Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

“Bad. Very bad.”

“I think I have White.”

“Oh, you’re fine, then.”

Just then, a very short boy in beige pants and heavy shoes came stomping up to us. “The bell has rung,” he said.

“Sorry, dude. Just helping this girl find her class.”

“Well, the bell has rung, so she needs a pass. I’ll take her to the office.”

The doughnut suddenly felt heavy in my stomach. I had no idea who this officious little kid was, but he was ripping me away from my new friend, and getting me in trouble.

“That’s okay, dude, we got it covered.”

And with that, my new partner in crime grabbed my hand and ran with me down the hall, away from the intruder, who continued to protest even as we turned a corner and started running up a stairwell.

Before I knew it, we were in a sunlit corridor, the walls painted a soothing shade of forest green, and Dimple Cheek pointed to an open door. “Just sneak in quietly and take the first available seat,” he said. “You won’t get in trouble. People do it all the time.”

He handed me the map and started to walk away, turning back to whisper, “Oh, and to get to number two on your map, just head back down these stairs and make a left. You can’t miss it.”

“Thanks. What’s your name?” I asked.

“Brady. Picelli.”

“Marina O’Connell,” I told him, lingering a moment longer just to watch him leave, and realizing that I was already half in love with Brady Picelli.

Math lab, as it turns out, is a class dedicated to working on what you’ve learned in math class. But as this was the first period of the first day, and nobody had actually sat through a math class yet, it was instead a period where everybody broke up into small cliques of friends and gossiped about what they’d done that summer.

I, of course, had no friends at East Township. At least, I didn’t think I did. Before my three years at St. Joe’s—that is to say, before Robbie’s accident made my mother decide to transfer me—I had gone to an elementary school just down the street from here. So at one point, I had probably known a bunch of these kids. But three years is a long time, and I hadn’t really kept in touch with anyone.

Across the room, I saw a girl who I was fairly sure was Macy Traper. She had been a willowy little blond thing in the fourth grade, but had now apparently gone Goth. I tried to wave in her direction, but she gave a curt nod and turned back to her friends.

And so I sat alone, doodling in my notebook, my mind wandering to happier times at St. Joe’s, where I would often start the day reading under a large elm tree with my friend Lana before first bell. My old school was nestled into a hillside, just outside of town, over where the old estates on “Money Row,” as my mother called it, sat rotting into their hundred-year-old foundations. My mother, who had some sort of obsession with anything that she deemed to be wasteful, loved to talk about how, long before the military arrived in the ’40s, the town had been formed by a bunch of rich bankers who had made millions by “speculating.”

“That’s a fancy way of saying ‘gambling,’” she had told me.

Gambling was one of my mother’s chief deadly sins, especially gambling with other people’s hard-earned money, which apparently is a key component to speculating. They used the money to build these hillside estates, sprawling mansions with fifty or sixty or seventy rooms. Every time one banker built a house, his neighbor would have to outdo him. “You have a swimming pool shaped like an egg? I’ll build one shaped like the whole hen.”

My brother, Robbie, and I snuck into one of them once, the one shaped like a pyramid. It was on a dare from his best friend, Kieren, who had bet us twenty dollars we would be too chicken to spend the night there, since it was haunted by some Egyptian pharaoh whose gold had been stolen from his tomb to make the bricks that lined the gazebo. Or so Kieren said, anyway. You had to take everything Kieren said back then with a large grain of salt, as Kieren was the biggest liar in town and everybody knew it.

But still, a dare was a dare, and my brother—at that time a tall and lanky ten-year-old—could never stand to be called chicken. And though I was only eight and scared to spend even one night at a friend’s house, I couldn’t let the boys think there was anything they could do that I couldn’t. If my brother was going, that was good enough for me.

“Don’t listen to him,” Robbie whispered to me after we’d snuck under a weak spot in the chain-link fence leading to the massive front lawn of the place. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. Kieren’s full of it.” And I laughed to show him I wasn’t scared. But I was. All I could think about was how to get out of it, how to convince him we had to go home, arguing that Mom and Dad might check on us and find us missing, which would terrify them.

Robbie could always read my mind. I didn’t even have to say it. “We’ll just go into one of the bedrooms and I’ll take a picture of you sleeping on the floor. That’ll be enough. Then we can go home.” I must have gasped with relief, because Robbie just laughed at me. He rubbed my head and we crawled in through a broken window into the massive cone-shaped living room of the place. At least, I think it was a living room. My memory’s a bit fuzzy, and the building was abandoned. It all looked alien to me.

Whatever the room was, we decided it was good enough. I lay down on the empty floor, closing my