The Twin Powers by Robert Lipsyte

Author:Robert Lipsyte
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Twenty-nine

EDDIE

WASHINGTON, D.C.

2012

I FELT like a prisoner. It was my own fault. I had let it happen. I remembered when Hercules had said that my elevator didn’t go to the top floor. It had stung, but then I’d flushed it out of my head, like the memory of an intercepted pass. Coach always says you can’t dwell on the negative because that will drag you down.

Coach says. Coach says. It was always somebody else says, somebody else telling me what to do. Coach. Dad. Grandpa. Tom. Erin. I had thought it was a good thing to be coachable, good that I listened to people and let them help me improve. Wasn’t it? A lot of players insist on doing things their way, and most of the time they don’t improve on their own. They drop off the team.

Tom isn’t coachable—he’s always talking back, questioning, doing everything his way as though he knows better. Maybe he does know better. At least he isn’t a puppet.

What would Tom do in my place now?

What a joke. They think you’re Tom, but they want you to act like Eddie. You want to act like Tom, but you’re still Eddie. Maybe it was time to be the Eddie whose elevator goes to the top.

When Erin showed up that morning to take me to an interview, I told her I wanted to see Grandpa and my friends.

She sighed and shook her head. “It’s not a good time to hang out at the wagon.”

“Why can’t they come visit me here?”

“They all went home. They were uncomfortable in the wagon.”

“So get them hotel rooms too,” I said.

Erin sighed more deeply. “I hate to tell you this,” she said, “but they’re jealous of you getting all the attention.”

“So let them come on stage with me. I’d like that.”

“The truth is,” said Erin, “they were homesick and bored of the tour. They wanted to get back to school, to their lives. They really weren’t committed to the tour.”

Too many different answers. I wondered what was true. I wished I could look into her mind.

Could I? I stared at Erin’s forehead as if I were looking for a hole between blitzing linebackers. Nothing. I remembered a TV show where the cops slipped a skinny wire with a tiny TV camera at its tip under a door and got to see what was going on in the bad guy’s room.

I imagined slipping a tiny microphone up Erin’s nose and into her brain.

I heard static!

And then, This nimbot is getting to be a pain. Where is Keith?

Her phone rang and she turned away. “There you are. We’re ready . . . That long?”

She turned back to me and gave me a phony smile. “Someone’s coming—an old friend of yours.”

Keith? The guy Tom called the Lump! Tom thought he might be some kind of government agent—when the Lump had been living in Tom’s house, he’d always been working on computers in the basement. I’d gotten along with him because we were both Yankees fans, but if he came here, he might figure out that there are two of us.

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