Kim

by T Cooper

  It makes me believe, at least for a moment, that it can all be so beautiful, what’s underneath, if you just get the opportunity to zip yourself out.

  Change 3–Day 79

  “You’ve changed. You’re daring. You’re different in the woods. More sure. More sharing . . . If you could see—you’re not the man who started . . .”

  At dress rehearsals I was watching Mia, this reedy wisp of a girl, a self-possessed freshman (who barely looks like she should be in early middle school, much less high school). You wouldn’t think she had such a voice buried in her, but there she was in her bonnet and giant apron, center stage as the baker’s wife, belting out “It Takes Two” like she was in the finals of American Idol.

  DJ stepped out from behind Mia, him in his floppy baker’s hat and puffy white shirt. There was a dramatic pause, and then DJ echoed the lyrics, putting his own spin on the melody as he likewise twirled Mia around twice until they stopped face-to-face, both of them out of breath, palm-to-palm, crackling with (stage) love.

  As I sat behind the the action, listening to the duet while putting final flourishes on the hundreds of leaves in the trees of our makeshift stage forest, I tried to shut out the lyrics and just, like, do my job of painting the scenery and bringing the stuff in the background to life. (If that’s not a microcosm of my present existence, I don’t know what is.) But every time DJ and Mia get to this number in practice, I can’t help but stop what I’m doing and let the words penetrate my being(s), and . . . Stephen Sondheim? If that guy’s not a Changer, I’ll eat these cardboard leaves.

  Which reminds me: Tracy recently revealed to me that there’s apparently some book of renowned Changers that we get access to once we’ve completed our Cycles and have chosen our Monos. I don’t know whether she was just messing with me to get me to “keep going” despite my obvious ill-adjustment to this V, but nevertheless, note to future self: look up to see whether Sondheim appears in that book. (Same for Dolly Parton and David Bowie.)

  As DJ and Mia finished their duet in perfect harmony, Chloe blew by me, achingly mouthing the lyrics in her official role as Mia’s understudy/the baker’s wife (this in addition to her assigned, considerably smaller role of Florinda). Apparently Mr. Wood doesn’t feel the same way about Chloe’s talent as Chloe does, and as somebody must be to blame, when she passed me, Chloe’s pointy shoe just happened to hook around a leg of my stepladder, making me lose my balance and fall off my perch, my paintbrush streaking green across my chest on the way down. I hit the floor with a thud, a turtle on its paint-smeared back.

  Oops, she mouthed insincerely over a shoulder, before returning to holding the last few notes along with DJ and Mia: “It takes twoooooooo.”

  (If I’m Mia, I keep a keen eye out that Chloe doesn’t pull a Tonya Harding and have Jason splinter her shin or something, sidelining her before opening night, because that B defines thirsty.)

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Mr. Wood said, halting the scene just as Jack ran onstage chasing an invisible chicken, yelling, “Stop her! Stop that hen!”

  The music ceased, and the whole cast turned their full attention to Mr. Wood.

  “Everything okay back there, pet?” he hollered from his second-row seat in the audience.

  “Yeppers!” I shouted stupidly, my cheeks and neck blazing up at once. “All good!”

  “Great,” he said, side-eyeing Chloe like he knew she was guilty of something, even if he couldn’t prove it. “It’s getting late. Now, let’s try that abominable opening one more time, and then I’ll let you go home for the night. Narrator, Cinderella, Jack. Places!”

  As Kris all but floated across stage in his Cinderella frock, I righted myself, wiping at my sweatshirt, inadvertently smudging green paint across the tips of my boobs. Perfect.

  Audrey, dressed in her red riding hood, must’ve caught the little do-si-do with Chloe, because out of nowhere she padded over to me while the narrator began, “Once upon a time,” and Kris busted out singing, “I WISH!” She stooped to pick up the paintbrush, then held it out to me and whispered, “Are you alright?”

  Not really. Which is what I wanted to say to her, but I couldn’t. I didn’t really know what to say to Audrey. It wasn’t every day—heck, it wasn’t any day this year—that Audrey willingly talked to me. I’ve gone over in my head so many imaginary conversations we’ll have, but I’m always too afraid to actually open my mouth, for fear that all the familiarity and history might come tumbling out.

  “I think it was just an accident,” Audrey added then, flimsily.

  “Mmm-kay.” I took the paintbrush from her. “Thanks.”

  A wet “Shhhhhhhhhh” was spat toward us from the side of the stage, where Chloe was giving me the thousand-deaths-glare before she went back to sweetly trilling, “More than life . . . more than anything,” along with Mia.

  So now Audrey was Chloe’s official apologizer/denier? Awesome sauce. I think I’d respect her more if she was a flat-out bitch under her own steam. I mean, did she really think Chloe just happened to trip over my ladder? Or did she know it was on purpose, but think that I was stupid enough to believe her when she suggested it could’ve been an accident? None of the possible scenarios were cool. Not to mention consistent with the Audrey I used to know and love. Okay, maybe the fact that Aud actually noticed that it happened in the first place, but that’s it. She was still standing on the side of awfulness. On the side of the shady, sneaky wolf.

  Audrey smiled thinly, then went over to rejoin Chloe behind the curtain. The narrator soon ended the scene: “And her father had taken for his new wife a woman with two daughters of her own. All three were beautiful of face, but vile and black of heart.”

  You said it, sister.

  Watching Audrey sewn to Chloe’s hip like that, the glow of the stage lights blasting both of their faces into horrific contrasted angles, a vivid memory came rushing back at me: How unabashedly cruel Chloe had been at the start of school last year, when Audrey showed up on the first day with her adorable short haircut. Chloe calling Drew (me!) a retard and Audrey a retard-loving lesbian, claiming Audrey had chopped off her hair because she was mourning her break-up with Drew, suggesting Drew never even loved her, because check it out, yo, that girl was gone without a trace. Audrey looked so defeated. And now? Now she just looked . . . empty.

  After the number, Mr. Wood wasn’t happy, but he was “happy enough” with the run-through to let us break for the night. Kris leapt off stage like in Dirty Dancing, into the arms of his very new, very cute (older) boyfriend Rooster, whom he met I don’t really know where, come to think of it, but whose mere presence in rehearsal seemed to make Kris positively buoyant. Seeing them embrace so passionately, Kris hugging another boy while wearing a dress in front of everybody, made me jolt with concern for them. I instinctually scanned the room, in case anybody was about to jump them or drop a piano from the rafters and leave them in a crushed, phobic splat.

  Then I realized this was the theater, not varsity football, where Jason and his douche-jockeys wouldn’t waste a second flexing in the mirror before pounding Rooster and Kris into two thin, glittery crepes if they caught even a glimpse of their gay on display. Here, nobody seemed to give a rat’s ass. And for a moment, I felt good. Happy that I’d forgone the traditional route and forged into more freak-hospitable territory.

  But then I watched as Chloe threw her expensive European backpack over a shoulder and tried to sidestep the boys, making a face like she was smelling broccoli that had gone off. “Get a room,” she slurred, before she marched out of the auditorium, pulling her loud, ginormous key ring out of her even more loud and ginormous designer purse. Size queen, I thought to myself, just as Kris scooted over, still in his dress.

  “Kimmycakes,” Kris said, pulling Rooster by the hand, “I told you about Rooster?”

  “Not everything about him,” I said cheekily.

  “You’re flawless,” Rooster gushed to me, taking my hand and kissing it.

  “I like what you’ve
done with your boobsicles,” Kris snarked, elbowing toward the green paint. “They definitely needed more attention drawn to them.”

  “You going to take a spin on the Carousel with us this weekend?” Rooster broke in, Kris hanging off his arm like a love-struck macaque.

  “Can’t,” I said. “My father practically sentenced me to seven years on the chain gang for sneaking out there last time.”

  Kris pulled an exaggerated sad face, his plump red lower lip sticking all the way out. “Come on, boooo.”

  “If she says she can’t, then she can’t,” Rooster piped in. “Boundaries much?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “listen to this man. That’s healthy.”

  “What is this word, boundaries?” Kris queried in a faux-European accent, and we all giggled just as Audrey walked by, glancing at us the way a single person does when a group of people are cutting up loudly about some seemingly inside joke.

  “Good night,” I said brightly to her as she passed.

  “Yeah, ’night,” she mumbled quickly, and sped by.

  “Gurrrl, you got it, you got it bad,” Kris crooned, loud. So loud that I shushed him, because I was pretty sure Audrey could hear.

  “No I don’t.”

  “Oh, you do.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Kris studied me like a doctor trying to settle on a diagnosis. “Whatevah,” he concluded. “We’re off to do bad things to each other.”

  “Please don’t tell me that.”

  “Too late!” Kris chirped, then skipped away, Rooster staying behind just long enough to hug me goodbye, green paint be damned.

  “I’m glad he has a friend like you,” he said as he broke the embrace. “Kids in high school can be so cruel and dumb.”

  “You think?”

  Rooster smiled, then trotted after Kris, who was miming looking at his watch and tapping his foot impatiently. As I turned, I noticed Audrey lingering in the wings. She was staring straight at me.

  Change 3–Day 81

  I hate that fracking stuffed chicken.

  The stupid, useless, uncooperative chicken that refuses to act even a teeny bit chicken-like. I have one week to make the prop seem like it’s running across the stage instead of being dragged like a toddler’s blanket. Seems simple enough. But no. It either bounces across the stage comically, or is lifelessly towed, or gets stuck on the floor so that when I reel it from the other side of the stage, it springs ten feet into the air, more often than not hitting one of my carefully painted trees, or knocking over the cardboard Milky-White cow, which is comedy, sure, but not the sort of comic relief Mr. Wood is after.

  “No one wants to be upstaged by a chicken, Miss Kim,” he told me last chicken-fail.

  “Got it, Mr. Wood.”

  Thank goodness I have Michelle Hu, science goddess (which she jokes is really the only stereotypically “Asian thing” about her), to help me navigate the physics of chicken propulsion.

  “I think it’s going to be about the friction,” she posits when I present the problem to her after school.

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Har har har,” Michelle cracks, as she turns the stuffed chicken every which way in her hands, really considering the conundrum I put to her, like if she solves it, the universe as we know it will become a better place—and for me, it will. “Gotta figure a way to reduce the drag, or at least control it, so with a continuous tug, its velocity is kept at a more constant rather than variable rate.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” I say.

  “I think I can do this. My mom has some stuff in the garage I can use,” she goes on, still pondering. “Mind if I take her home? Alter her a bit? Nothing obvious.”

  “Like Monsanto?”

  “Less insidious. But yeah.”

  “Genetic engineer away.”

  “Shoot, dinner’s in twenty,” Michelle says, checking her digital watch and stuffing the chicken into her backpack. “I’m really glad you decided to join the ACC. I think you’re going to have fun.”

  On that front, Michelle was mostly right. I did have fun at the Asian Cultural Club dinner. The spotlight was on South Asia this month, so the venue was Punjab Palace in the mall. It wasn’t Fun with a capital F, but it was definitely lowercase material. Lowercase because while Amy, Adelle, Christine, Sarita, and (another) Kim, plus Henry (the only guy brave enough to hang) were all cool and kind and friendly, and we laughed a lot and the food was decent, and nobody was throwing shade at anybody, I couldn’t help feeling like the imposter I am.

  It was like I was back at the “black kids table” all over again. Oh yes, I’m the great pretender. Tracy would say I’m not pretending anything. That once you inhabit a V, and the world responds to you as that V, you are that V, period. She has a point, I guess. But being Asian, or black, or differently abled, or anything outside the Barbie–Ken doll norm for one year isn’t exactly the same as being that way your whole life. As John Legend would say, I can change. And my new friends who are feeling me because they see themselves in me, well, they don’t know that this is like an outfit I can ultimately take off if I choose to. And if I do choose to? What does that say about them?

  There they were accepting and taking me in over veggie samosas and pakoras, but only because of what they thought I was. Not anything on the inside, just this general, regional familiarity. In truth, I actually couldn’t relate to a lot of the stuff they were saying, not any of the familial or cultural in-jokes. And to front and agree and laugh along would make me feel like a big ol’ racist. (I bet Tracy never felt like a racist in her entire life. She probably went way overboard and did accents and crap—all in the name of finding her best self.)

  I know I’m not living in some refugee camp in Turkey, or emptying Porta-Potties at seven dollars an hour for a living, but all this circular thinking is making me crazy, like a hamster in a Habitrail. Around me is all clear plastic that makes it look like freedom’s right on the other side, but ultimately, part of me knows I’ll never escape.

  I guess in a lot of ways, I’m still a white boy who grew up outside of New York City and loves to skate. At least, that’s my history. I guess that is the million-dollar Changer question: what matters most, the past you’ve been given or the future you choose?

  To which I say a definitive . . .

  For now, I guess it’s cool to have the Asians of Central High on my side. Because at least for the year I’ll have a group I “fit” into. Even if I actually don’t fit.

  What do I know for sure?

  1. I am what I am on the inside.

  2. And I am what I am on the outside (for now).

  3. I fit with Audrey.

  I can say that again. I fit with Audrey as Drew. And I fit with her as Oryon.

  Do I fit with her as Kim? H. E. double hockey sticks NO. But who can tell? We haven’t even hung out. Maybe we will. Somehow. If the core of her could reemerge and connect with the core of me. (That sounds gross. Who am I now, Turner the Lives Coach?)

  Why do I still care about her so much?

  Because you do, Kris would say. The “why” hardly matters.

  Which is good advice for this whole Changer gig.

  Change 3–Day 87

  I don’t have more than a minute to Chronicle. I’m so weary. It’s eleven thirty on a school night, and I just got back home.

  Overall: the play’s opening night went pretty well, considering.

  Kris was amazing, didn’t flub a single line, fudge a note, miss a mark.

  Everybody else? Not so much.

  Even Mia, who seems like she should already have her own show on the Disney Channel, tripped up in scene two: “The cow as white as blood, the cape as red as milk,” to which DJ broke character momentarily as he tried to stifle a laugh, which made the audience laugh, and the rest of us backstage laugh . . . until we saw Mr. Wood’s “disappointment face,” which whipped all our butts back into line for the rest of the show.

  Michelle’s chicken rig worked beautifully
in scene three, but I screwed up in the finale, when I didn’t have the pillow prop readily available (for Mia to stuff under her dress to look pregnant). We grabbed somebody’s down parka and balled it up and used that instead, and nobody was the wiser (even if Mia looked like she was about to give birth to a Patagonia store onstage).

  Just two more shows. And then the nightly stress of being the scenic, prop, and costume wrangler with everybody relying on me to make them look better will be safely in my rearview . . .

  I’m so tired, I don’t even know what I just Chronicled. I’m going to have a glass of warm milk as white as blood, and then I’m going to pass out in bed and wake up and do it all over again tomorrow. Kim Cruz out.

  Change 3–Day 89

  The audience was on their feet, Kris, Mia, and DJ taking their final bows out in front of the rest of the cast. Grocery-store bouquets of roses and baby’s breath landed onstage, seemingly being tossed out of a black void in the audience, Kris gathering the bunches up and stacking them in the crook of his elbow like they were all intended for him. (They kind of were.)

  Then the entire cast pointed to Mr. Wood, who happened to be standing in front of me stage left. The audience roared even louder, but Mr. Wood was not interested in going out there, despite the unambiguous encouragement. He was waving his hands and making the “cut it off” gesture with a flat hand in front of his neck, but the cast wasn’t relenting, the audience wasn’t piping down, and so there was nothing left to do but for me to (gently) push him out from behind the curtains and onto the stage.

  Which I did.

  And which he did not appreciate, judging by the We’re gonna talk about this later look I got as he shuffled onstage.

  Nevertheless, it was kind of a cool moment to see, Mr. Wood surrounded by the whole cast and Kris presenting him the largest, most over-the-top bouquet while the audience stayed on their feet clapping, hooting, hollering, and generally bathing everybody onstage with mad love—until the curtain fell.