Down World by Rebecca Phelps (best new books to read .txt) 📕

He reached out to wipe them off and I instinctively flinched away from him, more aggressively than I had intended.

“I just wanted to get you out of here.”

“I’m okay.” It was a relief to see how upset he was. It made me realize that somewhere in this strange body before me, maybe my friend was still hiding.

“I would never hurt you.”

“I know that,” I told him, controlling the tears now. Feeling emboldened by his remorse, by how vulnerable he suddenly seemed to me, I took Kieren’s hand. He looked down at our hands and held onto mine so tightly I was afraid he might cut off the blood supply. “Talk to me,” I said, trying to catch his eye. But he kept looking at our hands.

“Brady told you about Piper?”

“It wasn’t his fault. Don’t get mad at him. I made him tell me.”

“Of course,” he said, nodding as if to himself. “You like him.”

I broke away from him then, feeling the blush fill my cheeks despite myself. “What? No, I don’t,” I insisted weakly.

“And so you’re glad Piper hasn’t come back.”

“Of course not. Do you think I’m a monster?”

“No,” he said, looking at me again. “You think I am.”

I shook my head, but I couldn’t deny it. A monster is exactly what I had been told Kieren was for the past three years.

“I’ll tell you more,” he continued. “But not here. Someone else might be coming. Let’s get our bikes. I’ll take you home.”

We walked together down the corridor and up through the boiler room, sneaking out of the gym entrance past a group of sweaty basketball players who were taking a short break by the water fountain. We didn’t say anything to each other the whole time, and yet I felt like we had broken through something. The silence between us seemed comforting, not strained.

Out back, I saw his old Schwinn locked up next to my bike, so they sat side by side. I realized he must have gone home after school and then come back. It was the first time I’d seen him on something other than his skateboard, and I wondered if Kieren had come back here only to look for me. Or had he come for the same reason I had? Maybe he did visit Robbie after all.

I didn’t ask, though. If the answer was yes, I had a feeling he’d tell me in time. We biked alongside each other, able to cut through a nearby park now that the warm spring air had thawed the last of the winter ice. A bloom of pink petals rained down from a row of cherry blossoms, forming a pink sea that lined the path back to my house.

Finally, we got to the end of my street, the same place where he had stopped the last time. We pulled over, our legs straddling our bikes. He stared in the direction of my house. “I can’t go any closer,” he said.

“I know.”

“She still hates me.” I knew he meant my mother. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement, as though he had been in my house over the past few years and knew it to be a fact.

“She hates everything,” I told him, and hearing the words out loud, they sounded very cold and perhaps a little too dramatic. But they were true.

He nodded, still looking at the house. “If she ever hurts you, you come and tell me.”

“She’s not like that. She just . . . she’s sad. I hear her sometimes . . .” It was hard to talk about my mother, but it occurred to me that I had never had the opportunity to tell anyone what it was like to live with her. No one had ever asked. “I hear her in the bathroom crying. Sometimes she just closes her bedroom door. She doesn’t come out. I want to knock. But I don’t.”

“I do care,” Kieren said then. “About Robbie. Of course I care.”

“I know you do. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“I’ve been trying, M, to find a way. A way to get him out of there, but for good.”

The shock must have taken over my face.

“There’s a group of us. We’ve been working on it for a long time. Piper was part of the group. But she acted alone and screwed everything up. We weren’t ready yet.”

“I’m in,” I said. I didn’t even think. “Whatever it is, I’m in.”

Kieren stole one more glance at my house and started to turn his bike around. “You know the pyramid house? On the other side of town.”

“Of course I know it,” I said with a laugh. “You dared Robbie and me to spend the night in it once, remember? What about it?”

“Tell you later,” he said, and then hopped up onto his seat.

“Tell me what later?” I asked. He didn’t hear me, though. He had already ridden away.

The next morning, I was licking the last bit of whipped cream off a stack of blueberry pancakes at Pat’s Diner, my parents both chewing absentmindedly on either side of me, when a woman I didn’t know approached us, staring intently at my mother. She was about Mom’s age, but she somehow seemed younger. Maybe it was the flowing white dress or the long, braided hair falling halfway down her back.

“Rain?” she asked, as she approached the table. She said it like it was a name.

My mother’s eyes opened wide for a moment, then darted back down to the table. She straightened herself up and seemed to shuffle for a moment, so visibly uncomfortable that my dad and I couldn’t help but exchange a glance of concern.

“Ana,” my mother said, revealing her own name. “It’s Ana.”

The woman seemed confused for a moment, but nodded when she took in me and my father—some hidden conversation they were having right in front of us.

“Ana. Of course.” Then she offered my mother a smile that seemed so completely genuine and warm, there was no doubt in my mind