Carter
Have you ever had your parents say something to you that not only feels heinous and inaccurate but also like they might be
losing their minds?
“Um,” I say. “If this is a prank, it’s a very bad one. It’s confusing and not funny and seriously WHERE IS LINCOLN? Dude,
if you’re hiding behind the couch or something, you can come out!”
“He’s not here, Carter,” Mom says. “He’s at college. His first semester.”
“Ohmigod,” I say, and, though I don’t sit down, I do lean on the table and bury my face in my arms for a moment before resurfacing.
“Guys. This is a noble try, very noble indeed, but you are absolutely terrible at pranking.”
My family has always been this way. I keep waiting for them to evolve, to get better at it, but it’s just not their thing.
“There’s an art to it, you know? And though I appreciate—”
“It’s not a prank, Carter,” Dad says. “We don’t do pranks. You’re the prank guy. And every year, you think this is us attempting
a prank, and every year, we feel horrible that we have to explain it to you all over again.”
“‘Every year’? What does that mean: ‘every year’?”
“It’s been five years, sweetie,” Mom says. A phone rings on the kitchen counter. I’m thinking maybe that’s where I left mine,
but Mom grabs it. “Here he is.” She answers the call and stares at the screen. “Hi, Link.”
“Hey,” a man’s voice says. “How’s it going?”
“Oh, you know,” Mom says. “I’ll let you talk to him.” She hands me the phone. “It’s . . . Well, you’ll see.”
“Hey, bro,” the man on the screen says, and I sort of want to pass out because he does resemble my little brother. He really
does. But, like, a nineteen-year-old man version of him. His huge locks are gone, replaced by a short cut with a few bouncy curls dangling down his forehead. He’s
sitting in front of a white wall, a sticker that says Arlo Parks behind him. “Happy birthday.”
I look up at Mom and Dad. “Who is this? Did you hire an actor to play older Lincoln? This is seriously messed up.”
“I know this seems batshit, CT,” the man on-screen says, smoothly incorporating Lincoln’s nickname for me, “and it is batshit, but it’s what we’ve all been dealing with for more than half a decade.”
“What are you talking about? My brother is thirteen. Which is less than sixteen.”
“No, I know,” the Lincoln imposter says. “But you’ve been sixteen for six years. And every time you’re about to turn seventeen,
you don’t. You flip back to thinking you’re sixteen, and you lose all the memories and, like, physical changes from the past
year. And it just happened again.”
I stare at the screen for a long moment.
Then I start cracking up. “Dude, that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. And so unnecessarily complicated.” I look to
my parents, who are both grimacing like they need to number two. “Mom and Dad, you have to keep a prank simple. Like, you
could’ve rearranged the furniture or something, put all the kitchen stuff in the bathroom, so, for example, I’m about to pee,
right? But then there’s a microwave on the toilet. And I’m like, Whaaaaaa? And you’re like, Ha ha! And I’m like, Ohhhhh. That would be a good pr—”
“Our wrestling safe word is Cheetos,” fake Lincoln says.
I look back at the screen. “Come again?”
“We once accidentally broke the glass on Mom and Dad’s wedding photo—the one where they’re standing in a random meadow holding
umbrellas—and Dad freaked out at us and said we were maniacs. We once wrote a play about being doctors in space doing surgery
on an alien, and we performed it for Mom and Dad and Uncle Flip and Uncle Jed. Well, actually, you said you weren’t a writer
so I would have to come up with everything myself, but then you kept having all these great ideas.”
My fingers are trembling. That is a lot of really specific information.
“Okay,” I say, working extra hard to form the words. “So . . . clearly my parents prepared you well. But did they tell you
what the name of the alien in the play was?”
“Ah yes!” the guy says, excited. “You asked me this last year, and I couldn’t remember, so I dug up the play from the box
in the basement. It’s Flanghorn! The alien is Flanghorn.”
He’s right, dammit. The alien was Flanghorn.
I glance at my parents, and suddenly I see it: They look a little older than they did last night. Mom’s black pixie cut is
the same, but she has way more lines on her face. Dad’s hair, on the other hand, has gone almost entirely gray.
Which is when it dawns on me:
This might not be a prank.