Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

find you, Robbie. But if she did that, she would have been trapped on that train with you. No, she wasn’t there for the train portal. She was there to make a key.”

“You mean, like the coin I made you?” asked Kieren.

“Yes. You made it on the tracks where the portal is. And somehow, for some reason, maybe some of that energy got trapped in that coin. Because it has a special power. You can use it to control DW—to go wherever you want to go. That’s how we got here,” I explained, nodding to Robbie and Piper.

“Marina handed the coin to the conductor,” Piper explained. “And he took us home. Or wherever we are.”

“And you think that coin could also open the Yesterday door?” Kieren asked, following my reasoning.

“I do,” I explained, my thoughts returning to those doors under the school, the brick walls, the little peepholes with nothing but blackness inside. “They aren’t peepholes,” I realized. “They’re coin slots.”

Kieren exhaled and cradled his head in his hands. We all fell silent for a moment, letting the ideas settle over us. The more I thought about it, the surer I was that I was right. All the pieces seemed to fit—why Mom was on the tracks that night, why she then went into the high school.

She must have realized it was too late to get Robbie off the train, too late to prevent what was inevitably going to happen as a result of him being there—namely, that the world she had built under the lake and ours would cross.

But what if the world under the lake had never existed in the first place?

What if Robbie had never been hit by that train?

A guard walked by then, wearing that same uniform that the man driving the fire truck and the one at the jail had been wearing. He eyed us unevenly for a moment, making me realize how suspicious we must have seemed, standing in a cluster, wearing shoes, which no one who wasn’t part of the town’s elite was still allowed to do.

We bowed our heads and started walking, pretending to take an interest in a carnival game where you shoot water pistols into a clown’s mouth, trying to blow up the balloon on top. We all picked up a water gun, and Kieren handed the barker some money.

The guard finally moved on, convinced, I suppose, that we were the teenage children of some important colonel or general, and that we were enjoying the carnival like everyone else.

“She went into Yesterday,” I concluded, knowing now that it must have been true. “But whatever she tried to do didn’t work. If it had, the world wouldn’t be like this now. We have to follow her . . . and find out what went wrong.”

Piper took aim at the clown’s mouth, waiting for the game to start. “How do you know you’ll go to the same place as her, though?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“I mean,” she began, “the door to Today leads to all sorts of places. I usually end up in town, by the drugstore.”

It was Kieren who spoke up this time. “And I used to land in my bedroom, holding the wrench I use to fix my skateboard wheels when they come loose.”

I looked down at my hand, gripping the water gun. I was wearing the ruby ring my parents had given me for my tenth birthday. They’d handed it to me in the kitchen, while we were eating breakfast.

“Where did you get those earrings?” I asked, turning to Piper.

She touched the fake diamond studs in her ears, smiling at me. “Groussman’s, I think. Years ago.”

The man behind the counter rang a small bell, and the water guns began to vibrate. We shot the water into the clowns’ mouths, and Piper’s balloon popped first.

“I win,” she squealed.

Kieren turned to me. “I had my skateboard in my backpack the first time I went through.”

I smiled. We had solved another part of the mystery: whatever token you had on you at the time you crossed determined where you ended up.

I thought of my mother’s little dangling blue earrings from the night I’d last seen her. They were the same ones she was wearing in the old photos in her closet, from the beach in Portland.

The night she built the portal under the lake.

“None of that matters if we don’t have the coins,” Robbie said, coming back to the conversation after being distracted by the carnival game.

He was right, of course.

“I’ll go to the track and make another coin,” Kieren offered, as Piper gleefully collected her stuffed bear. “I’ll meet you back at my house tonight.”

“Make two,” I said. “In case we need it to come back after.”

“I’ll help you, man,” Scott offered, and the two of them ran off.

I watched them go for a minute, until they disappeared into the crowd, and then Robbie and Piper and I left in the other direction.

CHAPTER 21

I thought I would lose my mind sitting on the couch in Kieren’s rec room, waiting for him to come back with the flattened pennies.

“What do you think it is?” Piper asked, sitting next to Robbie on the floor. “The thing that your mother changed?”

“Well, we know what she did in real life—our real life, anyway,” I said, nodding to Robbie. “About ten years ago, she went to Portland to visit her old friends, the Mystics. She brought me with her but, Robbie, you stayed home with Dad.” Robbie looked confused by this, as though straining to remember it, but he said nothing. “While she was there, she gave John a key, and he used it to build the lake portal. It’s not like the doors under the school, though. It leads to only one place: the world we saw, Robbie, the one where Mom was in the paper.”

“It’s awful,” Piper said.

“The world from that train station.” Robbie nodded.

“I think what she’s done now is gone back to that day, at the beach in Portland,