Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

already got my number. If I sneak out of line, they’ll know.” In her hand, she was holding a small yellow card with a number printed on it.

“I’m cold,” Piper said, starting to shuffle her feet. “Can we go home? I want to go home.”

“We’re going,” I assured her.

I leaned in to Christy to say one more thing. “Can you text Kieren and tell him I’m okay? That he should meet me at the pyramid house tonight.”

“No,” Robbie interjected. “Not him.”

“We need him, Robbie. Trust me.” I turned back to Christy.

“I’ll tell him,” Christy whispered. “But he won’t be able to get out after curfew.”

“Please,” I begged again. “Tell him to find a way.”

Christy nodded reluctantly. We had reached the front of the line, and I knew we should walk away. But I needed to ask. “Hey, you haven’t seen that guy Brady around, have you?”

“No,” she said, distracted, as it was almost her turn. When she saw the worry in my face, however, she offered a weak smile. “But that doesn’t mean anything. I never saw him before except at school. And he graduated, right?”

“Right,” I agreed.

As Christy offered her number card to the nurse, Robbie and Piper and I snuck away. We walked in unison, silently praying not to get stopped, out of the parking lot and down the street, as far away from that hellish place as our feet could take us.

“Now what do we do?” Robbie asked me.

I smiled at my brother. “Now we see Dad.”

CHAPTER 19

The detention center looked more like a power station than a prison. Piper waited in the lobby, awkwardly trying to make a bed out of the molded plastic chairs. We had offered to take her to her house, but upon remembering that she would find it as empty as ours, she was reluctant to leave our side.

My hand felt clammy as I reached for Robbie’s, but his was cold. I couldn’t read his expression. Only a slowness in his gait, a halting in his breath, revealed the tension he felt. We were being ushered into a small beige-colored room, devoid of any furnishings save two chairs facing a table, with a third on the other side.

Robbie and I stood together, too nervous to sit, while the guard who had escorted us in retreated to a corner and stood at attention, his eyes distant. I noticed he was wearing the same uniform as the guards at the high school. I swallowed hard, trying to keep the well of emotions from overflowing.

Finally the door opened, and my father walked through. He was wearing dark pants and a dark blue shirt, which were not his own. His hands were free, but I realized he was a prisoner here. He walked slowly, like someone who had been broken down somehow. But when he looked up and saw Robbie, his eyes all but exploded out of his head.

And then something happened that I wasn’t expecting. I thought Dad would scream or flail, or maybe even deny that it was really Robbie standing in front of him. After all, he’d had no preparation for this moment.

But Dad didn’t do any of those things. Instead he turned white, and then red, and finally, with eyes rimmed with tears, he simply mumbled to himself in the faintest voice, “She was right.”

“Dad?” Robbie asked. Or maybe it was more of a begging. A begging to be believed, accepted, and loved still.

“She was right,” Dad repeated, more to himself than to us. “I should have believed her.”

Then Dad ran to Robbie and held him. The guard in the corner shuffled a bit; there wasn’t supposed to be any contact. But even he seemed to sense that he should let them be.

The tears fell hot and heavy down my cheeks, burning their way past my chin and falling freely until they landed with tiny thuds on my shoes. I wiped my face and felt the wetness coat my fingers.

Robbie was taller than Dad now, but he fell into him like a baby nonetheless. When they separated, a smile cracked over Robbie’s face that lightened the room and seemed to surround us, temporarily at least, with warmth.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

“Are you okay?” Dad finally asked. “Are you whole? Are you hurt?”

“I’m okay, Dad,” Robbie said, keeping his voice steady and his head straight.

“You’re so tall. You look . . .” Dad’s voice cracked, but he pulled it back together. “You look like your mother.”

I stood next to Robbie, placing a gentle hand on his back. Dad leaned in and embraced me as well. “I knew you’d find a way back to me, kiddo. I just never believed you’d really find your brother.”

“I’m sorry I scared you, Dad,” I whispered in his ear, but he only shook his head and smiled.

The guard cleared his throat, and we all shuffled to the chairs.

“They’re not going to keep me here much longer,” Dad said. “They’re transferring me. There will be a trial, but I don’t think . . . I don’t think I’m going to win. They think I did something to your mother.”

“Dad, we’re going to fix this,” I promised him. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll put everything back the way it was.”

“The way it was when?” my dad asked, looking at Robbie. “Before she went missing? No, Robbie is back now. Let’s let it lie.”

“You don’t know what it’s like out there, Dad. What’s been happening.”

“Honey, I know you mean well,” Dad said, cutting me off. “But there was a reason your mother left. We didn’t want you to know, but I guess you did. We weren’t happy. Your mother—she was never the same after.”

“But Dad, this isn’t just about Mom anymore.”

I stopped myself before I could say anything else. Maybe it was for the best that Dad didn’t know what was happening outside, how the world was changing. There was nothing he could do about it from in here anyway.

But gauging his reaction to seeing