Free Reality Boy by A. S. King

knows too much.
    I am driving again.
    I look in my rearview mirror and see there is no one in my backseat. I glance around the car and there is no inflatable hammer, no puppy. I am not driving to Disney World. The road is made of tarmacadam. I am Gerald. I am Gerald and there is no way I can ever be anyone but Gerald.

19
EPISODE 2, PRESHOW MEETING
    A YEAR AFTER Nanny left us alone, Mom wrote another letter.
    I couldn’t stop myself from crapping on stuff all the time because it was the only method of communication that worked to remind them that I was still alive and still angry. Nanny hadn’t fixed us. She hadn’t fixed Tasha, who now, at age eleven, had started to hump pillows on the couch while we were all in the room. Dad would just leave. Lisi would go to her room and read. Mom just turned the volume up on the TV and pretended that humping couch pillows was normal—that her daughter making those weird, erotic faces while watching a Kraft Macaroni and Cheese commercial was totally okay. I was too young to understand any of it.
    But just old enough to get yelled at for picking my nose.
    So, the rules were: I couldn’t pick my nose, but my sex-fiend sister could hump stuff in plain view of the entire family with no problems.
    And so crapping became how I got my point across.
We are not okay. Fake Nanny messed us up worse. Mom isn’t doing anything different.
Maybe if other people saw it and she had to clean up dressing rooms at the mall or drive home barefoot from her friend’s house because I dropped one in her sneaker, she would have to make so many excuses and apologies that she would get the message. But she didn’t get the message.
    She wrote the letter, and Nanny agreed to come back.
    The ratings had been good, the producers said.
Network Nanny
had competed with the other established nanny shows on TV and won. Elizabeth Harriet Smallpiece had finally found her fame in being a nanny who wasn’t really a nanny. She was so good, they let Real Nanny go, which was a bummer because I was pretty sure Real Nanny had Tasha figured out.
    They negotiated for more money. I overheard Mom and Dad’s conversation about the whole thing. Dad sighed a lot. Mom talked about the one thing that really worried her.
    “I think we should get the kitchen redone,” Mom said. “It’s so outdated.”
    “We can’t afford that.”
    “But we’re getting money for the show and all,” she said. “And the kitchen is getting old.”
    “It’s only fifteen years old. What’s wrong with it? Everything works,” Dad argued.
    “But what will people think when it’s on TV? They’ll think we don’t
care
and that we don’t take care of our house,” she said. “They’ll judge.”
    Dad made a grunting noise in his throat but didn’t say anything else.
    We had two months until filming. Mom had some guy come and measure the place up and he had a kitchen installed in less than six weeks. He was a cool guy, too. Talked to me like I was normal. Let me help him and gave me my own little screw gun so I could play with offcut pieces of wood. I didn’t crap in his toolbox once.
    And then Nanny came back—first for the initial visit, which was mostly reintroductions. I tried to find her purse so I could crap in it on the first day, but she put it up high on the new fridge and I didn’t have a chance to get it. I planned on doing that at least once, though.
    But then the weirdest thing happened.
    She pulled me aside.
    “Gerald, I know things are very unfair for you
he-ah
,” she said. “I’m going to try to get your mother to see that this time ’round.”
    I didn’t trust her, but I nodded even though no one was telling me to nod, because there were no cameras yet.
    “Did you hear me?” she asked. Her hair was even bigger now, as if it was inflating to keep up with her idea of herself.
    “Yes.”
    “And what do you think?” she asked.
    “I think that’s good,” I said.
    “So you’ll help me sort things out, then, will