Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

the girl was going to end up, on that train. Did it really go somewhere like Oregon? I imagined her drinking coffee in the rain, my knowledge of Oregon admittedly limited.

It was at this point the headlights first lit up my path, from a car behind me. Someone coming home from work, I figured. I pulled over to the edge of the road to give him room, but he stayed behind me. I turned right onto my street, and the car followed suit, driving slowly. Too slowly. As though he didn’t want to pass me. As though he was following me.

I biked onto my driveway and fumbled with the keypad that opened the garage door. I didn’t dare turn around to see if he was still there. But after the whir of the opening garage door subsided, I could hear it—the faint hum of an engine. A big engine, the kind they put into great old American cars. Like Cadillacs and Broncos. And Pontiacs.

I pulled the bike into the garage. I didn’t turn around. I remained frozen there, like a child who thinks that if she keeps her eyes closed, the monsters under her bed won’t be able to get her.

A moment later, I heard the tires screech down my road. I looked up in time to see the now-familiar taillights of Brady’s car reach the end of my street and then drive away. So he knew I had followed him. And he would obviously be furious with me, prying into his business.

What the hell had I done?

Sitting on the school bus the next morning, staring out at the rain, I felt a great welling emptiness in the pit of my stomach. My palms were damp and I kept forgetting to breathe. I realized I was afraid, terribly afraid for reasons that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Yes, I was afraid that Brady would hate me. But it went deeper than that.

I couldn’t get my mind off that girl on the train. She didn’t have any luggage. Not even a toothbrush. And she was alone—only slightly older than me, and alone. Did she have any money? How would she eat? Where would she sleep? What was so awful here that she couldn’t face it?

I wasn’t sitting in my usual place on the bus, and my eyes fell on an etching in the leather of the seat in front of me—DW I’ll never tell.

“What is DW?” I said aloud. The girl sitting next to me, who was scribbling out the answers on a homework sheet she clearly was supposed to have finished the night before, glanced at me sideways for a second.

“I mean,” I stammered, trying to make it seem normal that I was talking to myself, “like, do you know?”

She just shrugged, then slid farther away from me on the seat.

I buried my head, trying to hide inside my hoodie for the rest of the ride.

When we got to school, I kept my head hung low in the universal “I’m not really here” gesture I had picked up since the fall, but I didn’t make it far.

A hand grabbed my wrist before I’d gone ten feet and dragged me out of the hallway, through a door I had never noticed before. The hand belonged to Brady, and when I realized this, I could feel a fresh coat of sweat forming in my palms. The anticipation of him screaming at me, demanding to know why I had followed him, was too painful to handle. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but think that here we were, ducking into a hidden door and up a short flight of stairs together.

His hand on my wrist was colder than I remembered from that first day when he had led me to class, and he was tugging with no regard for whether or not he might be hurting me, which he was. At the top of the five or six stairs, he opened a door labeled DARKROOM and closed it behind us. The room was, as the sign had promised, quite dark, with only a red light illuminating a bunch of photography equipment and some trays of developing solution. Black-and-white photos hung from clothespins on a line, most of them out of focus.

I was out of breath and shaking. I could barely look him in the eye and instead stared at the ground by his feet.

“Brady, I’m sorry—”

“Be quiet.” He looked around the room for a moment, to be sure no one was there, I assumed. He was angry. That much was clear. His breathing was heavy and overly regulated, like he was trying not to scream. “Did you get a good show yesterday?”

“I wasn’t—I didn’t mean to . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know what to say. I had followed him and spied on him. I had seen something personal, something I clearly wasn’t meant to see. There was nothing to say about it. It was a stupid thing to do. “I’m sorry.”

“That was none of your business,” he almost spat at me.

“I know.”

“You don’t know. You could get hurt.”

“I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I didn’t know she was going to get on the train.” He glared at me through the darkness in the room, and I knew I was only making things worse.

He sat down on the edge of the table and stared at me for what felt like an eternity. As my vision adjusted, I could see that his deep-set eyes looked haunted and tired. I wondered if he had slept at all. And the thought of him sleeping made me wonder what kind of house he lived in, what kind of bed he slept in. Who were his parents? Were they still together?

“This is serious. You could get hurt,” he repeated. “Is that what you want?”

“No.” My voice was barely a whisper. “It’s okay.” I choked back the fear and dared to look at him.

“You can never tell.