Yesterworld: Down World Series Series, Book 2, page 8
“Yes?”
“Aren’t you going to work today, sweetheart? Those tweens aren’t going to teach themselves how to make fart bubbles.” Laura laughed at her own joke.
I looked at the clock on my bedside table. Shit. It was ten thirty on Saturday. I was supposed to teach the junior-high class at eleven. But, hey, at least this part of my life hadn’t changed. I still worked at the Kids’ Science Lab.
“Be right down,” I called, throwing my phone on the bed and heading for the bathroom to brush my teeth. My image in the mirror was less than impressive, with blue half-moon shadows under my eyes and matted hair plastered to my cheeks.
I brushed with one hand and combed with the other while using my foot to open the top drawer where I kept my concealer. I didn’t even know what today’s lesson plan was. Not that it mattered much to the thirteen-year-olds. We could convert the Lego robots into a drum kit and just bang away at it for half an hour, and they would be perfectly happy.
“Shall I make you a Pop-Tart?” Laura asked sweetly from outside the door.
“Yeshh pleash,” I called back through a mouthful of toothpaste.
Finishing up in the bathroom, I darted to my room to dig through the clean-clothes pile for a bra.
“Oh, your ride’s here!” came Laura’s voice, this time muffled from somewhere in the kitchen.
My ride?
I usually biked on Saturdays as my dad had the car with him at work. And then a realization shot through me like an electric charge: What if it’s Kieren?
I whipped my backpack over my shoulders and tripped down the stairs, all while squeezing my feet into my Keds. I could feel my sweaty palms slip-sliding over the banister. A tall silhouette awaited me on the other side of the wavy yellow glass in the front door.
Laura appeared from the kitchen, a brown paper bag in her hand with a Pop-Tart–sized rectangle wedged inside.
“Thank you,” I breathlessly whispered while my shaking hand opened the door, bright sunlight flooding into my eyes and making me feel, for a moment, as though I were entering another portal.
But this was no portal. This was real life—my real life now, as I must have wanted it to be. Because in front of me stood Brady, a smile as wide as Texas on his lips.
“Hey, beautiful,” he said.
“Hi,” I stuttered, my brain frantically trying to make sense of why he was here. Were we friends? Did he give me a ride to work on his way to the gas station?
But my questions were answered when he leaned down and kissed me. There was no trace of cigarette smell on his breath, only mint gum. A waft of the lemon-scented detergent his cousin used to use on all his clothes filled my nostrils with a warm, nostalgic sensation. And though my brain had not yet caught up with my body, I found myself kissing him back.
Things end up the way they’re meant to.
Is this what I really wanted all along?
“You ready to go?” he asked, reaching out for my hand.
And having no idea what else I could possibly do, I took Brady’s hand and headed for his car.
° ° °
Brady scrolled through radio stations as he drove, not satisfied with anything. He lingered for a moment on a pop song before changing it again. Meanwhile, I stared out the window, trying to process what was going on, Laura’s breakfast lying unopened by my feet.
Is this what I wanted?
Yes, there had been a time when being with Brady, feeling his soft lips on mine as they had been just moments before and knowing that he truly wanted me back, was all I could think about.
But that was before Kieren had brought me home from Portland and then spent the night holding me in my bed. Before he kissed me, and I realized that all I wanted to do was kiss him back. Before I forgave him for my brother’s accident. In some ways, that was the night my real life had begun. And I hadn’t really thought about Brady the same way since.
The next thought made me squirm a bit in my seat, flustered and grappling with my memories. Because the morning after Kieren and I had spent the night together in my bed, he’d tried to hurl himself in front of the oncoming train. And, pushing him out of the way, I had gone into the train portal instead of him.
I never blamed him for that morning. How could I? It led me to my brother. But is that why we weren’t together now? Was I somehow still resentful of Kieren? Did I still not trust him?
Brady turned the radio off, his hand resting for a moment on my knee before returning to the steering wheel so he could make a left turn.
“You’re being quiet.”
“Am I?” I adjusted myself in my seat, trying to seem more open to him. Whatever had happened between me and Kieren wasn’t Brady’s fault. And though I was dying to scan my phone messages to try to piece together the past year and a half, I also didn’t want to miss this moment to indulge in my current reality: sitting next to Brady, watching the sunlight dapple his brown T-shirt through the windshield.
“I’m just thinking about work,” I improvised. “I’m not sure what I’m teaching the kids today.” Brady laughed. “What?”
“It’s just you usually have it planned out to the second. Isn’t that what the bullet journal was for?” he asked, nodding towards my backpack.
I opened my bag and pulled out a large spiral bullet journal, a picture of Marie Curie glued to the cover. Opening it up, my eyes fell on the inside front cover: “For the smartest girl I know. I love you. Congrats on finishing junior year! Brady.”
Hot blood rushed to my cheeks, both of embarrassment and something else—something like anger. Not at Brady but at myself.
I had been with Brady since at least June?
What the hell had I done to myself? Brady and I had apparently already said “I love you.” What else had we done? I didn’t even know.
Jesus, had we had sex? I had always thought that that was something I wouldn’t do until college. But then again, I had apparently made a whole bunch of choices lately that I hadn’t been expecting.
What other experiences had I robbed myself of?
I tried to calm myself down, suppressing an urge to scream.
There was probably a logical explanation for this. I just needed time to figure out what had gone wrong. Still, every question just created a million more questions, and no one would be able to fill me in on what I had missed. No one except . . . maybe Adam.
If he even made it back alive.
I could feel my breath straining, my fingers clenching. Would I always be on a slightly different path than everyone else? Would nothing ever just feel right?
“What’s that?” Brady asked, his eyes falling on my lap.
“Hmm?” I asked, trying to sound as normal as possible. I realized that, while grabbing the journal, I had also snatched up something else—a stack of papers, now jutting out from beneath Brady’s thoughtful gift. Moving the journal out of the way, I could see words in thick black ink: MIT Admissions. Part One.
Biographical Information.
Sorting through the stack, I saw that I had already filled out the whole first section. There was even a checklist with items such as Transcript, Standardized Test Scores (with “retake?” written beside it), and Letters of Recommendation. Next to the last one, I had scrawled giant red check marks beside the names Mr. Chu and Miss Yawani, my chemistry teacher.
So distracted was I with the forms, I didn’t even notice at first that Brady had pulled the car over. I looked up, expecting to see the small storefront of Kids’ Science Lab, but found instead that we were on the shoulder of the main road, still several minutes from work.
Brady removed his hands from the steering wheel and glared down at the forms on my lap. “I thought you said you weren’t applying there.” His voice sounded tight.
“I—I haven’t. I mean, I haven’t submitted it yet, obviously.”
But his eyes fell on the words written in black Sharpie at the top: Due Jan 12. “That’s due next week. How long have you been working on this?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” he asked incredulously. “Well, it’s obviously been a while. You already got letters of rec and everything.
Were you doing this over Christmas? During your birthday last weekend?”
“I don’t know, Brady. Why are you yelling at me?”
“Jesus.”
Brady sat back and ran his fingers through his hair. I still thought he was one of the most handsome boys I’d ever seen, with his caramel-colored eyes and broad shoulders. Although I guess boy wasn’t really the right word for him now. He was twenty years old. Did he still live with his cousin? Work at the gas station? Was he happier now than he’d been before?
“I’m not yelling, I’m just asking. Because you’ve obviously been working on this awhile, and you didn’t tell me.” He inhaled deeply, and when he let it out, his whole body seemed smaller. “I mean, you said you were going to stay . . .” he said in a very soft voice, looking at his lap. “With me.”
“I—” What could I say? The look of pain on Brady’s face was killing me. First Piper had left him, and now me. Why would I have filled out this application if I’d told him I was staying? “I mean, you knew I’d go to college.”
“Yeah, but you said state school. Or somewhere local.”
“I can’t study robotics at community college, Brady. I mean, not like I could at MIT.”
“State school then.”
“It’s just an application!” I shouted, not sure why I was suddenly so upset. Did I even want to go that far away? I hadn’t been sure before. What had changed my mind?
Brady sat silently, watching the cars go by.
I realized in that moment that what I’d said about MIT was true.
If I really wanted to study robotics, engineering—if I wanted it to be my career—then I couldn’t limit myself to staying here. I had been so afraid for so long to leave my father, to leave the only family I had left. But now that I looked around this town, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that it had brought me nothing but misery.
We were less than a mile from the train that had killed Robbie the first time, a few hundred feet from the ice cream parlor where I’d run into Kieren last year and he’d walked right by me. And now? Now I had a boyfriend who I couldn’t even remember my first real kiss with. The more I thought about it, the more I knew that I wanted to get the hell away from this place. Get on one of those dream-chasing trains to the coast and never look back.
“Why did it have to be Boston?” Brady asked.
“Because that’s where the school is.”
“No.” Brady laughed, shaking his head. “That’s not it. You’re going to live with them, aren’t you?”
“Them?”
“You know what I mean,” he shouted, looking right into my eyes now. “You’re going to live with your brother . . . and Piper.”
I stared at him, my voice choking in my throat. Robbie and Piper? They lived together in Boston?
It was just as she had always wanted, just like she had talked about that night when she’d asked me if I would live with them by the sea. It looked like maybe Piper had gotten her color-coded boxes all in a row after all.
“I would live with my aunt Amalia,” I protested, but it came out a beat too late to be convincing.
Brady put the car back in gear. “You’ll be late for work.” He didn’t say another word while he drove the rest of the distance.
And neither did I.
Chapter Twelve
I stared breathlessly at the parade of images before me, cowering deeper under the tent of covers that I had propped up to protect myself. Somehow I had known that I would need a barrier from the world, that whatever my computer was about to show me would feel like arrows attacking me from all sides. As it turned out, my comforter was not enough to shield me.
The first image of Kieren on Instagram was one that his girlfriend, Stephanie, had tagged him in. So he was still with Stephanie, but this time, the pictures only went back about six months. In the most recent photo, dated just two weeks ago, she was standing next to him in a field, and he was wearing a camouflage army uniform in desert beige. “So proud of my BF! Finished basic training today!” she had captioned it.
More pictures of them followed—date night at the movies; her BFF’s birthday party at a bowling alley; just Kieren, taken from her perspective sitting opposite him, paddling a canoe up a beautiful, sunlit river.
And then, working backwards in time, on his page: “First day of basic,” with the hashtag #GoROTC. In another of his photos, he was sitting at a large library table with books on chemical engineering splayed out in front of him. The caption: “They said college would be easy!”
I wasn’t surprised, to be honest. His dad was a real jarhead, having served in the Marines after high school. He had never lost the close-cropped military haircut or stern demeanor that had always terrified me when I was a kid. I had expected Kieren to follow in his dad’s footsteps, football and pride in service being the two religions in the Protsky household.
The pieces of the puzzle began to come into place: the Reserves were paying for Kieren to go to the state college, about half an hour away. Before that, though, he had helped out for a few months at his dad’s store, and that’s where he had met Stephanie.
The only part I couldn’t figure—the part that I was most afraid to find out—was why I wasn’t in the picture.
I scrolled desperately through my text messages, looking for clues. Right after the night we came back to this new reality, there had been a spattering of messages: Meet me at my place and Did you say 7:00 or 7:30? After that, very few texts passed between us for about five months, either because we weren’t speaking or because we were together and therefore didn’t need to text.
Then, almost a year ago, the messages started up again: Miss you tonight, I had written. And two days later, from Kieren: Miss you too. Then a few days later, from me: Why aren’t you answering? And Kieren’s reply: Studying. Call u later.
A week of nothing followed.
Then a message from me, sent at one thirty in the morning: Is this really what you want? No reply came.
The last exchange was from eight months ago. Kieren had written, Got your message. Don’t know what to say. I had written back, I’ll always love you. No matter what.
That was the last message.
I closed the computer, shut down the phone, and pushed both devices out of my cocoon of covers. A pervading blackness took the place of all the artificial light they had been providing. And in that darkness, I balled myself up like a seashell and cried myself to sleep.
° ° °
“Marina?”
I was still enveloped in my sheets, and the voice floated to me in muffled waves. A moment of panic gripped me as I suddenly came to consciousness and couldn’t remember what day it was, or even what reality.
“Marina?” my father gently called again.
I flung off the comforter and found him sitting on the edge of my bed, a mug of coffee in his hands that read, “Engineers unscrew things.” It had been my Christmas present to him two years ago.
“What time is it?” I asked with a jolt.
“Nine o’clock.”
“School,” I muttered, wiping my eyes.
“Honey, it’s Sunday.”
“Mmm.” My brain finally began coming to. I sucked in my dry lips to wet them and sat up more fully. “Is something wrong?”
“No.” My father smiled. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t wait for you to wake up. These were posted last night.”
He held up his phone, but my eyes weren’t awake enough yet to focus on the screen. Numbers, columns, something important-looking. I reached for my dad’s mug and took a sip, blanching at the bitter taste of unsweetened coffee. “Dad, sugar. Seriously.”
“It’s your new SAT scores.” He smiled wider, a barely contained enthusiasm seeping into his voice.
SATs? I remembered that I had written the word retake next to that item on my checklist. Guess I hadn’t been happy with my first results. In my old reality, I had taken the test once in October, and my score had seemed good enough to me.
But now, there was apparently more at stake.
My stomach suddenly balled up, and a burp got lodged somewhere in my esophagus. The coffee mug turned slippery in my palms, and I put it down on my bedside table, swallowing repeatedly. “I can’t read, just tell me.”
“Fifteen-forty,” my dad said, beaming, turning his phone back towards him and toggling to another screen.
“What does MIT require?” I asked, thinking ahead.
“Fourteen-ninety minimum, see?” Dad turned the phone to me again, having already anticipated the question and brought up the correct screen. “You’re in, kiddo. You did it.”
“Dad, you don’t know that. Test scores are just one element.”
“You’re gonna get in, I can feel it. I texted your brother. He was so excited.”
“You told Robbie? Dad, you gotta give me a minute here.”
“I’m sorry, I’m too excited.”
I hadn’t seen my dad like this in years. He was giddy, like a kid just about to pull into the Disneyland parking lot. Despite my apprehension, I couldn’t help but get excited too. Maybe it was just his energy rubbing off on me. I was proud of my accomplishment, but I hadn’t even had a moment to process any of this.
It was like, overnight, my life had been decided for me. I would go to Boston and live with Robbie. With Robbie and Piper, I corrected myself. In my old reality, I hadn’t been sure what I had wanted. Hell, in my old reality, I had just wanted to feel alive again.
Is this what feeling alive was like? Having life come barreling at me like, well, like a train rushing towards a station? But I hadn’t even gotten a chance to choose where the train was going. Was I ready to leave my old life behind? Leave Kieren to the course he had set for himself, one that clearly didn’t include me in any way?
And leave Brady? Just like Piper did.
“Were you studying last night?” Dad asked, eyeing my computer on the floor.
“Kind of.”
“Oh, hey, how’s that Genghis Khan paper going?”
