Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

were upright again. I had been in the back seat, which hadn’t really been crushed. But the front seat . . .”

“You don’t have to tell me, Piper. I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you live through it again.”

But my words slid right over her head like they were made of air.

“My mother always had the most beautiful legs. Like a dancer’s. They were crushed. She looked like she was asleep. My father’s neck was bent at a weird angle. I crawled out of the window. I didn’t have my cell phone. That was one of Dad’s rules for camping. I thought I could find a car, call for help.”

“Baby . . .” Robbie nestled his nose into her neck, like he was trying to give her his warmth.

“I had made it back up to the road before the car exploded behind me. I had never felt heat like that before. It knocked me over.” Piper cleared her throat, trying to breathe away all the horrible memories.

“I’m so sorry, Piper. I can’t even imagine.”

“I hitched a ride in a station wagon. A mom driving her two kids somewhere, with me sandwiched in between. She didn’t ask why I had been crying, why I was so dirty. Guess she figured it was none of her business. I was halfway back to town when I decided what to do.”

I nodded for her to continue, my heart breaking for her.

“I realized that no one in town knew they were dead. The police might find the car eventually, but we were in the middle of nowhere. The car might not be found for years. No one else at home knew. What if I kept it that way? If my parents were back at home in the morning, nobody would know the difference.”

I looked to Robbie to see how he was taking all this, but he’d clearly heard it before. His eyes were glassy and vague, focused somewhere on the floor.

“I snuck into the school through a back door we had made a key to last year. I went through the portal, and the whole time I was thinking: What if they’re dead there too? What if this doesn’t work? I was really prepared to come home empty-handed. But then I got to our house on the other side, and I found them sleeping peacefully in their beds. I woke them up and told them they had to come with me, that it was an emergency.”

“They believed you?” I asked, thinking that in the middle of the night, my parents would have probably just told me to go back to bed and leave them alone.

“No, not at all.” She laughed. “At first, they thought I had made a mess in the kitchen or something. They finally agreed to follow me downstairs. Then I told them the problem wasn’t at home, it was at the school. After more fighting, I convinced them to walk with me towards the school. My mother was angry at me,” she said with a chuckle, but there was a bitter sadness behind it. “And my father was too tired to argue, which is how you know when he’s really mad.”

Robbie’s eyes were still fixed on the floor, though he appeared to be listening in his own way.

“Finally I got them to the school and down into the boiler room. The whole time they kept asking, ‘Piper, what are we doing? What is this?’ They finally said they wouldn’t follow me another step. So I told them about the accident, that in another dimension somewhere they were dead. I told them everything about DW. They didn’t believe me, of course, until they were through the door. Nobody ever believes it until they’re through the door.

“Once we had crossed over, we walked the few blocks back home in silence. The whole time I kept praying they wouldn’t ask any more questions that might make them decide to turn around and go back. Thankfully, they didn’t. Maybe they were just too tired. Maybe they thought I was having some teenage drama that they didn’t understand. For whatever reason, they let it lie. We all went to bed, and in the morning we acted like it was just another day.”

She shook her head to get the tears out of her eyes, and let out a bit of a giggle, which I had begun to realize was a nervous habit.

“And it was,” she continued. “It was a new and beautiful day. Until it wasn’t.”

“What happened?”

“After a few months, things started to shift. Things around me. The trees. The sidewalk.”

“They disappeared?” I asked her, remembering what Brady had told me.

“One day the whole house wasn’t a house. It was—it’s hard to explain. It was like a military barracks or something. There were soldiers in it, sitting around a big table eating breakfast. I screamed at them, ‘Get out of my house!’ But they just stared at me, and then . . . and then they weren’t soldiers. They were my parents. Eating at our table. Staring at me. And it was my house again, just like that.”

I took a deep breath and looked out the window for a moment. A field was passing outside, the long grains of wheat blending into a seamless flurry of yellow, zipping by too quickly to take form.

“I knew I had to fix it,” Piper concluded. “I had to make it right. And I knew the way to do it was to put them back, of course—to take them back through the portal. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

“So I went to the Mystics to see if they could help. I liked them. I liked Sage a lot, she was so warm. But they couldn’t help me. They told me that my parents had to go back, that I had thrown off the balance of energy between the planes. And that my parents belonged in DW . . . with their own daughter.

“It was the first time