Doppel

The town of Gänger had it’s perks. I couldn’t name one off the top of my head, but I’m sure there were some.

Since as far back as I can remember, he was there, taunting me, tricking me, mocking me. Whenever things were going well, he would show up to put a damper on my very existence.

“Ruining your day never gets old, Ray-Ray,” Jay always said to me.

The biggest problem was that we looked the same. Now that I’m in a different place I believe there are different makes and models of vehicles and people; some people are the same make, as in they act similarly but don’t look alike, and some people are the same make and model where they act the same, look the same, even speak the same. In Gänger everyone is the exact same make and model as one other person, the problem is that one of you is good and one of you is evil but it’s not always easy to identify which label is given to who.

In my twosome it wasn’t hard to tell who was the evil one. If I had to miss school, he would skip his classes and sit in as me, cause some sort of irreversible damage, and I’d be left to deal with the consequences. If I had a crush on a girl he would swoop in, act alright at first, and then tell them some big, fabricated secret to scare them away. He even tried setting the hospital on fire once after I had just been released from a small procedure. And guess who always got the blame? That’s right, little ol’ Ray-Ray.

You would think this would be something that happened a lot so people would catch on to the classic switch-a-roo, right? Wrong. The problem was that money rules everything, and money is not something that I ever had. Everyone wore the same uniforms to school, and they had to be clean or you’d get the paddle. You were required to have the same haircut as your wealthier counterpart and if you didn’t have the money for the haircut you had to work all weekend to repay your debt. If you got in trouble and you weren’t the one with the money, get ready to pay the price in another way.

Jay was always waving that stupid little black check book around in my face. “What’s it like being poor, Ray-Ray?” Jay would bark at me.

“You’re so evil,” I’d whisper back.

When you turn 18 years old in Gänger you have a choice to make: continue your life there alongside your duplicate and hope that you’re the rich one or to find a way out. I was desperate, depressed, and hopeless. The jobs that were available to someone like me paid next to nothing in Gänger, so you rarely died wealthy unless you were born that way. That is, unless you got out, but the cost of a ticket out of that hell hole was $20,000 and there was no way I would ever be able to come up with that amount of money.

Jay was still everywhere I went, lurking in every corner, breathing down my neck. I always let it go, as annoying as it was it was mostly harmless. Until one day he struck it… my very last nerve.

I was leaving my friends house and Jay was waiting for me at the park down the road. It was just like any other day in Gänger, gloomy, bleak, and miserable; even on the sunniest days it felt like that to me.

“Are you fucking your friend? You’re gay aren’t you?” Jay snickered.

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” I questioned.

“Oh I can’t wait for Monday to roll around. What an ending to your senior year, Ray the Gay!”

“You’re so evil,” I said, as I’d said a million times before. “And who cares if I am?”

“No girls like you anyway,” Jay laughed.

“That’s because you’ve ruined my chances with any decent girl around here,” I said quietly.

I turned to go into the woods to take the shortcut back to my house, Jay followed.

“I didn’t think you used that thing,” Jay said as he cocked back and punched me as hard as he could in the groin.

I keeled over in pain. Maybe it was the punch, maybe it was the branch that he started smacking me in the face with, or maybe it was the loogie he spit in my eye as I was laying down in the middle of the woods in the fetal position, but I snapped. I rolled over and saw a rock, the most perfect rock, and I threw it as hard as I could at his nose.

Jay screamed, “You broke my fucking nose!” But I wanted more. I got up and got this rush through my entire body as I approached him.

“You’re,” I kicked his knee so hard that it buckled, and he fell to the ground.

“So,” I punched his right cheekbone and felt the fragile bone cave in.

“Evil,” I hissed, my hands squeezing tightly around his disgusting throat. I didn’t stop squeezing until the last breath left his body.

I patted him down and found that little black book that I had been teased with my whole life.

I wrote a check for $20,000 and made my way to the airport, not turning around once to look at his lifeless body.

“One ticket out of here, please,” I said to the clerk, handing her the check.

As I was heading to my gate I stopped at the bathroom. I sat in the stall for a minute and let out a deep sigh of relief, this was the moment I had been waiting for; my life was finally beginning, and I didn’t have to worry about Jay anymore.

I came out of the stall and walked over to the sink to wash my hands. As I looked up into the mirror, I could hardly recognize myself; I was not little Ray-Ray anymore.

I pulled myself closer to the mirror to examine my face more closely.

I fogged up the mirror with my breath and reminded myself that no breath would escape Jay’s mouth again.

I smirked, “You’re so evil.”