Crap Kingdom

by D. C. Pierson

  “Really?”

  “Ugh, this is exactly what you wanted, isn’t it? Not enough that I basically tear your face off, I actually have to say how great I think you are.”

  “So what did I say?”

  “You were there! You know what you said!”

  “I mean, I got kind of caught up in the moment, like you were saying.”

  “I just remember thinking, did he write this? But I can’t remember exactly. . . .”

  “Right, it wasn’t so much what I said as how I said it.”

  “No, it was what you said and how you said it. You said that we’d both worked really hard on productions in the past, and how I had all these things going on with academics and also my acting and modeling outside of school, but how I was electing—I remember you used that word, electing—to be here because I believed in the project and what it meant and, to sacrifice that, stood in opposition—there’s another phrase you definitely used—to the spirit, or something, of the play. And there were all these things that you said, but if there was going to be a thesis statement in all of this, this would have been it, something about how everything Arthur Miller stood for, all his lessons of tolerance and dignity, that could just go away at any time, and it wouldn’t have to be in a big court case, it could happen very slowly, just from people being too afraid in situations they assumed really didn’t matter because they were so small, like a school play. Small decisions, small moments, they matter. That there are small victories to be had everywhere, in our own lives, not just in the Supreme Court and stuff. Does that sound about right?”

  “Yeah,” Tom said. “It’s all coming back to me now. That part of it, anyway, because the other part—”

  “What other part?” Lindsy said. “Oh, you mean the part where, after the principal said he’d have to give some serious consideration to it, but you’d made a lot of excellent points, and then thanked me for my sacrifice in light of my many endeavors, we were outside and you said how we still had the whole afternoon free and I asked you if you’d like to come back here, and you said . . . Oh, god, I can’t even say it . . .”

  “Say it!”

  “Ugh. Fine. You said, and this I can quote: ‘Only if it’s not just to run lines.’”

  “I . . . am . . . amazing.”

  Lindsy thwacked Tom so hard he almost fell off the bed.

  “And then you said something about telling you all about everything from this afternoon that you said was about getting a ‘different perspective’ but was really about inflating your already overinflated ego.”

  “Wait! You skipped a part.”

  “What part?”

  Tom looked at her. She remembered. Then they reenacted that part, each of them playing themselves this time.

  17

  THERE WAS A fact so great that it made Tom suspect that the life he was living wasn’t his own, and it was this:

  Lindsy Kopec was his girlfriend.

  There was an additional fact that once again assured him that yes, this was Tom’s life, the life he’d always lead, and it was this:

  It wasn’t going very well.

  It hadn’t gone poorly immediately. There was the afternoon where they made out, and they even got to make out a little bit when Tom was actually present in his body, which was great. Then they heard the garage door open.

  “Don’t worry,” Lindsy said, “they trust me.”

  Tom and Lindsy got up from her bed and straightened up their clothes.

  “Tom!” Lindsy said, gesturing dramatically to her bedspread. “Your fortune!”

  Tom gathered up the sixty or sixty-five cents that had fallen out of his pockets onto her bed, trying to do it in a manner that indicated he didn’t care about sixty or sixty-five cents, that the money was meaningless to him but she was going to have to sleep there sometime, and she didn’t want change flying everywhere, now did she?

  Going downstairs, Tom had to pretend like he’d seen her house before even though he actually hadn’t. It was big and elegant, the kind of house people who buy each other Lexuses for Christmas in commercials have. Lindsy’s father was in the kitchen, actually wearing a suit, actually setting down a briefcase. He was opening a bottle of wine when they walked through.

  He shook Tom’s hand and invited him to stay for dinner but Tom declined, citing some awkward, poorly thought out combination of homework and a family obligation. If he’d been able to express the real reason, it would’ve been something like: I think your daughter will let me make out with her now whenever I want to so I need to leave now before I ruin it.

  She kissed him by the big wooden front door. There were carvings in the door of ancient people doing ancient stuff.

  She said, “You’re an egomaniac,” and then she said, “Can I have your phone number?”

  “Uh,” he said, “my phone’s kinda . . . broken.”

  “Really?” she said. “What happened?”

  “Fell in a pool,” he said.

  “Do you still have it?”

  “Not on me, but yeah.”

  “Wait here.”

  She bounded up the stairs. Tom marveled at his surroundings. This place was more of a castle than the one in Crap Kingdom. And when he tried to kiss this princess, she kissed back instead of laughing at him. Well, she did laugh at him. It’s just that the laughing didn’t result from the kissing. And really, what more could you want?

  She bounded back down the stairs. She was holding something behind her back with one hand. She reached him and held it up: a cell phone.

  “My old phone. Take it.”

  “No, I can’t do that.”

  “Sure you can. Just put your SIM card in it. Boom: Tom’s phone.”

  “Will that work?”

  She gave him a look and slapped the phone into his palm. He told her his phone number, and she programmed it into her newer phone. They kissed and he left and the enormous door shut behind him.

  It was only when he was six steps down her long, long driveway that he realized what the look she gave him when she handed him the phone meant. It meant, “This is a free phone and I’m a pretty girl, you idiot.”

  As soon as he got home, he put his old SIM card in Lindsy’s old phone. He turned it on. Ten minutes later, she texted him:

  this is lindsy. it worked, didn’t it?

  An hour later, after he and his mom had eaten dinner, Lindsy called him. It was great for exactly twenty minutes. Tom was thinking, She’s calling me just to talk about whatever, which was an absolute joy until he realized he didn’t have anything to talk about. Wasn’t he supposed to be smart? Yet after twenty minutes he found himself shockingly bereft of topics. At one point, he actually opened up CNN’s website and started talking about events of the day. Lindsy had to admit she didn’t know anything about health care reform, which was a relief, because Tom didn’t either. There was a good chance that if Tom had been able to pop over to Crap Kingdom and let his other self take over, that guy could’ve given Lindsy an earful about health care reform in a way that would make her say “I’ll be right over” and come tear Tom’s face off, as she’d put it. But he couldn’t pop over, so he didn’t, so he sputtered on until they both said their good-byes and hung up.

  The next day, Tobe texted all the kids in the play to tell them rehearsal was on for that afternoon, which meant that whatever Tom had done in the principal’s office, it had worked. Immediately after he got Tobe’s text, he received another one from Lindsy that said YOU’RE MY HERO. He spent the rest of the day looking back and forth from that text message to his lines for pages one through ten, which he still hadn’t memorized.

  He deserved to be called a hero, right? When he wasn’t looking at his lines or at Lindsy’s text, he was wondering about that. It had been him barging into the principal’s office to make a big important spe
ech, as far as anyone else was concerned. And it was certainly something he would’ve wanted to do, if he’d thought of it. And as for the stuff he’d supposedly said in the office, well, it wasn’t stuff he’d ever thought of before, but he definitely would have thought of it, right? It was all about the play and Lindsy and Tobe, topics that were in his brain, it just took this other person inhabiting him when he was off in another world to actually put it together and say it. So it was pretty much like he’d thought of it himself and said it himself, right? And since the other person was in limbo and could not be here to share in the spoils of heroism, he might as well enjoy all of it. He was sure this noble, well-spoken soul would understand, and would even want it that way. He’d been in Tom’s body. He knew what it was like.

  Being Lindsy’s hero carried him through the weekend. It got him back to Lindsy’s house after rehearsal on Friday. It got him on her living room couch, a long white leather thing that was fancy because it didn’t really have a back or arms. They were watching a movie. Lindsy’s parents were out. Tom knew he was supposed to kiss her at some point, but he didn’t know how exactly. He’d only ever kissed her after he’d already been kissing her. He didn’t know how to initiate kissing. Thankfully Lindsy mauled him at a certain point and he just went along with it.

  When Lindsy canceled the plans they’d made to see a movie on Saturday night because she needed to prepare for an audition she had to tape and send to her agent in LA, Tom was secretly glad. He needed to be the guy she thought he was, but that guy was in a void somewhere, floating bodiless, and Tom couldn’t get him to make an appearance unless he got Kyle to take him somewhere he was forbidden to go.

  “Are you okay?” Lindsy asked.

  They were at Lindsy’s again on Monday night. They were doing homework.

  Homework: this he understood how to do. So he just happened to have a homework companion who probably wanted him to put his tongue down her throat. He didn’t know how to do that, so he’d just focus on homework. They were on her bed. She was lying lengthwise in front of him, kicking her legs in the air, flipping through a French workbook.

  “What? Yeah, of course,” he said. On instinct his right hand jumped out to touch her, but then he got self-conscious about it and he let it fell limply between them like a weak, target-less karate chop.

  “In rehearsal today, you seemed distracted.”

  “I did?” Tom didn’t know how that could be. He’d spent all his non-Lindsy time that weekend learning his lines to the point where he felt like he’d never known anything so forward and backward in his life, and that afternoon he’d worked really hard to recapture the magic that made him worthy of being called “brilliant,” even though he still didn’t have any idea what exactly it was that he’d done. But he tried. Tried and tried and tried. Now his voice was ripped up and his legs hurt from pacing. He felt like he had out-narrated every narrator in history in one afternoon. “I didn’t feel distracted.”

  “Oh,” Lindsy said. “Okay.” She flipped a page of her book, then said, “Is this distracting you?”

  “Your book? No.”

  “No, Tom, this. Us. There was that one day last week where everyone was just blown away by you—and with good reason, you were fantastic—but ever since we’ve started dating, you haven’t seemed . . .”

  Last week she had hesitated because she didn’t want to give him a bigger head. Now it seemed like she was hesitating for exactly the opposite reason.

  “. . . the same, I guess. You seem different.”

  “Not as good?”

  “No! Not at all! You were always great. Remember what I told you on opening night of the last show?”

  “Vaguely.”

  Her arm lashed out and thwacked him. She could just fly off the handle to playfully hit him without thinking about it. Why did every instinct he had to touch her require fifteen different meetings in his brain?

  “Well, you were always very good but there was just something special about that day last week, but ever since we started this, you just haven’t seemed the same, and I would hate to be anything but good for you, so I’m thinking maybe we should . . . put a hold on things.”

  “What? Lindsy, that’s . . .” He tried to say her name the way she said his, but it didn’t feel natural. Why didn’t anything feel natural to him except lame things like eating peanut butter sandwiches alone in front of the TV? “That’s crazy. I mean, not that you’re crazy, you’re not crazy, but I mean, thanks for being concerned about me and stuff, but no, this, this is awesome. This is great. Seriously.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course!”

  “Okay,” she said. “Just so long as you’re sure.”

  Just so long as you’re sure? What other sixteen-year-old girl in the world said that? God, he liked her so much. I should just kiss her, he thought. Instead he looked back down at his homework. Numbers swam on the page. There was no way he could focus on anything else. He needed to act. He needed to be that man of action, that man who grabbed her hand roughly in the courtyard and said “come with me.” He had flung her into the principal’s office. Flung her. And that was before they’d ever kissed, and now they’d kissed a hundred times, and he couldn’t just kiss her again. She was right there! She wanted him, too! She didn’t want to be studying French any more than he wanted to be studying Algebra 3-4!

  The numbers on the page stopped swimming. They came into focus. There were six more practice problems left. He finished them all. Every so often he would hear Lindsy turn a page in her French workbook.

  Flip.

  Silence.

  Flip.

  Silence.

  Flip.

  A silence longer than all the other silences.

  Flip.

  “I should probably take off soon,” Tom said.

  18

  TOM CALLED KYLE as soon as he got home. He needed his help. It wasn’t ideal, but he’d already had one great thing slip through his grasp, and he didn’t want to let another one go. He hadn’t known that the first thing was great at the time, but he knew dating Lindsy was great. The only thing making it not great was him being himself.

  Kyle picked up on the third ring.

  “Hello, this is Kyle.”

  “Hey man, did I wake you up?”

  “I was beginning to sleep, yes.”

  “Are you . . . all right?”

  “I’m not sure I know to what you are referring.”

  This wasn’t Kyle, Tom realized. It was his other self. Kyle was in Crap Kingdom.

  “Hey, Kyle, call me back when you’re you, okay?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Can you write that down? Can you write that down for the real Kyle?”

  “I am Kyle, if that is your concern.”

  Tom hung up.

  Tom found Kyle at a bench in the courtyard on Tuesday morning before school.

  “Are you you?”

  “Krrgrgggprrrr . . .” Kyle said, rolling his eyes back in his head like a zombie. “Nah, kidding, I’m me.”

  “That’s not what you’re like when you’re not you.”

  “What am I like?”

  “You use way more big words but in this weird awkward way that leads me to believe you’re not actually all that smart.”

  “So like you then.”

  “Hey, you know what?”

  “Dude! I’m kidding. I know he’s not that smart. I came back to check my own homework. It’s not good. I’m gonna try to fix it in first period and go back after that.”

  “Cool. I need to go back, too.”

  Kyle shut his notebook and looked up.

  “You can’t, man.”

  “I know, but I have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Lindsy and I are dating now.”


  “What? Lindsy Kopec? You didn’t tell me that!”

  “I know, you’re always in . . .”

  “Krrrgggghhhrr.”

  “That sounded like your zombie noise.”

  “Yeah, I guess. But Lindsy, man, that’s excellent! When did this happen?”

  Tom told Kyle everything. He hadn’t heard about the play almost getting canceled, or about Tom waking up in Lindsy’s house, or any of it. It was weird. Normally, the second anything happened to either of them, the other one would hear about it. But for the past week of Tom’s life, basically the craziest week since he’d found out about Crap Kingdom, his best friend had been several universes away. They used to tell each other everything, but once another world got involved, they’d stopped.

  Once Tom finished, Kyle said, “But won’t you miss out on the good part?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Won’t you miss, like, you guys making out and stuff?”

  “Hopefully not. Anyway, it’s not just about making out, she’s great, she’s so fun and cool and smart and I think she would like me, the actual me, if I could just be the actual me in front of her. But I don’t know how to yet, and I need to learn, and I will learn, but I can’t right now. The other me needs to take over for a little bit before she breaks up with me or something.”

  “The other you sounds awesome. You’re lucky. My other me sucks.”

  “Yeah, he does. So can you do it? The king will never see me. I’ll hide or something! I won’t get you in trouble. I swear.”

  “I have to think about it.”

  Tom texted Kyle in third period:

  ???>

  Kyle wrote back:

  still thinking

  Tom wrote:

  dude, if i could soul-swap by myself, i would.

  Later, Tom saw Kyle in the lunchroom.

  “Man,” Kyle said, “school is boring.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said, “I know. So are we going?”

  “Yes,” Kyle said. “But if anybody sees you, I don’t know anything about it.”