Within/Without

chapter eight.

Simon - November 2003

Today I didn't have to go to school, which should have been a good thing. At seven in the morning, a half an hour before she would normally wake me up, Mom had come into my astronaut-themed room and leaned over me and shook me gently awake.

I told her, "But it's early."

She said, "I know. Your dad and I are taking you to the doctor's today."

I had been sitting up by then, rubbing my eyes. When I did they changed from brown to blue; I caught my young reflection in the mirror across the room, and the dismay on my mother's face. "But I'm not sick," I said, confused.

Mom looked at me for a long while, then just sighed and told me to hurry up, we'd be late.

Now it was early afternoon and the car's wheels were thunder against the road and I could hardly hear myself think. My parents were in the front seat, bickering, their voices a nearly indiscernible babble. I was five at the time, so my attention span was short and my understanding of real world things was limited, very limited, but I knew enough to know that my parents were mad, and they were probably mad at me.

I sat in the backseat, thumping my legs against the carseat, trying to forget the odd look the doctor had given me, the jabbing and poking of his fingers and needles. He was the fifth doctor I had seen in the last six months, but he wasn't much different from the others. He asked questions, a lot of questions. Checked my temperature. Drew blood. Asked more questions. My parents told me, "Show him, Simon. Go ahead." And then I froze up and I couldn't, because I was so young, and so afraid. The doctor said, "You are wasting my time."

It was beginning to get boring. Day after day my parents searched for answers that weren't even there—and would I want to find them, even if they did exist?

"We can't keep doing this, Mary, you know we can't," my dad was saying. From the backseat he seemed distant, like an image, a story. Broad, tense shoulders and scruffy silver-blond hair down his neck and tired eyes blinking in the rearview. "We're making ourselves look like complete idiots; no one believes us."

"All it takes is one time," Mom replied. She had her legs folded in the seat, laptop balanced on her knees. I couldn't see what she was looking at; I only heard the constant click-clacking of her nails against the keyboard. Searching, probably. My earliest memories of my parents were of them searching, always searching. Boy changes faces. Shapeshifting. Shapeshifting + illness? Check symptoms here. No match. Try again? "All it takes is one time for Simon to show them, and then they'll have to believe, won't they? Then they'll have to help us."

"But he won't," Dad said. The turn signal clicked, paused, clicked. I matched the beat with my feet against the carseat. "It's been five times now that he's just frozen up. He's not going to do it; he's too scared."

"And you're saying we should—what? Give up?" The click-clacking stopped. The car was still, except for me, except for the thud of my shoes against plastic. My mom seemed to flinch at every noise.

"Not...give up," Dad said, slowly, as if feeling around for something in the dark. "I'm just saying maybe we should give it a rest, for a bit. Wait for him to gain more control over it. Try some more research then."

Mom scoffed. The laptop slammed shut. "You're not serious. We don't have any time to waste! He's sick, Hank, and if we wait around long enough there might not be another chance. Are you okay with that? Watching our little boy die?"

"Mary!" he snapped. My father was a quiet, quiet man, and this was one of the few times I remembered him yelling. "We don't know that's what will happen—"

"Well, I'll be damned if I'm just gonna wait and see—"

They kept talking, voices rising over one another's, then rising higher than even that, but by then I had already tuned out. The thud of my shoes against the carseat stopped, and my hands began trembling, veins working beneath the skin, muscles stretching, then shortening again. My hair was red. Black. Blond. Curly, wavy, short, long. My skin spasmed from pale to olive-toned to dark brown. My heart hammered against my ribcage, blood rushing in my ears, stomach twisting itself this way and then the other.

When I spoke, the words were mostly a wheeze. "Mommy? Daddy? I think—I don't—I don't feel good."

I remembered the look of horror on my mom's face as she turned around, watched me change from one body to the next, never gaining control long enough to stay in one skin for more than a few seconds. Dad pulled the car over, and they both came around to the backseat and held me until it passed, until I finally retained one skin—not my own, even, but I was too exhausted to care. I was crying, clutching my dad's arm, burying my face in my mom's shirt. "Am I going to die?" I asked, and asked again. "Am I going to die? What does it feel like to die?"

That was the first time I ever lost control. That was the first time I ever understood just what it was to be more afraid of yourself than of anyone else, anything else.

Is it a good thing to know fear like you know your own name?