Page 13 of The Underachiever’s Guide to Love and Saving the World

COURTNEY

When the final course came out, I sat up in my chair with newfound interest. Dessert was some kind of melty chocolaty affair without an ounce of red meat in sight.

Despite my full stomach, my mouth watered in anticipation.

A servant had just scraped a generous helping of the stuff onto my plate when the dining room door opened with a bang.

“Your Majesty!” A page boy stumbled inside. “I come bearing somber news indeed.”

Everyone fell silent, immediately sobering and forgetting all about the heavenly food before them.

I inched my fork toward the mound of chocolate on my plate.

Byrce noticed and smacked my hand, gentle enough not to hurt, but firmly enough that my fork clattered to my plate.

A few people glanced our way, so I tucked my fingers under my leg and smiled innocently.

“Speak, my boy,” said the king.

“Winston, he’s…” The boy panted. “He’s missing!”

Gasps filled the dining room.

I looked around in confusion. “Did you guys really expect the chicken guy to stick around after you canceled him?”

“He did not leave of his own accord, Lady Courtney,” the boy said. “Once his punishment was over, guards were keeping him contained until one of his family members could fetch him from the dungeon. A guard heard Winston scream, and when they went to check on him, he was gone.”

“So he broke out?” Bryce asked.

The page boy shook his head. “Why would he, Sir Bryce? He was about to be released. We think… we believe he was kidnapped. It could very well be the work of the Evil One.”

A kidnapping? I hadn’t known people were going to be kidnapped . This was more than I’d signed up for.

Surely, everyone was just catastrophizing, and Winston had simply broken out, like Bryce said. Constantly going on and on about the Evil One had everybody paranoid. There was no need to panic.

Shakily, Amy got to his feet. “This is troubling indeed. Come. We must go to the prison and investigate.”

It took me several long seconds to realize Amy was talking to Bryce and me, so unaccustomed was I to being the responsible adult in the room. With one last longing look at dessert, I sighed and stood before Bryce had a chance to take charge.

This wouldn’t be so bad. I’d prove to everyone this kidnapping business was just some Scooby-Doo nonsense, and there was no real threat.

“I will get to the bottom of this.” I turned to Bryce and added generously, “Along with the help of my sidekick, Bryce, who is generally useless but occasionally attempts to provide comedic relief.”

The look Bryce gave me promised he wouldn’t let that snub go without repercussion, but he let it go for now. The heat in his gaze sent an odd shiver through me, but I shrugged it off.

The entire dinner party accompanied us down to the dungeons as though Winston’s disappearance were a fun murder mystery party. I wasn’t really surprised by their morbid curiosity, though, since these people considered a famine to be prime entertainment.

Grand halls narrowed to dark, musty staircases as we descended.

Torches lit our path. The flickering flames cast eerie light over the group’s faces, giving them the look of slumber partygoers with flashlights under their chins, telling ghost stories.

Despite myself, I shuddered. I still wasn’t convinced a kidnapping had taken place, but one time, I fell down an Internet rabbit hole about medieval torture devices, and I didn’t really want to witness those horrors in person.

I glanced at Bryce to see if he was displaying similar reluctance as we descended into the bowels of the castle, only to discover him holding a piece of dessert in a napkin and digging in with a fork he’d apparently brought from the dining room.

I slowed my pace, falling to the back of the line beside him.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“Stress eating,” he said honestly.

Well, at least I wasn’t the only one with the creeps. “I can’t believe you preemptively grabbed your dessert in case you needed comfort food.”

“I didn’t. I preemptively grabbed your dessert.”

Ah. Here it was. The payback for my comedic relief comment. He’d seen how badly I wanted my dessert, so he’d taken it. “Sometimes you’re a real penis, you know that?”

He laughed, his teeth flashing in the dim light. “Asshole tax,” he said, referencing our term for when we stole a bit of the other’s DoorDash order whenever it was delivered to the wrong door.

I swiped my cake from his hands, and he relinquished it with surprisingly little resistance.

I studied the cake for a second, deciding how best to eat the crumbling mess, but then Bryce wordlessly handed me his fork.

My suspicion over the tiny kindness was not enough to keep me from tucking in, nor was the knowledge that his fork had recently been in his jerkish mouth.

The cake was soaked in warm syrup that tasted like smoky toffee. As it melted in my mouth, I let out an involuntary moan.

“What?” I asked, noticing Bryce side-eyeing me.

“You’re making sex noises in a dungeon,” he said frankly. “Time and place, Courtney. Show some decency.”

I was suddenly grateful for the dim passage, as it hopefully hid my burning cheeks. “Please. You couldn’t recognize a sex sound unless it was a deeply disappointed sigh accompanied by someone asking, That’s it? ”

“I can recognize your sex noises,” he said coolly. “The walls in our duplex are very thin. I heard the buzzing, you know.”

Oh. My. God. We both knew what instance he was referring to, even if he had the decency not to remind me that The Buzzing occurred shortly after he shipped me a sex toy in very conspicuous, embarrassing packaging as a prank.

The catchphrase Elite thrusting for discerning tastes still haunted me—well, maybe haunted was the wrong word, as the memories weren’t entirely unpleasant.

In my defense, what was I supposed to do? Throw it out and contribute to a global plastic pollution crisis? No one could claim Courtney Westra was wasteful.

I delicately cleared my throat, trying to hide the fact I was panicking. “What you heard was my electric toothbrush. I’m very conscious of my oral hygiene.”

“Ah, of course. Discerning tastes require elite… toothbrushes. Multiple times an hour, apparently.”

My stomach twisted and turned like my body was being hurled up and down a roller coaster I’d been peer-pressured to ride.

First the suggestive texts, now this. When did Bryce become so bold and goading?

It was knocking me off-kilter, and it was all I could do not to let him throw me off our verbal sparring mat.

“I did not pleasure myself with a sex toy you bought me. That would be…” Well, for some reason, at the time, it had been incredibly hot.

It had probably just been a heat-of-the-moment thing; using my enemy’s diabolical schemes for personal pleasure had been an exciting and taboo secret comeback. A cumback, as it were.

Looking back now, it was mortifying.

“It was my toothbrush ,” I said again, firmly.

“No one moans while they’re brushing their teeth.”

“Plaque removal is very satisfying.”

“Sure. Plaque removal. Weird turn-on, Courtney.”

“Thank the Maker you’re here!” A new voice blessedly rescued me from the conversation as we rounded a corner and stepped into an antechamber.

The voice belonged to the distraught guard standing in the small stone room, wringing his hands.

The chamber appeared to be a sort of dungeon lobby, if such a thing existed.

Behind the guard was a small staircase that led down through an arched opening, presumably to the cells.

The room was entirely too small for the dinner party, but they all squeezed in anyway, mushing Bryce and me together near the back.

“We came as soon as we heard your summons,” Amy said, stepping forward. “Can you tell us exactly when the kidnapping occurred?” A real Nancy Drew, this one.

“About two hours ago,” said the guard.

“Why didn’t you alert us sooner?” asked the king.

“We spent a good deal of time trying to track Winston down,” explained the guard. “There was no time to send a messenger until after we realized we couldn’t catch the perpetrator.”

The visiting princess turned to Bryce and me and muttered, “Between you and me, something has always struck me as not quite right about this kingdom.”

Amy overheard and shot her a sharp look.

Before things could grow heated, I pushed and wedged my way through the crowd until I emerged next to Amy. “How did Winston escape? Did he dig out? Squeeze through the bars?”

“Whoever captured him stole a key and unlocked his cell, my lady,” said the guard sheepishly. “Come, I’ll show you where we keep the keys.”

Like an excited group of tourists, the dinner party shuffled after the guard through a side corridor I hadn’t seen before. We went down a short hall and stopped before a wooden door.

“The strangest thing is that the key room door was still closed and locked after the key inside had been stolen,” said the guard, and the group gasped with horrified delight.

“The only thing we can figure is the thief crawled under the door.” He pointed at the gap, which was a little over half a foot tall.

“Though they would have to be very small in stature.”

“Ah, a short king,” I murmured thoughtfully.

“The Chosen One utters treason, declaring the criminal our sovereign!” someone whispered, outraged.

Scandalized murmurs rose between the dinner guests.

“ Short king is just a phrase from my land,” I said quickly, before they could get any ideas about trying out any of those torture devices on me.

“Let’s put aside the fact that you guys really mailed it in when it came to the fitment of a fairly important door for a second.

Why would someone even want to take Winston? ”

“To use for evil, of course.” This groundbreaking revelation was delivered very proudly by the king himself.

“Perhaps the Evil One took a hostage as a threat to the rest of us, or perhaps they’re carrying out diabolical horrors on the poor soul, testing their vile spells and torture techniques.

Poor Winston was already shackled and vulnerable. He would have been an easy target.”

The hair rose on the back of my neck. I was out of my depth here.

“Please,” a wobbly voice said from the crowd, which parted to let its speaker through. “You must help my son.” An older woman emerged, clutching a damp handkerchief. “For all his crimes against chickens, Winston is a good boy. I fear what will become of him in the Evil One’s lair.”

This must be Winston’s mom. I swallowed hard.

I’d never had the type of mother who would insist her child was a perfect angel even when everyone else suspected the kid was possessed by a demon.

Somehow part of me was a little jealous of Winston.

My mother was acutely aware of all my faults.

She wouldn’t stand up for me like this if I so much as shoplifted.

The love of Winston’s mom felt realer than any “love” I’d experienced back home in the “real” world, and suddenly the whole saving-the-world thing felt a little too grave.

It had been easy not to take it seriously before, when the looming evil felt like hearsay.

But no matter how silly some of the citizens acted, they were real people with dreams and fears and families, and their lives were in danger.

Who knew what the Evil One would do next or if they would kidnap someone else’s loved one.

Amy seemed so certain Bryce or I were the Chosen One, but I wasn’t sure how that was possible.

I had no idea how to help these people, and the pressure of responsibility made it hard to breathe.

Part of me wanted to run away and find the portal home, but I wasn’t ready to admit defeat in front of Bryce.

Plus, it wasn’t like there were any other heroes stepping up to take the job.

Well, except for Bryce, which was unacceptable because, no matter how clueless I was, Mr. Flip-Flops-Cause-Plantar-Fasciitis leading an attack against an evil force was ludicrous.

All I could do was keep pretending I knew what I was doing.

“Keep the guards searching for more clues,” said Amy.

“If we can find Winston’s whereabouts, perhaps we can arrange a rescue mission.

There is nothing more we can do tonight.

The Chosen One must complete their training and grow stronger.

Only after then will it be time for them to launch their defense against the Evil One. ”

The dinner party was somber now. I looked from one face to the next.

The guard said Winston’s kidnapping had happened two hours ago.

That would have been after we arrived at the castle, but before we all gathered for dinner.

Anyone here might have been involved. Of course, the suspect could have been an outsider, but the castle inhabitants would have easier access to the dungeons and might not be questioned sneaking around the passages.

There was only one person among the dinner party small enough to fit under the truly half-assed specimen of carpentry that was the door to the key room: the visiting princess.