Crap Kingdom (2 page)

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 the 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.

“Oh man,” Tom said, attempting to lighten the mood, “your tastes sure have changed.”

Tom’s dad didn’t laugh or say anything at all. Tom looked over to see what the deal was and saw that his father’s face was melting.

Tom screamed.

“Sorry! Sorry!” his dad said. “It’s wearing off! I could barely keep it going for that long!”

Tom kept screaming. His melting-faced dad kept driving. He reached up with one hand and wiped most of the face-melt off, revealing the non-melted face of an entirely different guy.

“I need to tell you something, and—” the entirely different guy said in Tom’s dad’s voice. “Hold on a second.” He swallowed hard.

“I need to tell you something,” he said in an entirely different voice, “and the thing I have to tell you, it’s that there’s this other world, right? And in it—
in it
”—the guy grimaced, choked, and went on—“in it, you’re the Chosen One, so I need you to come with—I need you to
come with
—” and before finishing the sentence, he threw up on the windshield of the van. It came out in a spray that made Tom finally understand the phrase “projectile vomit.” It was like a laser beam of vomit, Tom thought. The thought made him stop screaming.

“
Oh
, man. Ohhhhhh, man,” the entirely different guy said. “You’re never supposed to swallow a voice changer. That was really dumb of me.” He reached down with both hands and activated the windshield wipers. They moaned as they scraped the windshield, doing nothing to the vomit spray, because the windshield wipers were on the outside, and the vomit was on the inside.

“That’s dumb too,” the driver said. “Those things should be on the inside.”

Tom didn’t know exactly what would happen next. He hoped the guy would say, “Check
this
out,” and he’d reach over and hit a switch on the dashboard that Tom hadn’t noticed before, and that switch would cause everything in the van to reveal its true, magical nature. The sliding passenger doors would fold out and become dragon’s wings, the stereo would pour forth the chanting of a million wizards, and this magical supervan would rocket upward into the stratosphere toward a portal in the middle of a thundercloud.

But the guy with the melting face didn’t hit any other switches after the one to activate the windshield wipers. Minutes after he’d turned them on, they were still scraping ineffectively over the dry exterior surface of the windshield.

Scrape.

Pause.

Scrape.

Pause.

Scrape.

A pause that Tom could’ve sworn was longer than all the other pauses.

Scrape.

Tom reached over and flicked off the wipers with just one hand.

“Thanks,” the driver said. “There’s lots of other stuff about the world, the world I’m from, that I think you’ll be pretty excited about, but I think it’s better if you actually see it. Then you’ll believe me.”

“I believe you,” Tom said, hoping this would prompt the driver to say something dramatic like, “Would you believe . . .
this
?” and then he’d snap his fingers and transport them to an endless, swaying grove of fifty-foot-tall neon palm trees. He didn’t. They just kept driving.

“What’s your name?” Tom said.

“Gark,” said the driver.

“Oh,” Tom said. “It’s, uhm, nice to meet you, Gark. I’m—”

“Oh, I know
your
name,” Gark said. “I know it very well indeed.”

Tom got excited. He just knew this would be the part where Gark told him that in this other world, his name rang out in the realms of legend and frightened the enemies Tom was destined to defeat. “Your name,” Gark said, “is
Tim
.”

“Tom,” Tom said.

“
Tom
,” Gark said, almost before Tom finished saying it, as though he could make Tom forget he’d ever said
Tim
. “Tom.
Tom
. Of course.”

They stopped at a red light. The light turned green, and the van didn’t move. Tom scanned the traffic light for any sign of secret magical properties. Maybe it had a fourth unknown color of light besides the standard red, green, and yellow, and if you drove through the intersection when this fourth color was illuminated, you would hit hyperspeed, and enter the land where Tim, or Tom, or whoever, was destined for destiny. But it was the same boring traffic light that had always hung over this intersection. They were just sitting there.

“I’m sorry, I think I’ve got the directions screwed up,” Gark said. “Do you know how to get to Kmart from here?”

3

ONCE A YEAR,
Tom’s mom made him go through all his clothes and pick out things that no longer fit and box them all up so they could be given to charity. The last time they’d done this, after Tom had gathered up just about every T-shirt that he’d outgrown, a few shirts he used to wear in spite of them being way too big for him because he liked the anime characters that were depicted on the front, and a couple sweatshirts he’d received as Christmas gifts from an uncle who mistakenly thought he liked baseball, or more specifically, the Kansas City Royals, Tom’s mom said, “Great, go put them in the washer.” She told Tom to do this every year, but he’d never really thought about it before.

“Why?” Tom had asked. “They wash them at the place, right?”

In what Tom felt was a tremendous act of maturity, he had recently decided he would no longer wear a shirt that was too big for him just because he liked the artwork on it. It was an important personal milestone brought on by a mean girl in his history class calling his favorite shirt “a dress” one day. Now Tom was mostly wearing ironic shirts he and other drama kids had gotten from thrift stores. His newfound thrift-store expertise assured him that not only was everything washed before it was put on the rack, but it was washed in some special thrift-store-only solution that gave every piece of clothing the same smell, which was like cigarettes and a recently flooded church basement.

“That isn’t the point,” his mom said. “The point is to take the time to do it so we’re not just giving these people our unwashed junk.”

“But . . .
they
wash it.”

“You still need to make the effort.”

She gave him eight quarters, and he trudged down the stairs of their apartment complex to the laundry room in the sulkiest way possible. The sulking was going pretty well until his foot slid off the second-to-last step, and he had to stop sulking to keep himself from falling.

They ended up taking the clothes to a big metal drop box in the Kmart parking lot. The box had the logo of the charity painted on the side along with all kinds of rules about what kinds of clothes could and could not be donated. After they got out of the car, his mom tapped a long fingernail on the rule that said
CLEAN CLOTHES ONLY PLEASE
. Tom wanted to say,
Yeah, yeah, yeah
, but he’d gotten in trouble before for saying it in the tone he wanted to say it in. He tried to put his donations in the chute on the side of the box in the sulkiest way possible. He made sure not to trip on anything.

This was the same metal donation box Gark and Tom ended up parking in front of fifteen minutes after Gark had snatched Tom from the (possibly) loving gaze of Lindsy Kopec. Gark shifted the car into park with both hands and took the keys from the ignition.

“Why do you do everything with two hands?” Tom said.

“I’m unfamiliar with this apparatus,” Gark said. “It’s extremely different from our modes of transportation. Anyway, this is it!”

“What?” Tom said.

“The portal!” Gark said.

Tom looked at the empty parking lot. He looked at the glowing red Kmart sign. Nothing about this parking lot screamed
portal to another dimension.
Nothing about it screamed anything. It was a parking lot. If it spoke, it whispered, and the word it whispered was
boring
. But there was still the chance that Gark would utter a single mystical phrase, and a lightning bolt would shoot out of the cloudless sky, hit the pavement, and open a shining space-time rift right between them and the closest shopping-cart return stall.

Gark got out of the van, and Tom did the same. Then Gark said, “
Oh!
” and opened the driver’s side door again. He leaned in and reemerged holding Tom’s empty water bottle. He crushed the bottle lengthwise and shoved it in the waistband of his pants without offering any explanation. He shut the door again and walked toward Tom.

“Do you need to lock the doors?” Tom said.

“Yes,” Gark said, and then did nothing to lock the doors. “C’mon! I’ve got so much to show you!” He ran right up to the donation box. He opened the rusty metal chute, and it gave off a yawning screech.

A blinding light did not shine out of the chute. No winged beast flew out to carry them away to wherever they were going. There was only the black rectangle of the open chute and Gark looking at Tom.

“Hop in!” Gark said.

In movies and books, Tom thought, portals were sometimes pretty inconspicuous. It seemed the more inconspicuous a portal was, the more magical the world on the other side. If that was true, the world on the other side of this donation box would be wall-to-wall wizards.

What the heck,
Tom thought. He’d come this far. Even though the only magical thing he’d seen so far, the face-melting fiasco, was also the grossest and most disturbing thing he’d ever seen, it was still
magic
.

Tom took a running start at the chute. He wanted to remember this feeling for when he finally returned to this world and claimed Lindsy Kopec as his one true love: the feeling of not thinking and just doing something. Cutting the small talk and just asking her out to the movies. Just leaning over and kissing her in the moonlight after the movie while they waited for their parents to pick them up. He would do it all the way he did this. He took a dead run at a rusty metal clothing donation box, the chute held open by a guy he thought half an hour ago was his estranged dad, but who turned out to be an emissary from a fantastic universe where Tom was special, where Tom was needed, where Tom would prove the heroism he’d always suspected he had inside of him even though he had no good reason for suspecting it. He reached the box and dived.

He was sure he would land in another world. Instead he landed at the bottom of the donation box, and it really hurt because the box was metal and there were exactly no clothes in it.

Then Tom was sure he knew what was really going on. He had fallen prey to a serial killer whose MO was convincing people to climb into a metal donation box where they then suffocated. The guy had just killed his dad and worn his face like a mask. Tom had merely imagined his face melting away magically because he wanted his story to be true. It was selection bias, the theory Mrs. McEllary had talked about in her psychology elective, how sometimes wanting to see something a certain way will make you see it that way.

Tom thought,
A good serial killer name for this guy would be the Donator.

Then he thought:
It’s unfair that the victims of a serial killer don’t get to come up with their killer’s nickname. They know best, after all.

Tom was mad at his adrenaline. It was supposed to kick in and allow him to fight back. But he didn’t feel adrenalized: he felt scared and tired and above all, dumb. Maybe if he pretended he had become superstrong from an adrenaline rush, Tom thought, he might actually become superstrong from an adrenaline rush. He stood up. He banged his head on the metal ceiling. Okay, so he couldn’t stand up. Still, he remembered where the chute was. He pushed with all his might in that direction. The chute slid open easily and cool air rushed in. Now all he had to do was climb out, physically overpower his would-be murderer, and make his daring escape. Or maybe his would-be murderer had left already and he wouldn’t have to physically overpower him. That would be nice.

Then the Donator’s face filled the rectangle of the open chute. He was back to finish the job.

“Here I come!” he said cheerfully.

The Donator leapt into the chute. His head hit Tom’s head, causing that horrible head-on-head collision pain that always made Tom wonder how soccer players could stand to head-butt anyone when it clearly hurt them just as much as it hurt their target. Tom’s best friend, Kyle, had played soccer throughout middle school. If Tom left this parking lot alive, he would have to remember to ask Kyle how they did it.

Again Tom landed on the floor of the box, this time on his back, this time with a full-grown human on top of him. The wind had been knocked out of him, and he couldn’t get it back while he was being crushed by a person. He wondered if this was what it felt like when your lungs collapsed. He hoped the Donator would not be mad that Tom had damaged two of his precious organs before he’d had a chance to surgically remove them. If the Donator cut out people’s organs, it would make the name twice as clever.

“Sorry!” the Donator said, and rolled off of Tom.

“Listen,” Tom panted. The long-awaited adrenaline was giving him just enough diaphragm strength to beg for his life, which, if he was honest, was a way more Tom thing to do than making some last great physical effort. “I’m not gonna say that I’ve got like, rich parents or anything. We’re not rich. But . . . but . . . anything we have . . . I mean . . . my mom would . . .”

“What are you talking about?” the Donator said.

“Just please don’t kill me.”

The Donator burst out laughing. “Kill you? You’re the Chosen One! If I killed you everyone would hate me. Even more then they already do,” the Donator said. “The portal’s timed. Give it a couple of minutes.”

“Okay,” Tom said.

“Kind of creepy here in the dark, though, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I think I have something for that.”

The guy Tom thought of as the Donator snapped the fingers of his right hand, and it was like someone had switched on a light inside the donation box.

At first Tom wished this hadn’t happened, because the only thing worse than being inside a dark metal box you could just assume was filled with grime and roaches and a crazy guy was being in a well-lit metal box where you could see the exact location of the grime and the roaches and the crazy guy. Then Tom saw where the light was coming from. It wasn’t a flashlight or any kind of bulb. It was a flame, but not a flame given off by a lighter or a match. It was a purple flame rising from the palm of the crazy guy’s right hand. It was unlike anything Tom had ever seen. It didn’t burn like a normal flame. It poured upward from his box companion’s hand. It was a tiny upside-down waterfall of purple light and mild heat. The man held it close to his face. He looked excited but not entirely confident in his mastery of it, like a kid holding a hamster.

“The Tame Flame,” he said. “Not my people’s native magic but still, pretty cool, right?”

Tom nodded. So, he thought, the guy actually was Gark. The most negative thing Tom could imagine—that he was about to be serial killed—turned out to be fake, and the most fantastic thing—that this guy was actually from some other universe—might actually be true.

“You guys have roaches too?” Gark said, noticing some of the box’s amenities. “We have roaches where I’m from, so you won’t miss them.”

“That’s good,” Tom said.

“Shouldn’t be long now,” Gark said, “which is good because—c’mon, c’mon, don’t be like that, hey . . .”

The fire in Gark’s hand was becoming more firelike, the orderly droplets of purple light becoming tongues and curls of standard fire. It grew wilder and crawled up Gark’s arm. In its tame form it had burned silently. Now it popped and hissed, seeming to want to make up for all the time it had spent pretending not to be a dangerous fire.

“Don’t worry,” Gark said, “I can . . . Hey, flame! Hey! Let’s—HEY! OW! OWWWWW!”

Gark started whipping his flaming right arm around what little space there was inside the box.

“Roll!” Tom said. “Roll on it!”

“Okay!” Gark said. He threw himself onto the floor of the box. Tom huddled as far away from the burning as possible while Gark rolled, banging repeatedly into the far side of the box, howling in pain.

The light went out. Tom could hear Gark panting as he finally lay still.

“Good idea,” Gark said.

One second later, it was brighter than ever in the box, because every piece of Gark’s clothing burst into flame.

Tom lunged toward Gark to try and help him beat down the fire, but he didn’t land on Gark. He didn’t land anywhere. He had been flying through the tiny space in the box and then, instantly, he was underwater.

It wasn’t like he’d dived into a pool. It was like he’d just appeared, submerged, in the deep end. He was confused and panicked until he realized he was underwater, and then he was thrilled even though he still had no idea what was going on. The water felt glorious after being in a metal box that was insufferably hot even before it became filled with fire. It would put out Gark’s full-body inferno. Best of all, it meant that they were through the portal, in another world. Tom hoped this entire world wasn’t underwater, but hey, he was the Chosen One: he probably had gills.