Crap Kingdom (9 page)

9

FOR THE NEXT
three weeks, Tom was boring. He came home every day right after school, missing drama meetings and hangouts with Kyle. He did all his homework. Then when the homework that was due the next day was done, he worked on projects and essays that weren’t even due for weeks. It was insane. And most insane of all, after the homework and essays and projects were done, he’d just plain
study
. Pop quizzes would be announced in class and everyone would groan but for once, Tom didn’t join them. Was this what being prepared was like? It kind of felt like being a superhero. A very boring superhero whose power was taking pop quizzes, but a superhero nonetheless.

At home, when the work was done, he’d watch TV. But only once the work was done. Then he would have a brief, blissful, satisfied few minutes of watching whatever was on before his eyes started to get heavy and he went to bed. Back when he was the procrastinating type, he could watch stuff for hours, knowing he should go to bed but never feeling tired. Now there were actually periods of time where he didn’t have anything he should be doing other than watching TV, but the work involved in getting all that other stuff done made him too tired to actually watch for very long. He was so proud of himself. He wanted to shoot a video of himself turning the TV off at 11:15 and rolling over and going to sleep, and send it to the American Maturity Council.

He’d wake up at 7:30 and actually go out to the kitchen and eat breakfast, and every time he did it he wanted to run to the window, open it, and scream “Look at me! I’m awake before eight
AM
without anyone having to wake me up! My
mom
isn’t even awake yet!” One morning he woke up at 7:29, a full minute before his alarm was supposed to go off. No loud noise or nightmare woke him up, either. His eyes just sprang open with a whole sixty seconds to go before the alarm would buzz. It was eerie. He went out to the kitchen to get a grapefruit, the most mature of breakfast foods.

Every Friday he’d get a progress report from his teachers. On the Friday of his third week of responsible grown-up living, he had two Bs, two B-pluses, two As, and one A-plus.

That night, he heard his mom’s keys in the door again at 8:04. He brought the progress report out to her. She looked it over. She smiled. They hugged. She told him to order a pizza.

On Monday after school, Tom sat in the third row of the auditorium waiting for
A View from the Bridge
auditions to begin, feeling like he’d never had more of a right to be anywhere in his entire life.

He put his foot up on the red metal back of the chair in front of him and started bouncing his leg absentmindedly. He saw Lindsy sitting with some of her friends in the front row. He slid down into what he imagined was a cool, devil-may-care pose. Any Lindsys who happened to look back and see him would think,
Oh my, that rebel has no regard for polite society’s rules about posture.
Lindsy turned to say hi to her friend Margot. Then she spotted Tom. She smiled and waved. He saluted. She turned back and continued talking with Margot. He immediately felt dumb. Why did he salute? All he needed to do was wave back and smile. That was all that was required. There was no need to try to score points with an interesting variation on the standard smile-and-wave. Then his absentmindedly bouncing leg drove its knee into his mouth. It really hurt.

He looked around to see if anyone had noticed him kneeing himself in the face. They hadn’t. He shook it off and looked down at the photocopied script pages they were supposed to read for the audition. Normally, instead of really going over the lines, he’d be sitting back here goofing off with Kyle, but Kyle wasn’t there.

“What parts are you gonna audition for?” Tom had asked Kyle earlier that day in the lunchroom. “I was thinking I would—”

“I don’t think I’m gonna try out,” Kyle had said. Kyle always said “try out” instead of “audition” like it was a baseball team and not a play, just like he said “practice” instead of “rehearsal.”

“Seriously? Why?”

Kyle shrugged. “Just some time off.”

Tom couldn’t remember which one of them had first expressed an interest in doing drama. He didn’t remember it being a conscious decision. It was more like they’d been drawn down to the Performing Arts wing by a mysterious voice that whispered:
Hey. You get to stay after school and fool around pretending to be other people and it’s actually encouraged. There will be fake guns. There will be fake swords. There will be real girls.

And there had been all three, though Kyle was the only one who’d kissed any of the girls in an offstage context. Tom wasn’t bothered by it. He’d been focusing on Lindsy. In the meantime, there had been tons of chances to do British accents and get attention from crowds and older, funnier kids, so that tided Tom over in the absence of girl activity. He wasn’t concerned. He really wasn’t.

Even though he definitely wasn’t concerned and definitely wasn’t jealous, sitting in the auditorium waiting for the auditions to start, Tom was maybe just a little bit glad that Kyle wasn’t there. For one thing, it made it easier to prepare, and he was all about preparation now, all about focus.

There were other reasons, too. It wasn’t that he was jealous of Kyle, or that he thought Lindsy liked Kyle, or ever would. It was something much less specific.

At the end of freshman year, Tom and Kyle had had tiny chorus parts in the musical. They didn’t have all that much to do, which was sort of a gift actually, because it meant they had a chance to sit back and hang out with the older theater kids they’d been admiring all year. One afternoon, they were lingering up against the cinder-block wall at the back of the stage with two older girls, Jessica and Ella, while the choreographer Tobe had brought in especially for the production was running twelve other kids through some dance involving a lot of multicolored silk. Tom and Kyle and the girls were talking at full volume because the choreographer’s boom box drowned them out. It was fun.

Then Kyle and Ella went off to get snacks from the snack machine. Tom had given Kyle four quarters and instructions to bring back one of those big Kit Kats and then he was left alone with the other older girl, Jessica. She was looking off after Kyle and her friend as they left and then the choreographer hit the pause button on the boom box and the music stopped and the dancers’ silks started drifting down to the ground.

Jessica said, “Your friend Kyle is very handsome.”

She didn’t say it in a way that indicated she liked Kyle. Supposedly she had a boyfriend who was already in college. She just said it matter-of-factly, like it was something Tom ought to be aware of. It bothered him anyway.

It wasn’t that he was jealous. It was just that he didn’t need cooler older girls telling him his best friend was handsome like it was something all the adults had gotten together and decided. He and Kyle were supposed to be nerds. They’d had a lot of practice at it ever since sixth grade when Kyle had finally hung up his soccer cleats. They’d finally found this place, the Drama Department, where a nerd was maybe not such a bad thing to be. They could now go about getting girlfriends the way they were supposed to, by having girls realize their nerdy exteriors actually concealed untapped reserves of sensitivity and talent and smartness. No one was supposed to cheat by being just plain old-fashioned handsome. That wasn’t part of the plan. Granted, Tom had never really said the plan aloud, or even really admitted to himself that there was a plan. He just assumed that it was assumed.

So while he would miss his friend, he was also grateful not to have Kyle’s supposed matter-of-fact it’s-just-out-there-and-people-notice-it handsomeness around. He’d worked really hard to be here. He needed to get a part and perform brilliantly so that he could re-create that magic moment with Lindsy Kopec and then hopefully take things one step further, all while keeping his grades up. He couldn’t do all that if he also had to worry about everyone thinking Kyle was so great just because he was good-looking or whatever. Noticing Tom was great would be a lot more rewarding for people because Tom’s greatness was inside. It wasn’t just a face or a haircut.

Tobe walked down the aisle between the stage and the front row of seats.

“Let’s get started,” he said.

10

IT WAS THE
third name down on the cast list:

ALFIERI—TOM PARKING

Tom was ecstatic.

It wasn’t the part he’d wanted, necessarily. There was the male romantic lead, Rodolpho, and Tom hadn’t read the whole play yet, but he knew that Rodolpho got to be extremely cool and Italian around the female lead, Catherine, a role Lindsy Kopec had been a shoo-in for. Tom didn’t know how to do an Italian accent, but how hard could it be? He’d worked hard at everything these past three weeks. An accent would be no sweat.

Lindsy had gotten Catherine, but Rodolpho had gone to some senior. But Tom’s character, Alfieri, narrated the play, so he had a lot of big speeches. Would he rather have a girl fall in love with him for acting suave and romantic, which almost seemed like taking the easy way out, or would he want a girl to fall in love with him for his ability to handle long speeches bursting with big words? The second one, absolutely. There was much more to Lindsy than just her looks, and Tom’s performance as Alfieri the narrator would speak to the sophisticated side of her. And if she wasn’t into long, well-written, well-delivered speeches, he probably didn’t want her anyway. Actually, he probably still wanted her. Once he had her, he was pretty sure he could make her come around on the well-written speech stuff.

He practically galloped into the drama room to get his script from Tobe.

Tom flung his backpack so hard across his bedroom that it smacked the wall before falling onto his bed. Then he flung himself onto the bed equally hard. He unzipped his bag and took out the script. He wondered if he should read the play first or just go through and highlight all his lines. He knew the right answer: he should read the play. But he also wanted to know how many lines he had right away. He decided he’d go through really fast and highlight his lines and then go back through and actually read the thing, and then he’d do his other homework, because as he kept reminding himself, he had to keep up his recent level of excellent academic performance if he wanted to actually be in the play. No problem. He flipped past the five-page introduction by the author, which he told himself he would also read later.

The first line of the play was his, and it was one and three quarters of a page long. Even better, it mentioned Al Capone.
See what happens when you work hard,
he told himself.
You get to say two-page-long monologues about Al Capone in front of Lindsy Kopec.
Well, it wasn’t about Al Capone exactly; he was just mentioned. But still.

His yellow highlighter was flying across the page. Marker fumes filled the air. It was the glorious smell of Tobe trusting him to pull this off. He skimmed his lines as he went. This was heavy-duty grown-up drama. He was going to blow the guy playing Rodolfo off the stage with the sheer force of his talent and extreme maturity. He finished highlighting his first speech and took a second to admire the continent of neon-yellow he’d just created. Then he turned the page and skimmed down the side of the next one for his character’s name. Nothing. Same thing on the next page, and the next. Not a big deal. He was the narrator, he dropped in and out, he set the scene. He was outside of the story looking in. It was fine—he’d already had the mother of all lines on the very first page. Rodolfo hadn’t even had a single line yet.

Then he hit page 30 and there he was again: Alfieri. The role made famous by a young Tom Parking. Again he skimmed the line as he highlighted it. He stopped after two sentences and put the marker down.

The two sentences he’d highlighted read:

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

He read it one more time. This time, even though he knew what the real words were, his mind insisted on hearing it this way instead:
Who can ever know what will be discovered? Tom Parking had never expected to have a destiny.

He’d made a massive mistake.

Tom couldn’t say he hadn’t thought about Crap Kingdom at all since dropping the note into the clothing donation box. He had thought about it the way anyone would think about a mystical world they’d just learned existed on the other side of the Kmart parking lot. But his feelings on the subject hadn’t really had time to change. He’d been upset about getting in trouble, sad about lying to his mom, and mad about missing the last two nights of the show, and he had immediately channeled those feelings into three weeks of schoolwork and nothing else.

Also, he’d never really said no to anything before. He had spent his life asking to be a part of things and having someone else say no—groups of friends, plays, girls. It was the first time anyone had ever put him in the position to decide his own fate. He had to admit there was something cool about being offered something, especially something that in theory he’d always dreamed of but never thought possible, and then being able to say, “You know what? Not for me.” It was a weird sort of power. He felt powerful.

Any time he thought about it, he figured he’d traded a miserable life in a fantastical universe for a decent one in the real world. It was like a more efficient
Wizard of Oz
where Dorothy had landed, taken one look around, said, “I get it, thanks,” and then woke up in her bed in Kansas having learned never to look farther than her own backyard without ever having to be kidnapped by flying monkeys.

Now, though, staring down at these words, Tom wondered if he’d made the wrong decision. He had never expected to have a destiny. He’d thought almost exactly that a few weeks ago, the night before Gark came and told him he did have one. You didn’t get more than one destiny, did you? When it was gone, it was gone, and he’d sent his away without a second thought and devoted himself entirely to academics. Last year he’d heard this girl Julie saying she wasn’t going to audition for the fall play because she was going to take some time off to focus on her studies. Tom thought she was being ridiculous. Now he realized he’d given up an entire universe to focus on his studies.

There had been a thousand reasons, and they’d all been good ones. He didn’t want to work in the Rat-Snottery. He hadn’t gotten any magical powers. He didn’t want to have to lie to his mom a bunch. Existing in this world and in that one simultaneously had seemed impossible. But isn’t that exactly what Chosen Ones were supposed to do: impossible things? That night when his mom first told him he needed to focus, really studying had seemed impossible, yet he’d just done nothing but study for weeks on end. He put his mind to it and he actually accomplished it. Who’s to say he couldn’t have done that in Crap Kingdom? He should have barged in there and said,
Quit it with all this our-kingdom’s-name-is-a-random-noise stuff. This kingdom’s name is Tom-Town and there will BE. NO. ARGUMENTS.

Tom stood up and started pacing around his room. It was a tough room to pace around because his new hard-work regimen had not extended to organizing his room and there were dirty clothes everywhere. They made him think of the waterlogged landmasses of laundry in the lake that was the gateway to the nameless kingdom. Sure, it was gross. The whole place was gross. Tom’s room was gross, too. If he was honest, Tom was often gross himself. So who was he to judge them?

What if Gark finding him was the only cool thing that ever happened in his entire life? A lot of people got As on their report card and got into good colleges. A lot of people did high school drama. Not a lot of people were mentioned by first and last name in a prophecy in another world. Who can ever know what will be discovered? Tom hadn’t stuck around to find out.

He couldn’t go back, could he? No. He’d built something here. Something he’d worked really hard for. His home was here. His life was here. His mom was here. Lindsy Kopec was here. He wished he could call Kyle, but his phone was still broken. Not that he’d have confessed everything to him. He just needed to talk to somebody.

He sat back down on his bed and tried highlighting lines to distract himself. It wasn’t as much fun as it had been a minute before. All he kept thinking was that this was the stuff he was going to do instead of being a hero. He tried reading more closely. At the end of the play, it turned out that the main character Eddie’s destiny involved getting killed in a street fight.
See,
Tom thought,
you don’t want to get killed, do you?

It didn’t help, though. Maybe you got killed. Maybe you were a hero. Maybe both. But what could possibly be worse than not finding out and wondering forever?