Ditto
A short story!!!!
A week ago, one of the long trains derailed and exploded chemicals all over and now the air feels heavy like the sky is about to open up and rain proper, but it only rains backwards: wet burping up from below.
Someone said three to four months for cleanup which sounds crazy because the chemicals are completely part of the dirt now, which is the same as being gone, and it’s just bits of train left. But still there are like five hundred men in tents there every day standing around, it seems, mostly to watch. It’s all the same to you and the show must go on.
You lean close to the bathroom mirror, both hands on the sink to raise your body up to it. The vest and beret are adult sizes but they will be pinned to your size tomorrow. You got special permission to wear them home tonight.
“I know what you did,” you mouth to your reflection, watching your lips pinch and stretch, tongue here and there, “scoundrel!”
“Get out, Evan—it’s my turn!” your sister yells through the door. When you leave she tells you she could hear you breathing from outside and that it was gross.
You didn’t do theater before this or anything besides all of the sports. Your sister is the smart one anyways and not just because she’s older. When you were younger, when they’d ask what you want to be when you grow up, you would say someone else’s answer. It seemed like a good idea. Your favorite Pokémon was Ditto, which is the one that turns into anything. Adam and Erin were auditioning for the play, so you did too.
“It’s a love story about corruption,” you tell your parents later during dinner, which is how you misremember Mr. Paul explained it once.
“That doesn’t make sense.” Your sister listens but she only knows how to do it like a lawyer.
“Be nice,” your mom says over Piers Morgan who is always at volume 70. News is big right now because everyone and everything you know is on it, because of what happened so close by with the train.
“Now, how can that be? A train full of chemicals, miles long, I-mean-this-thing-was-gigantic, full of toxic—presumably toxic—how does a train like that derail? And, what sorts of health effects can we expect to see, from exposure to these chemicals?” Piers’ voice clobbers the room but it reaches his guest on a delay.
“Yes, how can that be!” Your mom protests over the response that isn’t an answer. “And what are the effects!” Your dad is always silent.
The picture freezes but the sound keeps going: “I’m sorry, aren’t you supposed to have this information?” Piers: lips closed, teeth parted, paper maiche brow; guest: skeleton head.
“There has to be a reason they won’t tell us anything, and I think it’s nefarious.” Your sister is always showing off her SAT words but you don’t care. You know it’s easy to learn words if you want.
You tell them all again about your plan to sleep in costume.
“Evan has anyone told you you look like a school shooter.” This is what your sister says.
You pull at your houndstooth: “No, obviously—I look like a detective!”
“I’m talking about your hair, like your real hair cut.”
You like that the theater has no windows. Before you go in, you have no idea. When you’re in, it could be anything outside and you don’t know. “Leave your attitude at the door,” Mr. Paul says, and it’s waiting out there with your parents and your sister and Piers Morgan.
Some people got sick or said they started hallucinating after the train crash (Adam says they’re faking it for money), and at the meetings they show up and cough or fuss so badly that everyone else yells at them to go home. No one leaves and it gets very loud.
Something you have not told your family is that you have a kiss with Erin in the play. Mr. Paul says a lot about everything and he’s always singing to himself like he’s his own dying pet but he does not say much about the kiss. Once he said moonlight is sunlight and Adam said that’s not possible but he was wrong which he hates.
You have not rehearsed the kiss because that would be too much kissing. Through dress rehearsal, every time the moment arrived, you and Erin would sort of step together, laugh and shrug, and then the whole play would be over. It makes sense to you that the kiss happens at the end and just once.
Saying the scripted lines feels like wearing shoes that weigh as much as your dad’s except they fit, and like your jaw is a part of your mouth and also your head. But when you think about the kiss it’s quicksand legs. You lose your place in the vocal warm up.
If you haven’t kissed anyone yet, how are you supposed to know how detectives kiss!
When your parents kiss their bodies stay far apart, it’s all reaching neck and lips. They do this when they say goodbye, even when your dad will be right back.
In the car he takes the way that gets a look at the wreck, and when you pass it he says these are strange times.
You don’t agree but you don’t say.
You don’t get what’s so bad about the train thing. It feels as different as most things, similar to construction, not as bad as war. It’s only recently that you’re getting used to anything. You go “oh and now it’s this again, like last time.” You say, “I see.” Your dad says “I see” but nobody smiles when he says it.
At the last rehearsal before the show, you get a pizza party. Erin tells you about lucid dreaming, which sounds the same as imagination, but she says it’s better. Kayla does her character accent all night: Ay’ll have anotha slice, puh-lease.
The morning of the show, you dry the wet off your bike and ride through the woods with your friends to the crash site. They talk about the train and you listen. Every theory sounds plausible.
“It’s obviously CIA government mind control—”
“—to make you gay!”
“You wish!”
Beneath you the earth seems completely fine even though you know it’s also maybe giving people visions and ruining their lungs. When you arrive you are turned away.
“You boys can keep coming back but the answer’s the same today as yesterday and it’ll be the same tomorrow, and next week, and all the way till fall, at least.” He is standing far away so he needs to yell, but he probably also wants to.
“‘At least’?!” Adam is not afraid of any man.
You all knew you’d get turned away, but Adam’s dad likes getting reports, and you are practicing detective. Which reminds you.
“What are you?” you ask the man on the other side of the tape.
He seems confused but also like he thinks you’re doing a set up for a joke he doesn’t want to hear.
“Are you a detective?”
“What I am is telling you boys to go back home.”
You start to explain but Adam interrupts: “If we stay over here can we stay?” He is pointing where you are, on the side of the tape with the cars.
The man shakes his head and turns and once he is facing away from you he screams a shocking and horrible scream like an animal’s and crumples to the ground. In seconds he is surrounded by other men, some of whom look up at you accusatorily, or maybe concernedly, those stares are about the same.
You all scramble away afraid. On the bike ride home you replay the scream in your head and once you’re alone you scream it in your closed mouth. You cannot believe what was inside of that man.
Then at home lunch is bow ties with jar sauce. Your sister is by the window and she asks, “did you see that?” and then says “never mind” but your dad says “not this again” and then she runs to her room crying. When you hear “not this again” and the running and the crying you hear the scream, inside and outside, the source and the echo.
There’s one warm up that’s everyone’s favorite because it sounds like it’s for kids but it’s got big vocab and “dark themes.” You do it three times before the show like Bloody Mary.
To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,
In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock,
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!
In the theater everything feels kind of like this, big even if it’s small. Where your toe points. When the door slams. Which suspenders you’re wearing, because one pair backstage is specific. Some of it is like a haunted house that can also chase you, and some of it is like how you want your parents to be: when it’s too dark to get their faces but they’re with you by your bed, and it’s so quiet that it’s only your breaths cycling in and out of the spot lit by the moon (by the sun).
Later you’re alone in the bathroom, all dressed up and ready for the show, and you press your mouth to the mirror. It leaves a smudge that you spread around with your finger so it becomes like two clouds, flat and trapped, one on the surface and one in the reflection, separate but the same. No one will know what you did except you; they’ll just see one big smudge, or two if they really look. Your secret. You close your eyes and pretend to disappear and then come right back. It feels very important and easy, like magic.
And then suddenly the audience is all there, a big waiting that your sister’s boyfriend and Mrs. Soodak’s next-door neighbor for some reason are a part of, and it’s time for the final scene. The whole play has been a blur, because the memories aren’t yours. You enter stage right through the freestanding door and cross to Erin, who is nervous, standing stock still with her prop broom which is real. You step together like in rehearsal but this time you take her hand, and she smiles a little like she is holding down tears. She is looking for you, for recognition of herself in your eyes, afraid and alone on stage. She does not see you, because for now you are not Evan. You are the surprising scream, the serious kiss, the grown up with answers.
yesss can’t wait to read 😍