Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

I shook my head, not understanding. “He looked real to me. And I was real too. My mother told me to sit and eat.”

“That’s because as soon as you crossed over, she saw you as the Down World version of her daughter. That’s how it works. That way, you never run into the other you or anything like that.”

“Okay. But then what happens to the other version of me?”

“You’re one and the same for a minute. And she reappears when you leave.”

“What if I don’t leave?”

“You have to leave. You can only stay down there for a few minutes.”

“Or what?” I asked. Everything he told me was just raising more questions.

“Enough. That’s all you need to know,” he said in a very final kind of way. I was annoying him, but I wanted to know more. “Just be careful if you choose to go see that Robbie.”

“You visit him there?”

“No.” It was such a short and definite answer, and the coldness of it hit me like a slap. Kieren was staring ahead, not at me. All his warmth seemed to have faded away. “Like I told you, the kid you saw isn’t real.”

I paced for a moment, trying to collect my breath, my thoughts. But I knew already what I was thinking. “But if he came up here? Would he be real if he came up here?”

“You can’t take anything out of DW,” he began before I’d even finished, as though it were a fact he had resigned himself to long before.

“I did.”

Kieren looked at me, and the look in his eyes could only be described as sheer terror. “What have you done?”

“I brought back an egg timer.” I lost my breath for a moment, but collected myself to keep going. “I had it in my hand . . .”

“Where is it?” Kieren suddenly demanded. His eyes grew wide and his mouth clenched. Was he afraid?

“It—it’s in my room.”

“We have to go get it. Now! We have to put it back.”

“Why?”

“Now, M! Grab your bike.”

“Kieren, it’s just a timer,” I insisted. What was going on here? Why was Kieren so afraid?

“M, you can’t take anything out of DW,” he repeated.

“Why not?”

“Because . . . ,” he began, grabbing my frozen bike off the rack and handing it to me. He took his skateboard out of his backpack. “Because then you’ll owe them something.”

He started guiding me towards the bike path then, and my heart froze. Then I’d owe who something?

CHAPTER 6

Two weeks went by and there was still no word of Piper McMahon. Two weeks of sad cheerleaders walking by, of her “Missing” posters starting to fray around the edges, of the evening news moving on to other stories.

I hadn’t talked to Kieren since the day he took the egg timer from me to put back on the other side of the Today door. He had followed me to the end of my street after we’d met up at the train station, careful to stay far enough away that my mother would never see him from our front window. Once I returned with the timer, he had grabbed it and shoved it in his backpack.

“I’ll clean up your mess this time,” he had warned me, “but not again. You understand?”

I asked him then if the Today door always led to my kitchen. He said it didn’t; that there was no way of knowing where you would end up once you walked through. But as long as the timer was somewhere on the other side, it wouldn’t affect us anymore.

I could only nod sadly, painfully aware of how coldly he was treating me. I had wanted to ask him more about the portals, of course, but he rode away before I got the chance.

That felt like a lifetime ago, I realized now as I walked the halls.

Several times a day, my mind would drift to Piper McMahon’s mother. I had never met her, but I knew who she was. I knew what she must have been feeling every day. I knew that moment when she would wake up in the night, and for just a moment she could dismiss it all as a bad dream. Until she remembered that it wasn’t.

In those two weeks, I watched my own mother start to lose her mind. I would come home and find her scouring the internet for a word, a hint, anything she could track down about what had happened to Piper McMahon. It was like she had made Piper into Robbie, and maybe if she could find Piper, then Robbie wouldn’t be . . .

I was a monster. I knew where Piper was—or, at least, I knew where she had gone. And I wasn’t saying anything because Brady had begged me not to. Brady insisted that she would be back, that everything would be okay. Brady made one thing clear—whatever DW was, whatever power it held, it was a million times worse than the suffering of Piper McMahon’s parents.

But was he right? How long was I supposed to wait?

I started averting my eyes every time I had to pass the door to the boiler room. It almost felt like walking past a roomful of ghosts. Like walking past my brother and pretending I couldn’t see him. I knew what Kieren had told me: that the Robbie I saw wasn’t real, that you can’t take things out of DW. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had seen behind the Today door. Robbie had been just feet away from me, eating those eggs at the kitchen table. If I had taken a couple of steps towards him, I could have touched him.

He had been as close to my hand as . . . as the egg timer.

Things couldn’t go on this way. I would need more answers.

I had seen Brady only a handful of times, always walking dead-eyed down a distant hallway. People still avoided looking at me. That girl Christy from chem class—for her