We re-enacted the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, too. The Underground Railroad and the Japanese internment camps. I was a Red Coat and then a Gray. I didn't get to be Harriet Tubman but I did get to be Noguchi, who interned himself voluntarily but then spent seven miserable months at Poston as both a prisoner and an outcast.

Ms. Spence had not always wanted to be a high-school history teacher. Once she had wanted to be actress. She had gone to Stanford in the nineties and told us about it whenever we were between reenactments.

We fought over who got to throw the first brick at Stonewall. I had to be Joe Biden three times, once during the Anita Hill hearings, once during Obama's inauguration and once during the Iowa caucuses.

And then suddenly we were caught up to the present. We had re-enacted every single moment in American history and we still had a month left of school.

"I've nothing left to teach you," said Ms. Spence. "You've learned it all."

It was just what I wanted to hear but still it didn't feel quite right.

"Can we do the Spanish American War again?" I asked. "I want to be Hemingway."

"That's the Spanish Civil War and no," she said, "History can only happen once."

Ashley Jacobs raised her hand and didn't even wait to be called on. "What about parallel universes?" She didn't know it, but she was my nemesis. That made all of her ideas bad ones, even the ones I agreed with.

"What about them?" asked Ms. Spence.

"Didn't you say there were an infinite amount?" Ashley continued as if she were giving a TED talk. She reasoned that the infinite parallel universes operated much in the same way that the infinite monkeys on the infinite typewriters did.

"What has this got to do with Shakespeare?"

"If there are truly an infinite amount of monkeys, then they aren't just typing out the complete works of Shakespeare. They are typing out every thing that could ever possibly happen. That means there's a monkey typing out the exact words I'm saying." The whole class oohed at her rhetoric, which had an obvious flaw.

I raised my hand impatiently. Ms. Spence called on me.

"Those monkeys aren't real. They're a rhetorical device meant to illustrate the vast incomprehensibility of infinity." The class looked disappointed.

"Of course, the infinite monkeys aren't real. But parallel universes are..."

"Just because quantum theory allows for them doesn't mean they exist."

Ashley ignored my interruption. "...and because there are an infinite amount of parallel universes, that means anything we could make up is actually happening in one of them. All fiction is alternate history," she concluded, and the class clapped, everyone but me.

"You can't just ignore the continuum hypothesis. There are different types of infinities." Ashley was intentionally conflating the countable with the uncountable. It made me so mad.

"This isn't math class," said Ms. Spence, wistfully. She told us that things would have turned out differently for her had she been able to do higher mathematics. She would have enjoyed her time at Stanford more. She could have been a STEM major.

Despite democracy being the best-worst system, we put Ashley's alternate history reenactments to a vote. It passed, so we proceeded.

I'm not sure how, but fan fiction began to creep into our re-enactments. Blame it on the perniciousness of pop-culture. We fought the Civil War again, but this time the Union was led by Hermione Granger. The Confederacy was commanded by a Hitler-Voldermort hybrid we started calling Hitlermort to save time.

I continued to participate, even though it was stupid. Thor won the Iowa Caucuses, with the remaining Avengers in a nine-way tie for second and this time Joe Biden, aka me, came in eleventh place.

I told the class I didn't want to be Joe Biden anymore.

"And no more Dick Cheney or Dan Quayle either. Al Gore maybe, no George HW Bush."

Ms. Spence was intrigued by my stand. "If you can name the rest of them, you'll get an automatic A and be excused from re-enactments."

"Mondale... Rockefeller... Ford... Agnew... Johnson..." And then I was out.

Our teacher sighed a disappointed sigh. She had taught us everything and I had forgotten most of it. The class was not unmoved by my plight. Ashley stood up and recited the rest of the vice presidents. And we, as a class, were able to work out a compromise. We would each take turns being Joe Biden until we didn't need him anymore. And then we would discard him altogether.


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Dominica Phetteplace has had stories in the Pushcart, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Best Microfiction annuals. She's the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award.

Read more of her work in the archive.

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