Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

lips landed on mine for just a moment, before he seemed to catch himself and sit back a bit.

I was struck by the irony of it: my first kiss happened at the worst moment of my life.

“Why don’t you sleep?” he asked. “It’s still raining. You’re tired.”

“I have to get home. My dad will be worried.”

“Sleep,” Kieren insisted, helping me lie back and covering me with the throw blanket. “I’ll wake you before dawn. Promise.”

My eyes didn’t need any more encouragement than that to close. I felt the rough corduroy of the couch hit my cheek as Kieren stood and turned down the light. I could feel the warmth of his body fade away from me, like a train pulling out of a station.

CHAPTER 9

Weeks passed, and she didn’t return. My father and I fell into a pattern, trying to do “normal” things like eat dinner, do the dishes, fold laundry. At first, we talked about her all the time, like she was just out at the grocery store. “When Mom comes back . . .” “When you talk to your mother again . . .”

Then we didn’t talk about her at all.

Sometimes I’d wake up in the night, trying to feel her presence in the world. I knew she wasn’t dead. Was she in DW? If so, how did she get in there? Was she looking for Robbie? Would she come back if she didn’t find him?

The questions had begun to drive me insane. I would pace in my room at night, touching things to be sure that they were solid. That they hadn’t disappeared.

Late May came, and the seniors graduated. Christy and I watched the ceremony from the back of the auditorium.

“Could you help me with something?” I asked Christy in a whisper.

“Sure,” she answered, her eyes on the stage.

“There’s this summer camp upstate. I read about it online.”

Christy glanced over to me for a moment, then back to the seniors. There was a hunger in her eyes, watching them, like she couldn’t wait for it to be her turn. Christy and I had that in common.

“It’s just two weeks,” I continued.

“Okay,” she said, clearly not knowing where I was going with this. “Are you—do you want to go there?”

“No. But I need my father to think I have.”

Brady made his way to accept his diploma, followed by Kieren, and we stopped talking to watch them. I couldn’t help but feel proud of them both, standing onstage in their caps and gowns as the rest of the seniors filed in beside them.

But then an odd hush fell over the room. One name had been conspicuously absent from the roll call.

“We’ll now have a moment of silence for Piper McMahon,” said Miss Farghasian, and a ripping sound of grief caught in her throat at the name.

The silence was accompanied by much weeping throughout the auditorium. Whispers ensued, everyone adding their two cents to whatever the latest rumors were about Piper’s whereabouts (“She went to have a baby in Ireland” was the most common theory), and then more silence.

Almost four months had passed and no new information had been given. Some people assumed she was dead.

Brady kept his eyes downcast, neither crying nor showing any other visible emotion. He looked tired, and seemed to realize that many of the eyes were falling on him. One of the rumors that had briefly circulated had been very unflattering to him, all but accusing him of her murder. But like all rumors, it eventually faded into air.

“She wasn’t that pretty. She just had a good body,” I heard Holland Pfeffer whisper behind me. The girl next to her responded with a stifled, “Oh my God, stop. You’re the worst.”

“Why summer camp?” Christy whispered to me, while Miss Farghasian walked to center stage to give what I’m sure she considered to be a Very Important Speech.

“I want to go to Oregon. It’s a long story, but I think there are people there who know something . . . about my brother, Robbie.”

“And your dad won’t let you go?”

I thought about it for a second. “I haven’t asked him.”

“You know,” she started, “your dad is cool. You’re lucky like that.” I could tell she was referencing her own parental situation with that last dig. Christy’s mother had been the first woman in her family to go to college, and she had let Christy know at an early age that she expected her to follow suit. She’d basically been planning Christy’s life out since birth.

“If you asked him . . . ,” Christy continued.

“If I asked, I know what he would say,” I responded, having already had this conversation with myself eighteen times. “He would either say no, that it’s time to move on and let Robbie go. Or he would decide to go without me because I’m too young to possibly understand. Trust me, I’ve been hearing it my whole life. It’s just two weeks. I’ll be fine.”

She nodded, needing no more convincing. “What do you want me to do?”

“Help me make up some stationery from the summer camp, for a letter saying that I’ve gotten some scholarship or something and that I can go for free.”

“You’re crazy,” she said, laughing.

“I know.”

Miss Farghasian droned on about the bright future that lay ahead for all the graduates, which everyone in the room knew wasn’t exactly true. Probably only about half the kids up there were going to college. And we all knew which half. The other half, the one Brady belonged to, well . . .

“Okay,” Christy said. “What’s their website? I’ll copy their letterhead and paste it on an acceptance letter. You’ll have to buy some nice paper to print it on.”

I stole one last look at Brady on the stage in his gown and mortar as we stood with everyone else to applaud the graduates.

“Thanks, Christy,” I said. She followed my eyeline to Brady. I had told her, of course, about my pathetic crush on him.

“You know,” she