Crap Kingdom

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

  Copyright © DC Pierson, 2013

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Pierson, D. C.

  Crap kingdom / by DC Pierson.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Tenth-grader Tom Parking’s dream of being swept away to a fantasy land where he becomes a hero nearly comes true when he finds himself the Chosen One of a nameless world, the most annoying, least “cool” place in the universe.

  ISBN 978-1-101-58972-4

  [1. Fantasy. 2. Heroes—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P6162Cr 2013

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012015578

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  To Matthew.

  You know the rooms I was thinking about.

  “Who can ever know what will be discovered? Eddie Carbone had never expected to have a destiny.”

  —Arthur Miller, A View from the Bridge

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART TWO

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  PART THREE

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1

  THE PROBLEM WAS, his life wasn’t bad enough.

  Tom liked books and movies where a seemingly un-special kid was having the absolute worst night of his or her life, a life that was already terrible overall, and someone appeared and whisked that kid away to a world where they were THE ONE, the hero, and all the things that made them awkward and misunderstood on Earth were the exact things that made them the only one who could save this other world from disaster.

  Welcome, Chosen One, the people or elves or aliens of this new, endangered world would say. Your coming was foretold to us.

  Lying diagonally across his bed at seven thirty on a Wednesday evening, Tom got the distinct feeling that his coming was foretold to no one, that his name was written in exactly zero magical books, that nowhere in any universe was a mystical elder waking from a trance, accidentally knocking an orb to the floor and shattering it in his haste to bustle down a hallway, kick open a door, and gasp to a bunch of other mystical elders, “Tom Parking just ate dinner!”

  He had just eaten dinner. That kind of told you everything you needed to know about him and why his life would never be bad enough to warrant his being snatched away to other worlds. It would’ve been better if he’d been sent to bed without supper. But he didn’t even ever have “supper.” He had “dinner.” How many kids who ever turned out to be Chosen Ones ever had “dinner”? None, that’s how many.

  He was full and sort of sleepy and he was lying on his bed, but he probably wouldn’t actually officially “go to bed” until one or two in the morning. He would probably eat something at least once before then, more out of boredom than hunger. And all this on the night he felt was the worst night he’d had in a while. If, on a really bad night in your life, you still ate a full dinner, finished your homework, and stayed up to watch The Daily Show, there was no way your life was bad enough for you to ever get plucked out of it and told you were a hero in some distant realm. This thought bummed Tom out even more than his mom telling him that after the fall play was over, he had to quit drama club, which was the thing that made his night so bad in the first place.

  “If you want to do after-school stuff, you have to do your schoolwork,” she had said at the dinner table. “No grades, no drama club. That’s just all there is to it.”

  He couldn’t argue with her. She was a good mom. That was also a problem. Kids in movies and stories who ended up being the Chosen Ones had parents who were dead, or at the very least, awful. If they were alive, they spent that life locking you, their child, in closets. Tom’s mom was single, but she was trying her best and pretty much pulling it off. Tom’s dad wasn’t dead or awful. He was just in California.

  His mom wasn’t telling him he couldn’t do plays anymore because it was “all rubbish” and she wanted to crush his artistic ambitions or rob him of joy. She was telling him he couldn’t do plays anymore because his grades were bad, which was a totally reasonable thing for a good mom to do. At dinner she’d repeated what she’d said so many times before, which was that his life was happening in the present tense, and he needed to realize that unlike in middle school, every single high school grade counted toward something in the future. Then she’d said the bottom line was he’d better study his butt off or no more plays, period. Tom wondered if he’d ever actually “studied” anything. You did your homework and you took tests, right? In between all that, were you supposed to just open up your textbook and look at it even if you weren’t directly instructed to do so? How would you know when to stop? Tom was smart. He’d always been smart. So his grades weren’t so good right now. Surely they’d get better at some point, right? Why couldn’t she understand that this failure to ever do his homework was in no way a reflection of his character? Just because he almost always forgot when assignments were due didn’t mean he couldn’t have done them if he’d remembered. It was nice of her to buy him a planner, but in order for it to work, he’d have to remember to write things down in it. And the not-remembering was his whole problem.

  Why did she have to care so much? Couldn’t she be just a little more neglectful? Couldn’t the food she made be just a little colder or blander? Why didn’t she ever sn
atch it away from him and fling it against the wall for no reason? She cared so much about him having the opportunity to go to a good college and find a satisfying career, but what about his opportunity to ride a winged beast at the head of a ragtag force of fantasy creatures battling tyranny in a faraway land?

  It was Wednesday night. Tom had a Wednesday-night kind of life.

  He turned his head and looked at his reflection in the mirrored door of his closet. Neither man nor beast nor shadow creature was going to pass through the mirror and spirit him away. The mirror was just a mirror and he was just a tenth grader and there was nothing remarkable about him in this world and that meant he’d probably never get to find out if there were any other ones.

  2

  BUT IF SOMEONE were going to whisk Tom out of his mundane life and take him to another world, they could not have picked a worse time to do it than Thursday night around ten PM, the night after Tom’s mom had told him he couldn’t do plays anymore if he didn’t bring his grades up. On Thursday night around ten PM, Tom had just finished acting in the first of three performances of the Arrowview Drama Department’s fall play, and Lindsy Kopec was touching his arm.

  “That was amazing,” she said. “I mean, do you realize? That was amazing.”

  She was talking about a moment they had apparently shared onstage. He wasn’t completely sure what moment she was talking about. It was all kind of a blur to him. Lindsy had clearly experienced some sublime thrill, some WE-ARE-ACTORS! thing, while Tom had mostly been trying to stand where he was supposed to stand when he was supposed to be standing there and not forget any words and be as loud as possible. It wasn’t even like they kissed at any point during the play. They were playing cousins, in fact, in one of those big, old-fashioned comedies their drama teacher Tobe liked because there were a lot of parts so a lot of kids could be cast and a lot of parents wouldn’t be upset, and the only swear words were innocent ones no one uses anymore, like Phooey! Tom knew this supposed moment of brilliance had happened during this one little semi-serious exchange between their two characters, when they were alone and the stage was lit by only a candelabra Lindsy held, and Lindsy’s character was telling Tom’s character that she was worried they might not receive their full share of their grandmother’s fortune. In that scene, Tom had apparently done something that Lindsy said “seriously sent shivers up my spine” and that “honestly, actors work their whole lives to achieve.” He could not remember what this thing was. It didn’t matter, though. What was important was that he had done something that had resulted in Lindsy Kopec touching his arm. Grabbing it, even.

  People were coursing all around them in the lobby. Tom’s mom wasn’t there because she planned on coming to the Saturday night show, and he hoped Lindsy’s parents weren’t there, either. He wanted this moment to last as long as possible. With Lindsy gripping his arm, looking into his eyes like they contained a million stories and truths instead of just dull gray irises, all the homework in the world seemed doable. He saw himself sitting up straight in class. After his homework was done, he would stare at his textbooks until his eyes bled. His butt would be fully studied off. He’d bring in dioramas to go with every assignment, even when the teacher hadn’t asked for any dioramas. He would do anything if it landed him back here. Maybe next time they would play people who weren’t related to each other. The next play was going to be A View from the Bridge. There had to be kissing in that, right? Where did people kiss if not on bridges?

  “Tom,” she said, “Thomas. YOU are an actor.”

  “Lindsy,” Tom said, not knowing what he was going to say next, but just trying to match what Lindsy had said as much as possible without actually saying his own name. “Lindsy.” Lindsy had said his full name, Thomas. He wasn’t sure if Lindsy was short for anything, but he wasn’t going to venture a guess.

  Lindsy Kopec was a model. Like, an actual model. She didn’t talk about it a lot, the way Tom suspected anyone else would if they were a model, and the fact that she didn’t talk about it a lot made it that much more plausible that she actually did it. Tom could not believe that someone like Lindsy shared a zip code with someone like him. She seemed like someone who was on her way somewhere else and was just gracing the world that contained shabby things like Tom’s school and Tom’s suburb with her presence for some unexplained reason. Maybe she was some kind of teen spy, and a rogue Russian missile scientist had stashed nuclear launch codes inside a dusty book in the school library. It would explain why she spent so much time there. She claimed it was because she wanted to be fluent in French by the time she graduated so she could study in Paris, but Tom wasn’t buying it.

  “Lindsy,” Tom said a third time. He still hadn’t thought of a follow-up.

  “Yes?” Lindsy said.

  “Well . . .” Tom said. He took a swig from a water bottle he was holding, as though he was about to launch into a brilliant monologue and needed to be properly hydrated. Ideally the monologue would be about Lindsy’s greatness, his own greatness, and how they should probably celebrate their mutual greatnesses by making out. But Tom knew he could never say something like that, and he was hoping the swig would give him extra time to think of something he actually would say that would have the same result.

  Then Tom felt increased pressure on his arm, like Lindsy had grown five extra fingers to further express her enthusiasm for him as an actor, and as a man. Tom knew it was probably just someone else’s hand. And that’s fine, he thought. Better that Lindsy Kopec see that his arm was in high demand for squeezing, that she was just one of his many fans and well-wishers. Tom broke Lindsy’s gaze and turned to see who this other person was.

  It was his dad. Tom hadn’t seen his dad in a really long time.

  He had no idea what to do or say. With Lindsy two feet from his face telling him how great he was, he had been feeling elated, and a positive sort of nervous, all of which was very rare for him to feel. Seeing his dad again, he felt something entirely different. It was his third big feeling in twenty-four hours, an extremely high number considering he would have described himself as someone who usually had maybe four feelings a month, on average.

  “Got a second?” his dad said.

  Tom and his dad floated away from Lindsy and the circulating parents and kids.

  “What are you doing here?” Tom said, and immediately anticipated his dad responding with something like “That’s all the thanks I get?” or “Good to see you, too.”

  Instead his dad said, “I came to see your play!”

  “Right,” Tom said. “But I mean, like . . . what are you doing in town?” He knew this would piss his dad off, that he would say, “I have every right to—”

  “I’m visiting town!” Tom’s dad actually said, smiling in a way Tom had never seen him smile before, though granted, he hadn’t seen him in a really long time. Maybe he’d mellowed or something. Maybe he was on antidepressants.

  “Come with me!” his dad said.

  “Okay,” Tom said. “Dad . . . is everything okay?”

  They were out of the lobby and halfway across the parking lot before Tom’s dad responded. “Peachy,” he said. It could have easily been the sarcastic thing Tom was waiting to hear, because no one says “peachy” unsarcastically. But it didn’t sound sarcastic, unless Tom’s dad had been in California developing a type of sarcasm so sarcastic it sounded fully, creepily sincere. “Get in!” he said, gesturing to a white minivan with rental-car plates.

  Tom got in. His dad got in on the driver’s side.

  After he was buckled in, Tom wondered if he should be doing this. After all, people got kidnapped by their estranged fathers. But his dad didn’t seem like the type. There hadn’t been any kind of custody battle. Tom’s dad had never sworn he’d get him back by any means necessary. He’d just gone to California, reducing their family population from three to two. Now Tom was wondering if he actually secretly wanted t
he kind of dad who would kidnap him. Then he wondered why the van wasn’t moving.

  Tom looked over at his dad. He was staring at the steering wheel like he’d seen a steering wheel exactly two times before, and even then, only on TV. Finally, he reached up and death-gripped either side of the wheel so his fists were exactly parallel, like he was milking a cow. Tom couldn’t drive yet but he was reasonably certain that that was not how you were supposed to hold a steering wheel.

  “Dad . . . you all right?” Tom said.

  “Peachy!” Tom’s dad said again, exactly as sincerely as he’d said it the first time. He turned the key in the ignition and reached both hands over to shift the van into reverse. Tom was pretty sure that on most modern vehicles you only needed to use one hand to shift gears. Something he knew for sure was that when you were backing the car up, you were supposed to look behind you and make sure you didn’t hit anyone. So he was surprised when, while backing up, his dad continued staring straight ahead.

  “DAD!”

  Tom’s dad slammed on the brakes. Lindsy Kopec’s big, beautiful eyes were wide in the red glare of the brake lights. His dad had almost killed Lindsy and her parents, who were walking to their car. Tom waved to them with all the energy he wasn’t using being completely embarrassed, so it was a very weak wave.

  Without apologizing or acknowledging that he had done anything wrong, Tom’s dad again reached both hands over and put the car into drive. Tom’s mouth had gone completely dry in his moment of panic. He downed the last of his water and put the empty water bottle in the cup holder.

  There was silence as they drove out of the parking lot, and no further near killings. Tom reached over and turned on the radio. Historically, it was his dad who would do this when the car got quiet. Whoever had rented the car last had the radio tuned to the local hip-hop station, unless his dad had it on that station, which didn’t seem likely.