What happens when someone else finishes a story you start?
Let’s find out!
It’s time for STORY SWAP, when a viewer and I finish each other’s stories.
During the last stream, a subscriber (SIXSIXseve_n) requested that we do a story swap together.
We each wrote the beginning of a story, then swapped, and wrote the ending to each other’s. We both had to start with the same line: “Two seats were vacant.”
Here’s the one Abbey and I started and SIXSIXseve_n finished: (NSFW language)
Two seats were vacant. Two open stalls only. And both of them were in undesirable condition.
The stall on the left was choking to death on toilet paper. White sheets filled its porcelain mouth like it was being gagged and interrogated by TP terrorists. Just looking at it, I could tell that I’d be risking my life with one flush. I’d likely have better odds of winning Thursday night bingo against a crew of cutthroat grannies than getting my business down that poor commode without it gurgling right back up.
The stall on the right was a preschooler’s finger-paint art project, except they only used one color. Smears and stains ran down the rim and bowl alike, like a poopy Picasso. Either somebody had a serious medical condition that they decided to ignore until it came gushing out their backend, or I have an extremely vengeful and scatalogical guardian angel.
I wanted nothing more than to just leave them both and try to wait until I got home to the safety of my own, immaculate throne. But my stomach had other plans. It rumbled and cramped like it was trying to escape my body in the most painful way imaginable. I needed to make a choice.
Do I take my chances with the clean-yet-dangerous seat on the left? Or do I close my nose and clean up the mess on aisle two?
The time to choose was now, and I decided to…
(This is where we stopped and SIXSIXseve_n took over)
…do what any rational person would do in such a dire situation. I would perform the infamous upper-decker.
The upper decker was a legend around these parts. Once performed in a middle-school bathroom to the effect of shutting down classes for the entire day, I held the procedure in quite high regard. Only the best could pull it off. And today, I would be Winston Poophill.
It wasn’t often I found myself in such a situation. Usually, I’d release my bowels twice over before taking such a long trip away from home. But I had been too greedy. I had been too rushed. It wasn’t every day that I would get to see a Justin Beiber concert. So I had left without flushing out my large intestine. The adrenaline and excitement of the music had clouded my logic. So now the six pickled eggs I had consumed were begging to be set free.
I ran to the door to check. When performing an upper-decker, it is of utmost importance to be sneaky. Silent. Devious. Yes, I was a cat about to shit somewhere a human wouldn’t dare.
I creaked the door open and was immediately blasted in the chest by the bass of the music. This did little to calm my guts. In fact, it called to the fecal eggs like a marching beat, and they knocked at my asshole, ready to tell me a sick joke.
Without any teenage girls on their way to freshen up, I slunk back inside. I saw myself in the mirror. I was entirely too old to be at such a concert. What was a forty-year old woman doing here? I remembered the stares of the younger girls as I danced and sang along with Justin. What did they know?
Without further hesitation, I slipped off my panties completely and straddled the top of the only toilet my ass would be greeting that day. The only toilet worth any attempt. My salvation toilet.
The left one.
You see, I wouldn’t need to flush at all. In fact, I could place the porcelain top right back on and no one would even know that my vinegar turds slept silently in their casket.
I squeezed, and it felt like the entirely of my insides had just splashed into the murky depths below. Salvation. Relief. I hadn’t felt this good since that time that Mark used his finger to…Best not talk about that now. Wouldn’t want to ruin that memory.
When I finally pinched off the last of my pickled egg flesh feces, I realized that I had not made the biggest mistake that I had in recent memory. That was to come.
I searched the stall for toilet paper to no avail. Not a single piece other than the paper mache mountain that clogged the bowl existed in the entire bathroom. I clenched my buttcheecks together and waddled to the next stall. But there I only found poop smears and depression.
Even the paper towel roll near the sink lay empty. It was as empty as my soul when I heard the giggling of two Justin Beiber fans approaching the door.
I ran back into the left stall and slammed the stall door shut. I locked it and held my breath as they walked in.
“Oh. My. God,” one of them said.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” said the other.
“Hurry up, it smells like bigfoot’s dick in here.”
Luckily, they did not approach the stall. They went for the sink and the mirror, I figured, as I couldn’t see them. Now being a woman can come in handy in many situations, but never did I expect it to come in handy in a predicament quite like this.
You see, women carry with them various wipes for a multitude of reasons. It was my only out. I would have to sacrifice my dignity. But if the drying crusted poop on my ice-cold cheeks had anything to say about it, it was now or never.
I creaked the stall door open to see the two of them leaned over the sink. The taller girl held a rolled up dollar bill to her nose and she snorted a long line of white powder.
Cocaine.
“Oh, shit,” said the tall one when she spotted me. “Isn’t that your mom?”
The shorter girl turned to me, nose white with powder and red from abuse. My little girl. My. Little. Girl.
“Mom,” Stacey screamed. “What are you doing here?”
“Your mom likes Justin Beiber?” said the tall one.
I blinked away a well of tears. “Stacey, you’re…” was all that I could manage.
Stacey wiped her nose thoroughly and shook her head. “It’s not what you think. I…wait a minute. Why aren’t you wearing any underwear?”This was all too much for me to take. So I did the only thing I could do. “Stacey,” I said as calmly as I could muster, “I need you to give me your face wipes from your purse. If you do that and leave now, we will never talk about this night ever again.”
The tall girl raised her eyebrow.
“And that goes for you too,” I said.
Stacey sighed and handed me her wipes.
“Now go,” I said. “Remember. This never happened.”
Once she’d left the bathroom, I cried my eyes out as I wiped my ass. I wiped my tears first with the wipe, then went to my soiled cheeks, in that order. Once I was sufficiently clean, I left the bathroom without placing the top of the upper deck back onto the toilet. I didn’t care any longer. I had much larger problems at hand.
As I walked down the stadium hallway, I considered how I could possibly go about my life knowing that my little Stacey had been doing cocaine.
The song “Baby” started and my demeanor shifted.
“Thank you, Justin,” I whispered to myself. “I will deal with this in the morning. But for tonight, I dance.”
I skipped back into the stadium, ready to dance like I had never danced before. If only Justin knew how shitty of a night I had experience. What a shitty night indeed.
And here’s the one SIXSIXseve_n started and we finished:
Two seats were vacant. But we didn’t say a word. Not during roll-call, at least.
Lecture went on as usual, and although the professor droned on about the intricacies of advanced calculus, I didn’t process a single word. I was too distracted.
Andy and I knew they were unoccupied, of course. Even in a class of sixty, the only two empty seats screamed with deafening silence. We could feel the hollow presence pressed up against us. A ringing in our ears and a dizziness, like one would suffer when swimming deep into the ocean. Diving sickness, they called it. The void that occupied where Petra and Christine should have been dragged me straight to the bottom. Anchored me.
“Do you think they went through with it?” Andy asked me with a smirk. His whisper grazed my ear like a bullet.
I stared a hole right through his pimple-ridden forehead. I didn’t want to think about it. Not yet. But when he insisted, I leaned over to him. “I’m sure it was only a prank,” I told him. “There’s no reason to think it was anything more than that.”
I lied, of course. I knew what had been planned for today. For those two girls. It was no coincidence that both chairs lay empty, glaring back at me. Taunting me. “You should have done something,” they said to me without words. “You could have stopped this.”
“Are you okay?” Andy asked me, breaking me from my delusion of talking chairs.
“You’re sweating.”
“Fine.”
I sat back and tried to focus on the professor’s words. But no matter how hard I tried, my mind insisted on escorting me back to three weeks ago. To the bowling alley with the broken neon sign that read “Pin ushers” where it once said “Pin Pushers.” To the bar top where I sat next to Pete, nervously drinking a whiskey coke while a war raged within me that could rival the Persian Gulf.
“Both of them,” he had told me. “What do you think?”
I remembered every moment of that conversation. How Pete’s missing incisor caught my eye every time he spoke. How my underarms were drenched and itching. How I clawed at myself for just one ounce of courage. I could have put a stop to it. The worst of it was that I knew it then. But now…
The massive wooden doors of the lecture hall flew open. I shot my head around so fast I was lucky it didn’t snap off. My heart leapt to the back of my dry throat and I audibly gasped.
(This is where Abbey and I took over)
It was Petra and Christine, bursting into the classroom, each of them carrying a massive cake, blowing party whistles, and wearing oversized sombreros dangling multicolored smiling skulls.
“Happy birthday to you!” they sang together, dancing along the front of the class as all eyes were focused on them.
Goddamn it. I thought that… I thought that after last year, they wouldn’t do it again. That we had an unspoken agreement that they’d gone too far.
“Happy birthday to you!” they continued, now marching up the auditorium steps closer to me. Shaking plastic maracas with their open hands.
Three birthdays ago, Petra had called me to say my mom was in the hospital. I’d rushed over to St. Elliot’s emergency room, regretting all the time I’d wasted not telling my mother I loved her. But when I arrived, out of breath and looking like a disheveled beggar, it was Petra and Christine waiting for me in the lobby, dressed in lobster outfits and holding melting Sonic the Hedgehog freezer cakes from Stop N’ Shop. Mom was there too, in perfect health, giggling as I died inside.
“Happy birthday to you!” they both sang in unison, now just a few steps away from me. Everyone else had noticed their eyes on me, and now they were looking at me too.
Two birthdays back, I’d been giving my debate speech at Monson City High, when a slow buildup of music began behind me on stage. First soft, then drowning out my speech on climate change, as I turned to see Petra and Christine behind me dressed as rainbow-clowns and belting out the dreaded Happy Birthday at the top of their lungs. I don’t know which was worse: getting whomped in the face with one of their whipped cream pies, or the silence afterward that was only broken by Christine honking her clown nose.
“Happy birthday, dear Stacy!” they sang, now kneeling before me in the aisle. There was no doubt in any of my classmates’ minds who this charade was aimed at. They were all laughing or cringing now.
Just like last birthday, when Petra and Christine crossed the line. My grandfather had died two days prior, and now at college, I’d gotten a call from my mother to come to the wake. When I arrived at the funeral home, surrounded by grandpa’s friends and family dressed in black, I walked up to the coffin to say goodbye.
As I pressed my hand to the lid of the mahogany box, the top flapped open, and inside was Petra, dressed as a Halloween skeleton, who shot sitting and screamed “Happy Birthday!” as she offered me a cupcake with little bones on top. Christine crawled out from underneath, grabbing my ankles and wailing “Happy Birthday” like the dying zombie she was dressed as. Everyone, except me, laughed.
I hadn’t spoken to either of them since. It was a relief to have them out of my life. Though now, I wish I’d been more assertive. Said something. Anything to stop this.
“Happy birthday to you!” they both finished together to thunderous applause. Christine took out a lighter and lit the single candle on the head of Petra’s Paw Patrol cake.
“Don’t worry, Stacy!” the professor said from his podium. “They contacted me beforehand. This is all fine.”
If only he knew. This was not fine. He had no idea. None of them did. Except Petra and Christine.
I needed to finally make the truth known.
Slowly, I stood from my seat, staring down both of their idiotic grinning faces. Christine gingerly offered the lit cake to me, and Petra gave her maraca a welcoming shake.
“Are you surprised, birthday girl?” Christine asked.
I couldn’t take it anymore. With a rush so fast it blew out the candle, I reached under the cake and flipped it into Christine’s face, smashing the icing all over her. Petra dropped her maraca in horror, and the rest of the class gasped.
“What are you doing?!” they cried.
“It’s just for fun!”
“Don’t you like surprise birthdays?”
I took a deep breath. It was time to let everyone know. The truth of this year, of every year they’d done this to me. I bellowed it out as loud as I could.
“IT’S NOT EVEN MY BIRTHDAY!”
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Pakutaso (1, 2)