on my way, and there’s a long line of scruffy and bored delinquents waiting under a handwritten sign on the wall that reads, New Students: Unregistered. There’s also another sign that says, New Students: Preregistered, so I start walking up to that desk, because there wasn’t a line. Next thing I know, this kid in a German army surplus jacket and a ski cap (keep in mind it’s like ninety-five degrees with one hundred percent humidity), steps in front of me, blocking my way.
“S’up?” he slurs right into my face. He has sour garlic bagel breath, stringy black hair snaking out from under his cap.
“Hey,” I say back, and stop. Because there is nowhere else to go.
“Hey,” he repeats, but sing-songy, like making fun of my voice or something.
“Don’t be a wank, Chuckie,” the chick behind him says. She’s the girl version of him in the face, maybe a year older, and much cleaner. He ignores her and goes so far as to plant his leg on the wall in front of me, penning me in and getting dangerously close to rubbing his junk up against me.
“Let her go,” the girl says.
“Only if she asks nicely,” he says to me, not budging. Of course, I want more than anything to clock him in the jaw. But something tells me I probably shouldn’t.
The girl smiles at me apologetically. “Please excuse my brother, he forgot to take his medication this morning.”
Chuckie relents, maybe because he’s a little embarrassed. “Catch you around,” he whispers as I pass. I can practically feel his lips on my ear, which gives me an all-over body shudder.
