Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

I had on me was the flattened penny Kieren had given me.

Brady made a slight show of checking his pockets, but I knew he must have realized what I was already thinking—it didn’t matter because the money here was certainly different. He took his hand out again, empty. “Sorry, you got us. We’ll go.”

“Wait,” she said, again looking over her shoulder. When she seemed confident that the coast was clear, she looked at me and then at him. “Are you a part of it?” she asked, her tone suddenly anxious.

“Part of it?” I asked.

She seemed to think for a second. Then she asked us a question in Russian.

We both shrugged.

The girl seemed to give up on us then, and stood back up, her voice returning to its droll monotone. “I can bring you coffee, but that’s it. Then you have to go.”

She walked away before we could respond.

Brady leaned in towards me, his face almost touching mine. “It’s not real. Look at me.”

I looked up at him, trying to find some comfort in his being near me. But I still found myself shaking.

“It’s not real. We’re going home.”

“It’s real to her,” I said, nodding to the waitress.

“That’s not our problem,” he quickly countered. “We’re sneaking back to the lake tonight and going home.”

“How, Brady? You heard what they said.”

“There’s got to be a way. We’ll find it.”

The waitress came back with the coffees and Brady sat back immediately, as though he had been caught passing notes in class.

“She looked right through me,” I said, picturing my mother’s cold eyes. “She didn’t even know me.”

“That woman is not your mother.”

I stared at my coffee, wanting desperately to go back home. What had I done? Why did I bring us here?

“Did you hear me?”

I could only nod. I looked out the window at the desolate street. A few more people shuffled past, all tired and barefoot. Whatever money was in this world, it was clearly all concentrated among those at the hotel.

I thought of the hotel, and John in his nice suit, and my mind raced back to what Sage had told me.

“John wanted this,” I said out loud.

“What?”

“Sage told me that John built this portal. He asked my mother to bring him some sort of key, and he used it to build a doorway to this place.”

Brady glanced around at the hellscape surrounding us. “Maybe he didn’t know it would be like this.”

“Or maybe he made it like this on purpose.”

But Brady just shook his head, not letting the words land. “How?”

I thought about it, trying to imagine the day John first came through his new portal into this flip side of his reality. What would be the first thing he’d do? “The Yesterday door.”

“You think he changed something in the past?” Brady asked, still incredulous.

“It’s the only way this world could be so different—it was set on a different path a long time ago.”

“Why, though? Why make it like this?”

“Look at it,” I insisted. “He’s got everything here. Money, a successful hotel . . .” I paused, imagining the monogrammed hand towel he’d used to dry his hands. “And my mother, of course. That’s really all he wanted.”

“The John we met wasn’t evil, Marina. He’s just a weirdo who likes to paint action figures.”

“You just described every serial killer,” I couldn’t help but observe, which made Brady chuckle into the back of his hand.

I took the thought one step further. A weirdo who likes action figures. Did he like other toys too? “Maybe it’s like a game to him. Like cosplay. When things get too boring up there”—I nodded towards the sky, but Brady knew what I meant—“he can dip down here for a bit, take over this dark, powerful version of himself. Pretend he’s a captain of industry or whatever the hell that dude was.”

Brady nodded slightly, but his eyes were fixed somewhere on the table. “It’s hard to believe he would make all these people live like this . . . just for a game.”

“You don’t know what’s in people’s hearts,” I said.

It’s not real. They do it with mirrors. My brother’s voice kept echoing in my mind. If the John in the hotel was the version of himself he always wanted to be, then was that cold woman with the red lips a reflection of my mother? Was this what she had been hiding in her heart the whole time?

“Don’t lose hope,” Brady said. “This place is a mistake. I’m going to get you back home.” He grabbed my hand then, and I could see something shifting inside of him. “Let’s go.”

He all but dragged me out of the booth. We stood up and were about to walk away when he took a dollar out of his pocket. “Here. I don’t know if this works here, but it’s something.” He threw it on the table and led me outside. The old lady in her booth didn’t notice us as we zipped past.

We were already down the street when the waitress popped out of the diner behind us.

“Wait!” she called.

We turned and saw her holding up the dollar bill. She seemed to examine us both then, taking in our clothes and looking into our eyes. She approached slowly, like a tiger sizing up its prey. “What’s the capital of France?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. What was she talking about? I looked to Brady, who also seemed to get a chuckle out of the question.

“Um, Paris?” he asked rhetorically.

She nodded and walked the rest of the way up to us, handing Brady back his dollar.

“There is no France,” she said. “You’re from the other side.”

I felt a ball drop into my stomach. We had been caught. I didn’t even want to think about what happened to people here who were caught doing something wrong. I tugged on Brady’s hand, ready to make a run for it.

“It’s okay. I’m part of it.” She quickly turned her wrist over, showing us three dime-length scars on the inside of her lower