The Kingdom of Kevin Malone

 

The Kingdom
of
Kevin Malone

 

 

by Suzy McKee Charnas

 

 

 

 

ElectricStory.com, Inc.®

T
HE
K
INGDOM OF
K
EVIN
M
ALONE
Copyright © 1993 by Suzy McKee Charnas. All rights reserved.
Original publication: Harcourt Brace, 1993.
Ebook edition of
The Kingdom of Kevin Malone
copyright © 2011 ElectricStory.com, Inc.
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-59729-057-9
ElectricStory.com and the ES design are registered trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.
This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.
Cover art by and copyright © 2011 Michaela Eaves.
Ebook conversion by ElectricStory.com, Inc.
For the full ElectricStory catalog, visit www.electricstory.com.
v1.2

C
OPYRIGHT
N
OTICE
This ebook is protected by U.S. and International copyright laws, which provide severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material. Please do not make illegal copies of this book. If you obtained this book without purchasing it from an authorized retailer, please go and purchase it from a legitimate source now and delete this copy. Know that if you obtained this book from a fileshare, it was copied illegally, and if you purchased it from an online auction site, you bought it from a crook who cheated you, the author, and the publisher.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This book is dedicated to the Corner Kids, wherever and whoever they are.

 

Contents

 

 

Copyright

 

Acknowledgments

 

Dedication

 

 

 

 

More YA Titles by Suzy McKee Charnas

 

Other Ebooks from ElectricStory

 

 

One

Into the Fayre Farre

 

 

 

T
WO OF MY UNCLES WERE STANDING
by the piano with coffee cups in their hands, arguing about whether or not to sue the surgeon. I couldn't stand it.

I couldn't stand that Cousin Shelly was dead. You don't die of a broken hip, not in your forties! People's
grandmothers
die after they break their hips. Uncle Saul, the doctor, had said that it had to be because they had forgotten to give Shelly blood-thinning drugs after the surgery, but he was backpedaling, with his big face all glum and worried-looking, now that Uncle Irv was talking about suing.

I ignored the living-roomful of relatives and thought about the surgeon who had met Mom and me in the waiting room on the fourth floor of the hospital. At the time I had thought, what are
you
looking all blasted about? It's not
your
favorite relative that died while you weren't even there to say goodbye. Now I thought, maybe he had only been scared of getting sued.

I could still hardly believe it was true that my cousin and best grown-up friend Shelly Werthheim had had an operation for a broken hip and
died
of it.

And now, for seven days after the funeral, family and friends would come around to talk and cry and even laugh about Cousin Shell as they remembered her, forcing my mom to play hostess so she wouldn't just sit and brood.

It's called sitting shiva, and even nonreligious Jews like us sometimes do it when a close relative dies. It was happening in our apartment because Shelly had been an only child (like me) and her parents had died in a car crash in Florida years ago. She had no kids of her own, and she had lived with us for a year after her divorce, which was when I had gotten to know her so well. She and my mom had become very close also—“Like sisters,” Mom said over and over, shaking her head and crying. Aunt Jennie was mad because she and Uncle Irv are really religious and thought they should have done the honors. I sort've wished they had.

You can have enough of anything, especially when there's tons of stuff on your mind and everybody around you is upset and irritable and people keep hugging you and burbling at you about the dead person you're missing so much. That afternoon I'd had enough. It was a bright Saturday in spring, and I was ready for something besides the strain and gloom at home.

I found Mom on the phone with one of Shelly's friends, crying again, and I asked if I could go out. Mom sort've gulped at me, which I took for a yes. And that was how I ended up with my best friend, Rachel, roller skating in the park where my life was changed forever.

 

* * *

 

“Wow,” Rachel said when I told her how the shiva was going. “Sounds terrible. Did your dad come home?”

“Not yet,” I said. He'd gone back to Los Angeles again after the funeral to work on a screenplay and look for a house for us. I dreaded that when he did come home he would just whisk us out there with him and not even wait until the end of the school year.

Rachel threw back her hair, which was long and straight and blonde and the envy of my life. “Well, he's probably not too eager to come home anyway, not if all there is to do is sit and shiver for days and days.”

Rachel's family changed their name from Beckstein to Breakstone ages ago, and she's never been a sensitive person. I just said, “Ha ha, Rock-
hell,
” giving the name the Hebrew pronunciation with the accent on the “hell.” She hated that.

She said, “You're so
morbid,
Amy. Let's not just sit around being
morbid.
”

Which is how come we went over to Central Park, where I used to play when I lived on the West Side but where I didn't go much anymore because now we lived way over off Second Avenue, on the East Side.

Rachel led the way to this band of asphalt, running alongside Sheep Meadow, that had once been part of the park road system. Now it's closed to traffic at both ends and is used as a playing surface: volleyball at one end, roller skating at the other. I'd been promising for a long time to go skating with her. That day she lent me an old beat-up pair of her skates.

So we parked our butts on the curb and geared up.

It was a lively scene, just what I needed to clear the gloomy cobwebs out of my head. On an upside-down trash can in the middle of the pavement sat a huge boom-box, screaming out speed-of-light sales raps between blasts of music. Half of the skaters wore earphones anyway, moving to their own music.

The dress code was what you could call colorful. One guy skated in bright green sweats, somebody else in striped bike tights and a cut-off T-shirt. An older blond guy with a purple stripe in his hair, red shorts, and a red net-vest shuffled around in one small space making big moves with every part of his body but his feet. Everybody else worked around him, doing their best not to look at him.

I began to feel nervous. On skates for the first time in years, I was going to be in a class by myself here, except maybe for the jerk with the purple hair. I saw my future and it stank.

On the other hand, I was hardly thinking at all about Cousin Shelly. She would have approved of my being there. She always said you should try new things.

Like death, which she was trying these days.

“I thought we came here to cheer you up,” Rachel said. “Are you just going to sit there and watch me?”

So I stood and plunged into the mob after her. A slim black kid in army fatigues did a fabulous skip and jump to avoid taking a header over my left foot. At least I wouldn't be allowed to do any serious damage around here.

I was beginning to work up a sweat when all of a sudden somebody spun by and bopped me on the arm. I stopped short, almost falling on my face when my braking-studs hit the pavement: these people didn't run into each other.

He was a dark-haired boy in a peaked leather cap and gray sweatpants with a pair of bright running shorts pulled on over them and a baggy sweatshirt, and he was skating away fast from the music and the crowd. I saw the flash of his pale face looking back at me: a familiar face, but from where?

I looked down at my arm. Something bright was stuck to my sleeve: some kind of a pin? I pulled it off and looked at it, and I gasped. I was looking at a little bit of my past.

What I held in my hand was a little brooch shaped like a rose on a climbing vine, made of silver-plated pot-metal and studded with tiny rhinestones. Cousin Shell had given it to me on my ninth birthday, but I had lost it a week later.

No, I hadn't lost it—the pin had been stolen from me by—oh no—the bully of my old block! Could that skater be him, after all these years?

I craned my neck, staring after him as he veered south on the paved strip, around some volleyball players. I didn't think I could catch him with the headstart he had. What was I thinking of—why would I
want
to catch him?

His name came back to me: Kevin Malone. I wanted to catch him, all right, catch him and show him I wasn't still some helpless little girl he could push around any time he pleased.

“Rachel!” I screamed, across the whirling crowd. “I've got to go—see you later!” And I followed Rotten Kevin off the games-pavement and along a pedestrian path through the Mall.

Up ahead, he skated hard across the main promenade and between the statues of famous old writers that sit facing each other along the Mall walkway, staring creatively into space. Then he swooped down into the dip that would carry him under one of the park bridges.

I pumped my skates (well, Rachel's spare skates) faster. Once through the arch of the bridge, Kevin would be out of sight very quickly. Without very good luck I would have no idea which way he'd gone on the other side—right, into the zoo; left, up toward the model sailboat pond; or straight ahead and out of the park onto Fifth Avenue.

He zipped under the archway and disappeared.

I mean he was there one instant, a speeding silhouette against the light at the other end of the passageway, and the next second he was gone. Vanished.

I skated down to the stone-edged entry to the arch and peered inside.

There was no sound of skates. All I could hear was some little kids shrieking at each other somewhere out of sight.

I wobbled back a few steps. The arch was made of those small, old-fashioned bricks that give “brick red” its name, with a band of grayish sandstone blocks all around the opening. On the wall facing me, a narrow metal pipe ran power inside to the lights on the ceiling.