I was back in that dark little room below the school. Brady had slumped down against the wall, his head in his hands. He was waiting for me.
I took a moment to catch my breath. What had just happened? An illusion? A dream?
“Is it real?” I asked Brady.
“Do you want it to be?”
I realized I was still holding the egg timer in my suddenly clammy palm, its slight ticking echoing in my ears with the intensity of a telltale heart. Brady didn’t seem to notice, however, his eyes remaining focused on mine.
I slid the timer into my pocket, still trying to process that I had brought it back with me from the other side. I had to go home. I had to see if it was really missing from my mother’s kitchen. I started backing away from Brady.
“Marina,” Brady said, quite calm. “About Piper . . .”
“What about her?” I asked, still backing away.
“You can’t tell anyone about her. If you do, it’ll lead back to this place. And if people find out about this place . . . if the world finds out . . .”
“Brady, you’re scaring me.”
“She’ll come back on her own. I know she will. I know Piper.”
The egg timer was still ticking, and it seemed to be growing louder. I felt dizzy, the sound echoing around me. I realized that I could still smell bacon on my shirt. I scooped up the timer and dropped it in my backpack, trying to hide it away.
“I have to go home,” I almost whispered.
“Marina, promise me . . .”
I didn’t want to hear it. I kept climbing, up the stairs, out of that little tent and through the science lab. I ran and ran, down the hallway and away from that terrible dark little boiler room. I wouldn’t stop until I was back up in the school, and then out of the school, through the front door, onto my bike, and home again.
The final bell rang as I was emerging from the boiler-room door, so I easily lost myself in the gathering crowd of people. I weaved in and out of their heavy backpacks and overstuffed coats.
“Where you goin’, Marina?” called a girl I recognized from my chemistry class. Christy or Kirsty. I turned quickly to find her in the crowd and waved. She looked concerned.
“I—I gotta go,” was all I could muster before running off again.
“You okay?” she called after me as I ran.
I pretended not to hear her. I had to get home again. I had to see if it was gone from the kitchen.
I brought back an egg timer, I thought.
What did Piper McMahon bring back?
CHAPTER 5
I pedaled so hard the chain on my bike started to rattle and I was afraid it would fall off. I slowed down a bit, not wanting to be delayed by anything. But then my mind would start to race again and my feet would pump even harder, and soon the chain would be rattling again.
The farther I got from the school, the more the whole thing felt like a dark and twisted dream. That room hadn’t been real. Of course it hadn’t.
Robbie and I had seen a magic show once with my parents, one with all sorts of classic illusions—making a bunny disappear; sawing a woman in half. On the drive home, I think Robbie could tell how freaked out I was. I kept imagining the sword slicing through the woman’s body and the look on her face while the magician did it—she was smiling. So obviously it wasn’t real. Right?
“It wasn’t real, you know,” Robbie had whispered into my ear on the drive home. My parents were talking quietly in the front seat. “He didn’t really saw her in half.”
“Well, I know that,” I said. But I didn’t, really. I saw the sword go through the box. I saw the man pull the box apart into two sections. That woman’s body was ripped in two. Her feet still dangled out of the end. I knew it was a trick, of course. But I didn’t see how it could be.
“How does it work?”
“Mirrors.”
“What about them?”
“They just use mirrors. Everybody knows that.” Robbie turned back to the window.
And I realized that he didn’t really know the answer either. He knew mirrors were involved, but he didn’t understand how any more than I did.
Still, the answer satisfied me. She wasn’t ripped in two. Because mirrors. That was all I really needed to know.
Once again, Robbie had made everything seem all right.
I was still thinking about that magic trick when I pulled my bike into the driveway and dropped it off to the side of the garage so I could run into the house.
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, her pen hovering over a half-written shopping list. She had her head resting in one hand and she looked even more tired than usual. She seemed shocked to see me.
“Hey. You’re home early.”
“School let out,” I said, probably a little too enthusiastically. I tried to dial the volume down a notch. “I’m just gonna get a snack.”
“Okay.” My mom turned back to her list. The great thing about having a depressed parent was that they didn’t notice too much.
I gulped down a deep breath and searched the counter for the egg timer, fully expecting to find it there, just like normal. And yet . . .
“Where’s the egg timer?”
“Hmm?” my mother grunted while writing something on her list.
“Isn’t there usually an egg timer here? Where’s the egg timer?”
“Do you need to time something?” my mother asked, still disinterested. “Use the app on your phone.”
“I—I need it for school. What happened to it? It’s usually right here. Did it . . .” I could barely finish the sentence. I had to gulp down some spit and start over. “Did it disappear?”
I could feel my cheeks getting hot. The room started to spin. I looked over at the stovetop, the very place where my mother had been making bacon just a short while before. I could still smell it if I closed my eyes.
“Of course not. It’s right . . .” My mother examined the counter. “Um, it should be right there. Look behind the flour.”
I looked behind the flour, and behind the sugar. Soon I was furiously pushing aside everything on the counter, but it wasn’t there.
“Did you find it?”
I clutched my backpack to my chest. And there it was—tick tick tick. The only egg timer in this kitchen was the one I had brought from school.
“Found it,” I stated flatly, inhaling a sharp gulp of air. “Excuse me. I’ll go do my homework.”
I ran upstairs as fast as my legs could carry me and sat on my bed. Okay, don’t panic, I thought. There has to be an explanation.
And then it hit me.
Kieren.
Kieren knew. Of course he did. It was Kieren in the darkroom. And something that hadn’t made any sense at the time seemed to come to light. Kieren had told Brady to leave, and Brady had. Brady’s just a soldier in this thing. It was Kieren who pulled the strings. It was Kieren who was in charge.
The idea of Kieren as a master manipulator made perfect sense to me. He’d manipulated Robbie, hadn’t he? He’d taken Robbie to the train station that night.
That horrible little boy. That’s what my mother had called him.
What if she was right? Kieren had made Robbie disappear, and now Piper McMahon. Maybe Kieren was a monster after all.
No, stop, I told myself. Don’t think that. I walked over to my chest of drawers, took out my old childhood diary, and removed the flattened penny from the sewn-in pocket in the back, where it had lain all these years. I stroked it between my fingers, feeling its sharp edges.
This will protect you, Kieren had said to me. He was my protector, not my enemy.
One thing was clear: whatever was going on, whatever was happening under the high school, and whatever it was that had made Piper McMahon get on that train, Kieren must have known all about it.
I put the penny into my
pocket, and I immediately felt better. Like those kids at my old Catholic middle school who carried St. Anthony around with them and were convinced they would never lose anything as a result, I resolved to always keep the penny with me, to feel that much closer to the safety it was meant to provide.
And then I knew what I had to do.
The wind swirled my hair into my face, strands getting trapped in my mouth, as I stood at the dilapidated train station the following afternoon. I watched the track, overgrown with weeds, winding its way towards the endless nothing that lay past the borders of this town.
I watched one lone dying flower poking out through the cracks in the sidewalk, swaying in the wind, and I reviewed my list of questions: How does DW work? Is it real? Why was Robbie in my kitchen? And what about the egg timer? And Piper?
I suddenly knew that even if Kieren got the note I’d left in his locker—which was a big if, since I didn’t even know if he was at school today—and even if he came to meet me here like I’d asked, he wouldn’t simply tell me the answers to these questions. A girl had disappeared because of these questions. Kieren had threatened Brady over them. I needed a better plan.
I fought away the chill as I stood there, and started pacing back and forth down the station platform to keep my blood flowing. To a stranger, it must have looked like I was waiting for a train. And for a brief moment, I wished that I were.
“M.”
I whipped around with a gasp.
Kieren looked so different these days, it always took me a moment to recognize him. He really had gotten so tall. And his nose was somehow different—longer. Stronger, I guess. His lips were the same, though: tight and raised a bit on the right side, as though his mouth were asking a question. We both turned to watch the train tracks. Habit, I guess. We knew no train was coming.
“The pavement’s all cracked,” I said, not knowing where to begin.
“Yeah.”
I sniffled then, and realized my nose was running. I wiped it on my sleeve.
“You’re cold. Let’s go in,” Kieren said.
“It’s locked.”
“Oh. Right.”
We stared at the tracks. This was it—it was time to ask him. But now that I had him here, there were a million questions I realized I wanted answered more than the ones about DW. I started to feel light-headed. Being here with Kieren, it was like we had been transported into the past. It was like I could reach into a hole and pull out my memories. Hold them one more time. When I swallowed, I could taste M&M’s.
This was a mistake.
“I know you have questions, M.” I was glad he was talking, so I didn’t have to. “I don’t know what I can tell you.”
“You know about DW—I mean, Down World?”
“Yes.”
“And you know that Robbie is alive down there?
His chin set into a locked position as he wrestled with a thought. “How do you know that?” he finally asked. “What did you do, M?”
I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to get Brady in trouble, but I was tired of lying. I needed to know the truth, and I needed it now.
“Brady took me to the boiler room.”
“I’ll kill him . . .”
“Robbie was there, Kieren. Robbie was in my kitchen.”
“Look, M, here’s the thing with DW. You have to understand that it’s not real. It’s just, like, a movie or something. A movie with a different ending than the one we’re in.”
“Okay. What does that mean?”
“It means the boy you saw isn’t really Robbie. Or at least, not the one we knew. He’s another version of him. One that doesn’t belong to us.”
I shook my head, not understanding. “He looked real to me. And I was real too. My mother told me to sit and eat.”
“That’s because as soon as you crossed over, she saw you as the Down World version of her daughter. That’s how it works. That way, you never run into the other you or anything like that.”
“Okay. But then what happens to the other version of me?”
“You’re one and the same for a minute. And she reappears when you leave.”
“What if I don’t leave?”
“You have to leave. You can only stay down there for a few minutes.”
“Or what?” I asked. Everything he told me was just raising more questions.
“Enough. That’s all you need to know,” he said in a very final kind of way. I was annoying him, but I wanted to know more. “Just be careful if you choose to go see that Robbie.”
“You visit him there?”
“No.” It was such a short and definite answer, and the coldness of it hit me like a slap. Kieren was staring ahead, not at me. All his warmth seemed to have faded away. “Like I told you, the kid you saw isn’t real.”
I paced for a moment, trying to collect my breath, my thoughts. But I knew already what I was thinking. “But if he came up here? Would he be real if he came up here?”
“You can’t take anything out of DW,” he began before I’d even finished, as though it were a fact he had resigned himself to long before.
“I did.”
Kieren looked at me, and the look in his eyes could only be described as sheer terror. “What have you done?”
“I brought back an egg timer.” I lost my breath for a moment, but collected myself to keep going. “I had it in my hand . . .”
“Where is it?” Kieren suddenly demanded. His eyes grew wide and his mouth clenched. Was he afraid?
“It—it’s in my room.”
“We have to go get it. Now! We have to put it back.”
“Why?”
“Now, M! Grab your bike.”
“Kieren, it’s just a timer,” I insisted. What was going on here? Why was Kieren so afraid?
“M, you can’t take anything out of DW,” he repeated.
“Why not?”
“Because . . . ,” he began, grabbing my frozen bike off the rack and handing it to me. He took his skateboard out of his backpack. “Because then you’ll owe them something.”
He started guiding me towards the bike path then, and my heart froze. Then I’d owe who something?
CHAPTER 6
Two weeks went by and there was still no word of Piper McMahon. Two weeks of sad cheerleaders walking by, of her “Missing” posters starting to fray around the edges, of the evening news moving on to other stories.
I hadn’t talked to Kieren since the day he took the egg timer from me to put back on the other side of the Today door. He had followed me to the end of my street after we’d met up at the train station, careful to stay far enough away that my mother would never see him from our front window. Once I returned with the timer, he had grabbed it and shoved it in his backpack.
“I’ll clean up your mess this time,” he had warned me, “but not again. You understand?”
I asked him then if the Today door always led to my kitchen. He said it didn’t; that there was no way of knowing where you would end up once you walked through. But as long as the timer was somewhere on the other side, it wouldn’t affect us anymore.
I could only nod sadly, painfully aware of how coldly he was treating me. I had wanted to ask him more about the portals, of course, but he rode away before I got the chance.
That felt like a lifetime ago, I realized now as I walked the halls.
Several times a day, my mind would drift to Piper McMahon’s mother. I had never met her, but I knew who she was. I knew what she must have been feeling every day. I knew that moment when she would wake up in the night, and for just a moment she could dismiss it all as a bad dream. Until she remembered that it wasn’t.
In those two weeks, I watched my own mother start to lose her mind. I would come home and find her scouring the internet for a word, a hint, anything she could track down about what had happened to Pipe
r McMahon. It was like she had made Piper into Robbie, and maybe if she could find Piper, then Robbie wouldn’t be . . .
I was a monster. I knew where Piper was—or, at least, I knew where she had gone. And I wasn’t saying anything because Brady had begged me not to. Brady insisted that she would be back, that everything would be okay. Brady made one thing clear—whatever DW was, whatever power it held, it was a million times worse than the suffering of Piper McMahon’s parents.
But was he right? How long was I supposed to wait?
I started averting my eyes every time I had to pass the door to the boiler room. It almost felt like walking past a roomful of ghosts. Like walking past my brother and pretending I couldn’t see him. I knew what Kieren had told me: that the Robbie I saw wasn’t real, that you can’t take things out of DW. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had seen behind the Today door. Robbie had been just feet away from me, eating those eggs at the kitchen table. If I had taken a couple of steps towards him, I could have touched him.
He had been as close to my hand as . . . as the egg timer.
Things couldn’t go on this way. I would need more answers.
I had seen Brady only a handful of times, always walking dead-eyed down a distant hallway. People still avoided looking at me. That girl Christy from chem class—for her name, it turned out, was indeed Christy and not Kirsty—was the only one who was nice to me. We had started sitting together at lunch, and using our free period to study in the east stairwell. She was smart and talkative, and a gifted singer who would sometimes belt out her math answers to the tune of a Broadway melody. A whiz at social media, she had a YouTube channel that had reached ten thousand followers—all strangers—by the time she was twelve. Soon, these study sessions were the only thing getting me through the day.
The rest of the time, I was usually alone. Sometimes it would get to me. I started to feel like I was the ghost. I worried that I was going insane, that I would end up like my mother after a bad day of missing Robbie, cleaning the kitchen on her knees, furiously scrubbing at imaginary stains.
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