Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

the sheets, but they didn’t smell like anything. Piper rolled to face me.

“I miss talking to girls,” she said. “Do you have a lot of girlfriends?”

I thought of Christy, and the girls I had known at St. Joe’s. I felt so far away from all of them, but I did miss them. “Not really. You must have a lot, huh?”

“I guess,” she said, seeming disinterested. “They don’t know me. No one knew me, until Robbie.”

“Not even Brady?” I asked. I hadn’t meant to bring him up, but I couldn’t help it. She hadn’t mentioned him at all, really. Didn’t she miss him? Didn’t she love him anymore?

She was quiet for so long, I wondered if she had heard me. “Brady and I were together for a long time,” she finally said. “And I think, in some ways, he was always going to see me as fourteen. I think he thought of me as this pretty child who got lost somewhere in a field or something, and it was his job to make sure I didn’t get lost again.”

“What’s wrong with that?” It sounded lovely to me, to have a protector, to have a guardian who would never let anything bad happen to me.

“We’re not children,” Piper said, referring to herself and me. “It’s easy to play the part. Especially when you’re pretty. Like we are.”

I must have blushed. I had never heard anyone talk like her before. Piper didn’t seem to have an ounce of insecurity in her body.

“But we can’t do that to ourselves,” she continued. And then she smiled at me, starting to look sleepy.

“You didn’t want to go to Colorado?”

“God no,” she said. “I like the beach. Your brother and I were talking about living by the ocean someday. In a little house, you know?”

I nodded. I had never known that my brother liked the ocean. He had only seen it once, when we visited my aunt in Boston. And it didn’t occur to me that he had noticed it at all.

“Would you like that?” Piper asked me. “To live with us by the beach?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know where I want to live.”

Piper grew quiet then, drifting away. I thought of my dream apartment, and my fire-engine-red bathroom. They weren’t mine. They were Sage’s. And now, my fantasies stripped away, I was left with no imaginary escape to dream of.

CHAPTER 20

The old grounds, as they apparently used to be called, were completely altered when we all arrived there in the morning. The gas station that had occupied most of the lot for as long as I could remember was gone, and the few scattered skeletons of old carnival games were no longer abandoned and ravaged by time, but rather freshly scrubbed, apparently once again being used by the children of the local diplomats who had settled here.

Of course, this early in the morning, the place was abandoned yet again, a filmy layer of dew having settled over the cool night onto the empty bucket seats of the Ferris wheel and the shuttered-up vendor stalls boasting funnel cake and fresh cups of hot cocoa.

We were all there, everyone from the night before, with Mr. Protsky leading the charge.

“Where do we go?” I asked Kieren, although anyone could have heard me.

“The fun house,” answered Mr. Protsky, walking across the grounds to a large structure looming over the back of the field.

We all followed silently. Scott continued to trail behind Kieren and me like a nefarious shadow, silently boring his eyes into my back with a heated anger.

I began to wonder if Scott was in love with Kieren, or if he just blamed me for everything that had gone wrong. And despite my resentment of being viewed in that way, I couldn’t exactly argue that it wasn’t true.

“Kieren,” I whispered. “Why are we meeting here in the open? Wouldn’t it be better at your dad’s house?”

“It’s okay,” he answered. “No one will see us.” He looked around the grounds, his face seeming to assess how much they’d changed. “I guess this place used to have some significance for them.”

“For who?”

But he only put a hand on my back and led me inside, trusting that the question was about to answer itself.

We had to enter the fun house through the rotating cylinder that normally served as an exit; at the moment it wasn’t moving. I expected it to be dark inside, but instead found it well lit with camping lanterns, which illuminated, in grotesque silhouettes, the fun-house mirrors and distorted walls.

I was surprised to find a small breakfast party already assembled inside the fun house, and even more surprised to discover who was in the group.

Sage was there, having a morning cup of coffee, which she sipped gently out of a small tin cup, and she was joined by John and George. Sage’s white flowing dress and John’s dirty fingernails revealed that these were the real people from Portland, and not the altered personas that lived in that bitter land under the lake.

“Hello, dear,” Sage said when she saw me, not seeming the least bit thrown by my presence.

“Sage,” I said, taking a moment to process it all. “What are you doing here?”

Sage and John both laughed at my tone, and I realized that my words had come out sounding a bit harsher than I had meant.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

“No, it’s all right.”

“Is that him?” John cut in, addressing Mr. Protsky and cutting to the chase in his usual brusque manner. He clearly meant Robbie. This was becoming a pattern. Nobody wanted to address Robbie directly, as though he was merely a ghost floating through the room and the only way to confirm his presence was to ask one of the living.

“It is,” Mr. Protsky confirmed.

“Oh, boy,” Sage said, taking in Robbie with a sweet twinkle in her eye. “He’s so tall.”

“I can hear you,” Robbie said, but nobody paid him any mind. Piper whispered something in his ear and he nodded.

“Hello, Piper,”