The Double by Jackson Stone
The Story of Barron Trump's Body Double in 8 Chapters
Perhaps you’ve seen the cover of my novelette, The Double. My name is Jackson Stone. I recently joined the fine folks at Fugitive, and I’m publishing The Double here first. Sign up (for free!) and you’ll be the first to get the next chapter.
Chapter One is below the photo. Hope you dig it.
The Double
Chapter One
No one is safe around me. I’m not even safe around me. I bang my head on shit all the time. I have the scars and bruises to prove it.
At school, I’m taller than our center, Jamal—he’s 6’ 5”—but I’m way too clumsy to play basketball.
My old man was training me to be a welder, before he split for Milwaukee, where he’d landed a job making better money. He says he can get me into the Union, if I decide to apprentice. He just wants to put me to work as soon as I graduate. Dad has never mentioned college, except to tell me it’s a waste of money.
Last summer, he took me to work for three days to see what welders do, up close, and they put me on a job in a massive chemical factory.
On the third day, a catch tarp caught fire. A catch tarp is what welders use to catch sparks when they’re welding up high. This wasn’t an asbestos blanket though, and it started blazing as soon as a shower of sparks hit it. The supervisor blamed me when he wrote it up as a safety incident. They had sent me to the truck and I came back with a moving pad instead of an asbestos pad. Heck, they look just alike.
So, I haven’t even graduated and I’ve already got an incident on my record, that’s great. At least it’s my senior year, and now I can think about the future, and what life will be like on my own once I decide what I really want to do. I know it won’t be welding.
Our first day back at South Waukesha High, I found Ginnie getting stoned with a friend under the bleachers at the football stadium. That’s a great way to start the school year, I guess, but I don’t like getting high. My brain is scrambled enough already.
Ginnie was glad to see me. She was blotto, and she gave me a huge hug. She doesn’t know how I feel about her, because I haven’t told her. We’re just friends—the biggest nerd at South, and the biggest stoner—go figure. But we’ve been friends since elementary, and I’ve always seen her as a girlfriend, with emphasis on the girl parts. It’s a weird feeling, wanting more than a friendship with a friend.
Ginnie was hanging out with another stoner girl. I’d never seen her before. Her name was Lilly, she was from Alaska, and she was picking at her thumbnail that looked damaged, split, and I’m sure it hurt. I wondered if it had happened in Alaska, before she moved to Wisconsin. The split was healing, yet she was bothered by it, like fiddling with it had become a habit. She was sort of an Eskimo girl, and the first thing she said to me was, “You look like Barron Trump, I mean, dude, you look just like him.”
“That’s what everybody tells him,” Ginnie said. “It gets kinda old. Chip has been categorized.”
“I bet that sucks,” Lilly said, “getting categorized…yeah, that really sucks. You probably play basketball, right?”
“No,” I said, “I’m no good at sports.”
“You should make TikTok’s,” Lilly said. “You would go viral, sure as shit.”
“I don’t use TikTok,” I said.
“Chip likes to read,” Ginnie said, “he doesn’t use social media, he’s one of those Luddites, your classic nerd,” then she looked at me with a sugar-sweet smile, “You know I mean that in a good way, right, and how much I love you.” Then she looked at Lilly, “Chip is a psychic, too, he has a Spidey sense like you wouldn’t believe.”
“What does that mean?” Lilly said, “I mean I know what a Spidey sense is, it’s like you have intuition or something, but everybody has some of that. I have some of that.”
“Not like Chip,” Ginnie said, “he’s got a special gift.”
“Like how?” Lilly asked.
Ginnie explained, “Okay, get this…one day, when we out were riding bikes, he said we should ride to the park, so we were riding around the park, right, Naga-Waukee…”
“What the hell is Naga-Waukee?”
“I forgot, you’re new here, so, Naga-Waukee is where we have a big lake, Nagawicka.”
“You have a lot of Indian names here,” Lilly said.
“Yeah, Waukesha was a Chippewa word,” I explained, “it means little fox.”
“That’s pretty cool,” Lilly said. “Indian names are cool, same thing in Alaska.”
“Anyway,” Ginnie said, “we were riding bikes, and Chip said we should go to the lake, and we saw some kids playing at the edge of the lake, splashing around, because it was hot that day, and then one of them disappears, and all the other kids are screaming and freaking out, so Chip runs into the lake and finds the kid and pulls him out.”
“Like some kind of hero, huh?” Lilly said, then she looked at me, “you really saved that kid, huh?”
Ginnie kept talking, “But, you see, he knew we had to go to the lake. Well, first to the park, then to the lake, then to that side of the lake right when that kid went under the water.”
“That’s spooky as hell,” Lilly said.
Like I told you, Ginnie and Lilly were high on weed. They go through every day at school stoned as all get out. I’m Ginnie’s friend for one main reason—we’re connected in some strange way. From the moment we met, we’ve been connected.
I saw two guys walking from the bleacher shadows toward us, coming up behind Ginnie and Lilly. One of them was a wiry dude named Cody Plummer. His dad used to hang out with my dad when we were kids, and I knew Cody was a real asshole, like a lot of guys my age who don’t respect girls like they should. Cody wrapped his arms around Lilly from behind. Her face registered disgust, but not surprise, like this was nothing new.
“What’s goin’ on here?” Cody asked, his forearms tight against Lilly’s chest, “you doves got something for us?”
The other kid just stood there watching Cody.
“Nobody invited you,” Ginnie said, “so get lost, Cody.”
“Awwww, come on, you ain’t no fun…I need a toke…why can’t we have a little fun?”
I said, “She told you to get lost.”
“But what does Lilly here want?” Cody asked, and now his left hand was creeping lower on Lilly’s torso, like his arms and hands had become an octopus. His left hand was wandering where it had no right to be.
I walked forward and gripped his jacket at the neck and pushed him backward while he scrambled, but I was taller and stronger, I had him—I pushed him against a concrete column so hard his head snapped back, maybe knocking some sense into him.
“Yay, Chip, kick his ass!” Lilly said, her voice slurred by the weed.
I shoved Cody aside, hoping he might take a swing, so I could show him something else—a jab into his nose or a right to the side of his face.
But he just motioned to his friend and they walked away, his friend finally expressing himself with his middle finger.
Later that day, I saw Ginnie in the hallway outside the science building. I watched her, studying her like you would look at frog intestines under a microscope, and I saw inside her a young woman squirming and struggling with family demons—this had never dawned on me before now, how complicated she was inside, her intricate bowels. I was sad for her, sad and yet hopeful, thinking that I might be able to give her the strong arms she needed in the future, just to make it through life, you know, if I could convince her to love me in a romantic way, rather than a brotherly way.
At the age of seventeen, I don’t know how to explain all of this. I’m new at this. I’m squirming, too.
***
On Saturday, the man came by our complex, the first time we’d seen him. He was dressed like an electrician, had a uniform and a truck, and he was roaming around our apartment building. I spotted him first. He looked suspicious to me. I noticed how he walked like a military guy, upright, with precise steps.
Mom called the cops. She’ll do that at the drop of a hat, because we’ve had shootings at the complex. The cops checked the guy’s ID, and I guess he convinced them he was a repairman. Turns out, I’d learn later, the US Secret Service is big on surveillance. They have their bag of tricks, like pretending to be repairmen. But this guy was calculated, like he was mapping the place.
***
Two days went by before that guy dropped by again, but he was wearing a suit this time. He introduced himself as a Secret Service agent, said he was a recruiter, and said they were looking for some new blood.
“You came all the way to Wisconsin to look for new blood?” Mom asked.
“We look all over the country...and scour the earth if we have to. It's what we do at the US Secret Service, and that's my job more specifically......Shirley, we're very interested in your son."
“Okay, so why are you interested in Chip, and sneaking around like you were doing the other day?”
“You could call that a test,” the man said, “a test to see how Chip conducts himself in his home context.”
“No, that’s a lie. You were spying on us,” Mom said. Then she crossed her arms, needled him with her eyes, and said, “I don’t buy that for a second. You came here to recruit Chip? You’re going to let a teenager join the Secret Service? Do I look like an idiot to you? Who do want him to guard?” Before the words popped out of her mouth, she knew what was up.
“We do a lot of things besides guard people. I don’t make the assignments, ma’am. It’s a long vetting process, there’s no guarantee Chip will be accepted. But I expect he’ll need a job once he graduates. Of course, he should be going to college with the scores he puts up. Maybe we can help with that.”
“With what?” Mom asked. “With college?”
They were talking about this while I was standing in the kitchen, listening at the counter and watching them at the pass-through window.
“Right, with college,” the man said, “his tuition and expenses. We might consider that.”
“He can be a security guard here in Waukesha,” Mom said.
“I know. And I know the father is in Milwaukee. And I know that you work as a waitress, but, before you started waitressing, you were a dancer. We also know about Chip’s fights, that little scar on his brow, and his expulsions. We know he has a juvie record, and we know he was held back a year in school, because he had violent tendencies, according to the court records. But we could expunge that.”
“That was a long time ago, in middle school,” Mom said. “Sure, he’s had some problems, ‘cause he’s got a mind of his own, but he’s a good kid. Hell, he’s not even a kid anymore. He’s a young man.”
"Look, Shirley, your son can earn a lot more with us than he can working at Costco as a security guard. And we don't just guard people."
I could see Mom's resistance cracking. She was thinking harder than usual, weighing each word. Finally, she asked, "So, what happens next? He can’t miss school, it’s his senior year.”
“You’ll need to come to D.C. We’ll make it a weekend trip,“ the agent said, “and you’re welcome to join us, Shirley. Of course, we’ll pick up the tab. We’ll put you up in a nice hotel, pay for everything. It will be a mini-vacation. We’ll fly you in one of our jets. First-class. Free almonds.”
“That’s enough,” Mom said. “Oh boy, you are one slick talker.” She paused, looked at him with her severe eyes, and said, “Okay, I guess we’ll consider it.”
Mom considered it for about five minutes.
The man was waiting outside our front door. He knew what Mom was thinking. He was a salesman, and he had a lot of practice. I went outside and walked up to him:
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Carl. Carl Mahomes. Just like Patrick, but no relation. Good to meet you, Chip.“
He was wearing one of those neat black suits that says I’m government. He moved like someone used to being watched, each gesture measured and smooth. Even his handshake felt calculated, firm enough to show authority but not enough to intimidate. What struck me most was how ordinary he looked—that seemed deliberate, too. Medium height, medium build, a clean-shaven face that could've been thirty or fifty. Only his eyes gave anything away, pale gray and always moving, scanning everything like he was memorizing it for a report. When he spoke, he had a way of tilting his head, like he was listening to more than just your words. It was the same head tilt I'd noticed when he was pretending to be a cable guy, a habit too ingrained to hide.
"How did you find me?” I asked.
“We have ways of finding people,” he said.
“But why me?”
“You’re a smart kid. Surely, you’ve figured that out by now,” he said.
I had thought about it. Of course I had, because I look like Barron Trump. I’ve been told that a thousand million times, each time reminding me that I would never be normal. Were they looking for a body double for Barron?
***
“That’s the only thing it can be,” Mom said, after telling Dad about the offer.
“What did Dad say?” I asked.
“Your father said that’s what it has to be—they need a lookalike for Barron.”
“What did Dad say I should do?”
“He said, why not, we might as well see what’s involved. They’ll have to pay you, and I bet it will be good money, too.”
“But I’ve got school,” I said. “I’ve got my senior year.”
“Look, baby, it’s just a weekend. We’ll see if this is an opportunity for you. I’m sure they’re interviewing a lot of tall teenagers, so let’s take it a step at a time. We’ve been praying, right? Asking God to open doors? Maybe this is a door.”
:: end of chapter one, stay tuned….
Friends,
I also publish through Patriots Press, and so does my wife, Stella. She has a new novel available entitled MAGA Country. You can find the book right here.
And you can read more about MAGA Country right here at Patriot Press.
Stay tuned for the next chapter of THE DOUBLE here at Fugitive. Sign up for free!
All the best,
Jackson