what if they never chipped him in the first place? I mean, the call about Snoopy was the first thing that tipped Mom and Dad off that something was amiss back home. A few unanswered calls to your teenager? That’s expected, no need for panic at the disco. But when the shelter called, and they heard that Snoopy was found wandering free on the streets, they knew I never would’ve let that happen unless something was seriously wrong. I guess in a way, Snoopy being picked up by animal control was what helped the Council figure out that three of us Changers had gone missing. And . . .
Chase.
The ginormous elephant in the Chronicle I’m trying not to think about.
Chase.
Who is dead.
Dead because of me.
Even though nobody will put it that way. Nobody will come clean about the truth of what happened that day we got sprung from that basement. I couldn’t get a straight answer out of anybody during RRR. Not Tracy, not my parents, not a single Changers counselor. Turner the Lives Coach made it very clear that Elyse and I should “bask in gratitude” that we’d been saved, thanks to Chase’s brave actions, which was his “journey,” and not for us to mourn, but to “accept and celebrate.”
I knew Chase. Chase was not about his “journey.” He was about fighting the fight. He was at the head of the parade, bearing the banner, representing for all of us other cowards too chicken to be honest. He wasn’t about dying either. He would have said that crap was for the movies.
When I reflect on that time, on everything that happened, the rage fills me to my throat. Followed quickly by a sense of helplessness, a hobbling. So I shut it down. Put all the messiness in its respective boxes. Compartmentalize the eff out of my trauma. If I don’t, I can’t function. As evidenced by the first three weeks after the Tribulations when I lay in bed at Changers Central in a catatonic stupor, my mom and dad by my side, Elyse on the other side of the curtain, doing her own version of the same. Thank J for Battlestar Galactica. (Dad bought me the entire series on DVD, and I watched episodes back-to-back-to-back, breaking only for the bathroom and uncontrollable crying jags.)
The Council has advised that Elyse and I, the survivors, focus solely on our rehabilitation, our emotional recovery, and not fret about what happened, or how they will find and punish (or not) the perpetrators. Shut up and be happy, basically. We survived, we’re conscious and up walking about, even if not everyone else got off so lucky. Look at what happened to poor Alex. Sure, the kidnappers didn’t technically put him in that coma. But whatever happened amidst the fracas of the rescue certainly did. Yeah, the kid’ll get another body come his Change 2, Day 1, but it worries me what’s happening inside his brain, to his essential self inside the Alex shell, while he lies there in that bed at Changers Central, hooked up to beeping machines while his folks sit helplessly stroking his hand.
“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
