I say, the finality of the moment clocking me like a line drive to the skull. This will be the last time we’ll see each other as Elyse and Oryon. Externally anyhow.
“Good luck with the whole Audrey thing,” Elyse adds, being supportive, if not totally approving.
“Yeah, we’ll see how that turns out.”
“If she’s as great as you say she is, then it’ll be cool.”
“I guess,” I reply, wondering if anyone on any planet could be that cool.
“And if she’s not, whatever. You are too awesome for drama. Remember that.”
“I’m full up on drama for a long time,” I sigh.
“Word to your mother.”
Then a click, and she is gone. Forever.
Me too, come to think of it.
KIM
Change 3–Day 1
Yeah, so.
Uhhhhmmmn . . .
Is this supposed to be some sort of morbid joke, Changers Council? I guess I sort of thought that since I just went through the Tribulations, had to be sequestered at Changers Central for the remainder of my sophomore year and on through summer . . . you know, that you might’ve considered taking pity on me and given me an “easier” V this year of school. Make me a Hemsworth. Or even one of the lesser Wahlbergs.
But no. I am not a Hemsworth. Or a Wahlberg.
Nor am I a Latino goth girl with heavy eyeliner, in faux-dalmatian-fur creepers. Or a Southeast Asian–looking athletic girl with French braids and lululemon capris. Or a white guy with big tanned muscles and a loose, striped surfer tank top. Or a black girl with tiny ankles, in a giant sweatshirt she’s wearing as a dress. Or a lanky, pale white dude with acne and red hair that matches his checked flannel shirt.
These are just the first five people who come to mind.
Why? Oh, only because they are just the first five people I ran into today. No, I mean actually RAN INTO, as in collided with in the hallways at school—and this was before I even made it to homeroom. Why did I run into five people before the first bell? Because gravity. More precisely, because my center of gravity is so different from Oryon’s, from Drew’s, from Ethan’s, from anything I’ve ever known, that I actually lost my balance and/or tripped five different times while rushing through the hallways trying to make it to class on time, like a rogue bowling ball with shoes. That are tied together at the laces. And made of solid lead.
I’ll just come out with it: I’m fat.
I know you’re not supposed to say that sort of thing. Microaggressions! Body shaming! Even the word fat is verboten. And sure, it should be when you’re talking about other people. But I’m talking to myself, about myself, so I can say whatever the hell I want to say about my fatness. Which is not inconsiderable. I’m beyond chubby or big-boned or husky. I’m a full-on plus-sized, ample, rotund, zaftig lady. Gravitationally challenged. My thighs touch when I walk. Their whole surface. I suppose they would chafe if I were able to walk long enough without toppling like a stoned toddler. Something to look forward to.
I know as a Y-3 Changer I’m ostensibly meant to have evolved beyond all superficial thoughts and temporal concerns, but nobody else around me seems to have, so why should I? That’s the thing about being fat. People feel like they have the right—the moral imperative—to remind you of your fatness. As if you’d forget. (If this is my Y-3 lesson, I knew it already, Council. Every kid knows it.) At any rate, my fatness is all I can seem to think about right now, on the afternoon of my first day of being Kim Cruz. The five-foot-two, 170-pound Filipino-looking girl with the “pretty eyes” and “sweet smile,” as determined by Miss Jeannie while snapping my photo for my student ID this morning.
“Now be a doll and say cheese for the camera,” she cajoled in response to what had to be a “suck-it” frown sprawled defiantly across my face during registration. “Show me your sweet smile.”
“I’m okay,” I say.
“Come on, you gotta work what ya got,” Miss Jeannie prompts (subtle fat-shaming dig number 1), tapping the old eyeball camera atop her computer with a long fake nail with an American flag painted on the tip.
I shake my head. (Even shaking my head feels different now, like I could feel it in the rest of my body, an echo or something.) A few beads of nervous sweat creep down my spine as I press my back closer against the white backdrop.
“Awww, so pretty in the face.” (Subtle fat-shaming dig number 2.)
I yank my sweatshirt down over my chest and stomach (for the twentieth time already that morning) and stand there, working no expression at all. What I want to say is, May want to check your own scale at home, lady, but I somehow manage to bite my tongue, mostly out of grudging respect for her, knowing that it wasn’t Miss Jeannie’s fault that I’ve hated every single thing about myself from the second I opened my eyes this morning. Plus, I wasn’t about to add to the fat-ism in our culture.
“Posture, dear, a straighter spine gives a thinner line.” (And there’s the hat trick!)
I grit my teeth and smile, my eyes shooting daggers into her soft, folded neck.
“You going to join the Mathletes, sweetie?”
Really? Really?
And that was the best part of the school day.
The worst was Audrey. More precisely, my invisibility to her. Which. How could you miss me, right?
Even though I sat right next to her in Honors English (filled with relief that, yay! she’s still here) and made a point of saying a super-welcoming hello to her in the second floor girls’ bathroom, and then again as I cruised by her table at lunch giving Can I join you? energy to her and Em, who also didn’t even look up at me. They were both absorbed in the usual post-summer catch-up, feverishly talking over each other, and it was abundantly clear that I had no place joining that conversation, nor even a place at the table, at least not by their thinking.
They weren’t cruel or anything. They didn’t make snide remarks or even roll their eyes. They just ignored me. I was a plastic straw wrapper, a swiveling office chair turned into a corner, dirty popcorn under a theater seat. I was the detritus of peripheral vision. I didn’t register. Which was a whole new kind of horrible. Also, possibly, now that I’m reflecting on it, worse than hearing pig noises when you walk past.
I thought Audrey was different. The kind of person who would never write somebody off because of her size or looks or whatever. The kind of person who was tuned into everyone and everything, who celebrated difference. I mean, she had a crush on a girl, Drew! She slept with a black boy, Oryon! How bigoted could she be? But Drew was pretty and part of her clique, and Oryon was confident and good-looking, even if he was a little nerdy. He had swag, and Kim, by any measure, taken in any universe, does not.
Crap, never mind Audrey. If I’m
