Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

Everybody wrote this down, and I struggled to write faster.

“The study of mathematics makes women infertile.”

I almost laughed at this one, until I saw the room full of girls quickly copying it down. No one smiled, and no one looked up from their papers.

I leaned over to the girl next to me, whispering, “Isn’t there a real teacher?”

She glanced over to me, then addressed her paper. “Are you new or something?”

I flinched. Brady had warned me not to give myself away. “I just transferred.”

“Why bother?” she asked, dismissing me as an idiot. But then a second later, she added, “The real teacher comes on Fridays. Not that you could tell the difference.”

The day wore on in this fashion, and the recordings never seemed to end. Every now and then, the old cassette tape would click as it reached its end, and a student would get up and switch it over to the other side. When that side had finished, the student selected another tape from a large stack and put that one in. Nobody moved while this happened.

I wanted to kick myself for leaving my father, the one family member I had left, all to go on this hopeless and ultimately futile journey. None of this had brought me any closer to the real goal, saving my brother. This was nothing but a nightmare flip side to our world, and I needed to find Brady and get out of here as quickly as possible.

“Class dismissed,” the recording announced, with no warning or fanfare.

I looked up and realized that the sun had started to go down, and felt completely disoriented. Everyone around me began to pack up and leave, without saying a word to each other. They formed a neat single-file line and began to worm their way out of the room.

The line began to shuffle down the hall, and all the girls quietly and neatly took their turn entering a large women’s bathroom and then filing back out, all while the others waited patiently. Again, no one spoke. The whole process took about half an hour before I could get back to the front of the building and wait for Brady.

Buses appeared, apparently to take the long line of girls off to some other place, but I couldn’t leave because the boys were not yet out. Afraid that standing around and waiting would make me seem conspicuous, I quickly decided to get into the line for shoes. It was the same length as before, apparently because no shoes had arrived.

I waited about fifteen minutes before a guard came by, quickly grabbing everyone’s arms and examining them briefly before moving on. When he got to me, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, so I simply let him take my arm.

“You haven’t had your shot yet,” he said in English.

“Not yet, sir.”

He made a note in a notebook, and without looking up, he said, “You have to have your shot first. Do you want to spread the disease?”

The people in line before and after me seemed to hear this, and they all slowly stepped away from me.

“No, sir.”

He then looked up at me expectantly, and I glanced over at the long line for shots at the clinic.

I nodded and left the shoe line to walk over there, all while staring desperately at the front door of the school and waiting for Brady to come out.

The line for the shots was longer than before, with the same single nurse administering them. I waited for half an hour, feeling so hungry that I was growing weak in the knees. I didn’t dare ask anyone about eating, and nobody seemed to be in a hurry to do so.

At last, a long line of boys began to make their way out of the school, single file and neatly ordered. Head after head waltzed out, and I began to panic that Brady would not be among them. But finally, I saw him, his head down and walking in unison with the others.

I had only moved a few inches in the line, and I wasn’t sure if he was going to see me. His eyes scanned as covertly as possible, and when they finally locked with mine, I saw a look on his face I hadn’t seen before—complete relief.

He walked up to me slowly, casually, and despite every instinct inside of me to throw my arms around him, I knew I couldn’t draw attention to us.

“I saved you a spot,” I said, perhaps a bit too eagerly.

Brady stood next to me for a moment, subtly brushing my arm with one finger, so I would know that he was with me. And that was all I needed to feel an ocean of calm.

“Oh, I just remembered,” he played along. “We told Mom we’d be home for dinner. We’ll have to do this tomorrow.”

He grabbed my hand and was about to lead me away when a guard, identical to all the others, appeared by our side.

“Where are you going?” he asked, again in English. It concerned me slightly that all the guards had begun speaking English with us, as though it were obvious that we didn’t understand Russian. What was tipping them off?

“We have to be home for dinner,” Brady answered.

“Home?” the guard said, a smile crossing his lips. “How nice for you. But you can’t ride the bus until you’ve had your shot, now, can you?”

I tugged slightly on Brady’s arm, pulling him back into line. I realized that if it were that easy to leave, there would probably be a lot of people doing it.

“Of course,” Brady said, clearly arriving at the same thought. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

“Do you have your papers?” the guard asked.

“Of course.” Brady searched his pockets, just like he had in the diner. And I wished he could somehow have magic pockets that would miraculously produce all the things he pretended to look for in them.

The guard looked distracted, surveying the line we were in and the two dozen or