Yesterworld: Down World Series Series, Book 2, page 4
“Adult classes are on Saturdays,” Mr. Chu said as he grabbed his briefcase from behind the front desk and threw on his coat.
“Ten a.m.”
Mr. Martel turned to me. “Hello, Marina. I heard you worked here. Looks like the rumors were true.”
In his distracted state, Mr. Chu didn’t seem to think much of this interaction, but he looked at me for some sort of confirmation.
I cleared my throat. Mr. Martel and I had left things rather awkward, not getting a chance to discuss what had fallen out of his pocket.
Of course, maybe I was overreacting. Maybe the flattened penny in Mr. Martel’s pocket wasn’t from the train. Hell, they have machines at the zoo that flatten pennies, engraving them with little panda bears or sea otters. Maybe it was one of those, and I had just jumped to conclusions.
But then why did he follow me to work?
Should I ask Mr. Chu to stay, making him late to get his son?
He would demand an explanation. What would I say? I decided to give Mr. Martel a little rope and see what he did with it.
“Mr. Chu,” I began, “um, this is my history teacher, Mr. Martel.”
Mr. Chu turned to him with an outstretched hand.
“Adam,” Mr. Martel corrected. “It’s just Adam.”
“Nice to meet you, Adam.” Mr. Chu turned back to me, one foot practically out the door. “You’ll be okay, Marina?”
I debated for a split second what to do, but then I realized I was going to have to talk to Mr. Martel at some point. Now was as good a time as any. I smiled at Mr. Chu, reassuring him.
“I’m a big girl,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”
I waited several seconds after Mr. Chu left, until I could hear his car starting in the small parking lot, before turning to Mr. Martel.
I decided to let him make the first move, just in case this was all in my mind.
“So, yeah, the adult classes are on Saturday. Maybe you should come back then.”
“I think you and I need to talk, Marina.”
The alarm bell that had started when he walked through the door was blaring louder in my head now, not so much because of what he had just said but because of how he’d said it: his voice low and cool, his eyes unwavering.
“About what?” I asked, feigning naivete while I furiously ran through the options in my head.
“I think you know,” he said, stepping closer.
I curled my lips into the slow breathing I had been practicing.
My heart was pounding, but I couldn’t let him see that. I didn’t know if this guy posed a threat or not. Maybe he really did just want to talk.
But then something occurred to me: in his classroom, when I had seen the flattened penny, the look on his face—he was petrified. He knew immediately that I recognized the penny, that I didn’t think it was from the zoo the way most people would have.
He seemed terrified of being exposed, terrified of . . . of me.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m just who I say I am—”
“No, you’re not.”
He eyed me a moment, measuring what to say or, perhaps, what he didn’t need to say.
“Okay, let’s talk,” I offered. “The second that penny fell out of your pocket, you knew you couldn’t let me see it. You knew that I would know what it was. How did you know that about me?”
He smiled slightly, unsurprised by the question. His shoulders drooped, as though he was giving up some sort of ruse. “Because,” he said, shrugging, “you’re Rain’s daughter.”
And with that, the alarm bells exploded inside me. This man knew my mother’s nickname from high school. I wasn’t safe here.
Run, Marina. Run!
I tried bolting past him, but his body was blocking mine from the front door. He reached out to grab me, and I could feel his giant hand clasp around my sweater for a moment. I was able to rip my arm away from him and yank it free. But just as I made it to the exit, he caught up with me and slapped his hand against the closed door, barring me from opening it.
“Let me out!” I screamed.
“Let me talk first.”
“No!”
Instinctively, I thrust my elbow into his side. The jab was supposed to land in his kidney, but Mr. Martel spun at the last moment, and I got his ribs instead, which sent a jolting pain through my arm.
Still, it seemed to work. He doubled over with a grunt, allowing me to get my hand on the doorknob and get it open.
But once I had run out into the bombardment of ice-cold rain, I realized I had nowhere to go. My bike and coat were still in the lobby. I hadn’t called my father. Could I outrun him? An absurd thought popped into my head: Angela Peirnot slobbering over Mr. Martel’s fit frame in class. He looked like he worked out every day. The answer was no.
I turned to face him, and he was already standing out in the rain, hunched slightly, eyeing me like he was scanning for weaknesses.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said, rain plastering his button-down shirt against his well-formed chest.
I pushed the hair out of my face, shivering as my finally dried sweater was soaked through again. Thunder clapped above me like a steel drum, reverberating through my skin. “What do you want?”
“Like I said, just to talk.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“You should,” he immediately retorted. “I’m the only one who can help you. Please, Marina, come back inside.”
I looked around for an escape, but I was trapped. Taking deep breaths, I let the rain wash over me for a moment longer, as though it could carry me away somehow, take me somewhere magical, a place where Kieren or Robbie or even my dad would be waiting for me.
Somewhere I’d be safe.
But there was no magic here. There hadn’t been magic here in a long time.
Reluctantly, I walked towards the building again, around Mr. Martel, who knew better than to try to touch me, and into the lobby, where I shook myself off.
And a second later, the bells above the door told me he had followed me inside.
Chapter Five
“I did know your mother, it’s true,” Mr. Martel offered as soon he could see that he had my attention, that I wasn’t going to try to run again. “I met her when she was in high school.”
The wording of this took me a moment to process. My mother was in high school in the late 1990s. Unless . . . “How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-three, like I said.”
“So, then, you were what? Just visiting?” He must have meant he went through a portal to the past. But why?
“Something like that.”
Mr. Martel’s eyes scanned the stark, well-lit lobby and fell upon a coffee machine in the corner that Mr. Chu kept for parents. “Look, it’s cold, right? Do you want a coffee?”
I didn’t usually drink coffee, but I had to admit that something hot would be very welcome right about now, if only to warm my still shaking hands. I nodded a bit and watched him go find a clean mug on a small rack and plop a pod into the machine. When the whirring subsided, he came up and offered me the drink, the handle side facing me so I wouldn’t have to touch him in order to take it.
It was like he was trying to make up for the way he’d been a minute ago, to signal to me that he was safe. I still wasn’t sure I was buying it, however. “Tell me more,” I insisted, blowing on the hot liquid and feeling its warmth tickle my upper lip.
“I was a curious kid, I guess . . . like you.”
I nodded, watching him make his own drink while he kept talking. His voice was different than it had been in class. Younger.
Like he wasn’t pretending anymore, wasn’t playing a part. I could see the kid he had been not that long ago dying to break out.
“Have you told anyone else this?”
“No.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Let me finish?” he asked deferentially. Like he needed me, somehow, to give him permission to continue. What was he hoping to get from me?
I sat down on one of the beanbag chairs in the lobby and motioned to him to do the same, a task that he pulled off with surprising agility for such a muscular guy. It struck me that maybe he’d been a gymnast or something at one point.
“I didn’t mean to stay in Yesterday as long as I did. Honestly, I just wanted to see how it worked. Once I figured out how to open the doors, I wanted . . . I wanted to see everything.”
“That’s a dangerous game.”
“I know that now.”
“You met my mother, you said?”
“Yes.”
“Did you—is she why you stayed so long?” Images of my mother in high school zipped through my mind, mostly from the photo album that was still somewhere in the back of her closet.
The album that showed her with her old high-school friends—
Sage, George, Jenny, Dave . . . and John, her boyfriend at the time and her husband in this reality. John, who was obsessed with DW, who made it into a cult almost. A cult that none of them knew how to leave.
“No, it wasn’t like that.” Adam answered my question in a softer tone.
Relief flooded over me. It was hard enough to imagine my mom with John, but to think of her with this guy—
“It was for her friend, Jenny. Jenny and I . . .” He let the sentence trail off.
Jenny. That made sense. Jenny, who wore the tiny polka dot bikini in those old photos by the beach. Jenny, who was dating Dave. And a memory from long ago came back in a flash—my mother’s voice: They won’t come out.
In the old reality, before I had gone back into Yesterday and stopped the lake portal from being built, Jenny and Dave had been the first ones to go through it. They’d dived into the lake right after the portal was formed, and, in that timeline at least, they had never been heard from again.
But we were in a different timeline now—one in which they’d never had a chance to go under the lake. Jenny probably went on to live a normal life somewhere.
“I went back again and again,” Adam continued. “Each time, I told myself it was the last. And each time, I couldn’t stay away. I realize now that what I had with Jenny wasn’t healthy. She had a boyfriend, and we . . . well, all she ever wanted to do was go through the portals with me. It was like a drug for her . . . and for me.”
“You went through a portal while you were already in a portal?
Are you crazy?” I wanted to be mad at him for risking the balance between the dimensions like that, but I couldn’t. Hadn’t I done the same and even worse? Hadn’t I used the doors behind the boiler room like my own personal do-over machine? Who was I to judge?
He shrugged. “I thought I could conquer it.”
“Okay,” I sighed, “so what do you want from me? Why are you telling me this?”
“Because,” he said, steadying himself, “the last time I saw Jenny, she was nineteen. We had plans to meet up a few months later. She was going to leave Dave. We were . . . talking about getting married.
I was going to stay in the past to be with her.”
“Jesus,” I sighed. “You would have thrown off the balance of everything. And for what? Some girl who was cheating on her boyfriend and would probably cheat on you?”
“Well, I didn’t get a chance, did I? Because she never showed. I looked for her everywhere. Every portal. Every existence I could imagine her living in. I never found her.”
I swallowed hard, an ill feeling stirring in my gut.
If Jenny had never gone into the underlake world, she should have been up here somewhere in our reality. So where was she?
She was sort of obsessed with DW, I remembered Sage telling me.
Thought of it as a game. Did she go in another way? And if so, where had she been living all this time?
“I need to find her again, Marina. I need to know she’s safe.”
I struggled to think of what to tell him. I knew how he was feeling, of course, and I hated to sound selfish, but the truth was it just wasn’t my problem. Maybe Jenny just got sick of him and ditched him somewhere. For all I knew, she’d settled down in another state or another country—living a life that had nothing to do with him.
“I don’t know how to help you,” I finally said, trying to excuse myself from the conversation.
“You have to. Your mother was the only one Jenny would listen to, the only one who could have found her. I begged Rain to give me a token, something that would lead me to Jenny, but she wouldn’t. Said she would never mess with the portals again. Even though . . .”
“Even though what?”
“Even though if she didn’t help me, it meant losing Jenny.
Forever.”
The words hit me like a punch. He wasn’t acting like a guy who just missed some girl he’d fallen for. He sounded more desperate than that.
I couldn’t pretend not to know what he was going through, and I really did sympathize. Obviously I did. But if I had to live without the people I loved the most in the world, the people I would give anything to be with again, then he could live without some girl he’d had a fling with.
He looked up at me with eyes rimmed with exhaustion and grief. I could swear he was almost begging. Maybe he really did love Jenny after all.
“Will you help me find her?” he pleaded.
All of a sudden, something that had been dangling just inches from my consciousness sprang into clear relief. Something Brady had told me once, on the bus heading to Oregon to see the Mystics.
There was another guy named Adam who went a few years ago to ask them about all this . . . he never came back.
“Oh my God,” I breathed. “You’re Adam.”
He screwed his eyebrows together, questioning.
“Brady told me about you.”
“Brady?” he repeated. “Brady Picelli? That little freshman who was always following me around when I was a senior? You know him?”
“We’re friends,” I asserted, silently trying to picture Brady as a “little freshman.” He had always been the tall, confident older boy I’d fallen hard for when I first got to school.
“Will you help me, Marina?” Adam asked again, bringing me back into the moment.
“Why should I?”
“Because I can give you what you want.”
“And what is that?” I asked, honestly not sure what he might think the answer was.
But he only offered a coy smile, toying with me. He stood and took a couple steps towards me, standing just inches away. I gulped down some spit, feeling awkward being alone with him, still sitting while he hovered above me. “Don’t you know by now?”
I stood to meet him. Before he turned away, he grabbed my hand from where it dangled by my side and pressed something into it. “Let me know tomorrow,” he said casually before grabbing his umbrella and heading out the door. The bells jangled as the door slammed shut, a sound that continued to reverberate for a couple of seconds after he left.
I looked down at my hand and stared helplessly at the flattened penny Adam had just pressed there.
Chapter Six
I stood in the shadows of our garage, watching my father at his workstation in the corner. He was doing his favorite thing in the world: fixing up an old computer, bobbing his head to a song on his headphones. The computer was splayed out before him in a million little pieces, waiting to be put back together by his callused hands.
After a moment, he looked up and noticed me there. A smile popped onto his face, and he pressed a button on his phone so the music switched from his headphones to a small speaker.
Then he hung the headphones on a little wall hook—Dad’s way of inviting me to join him.
It was one of his favorite old albums by Buffalo Springfield.
Neither of us said anything for a moment as I approached the desk, surveying his progress so far, and the lyrics to the old song echoed off the concrete walls. Something about standing on the edge of a feather, saying goodbye to a loved one. Knowing that they’d gone. Knowing that it was too late to do anything about it.
Dad broke the spell by turning the volume down, his head still buried in his work.
“Hand me that DVI cable, will you, honey?”
“Sure, Dad.”
After a moment of tinkering with the cable, he spoke again. “I Skyped your brother today.”
My heart still caught in my throat whenever Robbie was mentioned. It was hard to believe, even to this day, that Robbie and I had barely any relationship. He’d been raised so far away from me in this reality, and in such a different environment, helping our mom run that little hotel outside of Portland.
“He said the classes are much harder this year at U of Oregon.”
I nodded, always afraid of saying too much, giving anything away.
“That makes sense,” I finally added. “He’s a sophomore now.”
Somehow, the word sophomore struck me with a painful throb.
A sophomore like I had been when I’d started a new high school without him, in the old reality where he had “died” at fourteen. A sophomore, meaning I had missed his whole first year of college, just like I had missed the nineteen years before that.
If I closed my eyes, I could still feel the cold night air whipping our faces as we ran from the pyramid house all those years ago, when Kieren had dared us to spend the night there. And now there was no one left to remember that night with me. My whole life, everything that had mattered, everything I had felt, ripped away day after day.
My brother and I were like two divergent rivers in this plane, twisting away from each other, never intertwining, wending through the earth towards two opposing oceans. I missed him so much sometimes that my bones ached with the pain of it.
A sob escaped my mouth, and once it had started, a tidal wave of sobs followed behind. My father dropped his tools and just held me, rocking me slightly against his chest.
“Oh, Marina,” he whispered. “My sweet girl.”
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I whispered through my tears, not wanting to break away from his protective arms.
“I just don’t know what to do for you, honey. You seem so sad lately, and I don’t know why.”
