Yesterworld: Down World Series Series, Book 2, page 30
“Please—”
“Get out of my car!”
With trembling fingers, I reached for the handle. Part of me was still hoping against hope that he’d stop me, that he’d tell me there was some way for us to still be friends. Or at least, that there was a chance he might forgive me someday.
But he didn’t stop me.
I opened the door and stepped out, and I stood still as a statue as he started the engine and his car peeled away down my street.
I was still shaking, overwhelmed with grief. I turned to the house, trying to collect myself.
Now it was time to see my dad. I could only pray that he would let me col apse into his arms, despite what I had done to him.
Because I couldn’t imagine going one more minute without being in the only place in the world that still felt safe.
Chapter Forty-Eight
My bike was in the garage.
That was the only positive thing I discovered that night, after my father had reluctantly let me sit at the dinner table despite the fact that he was still furious with me. My stepmother, Laura, had insisted that we should eat something and have a good night’s sleep before he could grill me more about any of the details of where I’d been.
It was the longest, most silent meal in history. The lasagna went down like a rock.
Laura tried to make conversation for a while, letting me know that Kieren had found my bike abandoned by the gym and had brought it back for me. “You really owe that boy a thank-you,” she added.
No one spoke after that.
Laura loaned me her cell phone for the night when I told her mine was gone, and I used it to let Kieren know I was back.
Then I sat on my bed and called Christy. We’d been friends for so long, even Laura had her number saved in her phone in case of emergencies.
“Where were you?” was all she asked. I had forgotten to ask Kieren to let her know I was safe, and she had spent two days assuming I was sick in bed before swinging by my house, where my father had told her I was missing.
“I had to go help a friend,” I said, giving the same vague and ridiculous answer I had asked Kieren to tell my dad.
She didn’t say anything for a minute.
“Christy?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m here. I’m just trying to understand. I don’t keep secrets from you.”
“I know you don’t.”
“Sometimes, I just wish . . . I wish I knew you better.”
“I know.”
There was something else I knew I had to ask her, but I wasn’t sure if she would do it. Yet I didn’t really have a choice.
“I need a favor,” I finally said in a low voice.
“Okay.”
“I need you to go to the pharmacy and get me something, please.”
She sighed, annoyed. “Why don’t you get it yourself?”
“Because . . .” I hesitated, clearing my throat. “I’m grounded, and my dad’s watching me like a hawk. But I need it right away. If I don’t take it tonight, it’ll be too late.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. For a minute, I thought maybe she had hung up on me.
“Christy?”
“Why can’t Brady go?” she finally asked.
I hesitated, not wanting to tell her any more lies. “It wasn’t Brady,” I finally admitted.
She was silent again. I sat on my bed, clutching Laura’s phone.
“I’ll drop it off in an hour,” she finally said and then hung up before I could tell her that I would pay her back.
The next four weeks passed in a haze of guilt, depression, and the occasional burst of boredom. I didn’t know which was worse.
After having spent half a week feeling the extreme stress of fearing for my life and having what I supposed I could officially refer to as my first real love affair, the daily ritual of getting up, getting dressed, brushing my teeth, and trudging through school just didn’t seem to be firing off the neurons in my brain in any noticeable way.
I supposed that was the real danger of DW. It didn’t take long before you got addicted to the adrenaline. After it was gone, nothing really felt like anything anymore.
My father finally told me that he wasn’t mad at the fact that I had left, he was mad because I wouldn’t tell him where I had been. “I thought we trusted each other,” he said, his voice broken.
I bowed my head, nodding at the floor.
After a week of him giving me the silent treatment, I finally went out to his garage lab one night and helped him reassemble a computer. He didn’t speak to me the whole time, except to ask me to hand him some wires at one point. I took that as a positive sign.
At school, it didn’t seem to surprise anyone very much that the new AP World History teacher had flown the coop.
“Boy, that didn’t take long,” Adrian Washington joked when we showed up on Monday morning to find that Principal Farghasian herself was teaching the class.
“Just until I find another sub for you guys,” she said from the whiteboard as she furiously tried to scan through Adam’s notebook to see what she was supposed to be teaching us.
The only one who seemed truly disappointed was Angela Peirnot, much to Adrian’s annoyance.
“I just don’t understand it,” I heard her whispering to one of her girlfriends behind me. “Who teaches a class for a week and then splits?”
After that, nobody mentioned Adam again. It was like he had never been there.
I finished my MIT application and sent it in, and then I called Mr. Chu and apologized profusely for missing two work shifts without so much as a phone call. After much groveling, I convinced him to forgive me, and he agreed to let me keep my job for the rest of the school year.
Christy wasn’t talking to me, and so I was home alone a lot. One night, I was so bored I actually rummaged through Dad’s old bookshelf, finding an ancient copy of Moby Dick. I fell asleep that night dreaming I was in the middle of the ocean on a churning ship, the ominous presence of a great whale lurking somewhere beneath me.
Somewhere I couldn’t quite reach.
° ° °
“Marina, come back to Earth.” My father’s voice woke me one morning a couple weeks later.
“Hmm?” I asked, sitting up quickly. It took a moment to get my bearings. It was the second time in my life my father had woken me early on a Sunday.
He was sitting on the edge of my bed, his mug of coffee in his hands just like old times. And he was talking to me. Did that mean he forgave me? Or did it mean something worse?
“What is it, Dad?”
“You got an email,” he said, holding up his phone to me. I still didn’t have a phone, since the pyramid house had been empty when I’d swung by after school one day to check it out. And since my dad no longer trusted me, he had insisted on knowing my passwords so he could check all my messages and my social media postings.
Of course, I’d had very few of any of those things since I’d driven away the only people I had ever cared about.
Still, I cleared my eyes and tried to read the message he was holding up. “What does it mean?” I asked, not able to process anything so early in the morning.
“You have an interview.” He smiled, seeming to forget that he was mad at me. “A recruiter from MIT. They say you can pick a place nearby for the meeting. A coffee shop or something. I was thinking of that place in town with the rooster on the sign.”
I nodded, my heart beginning to race. “Yeah,” I agreed. “Yeah, that’s perfect.” I smiled at my dad and was relieved to see he was smiling back. Then he seemed to remember that we were fighting, and the smile faded temporarily. But I couldn’t wait anymore to be forgiven. I threw myself forward into his arms, spilling some of his coffee onto my bed.
“You’re gonna be okay, kiddo.”
“I love you, Dad.”
“You’re gonna be great.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
The place with the rooster on the sign was called El Gallo, fittingly enough. Even with my pathetic Spanish, I understood that the name meant The Rooster. I cleared my throat nervously before walking in, straightening the blouse and skirt I had picked up at the mall the night before specifically for this purpose. I was about to enter when I suddenly remembered to turn and press the lock button on Laura’s keys. It did nothing, so I furiously pressed it again, causing her Toyota to beep repeatedly in protest behind me.
Breathe, Marina. You can do this.
I walked in and scanned the half dozen tables of the cute little café that had admittedly gone a little overboard with the rooster theme, knickknacks and tchotchkes on every surface. I straightened my back, trying to look confident and grown-up. I wished I’d worn jeans. Jeans and my favorite brown sweater would have been perfect. I wished—
“Marina?” a woman asked as she stood. She had been sitting alone at a small table behind a laptop. She was wearing an outfit almost comically similar to my own.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Lisa Sanchez. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too.”
We sat down together, and I wondered for a second if I was supposed to get up and get a cup of coffee. Although honestly, coffee was the last thing in the world that I wanted.
“So, tell me,” she began, offering me a warm smile with her rich brown eyes, “why do you want to go to MIT?”
I swallowed down a sudden dizziness, like the world was moving too fast and too slow at the same time. It was a simple question. And yet my entire future was tangled up somewhere in the answer. I cleared my throat, nodding a bit too eagerly.
“Well, I love engineering,” I began, my voice distorted as it bounced off the high ceiling. “I love robotics. I teach at a computer place. You knew that ’cause it’s in my file probably.” I wiped my hands, suddenly sweaty, on my skirt. “I love robotics. Wait, I said that already.”
“It’s okay.” She laughed. “Just relax. What do you love about robotics?”
“I love, um . . .” Why could I not think of one sentence in the English language? “I love the idea of how robotics and transportation can intersect. And how, in the future, we could have robots that, you know, do things . . .”
I’m drowning. I’m drowning in the ocean. The whale is going to eat me.
“And I love that—”
“Go on,” she encouraged, the warm smile not leaving her face.
“I want— Imagine an airplane,” I finally choked out. “An airplane that could run on its own wind resistance. And it wouldn’t need an engine, even, or produce any carbon. It would basically be a big drone. And you could go anywhere in this airplane. And you wouldn’t hurt the earth, you wouldn’t hurt anything or anybody.” I wasn’t saying it right.
There’s no right way to say it.
I choked down a sudden onslaught of spit, forcing myself to power on. “You could just get from point A to point B without—”
“Yes?”
Adam’s face when I told him this story. His bemused smile.
The warmth of his skin.
“You could get from point A to point B—”
“Marina is mine.”
Was that the last time I’ll ever be happy?
Was it worth it?
“Point A to point B without destroying the—”
Something will go wrong. It always does.
“The earth.” I couldn’t talk anymore. Because I couldn’t stop the tears that were forming. I couldn’t stop the fire rushing to my face. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Now I am become Death. Look at me now, talking about planes that run on wind resistance. Who am I kidding? I am the destroyer of worlds.
I asked Adam if we were good people. He never answered that question.
Lisa Sanchez didn’t seem deterred. Her eyes never wavered from my face. In fact, she smiled. She leaned back a bit and examined me, deciding something.
“I’m so sorry,” I continued. “I don’t know why I’m crying.”
She handed me a napkin to wipe my face. “You’re crying because you care.”
I laughed lightly, trying to dry my face and realizing that I was probably rubbing eyeliner all over my cheeks.
“Can I tell you something?” she asked. “Before my MIT interview, I was so nervous I threw up.” She laughed, her eyes darting up to the distant ceiling with the memory, then landing back on me. “I wanted it so badly, and I didn’t know if a place like MIT would ever take someone like me.”
I nodded, but I was so embarrassed I could barely look at her.
“Why wouldn’t they take you? You seem really smart.”
“I come from nothing. I’d worked so hard. But what if it wasn’t enough?”
I nodded, a fresh wash of tears carrying away whatever was left of my mascara.
“What if I wasn’t enough?” she continued.
“And? Were you?”
She smiled. “Only you can decide that.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said again.
But she leaned in even closer, like she was telling me a secret.
“Never apologize for caring, Marina.”
The waitress came and asked if I wanted anything, and Lisa Sanchez ordered us two pieces of coffee cake.
° ° °
I decided to walk through town a bit before heading home, letting my feet take me wherever they felt like going. I ended up in front of Groussman’s Pharmacy. I couldn’t help but lean in to examine the photo of the pinup girl, but it was faded too much to make out anything but the faintest streak of blond hair.
Everything else about it had been erased by the decades.
Stepping into the store, I headed up to the glass counter, following the same trajectory I had taken when I had pawned the diamond ring.
There was a young woman behind the counter who bore a striking resemblance to Mimi—the same curly brown hair and ready smile. But she was shorter, and her face was a bit longer.
“Hi,” I said awkwardly when I saw her.
“Hello, can I help you?”
“Sorry, it’s just . . . you look like a girl I know. Named Mimi.”
“Oh, that’s funny. That was my great-grandmother’s name.”
Taken a bit aback, I realized that this was a family business. It had never changed hands, not since it had opened almost eight decades earlier. And since this timeline and the one under the lake were now merged, there was a possibility that something else was the same. “Hey,” I asked, “could you tell me, did this place use to be pawnshop?”
“A pawnshop?” she asked, smiling. “I mean, maybe like a million years ago. Why?”
“Do you think . . . do you think anything might be left over from then?”
It took me a couple of minutes of explaining to Mimi’s great-granddaughter that I was looking for something that had been in my family once, something that had been lost for decades. I knew this was a long shot. In all the twists and turns of time and space, all the ways this reality and the one under the lake had combined and intersected and broken apart again, maybe that ring was gone forever.
Maybe it had never been here in the first place in this dimension, had never passed from Golda to Sage and finally to me.
But somehow I felt it calling to me. Somehow. Somewhere.
The ring was a promise. And promises never die.
The girl behind the counter was reluctant to leave her post at first, but then she seemed to get into the mood for an adventure.
She asked someone to watch the register for her and led me to a back closet.
“My grandpa used to keep all sorts of family stuff back here. It’s a real mess, I should warn you.”
“That’s okay.”
“Let’s see . . . no, just old paperwork. Cleaning supplies. Some old magazines. Uh, here’s a cigar box.”
“Wait.” I stopped her. “What’s in the cigar box?”
She blew about a pound of dust off the top of it and then creaked it open. “Oh my God,” she said, smiling.
“What is it?”
She gently reached inside and picked something out. “It’s an old ring. That’s crazy.”
“Can I see it?”
Holding it up for me to see, she twirled it in the overhead light of the closet. The small diamond was dull with age, but otherwise it looked the same. “Oh, wait,” she said. “There’s a note.”
I walked farther into the closet, trying to peer over her shoulder at the note. She held it up enough for us both to read. “It says, ‘Do not sell. Owner is coming back.’”
She laughed, trying to put everything back into the box.
“Can I buy it?” I asked her.
She hesitated a moment, her hands not wavering from the box.
“Oh, come on,” I teased. “How long has it been back here?”
“Well,” she finally agreed, “I guess the owner’s not coming back, is she?”
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars for it.”
She eyed the box one more time, and then her eyes turned to the wallet I was pulling out of my purse. Finally, she opened the box and handed me the ring.
“It’s yours.”
Epilogue
I stood on the platform, waiting for the eastbound train. It would take me as far as New York, where my brother and Piper would pick me up and drive me north to their place—my place, I should start saying—in Boston.
My dad had run into the station to buy me snacks for the trip, and I was flapping my tank top away from my chest to try to relieve myself from the mid-August heat. I checked my new phone, hoping to see a reply from Christy. I had sent her a congratulatory text the night before when she’d posted that she was about to get on a plane for Berklee. In what was perhaps an overeager attempt to rekindle our broken friendship, I had wallpapered the phone with lots of hearts and champagne glasses and fireworks.
She had written me back, Thank you.
Nothing else had come in since.
I couldn’t be mad at her for drifting away after I’d asked her to go to the pharmacy. I had suspected it would be the last straw for our friendship, not just because she’s a Christian and it goes against everything she believes in, but because I wouldn’t even tell her where I’d been or who I’d been with. I had asked her anyway.
