The Twinning Project

by Robert Lipsyte

  I’m an okay fiddler. I started when I was three. Dad played the violin, and we loved to play together. We played everything—Mozart, bluegrass, the Beatles. I kept playing after he disappeared so I could imagine he was still there next to me.

  Every time I practiced, I warmed up with a couple of minutes of the dueling-violins number from Riverdance. We’d seen it on TV once, and Dad and I loved whaling away, especially when he’d come home from one of his trips coaching star violinists. We didn’t do the dances, but we always ended up laughing. And then Dad would get serious and hug me around the shoulders. When I was smaller, he’d drop to his knees and touch his forehead to mine. Sometimes I thought he could tell what I was thinking.

  Dr. Traum was new at the orchestra job, and he left the musicians alone. I had the feeling he didn’t know that much about music. Alessa was the only cello player in school who was bigger than the cello. She wasn’t very good.

  My classes were all right. I like school, at least the learning part, not the having-to-get-along-with-other-people part. Math is math, you’re right or you’re wrong, and the books we were reading in English were okay, especially The Prince and the Pauper, by Mark Twain, my all-time favorite, which I’ve read lots of times. It’s about a poor boy with a bad father and a rich boy who’s on his way to becoming king of England. They switch lives for a while. The poor boy’s name was Tom Canty, like mine, which is why I named my imaginary twin after the prince, Edward Tudor.

  Science has hardcore information you can use. How else do you think I learned to make stink bombs? French is memory. So is music. I have a good memory. In tech lab, the controls on the computers were easy to bypass, so I could surf the web looking for new tech gadgets and bomb recipes.

  We hardly ever had gym, maybe because there were so many fat kids in school or maybe because the gym teachers were only interested in the jocks. That was okay with me. I’ve never played much ball because I don’t like teams. Anyway, I’m not into sports. That’s Eddie territory. He’s good at every sport. We’re mirror twins. Opposites.

  That first week at Nearmont we played dodgeball, the meanest game ever invented. I hate it. It’s like a training game for bullies. This one kid, a huge kid with a lot of pimples on his forehead, Todd Britzky, would yell, “Britzkyball!” and pick out someone slow or fat or scared, then fire away. He nailed Alessa hard. The gym teacher was busy on his iPhone, probably doing stuff for some varsity team.

  I watched Britzky. He had that jock-bully walk, but I could tell he really didn’t have much confidence in himself. He looked over his shoulder a lot, and his eyes flicked around. I figured I’d have to find a way to mess with his mind; he was making Alessa miserable, and she was trying to help me learn my way around school. But I didn’t have time. I had to act fast.

  I slipped the grease gun out of my pocket and up my sleeve and walked out on the gym floor. When Britzky heaved the ball toward me, I batted it away.

  “You’re out,” he said.

  “You’re roadkill, pizza face,” I said.

  He got so red, his pimples lit up. Kids started stamping their feet. Britzky didn’t know what to do. He knew he had to do something or he’d lose his bullyhood, but he probably knew my reputation from YouTube. I stood my ground, waiting for him to charge. I slipped the grease gun into full automatic.

  A hand closed around mine. It was Dr. Traum’s. What was he doing here? Following me?

  “You have to obey the rules, Thomas,” he whispered. “You’re not a special person here.”

  “Nobody’s special, and everybody’s special,” I said, remembering my last conversation with Eddie. I always love to quote Dad.

  Dr. Traum looked at me hard, blinked, and nodded. “I’ve heard that before.”

  He opened my fist and took the grease gun. I waited to hear him tell me I was expelled or at least suspended. But he walked out of the gym without looking back. Maybe he really needed another first violinist.

  SEVEN

  NEARMONT, N.J.

  1957

  EDDIE Tudor thought the new football coach was a kook. He didn’t seem to know that much about football, and at practice he didn’t wear sweats and a ball cap, like most coaches. Instead, he wore a shiny pale green suit. It was almost a zoot suit. The pants were pegged and stitched up the sides. The shoulders of the jacket were so big, it looked as though he was wearing football pads, and the lapels were wide, almost like wings. He wore a white shirt and a skinny purple tie.

  The guys on the team thought he was trying too hard to look hip, but Eddie told them to give him a chance, since he was new, and maybe he was just trying hard to make a good impression. Eddie was the captain, so if there was a problem with the new coach, it would be his job to represent his teammates. No sweat. He liked being Captain Eddie.

  One day the week before, the school psychologist suddenly quit, and so did the football coach. The next day Dr. Traum arrived to take over both jobs. Eddie was trying to like him. He was the coach. But it wasn’t easy.

  Now it was Dr. Traum’s first game at Nearmont Junior High, and he didn’t know all the players or all the plays in the playbook. Eddie stood on the sidelines waiting to go back into the game. He told himself to concentrate, to forget about Dr. Traum.

  Eddie loved football. He was the quarterback. He thought the best feeling in the world was during those wonderful few seconds when the ball was in your hand and the entire field was spread out in front of you, waiting for you to make your play.

  At that moment, he truly felt like Captain Eddie, powerful, in charge, a prince of the universe. Time stood still as he watched the opposing players rushing toward him, growling like attack dogs ready to pounce. He would dance out of their way until he spotted one of his teammates in the clear, and then he’d throw the ball.

  And he loved the crowd, loved hearing them whistle and yell. The new cheerleader, Merlyn, had a way of whipping her head from side to side so that her long black hair looked like a flag snapping in the wind. The crowd chanted “Touch-down” or “Dee-fense” in rhythm with her magical hair. Her voice, sweet and silvery, knifed through the crowd noise.

  Sometimes, Eddie imagined Dad in the crowd. Dad had seen him play PeeWee football, but he was gone before Eddie made the junior high varsity as a seventh-grader. He was the starting quarterback! Dad would have been so proud. He always said Eddie would be a great quarterback someday.

  And Dad would know. He traveled a lot, all year long, giving private coaching lessons to star college and professional quarterbacks.

  Dr. Traum banged Eddie’s shoulder pads, waking him out of his thoughts about Dad. “You ready, Eddie?”

  “Ready, Coach.”

  “Okay, Eddie, let’s go,” Dr. Traum said. “Blue seventeen.”

  “That play’s not working, Coach. They’re reading it.”

  “I said, ‘Blue seventeen,’ Eddie.”

  Eddie ran out on the field and waited for the huddle to form around him. Blue seventeen was a pass-action play. He was supposed to pretend to hand off to a running back before he stepped back to pass. It was a good play when it worked, but it hadn’t been working all game. The other team was supposed to pause while it tried to figure out whether Eddie was really handing it off or faking it, which was supposed to give him a couple of extra seconds. But the fake hadn’t fooled them, and that was why Nearmont was twelve points behind in the fourth quarter. Eddie didn’t want to do it, but if Coach said so . . .

  “Red nine, fourteen, green twenty-three, eight, blue seventeen.”

  The ball came back into his hands. He turned, bent over, and pretended to hand it to the best running back on the team. He wanted to really hand it off—a better play—but Coach said . . .

  Coach is wrong.

  You’re supposed to obey Coach.

  I’m the captain.

  Just do it!

  Eddie stepped back to throw, the ball in both hands under his chin, the way Dad had taught him. He pulled his right arm back, elbow bent. While he
stretched out his left arm, pointing left, he looked to the right, hoping to confuse the other team. He dropped his right shoulder, snapped his throwing arm forward, and stepped down on his left foot. He twisted his wrist and fingers as he let go and followed through with his empty hand facing the ground.

  Just before he let go, he heard the other coach scream, “Put a hat on him!” and he spotted a slight movement out of the corner of his left eye. It was too late to react.

  A helmet slammed into his chest, and he hit the ground hard, no time to roll into a ball. His head slammed into the ground.

  Lights blinked off, like a power failure in a thunderstorm.

  When they came on again, Eddie could hear his pal Ronnie yelling from the stands, “Eddie! Eddie!”

  The coach was looking down at him. “You okay?”

  “Just got my bell rung.” His head hurt, but he didn’t want to leave the game. “Did he catch it?”

  “How many?” Dr. Traum held up some fingers. They were blurry.

  Eddie guessed. “Two?”

  “Close enough. Blue seventeen. They’ll never expect it again.”

  He opened his mouth to say, They always expect it. It’s all you know.

  But Eddie never talked back to a coach. He shut his mouth and got up.

  EIGHT

  NEARMONT, N.J.

  2011

  DAD and I talked about history all the time. He was into empires—the Roman and the Mongol, the Russian and British, and the Han Dynasty in China. He said Americans had better study those empires if they expected to survive. Dad had a saying that went something like, “People who forget history repeat the bad stuff.”

  I wanted to like my new history class, but the teacher, Mrs. Rupp, spoiled it. She had this thing she called Mrs. Rupp’s Timeline, with all the dates she thought were important from ancient times to the present. She said that the best way to understand important events was by memorizing her timeline, so you would know the order in which things happened. I could understand that you should know there were almost a hundred years between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, but I hated wasting time memorizing dates. I liked to read about dinosaurs and the Roman Empire and Custer’s Last Stand and the civil rights movement, but I hated to memorize the dates. Math, French, and music you have to memorize, but not history. History should be stories about real people. Dad said so.

  My first week, Mrs. Rupp made the class memorize “Great Dates in Science and Technology,” like when the telephone was invented and when Earth conquered outer space. She tried to make it into some kind of demento game show we should be thrilled to play.

  “Oh-kay-doh-kay, here we go,” she shouted. “It’s time for . . . Mrs. Rupp’s Timeline!”

  She cranked up her laptop, and a picture of a spaceship with a hammer-and-sickle emblem flashed on the wall. “We haven’t heard from our newest student, Tom . . . Canty! Let’s break it out for Tom.”

  The class applauded, but they were sarcastic claps. They didn’t like memorizing dates, either. Or maybe they just didn’t like me. I’m oh-kay-doh-kay with that.

  “Let’s have the day . . . month . . . year when the first rocket ship orbited the Earth.”

  “That was Sputnik,” I said. “It was a Russian satellite, and it really freaked out America. We were afraid they would use it to—”

  “Thank you, Tom,” said Mrs. Rupp in that tone teachers use when they want you to feel so brainless that you’ll shut up. “Now, what’s the answer I’m looking for? Day . . . month . . . year.”

  A girl with long dark hair that covered most of her face raised her hand. Mrs. Rupp said, “Let’s hear from another new student. Merlyn?”

  Merlyn stood up and said, “The fourth of October, 1957.” She had a sweet, silvery voice.

  “Excellent, Merlyn. Got that, Tom?”

  I said, “It was important because America and Russia were enemies and—”

  “Thank you for sharing, Tom, but that’s not today’s takeaway.”

  I couldn’t stop myself. “It was a big deal, it changed history, it—”

  Mrs. Rupp glared at me. “Maybe you should be teaching this class, Tom.”

  “Excellent idea,” I said. I stood up, and Alessa pulled on my sleeve.

  Lucky for Mrs. Rupp, the bell rang. I was ready to give a lecture on how we hated the Russians back in the 1950s and what a waste that was. Dad told me all about it.

  The next class was orchestra, and I was looking forward to getting lost in the music. I could shut out everything in my life, even the scratchy out-of-tune violins around me, and hear only myself. I was thinking about the music, and I didn’t notice Britzky rush out of Mrs. Rupp’s class ahead of me. He was waiting for me in the hall when I walked out.

  He looked wild. “You think you’re so smart!” he shouted.

  “Tom, watch out!” screamed Alessa. She was right behind me.

  Britzky charged me. I jumped out of the way, but Alessa didn’t move fast enough, and he slammed into her.

  “Mind your business, whale-butt,” he growled at her.

  I helped Alessa pick up her music books. She wouldn’t look at me because she was crying.

  Too bad, I thought. I might have liked it here at this school for a while. But now I have to do something about Britzky.

  It would probably get me expelled again.

  NINE

  NEARMONT, N.J.

  2011

  THE night before I did something about Britzky, I rode my bike over to Grandpa’s nursing home in time for dessert. It’s against the rules for visitors to eat there without advance notice, except for me when I bring my violin and play with Grandpa, who plays the piano. He can still do that, except if you ask him to play Mozart, you might get some old song like “Moon River.”

  He was glad to see me and gave me a big hug. “Who are you?”

  “Tom, your grandson. John’s son.”

  “John.” He smiled. “He was here yesterday.”

  I wish. Dad disappeared two years ago when the small plane he was on crashed into a lake. He was on his way to give a violin master class. Everybody was saved except Dad. His body was never found.

  “Want to play?” I said.

  “Chess?”

  “Music.”

  “What do I play?”

  I led him over to the piano. We got applause before I even took my violin out of its padded backpack. Grandpa surprised me by starting Beethoven’s Sonata no. 1. Then he suddenly switched to a song from South Pacific. It was fun trying to keep up with him. He played tunes from other Broadway shows. I was sorry after a half hour or so when he got tired and quit.

  Dessert was great. Chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. Old ladies kept coming over to our table to pinch my cheek and rub Grandpa’s back.

  Grandpa leaned over to me. “Listen up.” He put his mouth close to my ear and whispered, “Stay on your toes. It’s crunch time. The monitors have landed.”

  I felt sad. Poor Grandpa. Sometimes I thought he was my only friend in the world—at least the only nonimaginary one—and he was old and crazy. I hugged him and told him I had to get home.

  He said loud enough for all the old ladies to hear, “Come back soon, John.”

  TEN

  NEARMONT, N.J.

  2011

  BOTH cars were in the driveway when I got home, and there were lights on in the kitchen and living room. I didn’t want to have to talk to Mom or the Lump. I rode around to the back of the house and into the little stone garden that nobody ever used except me. I leaned my bike against a tree and waited for Eddie.

  Sometimes it takes a while for the clouds to open up so I can spot the double stars in Eddie’s galaxy. Until there’s a clear path through the sky between us, we can’t send our thought beams.

  I know this sounds insane, which is why I don’t talk about it. It all began about two years ago.

  The summer Dad disappeared, Mom was a wreck and I hung out with Grandpa. His mind was fine then. We’d sit in th
e stone garden and take turns reading books to each other. Grandpa’s favorite author was Mark Twain. Grandpa said everything you need to know about how the world works and how people act was in Mark Twain’s books. He said Dad thought so, too.

  First, we read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which I liked, and then Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I liked even better. Huck was a rebel. Next we read The Prince and the Pauper, and then A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which I liked even though it was too long and I didn’t understand everything without Grandpa’s help. It was about a guy who goes back in time to fight knights and dragons. He defeats some bad guys by predicting an eclipse of the sun, which he knew was going to happen because he was from the future and had studied history and remembered the date. Mrs. Rupp would love that.

  Grandpa’s number-one all-time favorite Mark Twain book was The Mysterious Stranger. In that book, the devil comes down to Earth and explains the human race to a couple of boys my age. It’s almost like Mark Twain was on the devil’s side.

  Grandpa and Dad always told me to use my imagination instead of just believing what I was told. They said that Twain made up stuff that was truer than most of what you learned in school.

  It was during that summer hanging out with Grandpa after Dad disappeared that I started using my imagination to keep from feeling so bad. I came up with the idea of a twin brother.

  In my fantasy, Eddie and I were separated at birth to save us from the aliens who secretly ran Earth. (We were truly separated—we had been connected at the butt!) Then I came up with a great story to explain it. These aliens were scientists who had created two Earths as an experiment. I stayed on the first Earth they had created, while Eddie was sent to the newer planet, EarthTwo, which is almost like Earth but fifty years younger. But the experiment wasn’t working out because humans were messing up their planets, poisoning the water and the air, dropping bombs on each other, and letting kids die of diseases that could be wiped out. The aliens were thinking seriously about blowing up one or even both planets.