Crap Kingdom

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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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.

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 snatch 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.