Crap Kingdom

by D. C. Pierson

  Tom was out of breath. He started trying to breathe through his mouth instead of his nose, as the throne room had the stale cantaloupe-y smell of old dog pee.

  “As I said, Gark surprised me by retrieving you,” the king said. “Thus, I haven’t yet put enough thought into how we here in Ghhhhddkdffrr will deal with you. I must deliberate with Gark, as you are his project. You are free to explore the castle. I know you Earth types enjoy that sort of thing. Garko once said that, in exploring, you will either be disappointed when what you find fails to meet your expectations, or disappointed when things are exactly what you expected because they do not exceed your expectations, or thrilled when things exceed your expectations, but those exceptional things will always turn out to be evil or dangerous. I am reasonably certain our castle contains only things that fall within the first two categories.”

  He waved Tom away.

  Tom wanted to say something else, to not let the king have the last word, but he didn’t know what to say. He turned and walked out.

  He should have corrected the king! That was it. When Gark said “this is he,” and the king told him it was actually “this is him,” Tom should have jumped in and defended Gark. The king would have been impressed by Tom’s guts. It would have set a whole different tone. Why was he only now realizing this after it was too late?

  Gark’s and the king’s voices faded, and so did the dog-pee cantaloupe smell. The planks and beams jutting out from the walls made the place feel like one enormous backstage area for the weirdest show in history. Tom started to pretend that he was backstage, and that any second now he would round a corner and reach the real kingdom. This was the part no one in the audience was ever supposed to see. Any second now he’d step onstage, and he would be on a sunny hilltop with huge ivory towers in impossible geometric shapes off in the distance, and there would be dragons circling in the sky. He wanted a kingdom with just a few dragons. Even if the dragons had health problems.

  Then he rounded the corner and saw the first thing he’d seen since coming here that made him feel like he hadn’t rolled bad dice in a role-playing game.

  She was beautiful. She was sitting in a golden shaft of light with dust motes dancing in it. She was completely still, like she was sitting for a portrait. She was probably good at sitting still for portraits, because she would be highly in demand as a subject, because she was incredibly beautiful, and also because she was a princess. There were no two ways about it. When little girls said they wanted to be princesses, this is what they were talking about. As they grew up, their expectations could be modified by the slow realization that there was not a huge call for actual princesses in the modern world, but somewhere deep inside of them, in a place they would not admit existed to themselves or anyone else, an image lingered that looked exactly like the one in front of Tom: the princess, with the big pink cone of a princess hat, and the thin veil, and the long blonde hair and the big eyes containing wisdom and innocence and sparkling blue in equal amounts.

  Likewise, any boy who’d ever clutched a wooden sword and whacked his friend with it and then argued with that friend about whether or not that friend was “dead,” the argument going on longer than the game had, so long that they were both called in to dinner, that boy had felt that he was fighting for the honor of a princess very much like this one, and for the rest of his life, somewhere inside of him, the stakes of every struggle great or small would be measured against this vividly imagined bounty of princess love. He would always sort of be rescuing her.

  By now the idea of the princess as a passive totem of prettiness had been revised and revised, and yes, Tom would admit, princesses could kick ass or wear short haircuts or do whatever they wanted, but somewhere, for everybody, there was still this princess. Not that she was actually out there. You knew that. But an un-erasable part of you still thought you might get to meet her if you slayed enough dragons.

  Tom did not doubt for a second that she was a princess. Everything about her said “princess,” and said it in a measured, assertive-yet-soft, regal tone. A princess tone. And then she turned and, in an actual princess tone, said: “Greetings. I am the princess.”

  “Hi,” Tom said, “I’m Tom.”

  “Of course,” she said. She had one of those accents that’s incredibly distinguished but not quite from anywhere in particular. “I have heard much of your coming.”

  “You have?” Tom said.

  “Yes. You are the Chosen One, are you not?”

  “So they say,” Tom said. In his head, it had seemed like the cool thing to say, but when he actually said it, he realized he had no idea what he meant by it.

  “Come closer, Tom,” she said. “I must tell you a secret.”

  “Uh, okay,” Tom said. He took one step forward. He was nervous and he didn’t want to overcompensate or under-compensate and he was pretty sure he smelled like the worst kind of garbage so he wanted to be far away so as not to offend her or creep her out but he also wanted to be so, so much closer.

  “Closer,” she said. Tom stepped closer. This is definitely close enough, he thought.

  “Closer,” she said again, this time a little more playful and a lot more authoritative, so Tom took several steps, and then an additional one for good measure, until her impossible face was the only thing on his mind’s movie screen, and he felt like he’d stepped into some sort of princess-generated electrical field. The last step was probably a mistake, he thought. That was one step too many and I’ve definitely messed it up.

  “Closer,” she whispered.

  He stepped even closer. Now his dirty white sneakers were touching the hem of her skirt. “That’s better,” she said. It was the greatest moment of Tom’s life. Every moment this close to her was the greatest of his life.

  “My father hates you!” she whispered.

  “No!” Tom said, pretending to be shocked. He was still whispering.

  “Yes!” She was still whispering too. A look of real dread came into her eyes. “I cannot believe I’m saying this, as he is mine own blood, but he is in league with foreign enemies and your coming here, just as the prophecy said you would, puts his plan to surrender our kingdom to those enemies in jeopardy!”

  “Really?” he whispered. He did not have to pretend to be shocked this time, because he really was shocked.

  “It’s true! He seeks to undermine your confidence so that you will return home and not fulfill the prophecy! But you must stay here and do it! At all costs, at the risk of your own life and limb, you must stay here and do as was prophesied, or we shall all perish, or worse!”

  This was great! Well, it wasn’t great for this princess or for the king’s endangered subjects, but it was great for Tom, because it explained everything. The kingdom was so unimpressive because the king was weakening it to make a takeover easier for the enemy, breaking the will of the people so they’d never fight back. It explained why the king was dismissive of Tom: he didn’t want him to succeed. And it was great for Tom because a beautiful princess was six inches away from him, telling him he was their only hope, telling him she was his only ally, telling him her life was in his hands, and mauling him. Not in a painful way, just in a way where every time what she said got more dire she would move her hands somewhere on Tom’s torso and squeeze, tightly, as if her life depended on it. Tom’s first instinct was to touch her, just her hand or something, the way she was touching him, but he didn’t want to be rude, so he spent all that energy throwing a little mental party, and at that party, every part of his personality was toasting him, saying, YOU DID IT!

  “Promise me you shall stay and fulfill the prophecy.” She seemed close to tears.

  “I promise.”

  “Promise me!” She was squeezing his arm so hard now. Tom had no complaints.

  “I promise, my liege!” Liege might have been a little bit too much. Was she his liege even if he wa
sn’t from here? Or was he her liege, since he was the Chosen One? He probably shouldn’t fling lieges around if he wasn’t sure.

  “Call me Pira,” she said.

  “I promise, Pira.”

  “Now—quickly—kiss me to seal the promise!”

  Tom had had a “first kiss” already, technically. There was so much first kissing between the ages of eleven and fifteen that one had even trickled down to him. But when the princess asked him to kiss her he felt like he’d never kissed anyone. This, like everything when it came to princesses, was different.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!”

  He began to lean his head in. Her eyes closed.

  A dimple just next to her bottom lip appeared for a half second. He never would have noticed it if he’d had his eyes closed like you were supposed to when you kissed someone, and it reminded him that he should close his eyes, and he was about to close them when he saw it again: the dimple. Not a smiling dimple, which was typically on a person’s cheek. It was the kind of dimple you got when you were supposed to be paying serious attention in class but someone farted and you were trying really hard not to—

  “BWA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAAA!”

  Her shrieking laugh doubled her over. The head Tom had been one second away from kissing was now planted firmly in her skirts as she cackled.

  “Sorry! Sorry! I couldn’t keep—I couldn’t keep it going. Ohmigod! Ohmigod. You should have seen your face. Seriously? Seriously.” The voice now coming from Pira was totally different. “Did you like that, though? ‘You must fulfill the prophecy!’” She switched back into her regal princess voice for a second. “My like, princess voice? Pretty good, huh? I was like, about to crack up the whole time! You seriously bought it, didn’t you? It’s okay! I was like, super-convincing! Not to be all, like, self-absorbed or anything.”

  Tom backed away from her. She was still pretty, and her eyes were still striking, but there was something about them that was now, well, crazy.

  “So you’re not the princess.”

  “Oh no, no, no, no, I totally am, but seriously”—she filled each hand with skirt ruffles and brought them to her sides—“who would wear this?” Then she resumed cracking herself up.

  “Is your name even Pira?”

  “Oh yeah! I’m Princess Pira,” she said like a haughty courtier, tucking her head into her neck to give herself a double chin. “No seriously, I am, it’s just like, the whole ‘princess’ thing is so”—and she mimed throwing up.

  “So there’s no conspiracy between your father and—”

  “I don’t think so, God, how bad would I feel if there actually was? Can you imagine? No, I was just, like, entertaining myself, I guess.”

  Tom had wanted so badly to believe her. He had been very happy in a world where there was a reason why the king hated him, and he was still recovering from the whiplash of being pulled right back out of it.

  “Hey, cheer up, okay? Hey! This’ll be fun, wait here.”

  She jumped up and ran out of the room, so fast that the stool she’d been sitting on wobbled from leg to leg before it finally stopped. Tom sat down on it. He told himself not to be surprised if it turned out to be a hundred snakes pretending to be a stool. Nothing here was what it seemed: it was worse.

  “Bang bang! Gotcha, cowpoke!” Tom turned and saw Pira, standing in the doorway, dressed as a cowboy, pointing toy revolvers at him. At least, he hoped they were toys. She was wearing a fake mustache. It was long, curly, and brown. She had transformed convincingly from classic princess to classic cowboy in about six seconds.

  “Hilarious, right? I’ve got like tons of costumes. My dad ordered the clothes guys to bring me anything cool that they find.”

  “How do you know what cowboys are?”

  “Everyone knows what cowboys are. Don’t be crazy.”

  “Well then what are they?”

  “Guys who look like this and say what I just said!”

  It was hard to argue with that.

  He sat on the stool as she paraded before him in legitimately impressive Viking and pirate costumes. They both had mustaches. When she came out dressed as a race-car driver complete with a gold-visored helmet, Tom was relieved to finally see a costume without a mustache. Then she lifted the visor on the helmet. Oh, there it is, Tom thought: mustache.

  Finally she came out wearing a puffy multicolored jacket and neon-orange warm-up pants, and no mustache.

  “What is this one supposed to be?” Tom said.

  “This is just what I wear,” she said.

  Tom sighed aloud. He couldn’t help it. He knew it was unreasonable and probably sexist to expect a princess to dress the way Pira was dressed when he first laid eyes on her, and he could imagine his mom yelling at him, telling him that princesses could be whatever they wanted, even race-car drivers with mustaches, and he knew she would have been right. But he’d wanted her to actually be the way she seemed. For a moment, it was so like how he’d wanted it to be.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “When you came in you were all,” and she pantomimed eagerness and excitement, “and now you’re all,” and she pantomimed depression by half closing one eye and letting her tongue loll out of her mouth like she’d just sustained a head injury.

  “I dunno.”

  “Come on. What is it? Am I freaking you out? I’m not freaking you out, am I? I’m freaking you out. Oh God.”

  She started to squeeze the front pockets of her track jacket as hard as she’d squeezed Tom’s arms back when she was the capital-P “princess.” She stared down at the ground.

  “No, no, it’s not that! Seriously, it’s not. Your costumes are amazing.”

  “They’re hilarious,” she corrected him, sounding close to tears.

  “They’re hilarious, right, that’s what I meant.”

  “What is it then?”

  “I don’t know how to say it without, uhm. Offending you.”

  “It’s fine. I want to know. Tellll meee,” she said, hopping around like a six-year-old who has to pee.

  “Okay, well, your dad, right? He does hate me, you were right about that.”

  “He does? That’s too bad, but it’s not a surprise. He’s kind of like that. Hates everything. It’s sort of his job. I wouldn’t take it personally.”

  “I’m trying not to, but it seems like the only person who likes me here is Gark, and your dad says no one respects him.”

  “That’s pretty right, yeah. About no one respects Gark.”

  “I mean, I don’t get it. Gark’s just happy, right?”

  “Right, but like my dad would say, he’s happy in an opt-o-mistic way,” she said, over-enunciating “optimistic” and pronouncing it like it had an O in it, which led Tom to believe it was a word she didn’t use very much. “It means he’s looking forward to things, trying to make them better, instead of being happy in a settled way, where you’re just, like, ‘eh, this is what I have, could be a lot worse and it probably will be a lot worse so I guess it’s fine for now.’ I’m happy too, I mean, I laugh a lot, but my dad says it’s normal for kids my age to experiment with laughter and that as long as it’s, like, laughing at stuff, it’s healthy, because it’s, like, a healthy cynicism. That’s why he’s okay with my costumes. It keeps me busy and I only like ’em ’cause they’re stupid and ridiculous. If I just started, like, jumping around going TRA-LA-la for no reason, just ’cause I was happy, that’s when he would be worried and tell me to knock it off, which is fine, ’cause I’d never do that anyway, eww.”

  “It’s just . . . I never expected to be the Chosen One of anywhere, so it’s cool for that reason, but if I’m the Chosen One of a place like this, what does that say about me?”

  “What do you mean, a place like this?”

  “I just mean—I just mean
—” Tom said, stumbling.

  “You mean it sucks?”

  “You guys say that here too?”

  “Of course we do, we live here! Of course it sucks! No one here would ever argue with you about that. Wanna make friends here? Just go into any place out there, any house or whatever, and say, this kingdom sucks, your house sucks, you suck. And that person’d be like, ‘Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? You suck, too! Wanna stay for dinner?’”

  “Well, if you all agree it sucks and you’re all just fine with it, what does it say about me that I’m your Chosen One? Does that mean I’m supposed to change everything? Because it doesn’t seem like any of you want things to change and I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Wow,” Pira said, “you’re pretty negative.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “No, I mean it!”

  “I know you do!”

  “No, I mean it as a compliment! I honestly don’t see why my dad doesn’t like you. You guys are like, a lot alike.”

  “Okay, fine, but ‘negative’ wouldn’t be considered a compliment where I come from.”

  “Maybe it’s good that you’re here then. Maybe this is like, where you belong. I mean, you just found out there’s this whole other place than the place you’re from, and in it, you’re like, special, you’re like, a hero, and all you can think about is how much you don’t like everything. I’d say that makes you pretty negative. For real. Like, Gark’s-dad-level negative. I would seriously not be surprised if my dad hired you to give me lessons.”

  She was totally right and Tom knew it. He felt like a completely ungrateful piece of crap. There were probably tons of kids all over the world who would trade places with him in a second. A lot of them wouldn’t even need for the other place they’d discovered to be through a fold in the fabric of reality. They’d never left the town they were born in, they’d never been one state over, they’d never been on a plane. If they were from a hot place they’d be grateful just to get to go to a place where it snowed, and if they were from a place where it snowed, they’d be grateful for a place with a beach. Here he was in the midst of this other universe no one on Earth had any idea existed and all he could think of was how it was mostly made of junk from Earth and how much that sucked.