chapter nine.

Simon - present day

I make Noah do most of the driving on Friday, mostly because I'm still bitter about the whole thing. Though he argues, all it takes is for me to glare at him for a few awkward moments and then he says, "Alright, fine. Jesus."

The little duct-taped beater Noah bought when he graduated three years ago is not the ideal car for road trips. It barely has enough space for the two of us and our luggage, not to mention the road noise is deafening and the heating is terribly finicky. Noah's got an engineering degree; he even landed a job (somehow) at one of the biggest tech companies in Boston. He's clearly a capable person. For some reason, though, he refuses to work on this damn car.

Needless to say, I'm sitting in the passenger seat, bundled up in blankets with a beanie pressed down over my ears. The radio's on, though I couldn't say what station it's on or what song it's playing, because in the midst of the roaring tires it's mostly tinny background noise. I rest my head against the window, watching my breath fog the glass.

I'm, in a way, averse to driving; it brings back sour memories. Most people only have to take their driving test once or twice, but I took mine about six times, once for each of my main identities. I never want to get pulled over on the road and not have my face match the one on my driver's license. I hadn't thought about it before Noah brought it up, which, at the time, I both loved and hated him for.

My family was worried about me at first, which I guess they still are. But I can't say they haven't always watched my back.

"Hey, Ginger Snap," Noah says, flicking me in the ear while keeping one hand steady on the steering wheel. "What are you thinking about over there? Pondering space and time?"

"Been there, done that," I say. "I'm thinking that it was probably a bad idea to buy Great Granny Etta a snow globe. What the hell is she going to do with a snow globe?"

Noah scoffs. "Shake it and watch the glitter twirl around. Ooh. Aah. Duh. What else do you do with snow globes?"

"Nothing useful, is my point."

"I swear to God, Simon, if you're gonna be like this all weekend, I'll drop you off on the side of the road now," Noah scolds. I turn away from the window, and he's rolling his eyes, drumming his fingers across the wheel. "I know you're upset about your lady friend. But just take this weekend to give yourself a bit of a break. Come back refreshed."

"I've had enough breaks," I tell him. "Every time I screw up again, I get a break from her."

Noah exhales through his nose, and though I could be imagining it, it almost seems as if he grips the steering wheel a bit tighter. I watch him for a second, trying to understand the sudden stiffness in his shoulders, the frown at his mouth, the furrow of skin between his brows. I've never been able to read people particularly well, but my brother is a whole different story. He's inscrutable, an enigma in human form.

I lean away from the window, unable to fight a jolt of concern. "Noah?"

"You said—this is the first time she's met you as...as you?"

I hesitate, unsure of where he's going with this. "Yes."

He glances sideways at me, brown eyes caught in the afternoon sun. I know that glance. It's questioning. It's reticent. It's judgmental. I have seen it all too many times before. "Why?"

"I don't know," I reply automatically, my automatic reply for most queries. "I don't know, Noah; that's just how it happened. It's not like I've been...hiding from her."

"I just—you keep all these faces, Simon and I..." He trails off, hitting the gas more forcefully. The beater sputters, lurching forward, and though I grip the side of the door and the dash to steady myself, Noah doesn't seem to care. "I'll be honest with you."

"Oh, dear."

"The day you started coming up with names for all your different bodies, I got kinda worried," Noah goes on, ignoring my comment. The road—plain, flat, mostly vacant—is a blur of black and yellow all around us, and I realize I'm stuck in a car with him for the next three hours. I knew that before, technically. But the magnitude of it is hitting me now. Jesus. I'm not sure how much of this I can take. "You get so caught up with keeping track of what each one of your—I don't know, personas—is up to that I think you forget about your authentic self, sometimes. And I just worry that—"

"Noah, you are not giving me this lecture again—"

"Well, someone has to!" he snaps, then exhales, gritting his teeth. "I mean, doesn't it scare you, Simon? You lose control once, you slip up, and everything goes to shit. I just don't understand why you don't just stick with you."

"Because I never had the option to do that, Noah," I tell him, folding my arms. I position myself backwards in the seat, leaning back against the dash. "I screwed that up when I couldn't gain control of my shifting when I was younger, and now I just have to run with it. You know that. You know I'd change all this, if I could—"

"Would you?"

I look at him, wondering if he's serious, but he won't meet my gaze. "What?"

"If you could change all this—if you could just be you, Simon St. John, to hell with Oliver and Kenzo and Jun and whoever the hell else—would you?" Noah says, and before I can answer, he shakes his head and says, "I'm not sure you would."

"Doesn't matter," I say, flitting my gaze out the window once again. There is nothing to see but trees. I wish there was something else to see besides trees. "No use in fretting over things that can't ever happen."

"See? You're deflecting it. Just admit it. You live off this stuff," Noah says, and just for a moment I'm positive I'd do anything to wipe that smug look off his face, to smack away all his pride and self-assurance. As if he knows a thing. As if he knows a goddamn thing, when all he's done is watch from the outside. "You like it," he goes on. "You like getting away from yourself for a while."

"So what if I do?" I say, my voice louder than it has been in a while. I can't remember the last time someone ticked me off this much, but I suppose that's just what siblings are for. "So what if I like putting on a show every now and then? I fuck up, okay? Sometimes I fuck up grandly. So what, Noah, if I need to get out of my skin for a second? I was born with these messed-up cells, anyway. Might as well make use of them."

"Simon—"

"You know what, this is why I don't tell you any of this stuff. This is why I don't tell you how exhilarating shapeshifting can be, when I'm in control of it. This is why I don't mention how fun it is to have an instant disguise when you need one. This is why I don't tell you any of this, Noah," I say, and only then does he look up at me, his eyes wide, mouth pressed into a thin line. He's sick of me. God, he's sick of me. I can tell. "Because you just judge me for it. Like you know a thing about any of this."

"I do know. I've grown up with you, dumbass. How many people do you know that have a shapeshifting younger brother?" He makes a zero with his hand. "That many. Yeah, I may not be the special one. But I still have to deal with all your shit, don't I?"

"Jesus," I say, leaning forward, pressing my head against the seat. "What are we—why are we even arguing right now? I don't want to argue. I don't want to."

"Then don't," replies Noah, turning his eyes back to the road. His cheeks have turned a light pink, his mouth still deep in a frown. "I'm just saying, Simon. You're just important as all your other faces. More important, even. And it shouldn't take me or Val or anyone else to tell you that."

"Noah, you sound like a self-help magazine."

He grunts and reaches to turn up the radio. "For your sake, I'm going to pretend you said, Thank you, Noah. I appreciated this talk even though there was a bit of yelling. You're my favorite brother."

"You're my only brother."

He winks at me. "Irrelevant."

We're about an hour and half out from Marwick, the little grassy New England town in which I spent all of my childhood, when the gas meter's needle is leaning too far towards the E for comfort. Noah pulls into a dusty Citgo off the side of the highway and folds a twenty dollar bill into my hand. "I want some Bugles and some sparkling water. The lemon-flavored stuff."

"That's a very odd combination."

"Bite me."

I hesitate before getting out of the car. This close to home, I'm a bit wary of being recognized, as any of my selves. It will lead to small talk, which is bad enough when you only have one face to worry about. Throw in about five others, and it gets a little messy.

When I step out of the car as a middle-aged Mexican man with a bit of a potbelly, Noah just rolls his eyes at me and pops open the gas cap.

Inside the convenience store, it's sleepy as ever: buzzing overhead lights, aisle after aisle of brightly-advertised junk food, the whole back wall taken up by an industrial fridge filled with various six-packs of beer. It smells faintly like cigarette smoke and urine; the older woman behind the counter gives me little more than a perfunctory nod as I enter.

Damn Noah for not being more specific, because there's a lot of different flavors of Bugles. I cut Ranch out of the picture almost immediately, because Noah has had an odd hatred for ranch and ranch-flavored things since he was about nine (no one knows why). I can't say he wouldn't like the nacho cheese or buffalo flavors, though. I'm still standing there in the middle of the chip aisle, trying to make this decision for Noah comes in and starts yelling at me, when I realize there's a woman at the end of the aisle, and I'm pretty sure she's staring at me.

I don't look at her squarely, rather steal glances out of my periphery. She's middle-aged, I think, and her hair's tied back from her face. Sure enough, she's not moving. Just standing there.

Okay. I'll just go with the original flavor, just to get the hell out of here—

"Simon?"

I jolt. How would she know? I check the backs of my hands, catch the edge of my reflection in one of the refrigerators. I'm still a middle-aged Mexican man. Albeit the clothes are a bit tight, but how would she—

"Don't worry, Simon," she says, closer now. "It's me."

It's me.

I turn, and I'm not sure why I didn't recognize her voice before. She's literally the only reason I made it out of high school; besides my family, there's no one I trust more.

I blink at her, so startled I almost lose grip on my skin and shift back to myself. "Ms. Quang?"

She frowns at me. "I thought it was you. It's the birthmark, on your ear. That much never changes."

I lift a hand to my ear, brushing the birthmark she mentioned—an inch long caterpillar-shaped blot on my cartilage that I've had since I was a baby. "I'm sorry," I say, and for a good second I'm not even sure where the words came from. "I'm sorry I didn't write you like I said I would."

"That's alright, kid," she says, smoothing her graying hair down. She smiles ruefully then, tossing her head towards the door. "Do you have a minute?"

I buy Noah's Bugles and his fancy water and toss them both at him through the car window. He shoots me a silently concerned glance, but I just mouth Ms. Quang at him and then he seems to be more at ease.

There's a couple of rusty benches outside the convenience store; Ms. Quang chooses a seat on one and pats the spot next to her. She's older, more worn, but not much else about her has changed. Her narrow eyes are still watchful, ever-observant, her pink mouth still quick to smile, her frame still slender and frail. In the relative scheme of things, Ms. Quang is relatively young, barely out of her thirties. Back in high school, she was everyone's favorite counselor, and though she knew pretty much everyone, she knew me better than most of the other students.

I still remember the first day I'd ever sat in her office. It was a small, gray-carpeted room with emerald green walls that were covered in photos and pictures. It smelled like woodsmoke, via the air freshener she always kept plugged in. We had sat there and blinked at each other for a while until she'd said, "I know you're a shapeshifter." Then, before I even had time to protest, she'd just waved me off and said, "So tell me everything."

Until then, I hadn't realized just how integral counselors could be in managing the administration's view of your several faces. Ms. Quang knows my current advisor Mr. Ripley, too; she wrote to him before I even got to BU, letting him know just how much of an anomaly I was. I didn't want her to, at first—but she's good at this life stuff, and she knows it. I suppose that's why she's a counselor.

"So," I say, taking an awkward sip of the coke I got from the soda machine. "How are things back at the high school? All is well, I hope?"

"Oh, yes. Much easier now that you're not around for me to worry about," Ms. Quang says, pulling on my ear—the one with the birthmark. I've changed back to myself to make it less awkward, though I'm still glancing around every few moments, praying no one else from my old school or town will show up. "But boring, at the same time. What am I supposed to do with all these kids that only have one name, one face, when I'm used to dealing with you?"

I chuckle a bit uncomfortably. "Yeah. Well."

"Is it any easier, Simon?"

The question comes out of nowhere. Frankly, I'm not sure I would have had an answer to it, even if I had been expecting it. "Sorry?"

"Managing all this," clarifies Ms. Quang, gesturing wildly in the air. "All your different faces. I saw you back then. Sometimes you'd be under so much pressure that the cracks would start to show. So is it any easier?"

I look at her, open my mouth to speak, shut it again. Exhaling, I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees and hanging my head. I can see Noah out of the corner of my eye, watching warily from behind the wheel. Two of these conversations in the same day. If this is any indication of how the rest of the weekend's gonna go, I am certainly in for a treat.

"Do you want the truth?" I say to Ms. Quang, still looking at the ground. "Or what I wish I could say?"

She's silent. Typical Ms. Quang; she's just as eloquent nonverbally as she is with words.

"No," I say, practically breathing the word. "No. It doesn't. It hasn't, yet."

"You can stop, you know," she says. "Whenever you want, you can stop."

You can stop. If she told me that when I was four or five years old, when I was just beginning to understand what the hell was going on with me, when I still didn't know that this power, if one could call it that, had an off switch, I'd call her crazy. It still seems crazy now.

"It's not like—smoking," I say, the first example that popped into my head for some reason. Both Ms. Quang I look up then at the man leaning against the wall a few feet from us, cigarette in his hand, smoke billowing out towards the sun. Ah. "It's not like I can just decide to quit one day. It's—it's in my genes, Ms. Quang. You can't run from your DNA."

"No," she agrees, sitting back against the bench and folding her birdlike arms, "but you can stop letting it run you."

"Ms. Quang—"

"Don't say I'm being cheesy; I'm well aware I'm being cheesy. Whatever it takes to get it through your thick head," she says, and then she's on her feet, gaze tossed towards the road, upon which cars roll by intermittently. Her knee-length skirt flutters a bit as a breeze flows by; she flicks up her collar to shield her neck from the cold. "Just because people would kill for an ability like yours doesn't mean you have to use it all the time. Yes, it's cool—but the moment it's hurting you, you should rest."

I grin a little despite myself. "Thank you, Ms. Quang, but I am perfectly fine."

"I've heard that one a million times before," she says, then ruffles my hair. "I don't want to keep you. Your brother's been glaring at us this whole time and I'm afraid if I stay any longer I'll burst into flames."

I cast a glance towards the beater, still parked at the edge of the gas station. Getting to my feet, I tell her, "He's just a bit protective."

"Always has been," Ms. Quang agrees, then smiles at me, a smile so wide that it turns her eyes to slits. She could end wars with that smile. She has before. "You say hello to your folks for me, will you, Simon?"

"Of course."

She turns to go, feet pivoted in the direction of a silver SUV still hooked up to the tank. I watch her walk away, wondering if there's something else I'm supposed to say, if there's something she wants me to say.

Then, she stops walking. "Oh. Simon?"

"Hm?"

"A long time from now," she says, back still turned, "when this is all over, you will come back and visit me, my boy, won't you?"

"Yeah," I call after her, with little hesitation. "Yeah, sure."

It isn't till long after she's left and Noah and I are back on the road that I realize I don't know what she means. When this is all over. The words echo back and forth in my brain, never returning with any concrete definition.

What's this? And how do I know when it's over?