Never change. Never change. Never change.

  I had already changed so much from the boy she knew, and it hadn't even been two years of illness we faced together. Boy. At the time, I didn't know why referring to myself as such disgusted me so much, but I couldn't help but feel discomfort at the idea of being stuck in this form. My mind was breaking into pieces trying to contort around this idea, “Never Change,” but all I could do at the time was smile softly at my mother, tell her how much I loved her, and promise her that I wouldn't.

  She died later that day; they didn't let me see her body, but I imagined it looked a lot like the one I saw only hours prior, sad and sickly, just having stopped desperately clinging to life. The next week was the funeral. So many people showed up, people I had never even met. It only made sense, as my mother was the type of person to leave a lasting positive impression. There were so many people crying during the wake; there were a handful of indifferent children, looking around awkwardly, not really sure why they were there. I felt bad for both parties, weirdly more than I felt for myself. At the time my emotions had simply shut off, and I was a polite greeting machine, thanking others for the positive impact they had on my mother's life, even though I was completely unaware of their existence until this moment in time.

  My grandfather stood behind me the entire time, hand upon my shoulder, resolute and strong. He would converse in Korean to those who could converse back, and share stories of my mother and her warmth, but otherwise remain silent. Every once in a while, he would squeeze my shoulder, which I inferred was his way of ensuring I was remaining strong, but it was unnecessary; my mother taught me everything I needed to know about introducing myself to strangers.

  I left for South Korea the next week, having very few things to pack, and even fewer people to say goodbye to. I'm sure I had friends, and people who would be sad that I just up and disappeared, but I didn't want to deal with the reminders of a life that existed before this current version. It was an easy enough trip: just a few walks through some strange doors and I was on the other side of the world. My grandfather asked if there was anything he could do for me before we left; any wish he could grant that was in his power. I had only one; to leave everything behind, even my name. I wanted to be Avery, not Su-jin, and I wanted to be Grey, after my father’s last name. He was reluctant, feeling like I was abandoning my mother and her culture, but he was a man of his word, and so I was Avery Grey from that moment forward.

  I enrolled in school there quickly, and hit the ground running academically; I knew the material, I knew English and Korean, and I was so far-gone that zoning into class was easy enough. But socially, I was a wreck; when people spoke to me, I tried my best to speak back, but my mother's face came to mind every time, and so I would choke and say nothing at all. They quickly learned that I wasn't a talkative person, and left me alone. They then learned that I was a people pleaser, going out of my way to help people in need, just like my mother wanted me to in her last moments. So they began to ask for help studying with their homework. The next year, they asked for help with their homework in general; pretty soon, I had become a class gofer for the tougher and more lawless peers.

  My grandfather didn't know how to speak to me about how school was, or how I was, or about anything but groceries and teaching him sparse English. When he would try to ask, I would tell him and say it was going lovely, and that I was academically excelling, though that last part wasn’t a lie. Apparently my mother's death made me more than proficient as a deceiver, and so he took my words at face value and didn't pursue any further. We would spend time together watching movies I was probably too young to watch, a personal favorite being Oldboy. I didn't understand why it was twisted, I simply saw it as a deep revenge tale, but maybe that element was lost on my childlike mind. I imagined myself in the protagonist's shoes, being capable of what he could do, and feeling a sense of thrill at the idea.

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  It was only a matter of time before I asked to enter extracurricular martial arts, specifically Tae Kwon Do. My grandfather, ecstatic at the prospect of me doing anything but study and sitting in a dark room, enrolled me immediately, and it was love at first practice. Academics and martial arts became life preservers on a white-water rafting journey that had become my life. Practicing against Othersiders was amazing; they would annihilate me handily, but I could feel myself getting better with every defeat, imagining the day I could win against someone so clearly above me in every physical sense. Pretty soon, I became stronger than some of those who oppressed me, who made me do their bidding, but because of my mother's final words, I turned the other cheek still. The march of time went on: I suffered silently, watched movies with my grandfather, studied and practiced, until one day I was 16 years old and entering high school, the last stage before it was time for me to become something that others wanted.

  My body had developed as I had gotten older: my small, soft voice became a deep husk, and my slender frame and thin shoulders broadened and defined with muscle. I didn't hate all the changes, but I did hate most of them: the way my Adam's Apple shivered in my throat, and the hair that grew wherever it damn well pleased, and the genitals that just wanted to go off whenever they wanted, completely unprompted by whether or not I felt anything. It was a slow and horrible torture, with the only benefit being that I maintained a lithe enough form, and that testosterone helped maintain the muscle mass enough to fight well.

  Life was a fever dream, and I didn't have any idea how I got to where I was; I had been a machine on auto-pilot, doing everything everyone asked of me, everything I intuited they might ask of me, and nothing more. Nothing for myself, except for fighting, which had numbed and become just another piece of the monotony, no longer exciting with goals to look forward to. On the mat, I didn't try to win, because I didn't like winning; it felt wrong for me to win, like I was cheating the opponent out of a feeling that I could never have felt anyways. So I faked trying, and got beat down, and moved on to the next one. The instructor tried talking to me about it several times, as I used to be the best human in the class, but I can tell he has long since given up on me.

  I enrolled in a prep school for a college in Seoul, even though I intended to move back to America after my high school years. I wanted a clean break from the people who made things hard for me in middle school; when I learned where they were going, I enrolled in a school in the opposite direction, even though it was a bit further away from home. Anything for a few years of peace. My grandfather disapproved at first; lately, there had been a string of unsolved murders in the area, and he thought the extra commute might make life more dangerous for me. I reminded him that I had almost a decade of Tae Kwon Do to protect me. “But didn't you see the story?” He answered, a concerned look in his eye. “The state of the body suggests Othersiders might be doing it.” Eventually he let it go, because the prep school gave me a pretty nice scholarship, but he still couldn't understand why I didn't choose the school just down the road.

  Honestly, when I thought about the idea of being murdered in the streets by some stranger, I didn't feel too much about it. I wouldn't make it easy, but it wouldn't be a hard battle either. It made me laugh a little bit, remembering childhood me cowering in fear in my studio apartment at the thought of strangers violating my safety. The fear was gone, replaced by a mundane sense of anhedonia. I couldn't care about it, it didn't make sense to care about it, and I was sure that if other people felt how I felt, they would get it too. I didn't welcome it, but those who had suffered knew that death was not the worst fate to suffer in the world.