Chapter Five of Changeling

[the_siobhan]

Weekends were a boon.

Sure, the extra free time meant family dynamics were more likely to explode into yelling and sleepless nights. But on the other hand, no school. It turned out that it was entirely normal for my sisters and I to disappear onto the Toronto transit system and visit the museum or science centre under our own steam. I happily escorted my baby sister to places like the zoo, an attitude which was apparently uncharacteristic enough to garner comment. I couldn't help but feel a twinge of shame at that.

I could actually have dealt with school if it weren't so boring. The other students pretty much left me alone after the first time I hit somebody. It happend in art class, where our teacher was prone to leaving us alone for long periods of time while he went into the supply room and smoked up. I thought it was hysterical when he would emerge with pupils like basketballs, but it was also the time of day when the kids would try to pull shit. One of the "tough" girls dumped a jar of paint down the back of my shirt. So I clocked her.

I was shocked at how slow and weak I was and I immediately vowed to do push ups every day for the rest of my life. But even that was enough to convince people that maybe I wasn't so quiet as I used to be before I had the brain thing and they mostly stopped bothering me.

I continued having the occasional appointment where they wired things to me and took measurements and did tests and looked at me under various kinds of radiation. It always came back inconclusive and eventually they decided that since I wasn't dead they could just let it go.

Going downtown turned into my favourite thing to do on weekends. I found every place that was accessible by transit where I could watch the buildings leak into different versions of themselves. There were spots were I could sit on the street and watch my surroundings morph and change; factories turning into apartment buildings, warehouses turning into office towers. Sex shops and head shops turned into fancy restaurants and yuppie furniture stores. I wondered if the word "yuppie" had even been coined yet.

Some places were a lot more active than others. It was one of those places where I first met Clive.

There were a group of kids who hung out around the Eaton's Centre. One girl in particular stood out for me; she had a rough mohawk and she always had a white rat riding on her shoulder. There were many others of course, it was a large and fluctuating group, but for some reason she always caught my attention. I always wanted to warn her to be careful. Of course I never did.

They were all a few years older than me and I was always caught between fear of them and thinking they were just kids. Until one day I saw one of their number watching me as I was watching them.

The day we met he was wearing a leather jacket with the collar turned up, but even that couldn't hide the thick coarse hair that emerged from under his collar, growing up his neck and over his cheekbones. His eyebrows met neatly over his board nose. The pointed tips of his ears barely emerged from his shaggy hair. When he caught me staring at him he grinned at me, and his lips drew back over long ponted teeth.

I was fascinated.

I kept looking back over towards to group to see if he was still there and still watching me. Eventually when I looked for him I couldn't see him. I was scanning the crowd when I heard a rough voice beside me say, "Hey, can I sit here?"

I jumped about a foot. Then I said yes.

We talked. We talked for hours. We talked about music and politics and clothes and people and about ten thousand other things I can't remember. He gave me drinks out of a bottle wrapped in a plastic bag. It tasted bitter, then it made me warm, then it just tasted like more. We ate hot dogs off a truck that parked on the side of the road and sold food that tasted faintly of engine grease. The other kids wandered over when they saw him sitting with me and soon enough they were laughing along with us and sharing bottles and smoke and I bought some more hotdogs and paper baskets of fried potatoes and I was having loud belligerent arguments about society with total strangers on a city corner while the shadows lengthened and the street lamps came on.

I watched a woman pull her car over across the street and man-handle a length of thick pink tubing out of her car. In the diminished light it looked like she was wrestling with a giant penis. "I gotta go," I said. "I'm going to catch all kinds of hell if I don't get home soon."

He walked me down into the subway, away from the others. For the first time he was serious. "Don't forget," he said. "You know where to find me if you need me. Us changelings gotta stick together."

"Thank you," I said. "But I'm not a changeling. I'm just some kid who had an aneurysm or something and now I have hallucinations."

His ears twitched. I stared at them, enchanted. "Do that again."

"Later," he told me, but his ears twitched anyway, involuntary. "Look, could you tell right away that I was different?" he asked me.

"Of course. It was obvious." I tried to drag my attention away from his ears and focus on his words.

"And have you seen other changelings around?"

I thought of the dwarfs and the gazelle-like man from the bus. "A couple," I said.

"Did anybody else notice?"

I stared at him. "I... I don't think so."

"But you knew them right away. Just like you knew me right away. And just like I knew you right away." He paused, but I said nothing, so he continued. "I don't know what the hell you are, I don't know how the hell we all got here. But I know my own."

"And I figure we all got to stick together. But then us wolves are clannish folk." He gave me a crooked, fanged grin and as I watched him he turned around and headed back up the stairs.

I rode home on the subway, staring at my reflection in the darkened glass as we sped through the tunnels. Changeling I mouthed over and over again.

Then I smiled. For the first time since I had woken up in this place, I felt like I had a home somewhere.

Comments

[quetzal.livejournal.com]

... dammit, siobhan, now i have to dreg through my poor abused flist, digging through the eight hundred thousand "omg i only gots 5u4839574893653892 words on the first day lawl wtf" posts from the nanowrimolj crap JUST TO READ MORE OF THIS STORY.

(yes, that means it's awesome.)

thank you for posting. ^_^

p.s. or i'll just read it from your lj proper. *facepalm* it's early. forgive me. story's still awesome, though. :D )

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :-) That's very flattering.

I'm not quite sure what to do with it now. I'm going to hang onto it though, I think it will make a good setting for something in the future.

[quetzal.livejournal.com]

glad to hear it. i'd love to read more when you get a chance to work on it. ^_^

[eveofdstruction.livejournal.com]

Diane cameo, FTW!!