A short story by Rick and Tommy Kaempfer
(Our first-ever collaboration)
Joey’s father looked him in the eye and repeated the question. “Are you sure you don’t have any homework tonight?”
Joey gulped and nodded. He knew that his father had an extra scent organ that could smell a lie from a thousand feet away. It was uncanny.
“What is your teacher Mrs. Hogan’s nickname again?” his father asked.
“Homework Hogan,” Joey admitted. He summoned up his last burst of dishonesty. “But she said she wanted to give us a break.”
“Are you telling me the truth, Joseph?”
Joey nodded again.
“OK,” his father said. “I guess we’ll just have to live with the consequences.”
Joey began to walk into his bedroom, but stopped outside his door, and faced his father. “What do you mean by consequences?” he asked.
“Opposite world,” his father replied casually, as he walked back down the stairs toward the family room. With his back to Joey, he couldn’t see the confused expression on his 12-year-old’s face. Joey darted to the landing at the top of the stairs, and called after his father.
“What is opposite world?” he asked.
His father calmly explained over his shoulder as he walked away. “That’s where you’ll wake up tomorrow,” he said. “There are only three undeniable truths in the world. 1) Everyone has to pay taxes. 2) The Cubs will never win the World Series. 3) Homework Hogan will assign homework to her gifted math class every single night.”
He stopped and looked up at his boy.
“If what you say is true, and Mrs. Hogan has altered one of the three undeniable truths,” Joey’s father said solemnly, “then the whole world will spin on it’s axis overnight, and by the time we wake up in the morning, everything that used to be true will no longer be true. We’ll be living in Opposite World.”
He blew his son a kiss goodnight and walked into the family room. Joey stood at the top of the stairs and smiled. His dad was like that; always making up elaborate stories to teach him a lesson. This time it wasn’t going to work. Joey knew that he still had plenty of time to do his homework on the bus ride to school in the morning.
By the time his head hit the pillow a few moments later, he was no longer giving his father’s ridiculous story a second thought. He quickly drifted off to sleep.
Unfortunately that deep sleep was interrupted just a few hours later by a honking car. Joey rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and looked at the clock. When he saw what time it was he rubbed his eyes again.
“11:50?”
The car honked again. Joey got out of bed and moved the curtains to the side to see who was honking a car in his driveway at ten minutes before midnight. There was no mistaking that mini-van. That was definitely his best friend Brian’s car.
“I wonder what his mom or dad or is doing here at this hour?” he thought to himself. Joey hopped out of bed, and made his way down the stairs. When he reached the kitchen, he couldn’t believe his eyes. His two year old brother Phil was making eggs and bacon, his thirteen year old brother Andrew was adjusting his tie and rifling through his briefcase, and his mother and father were mindlessly toiling away at their Gameboys.
“Didn’t you hear that car honking?” Joey asked.
Nobody looked up. Joey wasn’t sure how his father managed to pull this off, but he appreciated the effort.
“OK,” Joey said, “I get it.”
“Get what?” Baby Phil said as he whisked the eggs in the bowl.
Something was very wrong here. Phil could barely speak, let alone fix scrambled eggs.
“Um…” Joey said.
“Can you be a dear and fetch me the milk,” Baby Phil said. “I need a little more for the eggs.”
Now Joey was completely confused. The car in the driveway honked again, but nobody seemed to hear it but Joey.
“Are you telling me that nobody hears that car?” Joey asked.
“OK already,” his father huffed impatiently. “We’re ready, we’re ready.” He put his Gameboy in his backpack and nudged his wife to do the same. They put on their backpacks, their shoes, and headed out the front door.
Joey wasn’t sure why he did it, but he followed them to the driveway. That’s when he saw who was driving the minivan. Brian’s head poked out the driver’s side window and called out to his best friend.
“C’mon Joey,” he said, “Let’s get a move on. We’ll be late for school.”
“But it’s midnight,” Joey said.
“Of course it is,” Brian explained. “When else would we go to school?”
Joey smiled. This was without question the most elaborate scenario his father had ever created to teach him a lesson, but he decided not to give his dad the satisfaction. There was no way Joey’s or Brian’s parents would allow this to go any further. When it came time to actually drive the car, the joke would be over. It had to be. Brian didn’t know how to drive.
Joey opened the sliding door to the back of the mini-van and was shocked at what was waiting for him there. His parents and Brian’s parents were all strapped in to their booster seats in the back.
“No kids in back,” Joey’s father said.
“If that’s the way you want it,” Joey said with a smile, “then that’s fine by me.”
He shut the sliding door and hopped into the front passenger seat next to Brian. “How did they get you to go along with this?” he asked his best friend.
“What do you mean?” Brian asked innocently.
“Fine,” Joey said. He challenged his friend to prove how far he was willing to take this. “Let’s go then. We better get to school.”
“Not until you buckle up,” Brian said.
Joey nodded appreciatively. This was quite a performance. He had to remember to compliment everyone accordingly in a few seconds when they all admitted it was a big joke. He was still chuckling to himself when something truly strange happened. Brian, who could barely reach the gas pedal, put the car into reverse and headed out onto Elm Street.
“What are you doing?” Joey asked, suddenly alarmed. “You’ll get us killed.”
“That’s why I asked you to buckle up,” Brian said.
He reached down with his foot to hit the gas, then looked up to see where he was going, then leaned down to hit the gas again. The trip that normally took ten minutes took nearly a half an hour, but Brian somehow managed to get them to school. Joey kept waiting for his parents or Brian’s parents to say something to stop the madness, but they didn’t say a word. All four of them didn’t even seem to notice what was happening. They were quietly playing their Gameboys in the backseat.
Joey was still recovering from car sickness when he walked into the school. That’s when he knew he had actually entered Opposite World. There was no way his father could have orchestrated this: night was day and day was night, the parents were dressed like kids and the kids were dressed like grown ups, and the principal’s office door now had his name on it.
“I’m the principal?” Joey muttered to himself as he rubbed the nameplate with his fingertips. He tentatively opened the office door, and closed it again almost as quickly. Had he seen that correctly? He opened it again.
His office was a basketball court.
He shut the door again and walked briskly down the main hallway of the school. The bell rang and the grown ups scurried into the classrooms and sat behind the small desks. Joey poked his head in Mrs. Hogan’s room. His friend Brian was teaching the class of grown ups….about Barbies.
“This can’t be happening,” Joey said to himself. He ran away from Brian’s class and checked out the rest of the school. He looked into all of the classrooms, and each of them was being taught by a kid. Lydia was teaching Pokemon in Mr. Orton’s classroom. Butch, the class bully, was teaching sewing to a classroom full of construction workers.
With each passing moment, Joey became more and more disoriented. When he entered the cafeteria and saw the sights there, he staggered in disbelief. The kids were preparing gigantic trays of candy, doughnuts, cookies, and other assorted junk food to serve the grown ups for lunch. One of the kids loudly cleared his throat to let the other “workers” know that they weren’t alone. The room was suddenly totally silent.
“What is going on here?” Joey asked.
“Um, Principal Joey, it’s like this,” his friend Alex began to explain.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a girl sneak something into her pocket.
“What did you just hide?” Joey asked.
“I don’t know what you mean,” the girl replied.
Joey thought he saw what she just hid, and he had to know if he was right or not. If he had witnessed what he thought he just witnessed, this was a world he couldn’t take for one second longer.
“Turn your pocket inside out,” he ordered the girl.
When she turned it inside out, and it only confirmed that she was sneaking a snack of Brussel Sprouts in a room full of candy and sweets, Joey ran out of the cafeteria at top speed, and let out a blood curdling scream in the hallway.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
As soon as he heard the scream, and realized it didn’t echo in the empty hallway, Joey knew what had happened. A moment later his suspicions were confirmed. According to the digital clock beside his bed, it was 7:00 in the morning.
His father entered Joey’s room with a concerned expression on his face. He was wearing a suit, obviously ready to leave for work.
“Are you OK, son?” he asked.
Joey’s mind was slowly getting rid of the sleep cobwebs when Baby Phil came running into the room and hopped up onto Joey’s bed, landing on Joey’s stomach with a thud.
“Joey sad?” he asked.
Joey smiled at his little brother despite the pain in his midsection.
“What’s the crybaby crying about now?” his big brother Andrew said from the doorway. He was still wearing his pajamas.
“I think he had a bad dream,” his father said.
“I’m OK,” Joey said.
“He has to get up anyway,” his father said, and leaned in to give Joey a kiss on the forehead.
“I thought he didn’t get up until 7:15,” Andrew said.
“I have to do my homework,” Joey said, giving his father a wink. “Right, Dad?”
Joey’s father smiled. “I guess the world didn’t turn on it’s axis after all,” he said.
“Not unless the Cubs won the World Series,” Joey said.
When both Joey and his father laughed, Andrew turned to leave the room.
“If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never understand those two,” he muttered to himself.
If you missed any previous Suburban Man columns, click here:
http://suburbanmanarchive.blogspot.com
Once a week long-time radio producer and author Rick Kaempfer shares his favorite brushes with greatness in a feature he calls “Celebrity Snippets.”
Ellen DeGeneres turns 49 this week. She has hosted The Emmy's twice, and her very popular TV-talk show “Ellen” is on the air every weekday on NBC.
Stories like this one (and many, many more) are available via Allworth Press--in my How-To-Guide for producing radio shows (co-written with fellow radio producer John Swanson)
