Crap Kingdom (12 page)

“Oh, man, I wanted to show you but it’s actually back where we just came from . . . Oh well, I guess I could just teleport us.”

“You can teleport us back there?”

“I think so, yeah. We’d have to step outside the Wall. You can’t teleport through it. But we’d just have to take, like, two steps out and close it again.”

“So why didn’t you teleport us here?”

“’Cause that was more fun, wasn’t it?”

“More
fun
? Dude, we
almost died!
”

“I knew I could handle it! And if anything else happened, I could handle that, too!”

Tom was mad at Kyle for endangering their lives, but he was more mad at him for being certain that he hadn’t endangered their lives, that any danger they’d been in was well within his powers to manage. Tom suspected that Kyle was probably right. After all, the guy could emit expanding balls of energy. His footprints came to life and attacked his enemies if he wanted them to.

“All right,” Tom said. “All right, fine. But I should probably head back now, so if we’re going to teleport anywhere, it should probably be the portal—”

“Dude, the portal sucks. Forget about the portal.”

“Okay, well then, this new way you have of getting here, can I use it to go back now? Rehearsal’s probably started already, and—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kyle said. “That’s what’s so cool about it. Remember when I was weird in the lunchroom? That’s because . . .” Kyle looked around as though someone might be listening, though there was nothing but a pile of scrap metal on one side of them and the invisible Wall and an endless field of brush on the other. “That’s because
it wasn’t me.
”

“What?”

“It’s called soul-swap. It’s this other way of getting between our world and this one. Your body stays on Earth. You and me right here, we’re just, like, duplicates, basically. But like, our ‘us,’ whatever makes us who we are, is here too. That’s why we’re seeing this, what’s going on here, instead of whatever’s going on in our bodies on Earth. You know how when you take that portal outside of Kmart, your body leaves here and goes there? In a soul-swap, it doesn’t. It stays on Earth and it gets kind of . . . piloted, I guess . . . by a random soul from a place that’s kind of like, between here and there.”

“You mean limbo?”

“The thing with a stick? No.”

“No, limbo, the place between life and the afterlife. You’ve seriously never heard of limbo before?”

“No, I guess not. Besides, it’s not a place between here and the afterlife, it’s a place between Earth and Ffffffttthhhp.”

“Are you gonna start doing that too?”

“It’s fun to do the nonsense words. Come on, try it: Pfffttcccckkk . . .
Fffttzzzzthrp
 . . .”

“Those both sounded like farts. So, this soul—”

“Well, not a soul, exactly, but that’s the closest word . . . I mean, it did belong to someone else at one point . . . but anyway, it comes to Earth and it gets in your body while your soul or your you-ness is being projected here. And when you go back, you get back in your body and it goes back into samba.”

“Limbo.”

“Dude, I was making a joke. Stop being so serious.”

“Well, now I definitely want to go back. Some random soul is, like, piloting me around during rehearsal? I’m going to get kicked out of the show!”

“It’s fine, okay? You’d be surprised how—”

“I don’t think you’ve ever met yourself when you were like that, man, you were
so
weird.”

“But every soul’s different. Maybe yours is cool. Besides, I didn’t even get to show you the—”

“Please! I wanna go back!”

“Okay,” Kyle said. “Fine.”

Tom realized he’d hurt Kyle’s feelings. “See you tomorrow?” he said.

“Sure,” Kyle said.

“Are you mad at me?” Tom asked.

“No,” Kyle said. “I mean, I’m about to push you . . . but it’s not an anger thing. It’s just how you go back.”

“Uhm,” Tom said, “Okay.”

“Ready?”

“Yeah.”

Kyle faced Tom and put both hands up, palms out.

“Bye,” he said. Then he shoved Tom, hard.

Tom fell back before he knew what was happening. Once again, just as his eyes met the sky, he felt his body tear through a construction-paper barrier between realities, and the gray sky of Crap Kingdom was gone and he was swinging backward through a void, and then up again.

There was another rip, and Tom had the bizarre sensation of crashing back into his own head, into his own body, standing upright in the real world as he knew it. The force of it caused him to take a single involuntary step backward.

Lights shone in his eyes. He was standing onstage. The other cast members of
A View from the Bridge
were in street clothes all around him, sitting on black orchestra chairs and rehearsal furniture, holding scripts. Several of the girls and a few of the guys had tears in their eyes. Somewhere, one person was clapping.

Tom turned out and squinted. Tobe was sitting in the third row. Were there tears in Tobe’s eyes too? They were definitely sparkling an unusual amount.

“Tom,” Tobe said. “That . . . was
brilliant
.”

15

“SO YOUR GUY’S
a badass?”

“I guess! I didn’t even have the script in my hand. Or, he didn’t even have the script in his hand. However you say that.”

Tom had been looking forward to talking to Kyle ever since he’d returned to his body and found the entire cast of
A View from the Bridge
and its hard-to-please director caught up in the performance he was giving, or the performance this other soul was giving in his body. He couldn’t text Kyle to ask if he was here or in the nameless kingdom, so he waited for lunch and was disappointed when he walked out with a tray full of food and saw Kyle sitting by himself in the corner again. But Kyle turned and waved him over. He was just sitting by himself so he and Tom would have a chance to talk privately. The only reason he was here, he’d said, was to talk to Tom about the whole experience of having someone else in his body, living his life. He’d wished he’d had someone to talk to about it the first time he’d done it. Tom was more than happy to talk about it. He was more than happy in general. Tobe had called him “brilliant.”

Tobe never said anything was brilliant. Tobe had problems with Shakespeare. For Tobe to tell him, not even after an opening night performance but during a rehearsal, that he had done brilliantly,
that
was brilliant.

His body was so innately talented that any old soul from any universe could hop in it, steer it around for an afternoon, and the result would be
brilliant.
Tom wondered what would happen this afternoon at rehearsal if he was just himself. Would he remember what he’d done to garner that kind of reaction? When he got onstage, would it all just come flooding back to him? He hoped it would. Seeing everyone’s faces after Tom had finished his final speech had been the first good thing to come out of Tom’s association with Crap Kingdom, and it hadn’t even happened there. And he hadn’t even seen Lindsy after rehearsal. He wanted to talk to her. Maybe, in the course of complimenting him, she’d tell him exactly what he’d done so he could replicate it. Maybe she’d drag him into a bathroom and make out with him. “Come back today! Hell, let’s go back now,” Kyle said. “See what your guy gets up to.”

“It’s always the same guy?”

“Always. They attach themselves to you.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

“That’s what I wanted to show you yesterday. So come today and we’ll do it.”

“I shouldn’t. Rehearsal again.”

“Dude, that’s the whole point, is that you can be there
and
here.”

“No, but I mean, me, I need to be there. I want to be there today.”

“Suit yourself. I’ll stick around in case you change your mind.”

“Did you just get this text?”

Tom looked up from his book. He was sitting in the back of his sixth-period class. Bridget, a girl Tom’s age who was also in Drama Department, had turned all the way around in her chair and was talking to Tom from the row of desks in front of him. She had recently dyed her hair pink, though she insisted it was not because Ella, an older girl everybody liked, had pink hair. She’d developed the idea independently a long time ago but just hadn’t gotten permission from her mom until recently. It was a coincidence, she’d insisted to anyone who would listen and even some people who wouldn’t.

“No,” Tom said. “Phone’s broken.”

“How did
that
happen?”

Tom decided it would be a bad idea to say,
It was drowned in a watery world-spanning portal that has recently been made obsolete by my best friend’s mastery of the soul-swap spell.
Instead, he shrugged.

“Oh,” Bridget said. “Well, check it out.”

She handed him her phone.

The text message said:
REHEARSAL CANCELED 4 THIS AFTERNOON—TOBE.

Tobe had acknowledged that it was probably hypocritical of him to text his student actors, since students weren’t supposed to text during school hours, but it was practical and efficient and if they were going to text anyway, which everybody did, they might as well all be grown-ups about it. He insisted this didn’t violate his otherwise strict adherence to school rules because there was no rule that explicitly stated that he couldn’t text his kids. Tom had always loved that Tobe didn’t realize his name would come up on kids’ phones once they’d programmed his number in, so he didn’t need to sign his texts “TOBE.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “Thanks.”

“Get a new phone!” Bridget said, as though it were something he’d just decided he didn’t want to do. She turned back around.

Tom was disappointed that there wouldn’t be rehearsal, but he was also a little relieved, because he hadn’t memorized his lines for the first ten pages, which they were supposed to be running off book for the first time that afternoon. The first ten pages contained his monstrous introductory monologue and he’d had every intention of learning it when he got home last night, but instead he’d just lain on his bed re-creating his masterful performance in his mind, even though he hadn’t actually been there for it.

Tom thought about borrowing Bridget’s phone and texting Tobe back to ask him what pages they’d be doing when rehearsal resumed. But he was already near enough to the Performing Arts wing to just stop by between classes, and he tried to stop by whenever he could. There were certain people you just wanted to be around, and Tobe was one of them. There was always a chance you could make him laugh or something. Also, Tom hadn’t seen Tobe since the end of yesterday’s rehearsal, and he thought maybe Tobe would drop some hint about what Tom had done yesterday that had moved kids to actual tears.

Posters from old Drama Department performances lined the walls of the drama room, and they’d always sparked Tom’s imagination. He’d think of how lucky previous generations of kids had been to get to do certain plays. Then when the time came for a poster to go up for a play he’d actually been in, it kind of diminished the whole thing. The ones he had actually been there for didn’t seem as cool for whatever reason. He didn’t know why things he was involved in were automatically less exciting to him than things he didn’t get to be a part of.

Kids were filtering in for Tobe’s next class. Tobe was sitting at his desk at the front of the room. Tom walked up and Tobe looked up from his computer.

“Hey,” Tom said. “I saw about rehearsal.”

Tom wanted Tobe to say something like, “Speaking of rehearsal—yesterday was no rehearsal, Tom—you were
performing
!” Tom wasn’t sure why he always wrote compliments for himself and put them in other people’s mouths in his imagination. Tobe was silent.

“Are we doing the first ten pages tomorrow instead, or the next ten?”

Tobe sighed. “Maybe neither. Look, you don’t know this . . . I mean, of course you don’t know it, because I haven’t told it to you yet, but once I tell you, you don’t know it, okay?”

“Of course not,” Tom said quietly.
A secret!
He was scared, because someone who seemed invincible to him sounded genuinely worried, and he was excited, because that person was about to take him into his confidence.

“The school doesn’t want me to do
View
.”

“What? Why?”

“The immigrant thing.”

Tom still hadn’t read the whole play, but at one point he knew that the main character, Eddie, came to see his character, the lawyer, about some illegal immigrants who were staying in his house.

“Are people protesting?” Tom got images of angry parents ringing the auditorium, holding up signs and shouting slogans on opening night. It was actually pretty exciting.

“No, but Principal Scott’s worried that people might protest, which is worse. If someone were actually protesting, we could do something to make them happy, or just say we’re ignoring them and going ahead anyway. But this anxiety’s almost worse because there doesn’t have to be anyone actually there protesting.”

“So we’re not doing it?”

“I don’t know. I have to go talk to him this afternoon. Plead my case.”

Before Tom knew what he was saying or why he was saying it, he said, “Do you want me to come?”

Tobe half smiled, which was about as much as Tobe ever smiled, which was one of the reasons it was nice to make him laugh when you could. “No,” he said, “I think I’ll be okay. But thank you for offering.”

Tom did not know why he had chosen to be bold just then. He always heard about people being impulsive, seizing the moment, but how did those people know which moments they were supposed to seize? He always looked for opportunities to be impulsive, but he was always impulsive at the wrong times. He left knowing he was going to spend all afternoon thinking about how dumb he was. Or maybe he didn’t have to sit around all afternoon thinking about it.

Tom hung out by his locker after the last period of the day let out. Kyle’s locker was right next to his. Eventually Kyle appeared out of the weather patterns of kids gossiping or roughhousing.

“Rehearsal got canceled,” Tom said. “I can go to ‘the place’ now if you want.”

“You mean
Krrgmmmppmmmp?” Kyle said.

“I was trying to be secretive about it,” Tom whispered. “I figured you’d know what I meant.”

“Dude,” Kyle said, “like anyone is going to know what Krrgmmmppmmmp means.”

Tom considered saying,
If I was the Chosen One I would be more careful than you’re being.

Instead he said, “Whatever. Are we going?”

After falling backward and leaving their Earthly bodies at the hidden gravel spot behind the auditorium, Tom and Kyle appeared in the same crater where they’d first been spotted by the Elgg pack.

“Why do our clothes and everything come through?” Tom said. “Like, is that a reflection of our souls, too? Do our clothes have souls?”

Tom realized Kyle wasn’t listening. He was staring at the far wall of the crater, where a perfectly rectangular patch of sand started vibrating and emitting a low hiss. Then, without any sound at all, each grain of sand blew outward. Tom braced himself for stinging eyes and skin, but nothing hit him. It was like the sand knew how to miss them. When it was over, they were in a bubble of sand, like a 3-D map of the stars in the night sky as rendered with floating grains of dirt, and in the center, in the side of the crater, was a rectangular doorway. Kyle walked through. Tom followed him, and as soon as he had stepped over the threshold, the small sand universe contracted, filling in the doorway, and they were left in darkness.

“One sec,” said Kyle. With no sound of ignition, a tiny purple flame began to grow in the darkness in front of Tom. As it grew, he realized it was emanating from Kyle’s hand, and he also realized they were in a small spherical chamber whose dimensions he could only now see thanks to Kyle’s hand-fire.

“The Tame Flame,” Tom said. “Gark said it wasn’t his peoples’ magic.”

“It isn’t,” Kyle said. “Not ancestrally.”

“Did he show you that one spell they have, the fart one where—”

“And neither . . .” Kyle continued dramatically, not really listening to Tom, “is
this
.” He threw the liquid flame side-arm and it splashed outward on the wall of the chamber, creating a bright, flaming stain.

Tom started looking around the chamber. The walls were lined with pictographs, stick-figure depictions of anonymous people doing fantastic things, like caveman drawings if cavemen had had enough imagination to draw guys shooting fire out of their eyeballs and converting their legs into tank treads.