LITMIR.BIZ

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tank every five minutes. There must be a slow, tiny leak somewhere.

      Okay, so all that’s happening. And so much more. And yet, also, really nothing.

      I notice my breathing is slowing some now. Can’t do anything but pay attention to it. In, out, in, out, in, out. Just for these five minutes I’m allowing Oryon/myself to be let off the hook. For everything. Nothing I have to do now but pay attention to the breathing, the panic subsiding. My heart isn’t flip-flopping in my chest anymore. My crazy is chilling out. I’m the boss of my body. I am the captain now. Breathe: in, out, in, out.

      KNOCK-KNOCK, my door is opening. (An actual door. Not a symbolic, spiritual one.) It’s Mom, knock-knock-entering without waiting for a “Come in!” Per usual.

      “Hey, petunia, you okay?”

      Simply being is simply done. “Yep,” I answer.

      “Do you need anything?”

      “Nope.”

      I glance up, notice again how Mom looks older. The events of the past few months registering on her face as years. She doesn’t bother chiding me for the “Yep” or the “Nope.” She doesn’t bother with a lot of things like that anymore. The things that don’t really matter when it comes down to life and death.

      “Some ice water maybe?”

      I shake my head. Smile with my lips closed.

      “It’s weird to be back, huh?” she asks quietly.

      “But I’ve never been here.”

      “I know. I just mean back from the retreat,” she says, pulling my old stuffed animal Lamby-cakes out of a box and propping him on my desk, his neckless head flopping flat to his shoulder. “I know everything is hard right now. I’m just glad you’re home.”

      “It wasn’t a ‘retreat,’ but yeah, me too.”

      Which wasn’t entirely true. Because while I’m happy to be sprung from all of my former incarcerations, I would rather be navigating my way on the city bus to Audrey’s house right this minute, trying somehow to make things right with her before I change again, instead of doing deep-breathing exercises in my bed with my mommy checking in on me every five minutes.

      Sure, Mom’s being totally thoughtful and accepting and nonjudgmental, all the things we talked about in family counseling during the triple-R sessions. (Dad’s a different story, but whatever.) Thing is, I need a friend whose uterus I didn’t come out of. One I can tell everything, despite how much trouble that could bring for not just me and my family, but for my entire Changers race.

      “Want me to help you set up your room?” Mom asks, scrambling my decidedly non-Changer-approved fantasies of outing myself to Audrey. “It’ll go faster if there are two of us.”

      “I’m good.”

      Since the Tribulations, Mom’s been treating me like a hollowed-out eggshell. Intact, but with its gelatinous guts having been sucked away via two tiny pinholes.

      Or maybe that’s just how I envision myself.

      I know she’s doing her best, that she’s suffered perhaps the most through all of this, but I just want to be alone in this strange room, the fourth strange room in as many months. First the pitch-black Abider basement of doom. Then the impossibly bright urgent-care holding pen at Changers Central for the few days it took me to be rehydrated, renourished, and “stabilized” (ha!). Next it was the white, pristine “no triggers here, folks!” suite I shared with Elyse while we went through the RRR program together.

      And now this bedroom, in a new house somewhere in the anonymous, weedy outskirts of Nashville, because “it was decided” by the Council that our old apartment in Genesis was potentially compromised—by my bringing Audrey there, and her brother maybe seeing me chasing Audrey across the highway like a scene from Dog the Bounty Hunter.

      Yes, the Boggle board of my life has been jumbled yet again, this time more thoroughly, with everything about to settle into entirely new squares, spelling out entirely new words and stories. Starting with my name.

      (It helps to name things.)

      Miraculously, the Council didn’t decide to switch my school. That particular risk-reward analytic came out in my favor. So, I’ll get to see Audrey again. I will see her in a mere six days, even if it’s from afar—and from behind the mask of yet another new classmate whom she will not know and likely not want to get to know after the last new kid she opened herself up to totally shattered her heart. Still, it’ll be better than nothing at all. I can keep an eye on her, make sure Jason doesn’t do something horrible, never mind that Kyle guy who was harassing her in my vision. Even if I don’t find a way to tell her what happened to Oryon, the new me can stay by her side. Ride or die.

      “You’re going to need some school supplies,” Mom says, interrupting my scheming yet again. “Make a list of the colors and ones you want, and I can grab them next time I hit the shop.”

      School supplies. I used to care about those. I actually spent time picking out the folders and the pencil holders, as if having the right folder or pencil holder would communicate something relevant about me and smooth my way into school society. Which it probably did. Because most students still care about folders and pencil holders, and they notice when a kid has a generic red one from the cheap place, and another kid has one with rhinestones in the shape of a kitten, and they make assessments about said kids based on those items and choices (loser, winner, friend-able, undate-able, rebel), and they do this because they aren’t preoccupied with, I don’t know, changing into a completely different human, even though—spoiler alert—they are! Just not as obviously.

      How’s that for insight? Oh how the path to knowledge is strewn with large, bloody, severed chunks of ego. I am feeling just a tick pleased with myself. Warmed slightly by the irresistible cocktail of my cleverness and bitterness, and I absentmindedly decide I’ll call Chase because he would laugh harder than anyone at my school supply riff, would nod his head and say he knew exactly what I was getting at, then probably ruin the moment by lecturing that I was finally “getting it” re: the hypocrisy of the Changer movement and the need for all of us to be out and proud and united and part of the fabric of daily life if we ever want to be completely 100 percent accepted and integrated into society, blah blah. The whole conversation plays out in my head in a matter of seconds, the way conversations with close friends always do. And it takes a beat before I’m reminded of the saddest thing of all. That from here on out, all my conversations with Chase will be in my head.

      “Whatever school supplies are fine, Mom,” I say.

      Oryon

       Change 2–Day 360

      This must be what death row is like. Actually knowing the day you’re going to cease to exist. You sit there as every minute, every second, every breath siphons away, aware this is the last time you will eat frozen chicken nuggets, a slice of terrible pizza, canned pear cubes in syrup; the last time you will do fifty push-ups; the last time you will have a headache; the last time you will dream about being a child at the park and holding your father’s hand.

      I know I shouldn’t be so scream-queen dramatic, because unlike guys on death row (and they are like 99.9 percent guys—not exactly a ringing endorsement for the male persuasion), I get to have another life after this one ends. And then another one after that. And then I get back one of the four I’ve had over the previous four years. Some Changers and Touchstones I’ve met (Tracy!) are hella psyched about this whole process. #Blessed. What a unique life opportunity to embrace! Sorry, lives opportunities. “In the many we are one.” Blurgh.

      When I was Ethan, I didn’t know I was a Changer yet, that in a matter of years, Ethan would be basically DOA. There was no goodbye. No processing. Maybe that was easier. Rip that identity off like the Band-Aid it was. Bye, Oryon/Drew/Ethan.

      Wow, this is the first time I’ve thought

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