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

her seat. “Pizza!” she all but shouted, and continued to talk as she walked back out the door. “You must be hungry. There’s plenty to share. Let me just grab my purse . . .” Her voice faded as she turned the corner, without any indication that she was actually going to stop talking.

Brady turned to me. “How did you know her name?”

“She’s an old friend of my mother’s. I met her at Pat’s Diner the day that . . .” I gasped slightly as my mind galloped ahead to the next thought. “The day that my mother disappeared.”

“Did you know Sage was one of the Mystics?”

“No, of course not.” I started to get out of my seat, trying to figure out what Sage and my mother’s disappearance had to do with each other.

“It’s okay,” Brady said, pushing me gently back down. “We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

We could hear Sage returning, still talking. Her voice reminded me of the jangling blue bracelet she had been wearing when I’d first met her: constantly in motion.

“I hope you like pepperoni,” she said as she came back into the room, opening up the box. I looked at Brady, whose eyes were on the pizza, and I realized he was probably starving. I nudged him lightly, realizing that we’d both think more clearly with some food in our stomachs. He grabbed a piece and started wolfing it down. Sage laughed. “Ah, young people. I forgot how you eat.”

Brady laughed too. “Sorry,” he muttered through a full mouth.

“No, it’s nice, it’s nice,” Sage continued. “I just need to save a couple pieces for John. He always eats a big lunch. If he eats after five, he gets heartburn. Should I order another?”

“John?” I asked, and Brady wiped his mouth with a napkin and leaned in a bit. I could have sworn the man she’d been with at the diner had a different name.

“My husband,” Sage continued. “Do you want juice? I have juice.”

“Sage,” I began, looking to Brady for support. I pointed subtly to my pocket, where I had the diary page, and he nodded. “Is this yours?”

“Well, what’s this?” she asked, taking the letter, her voice still jolly and a bit distracted. “Hold on, let me grab my . . .” The sentence simply trailed off as she stood and started pushing things around on a desk. While her back was to us, Brady turned to me.

“When you met her, what did she say to your mom?” he whispered.

I looked over at Sage, whose back was still turned, although she had finally stopped talking. “I don’t know. They talked about something called ‘the old grounds.’ I didn’t know what that meant.”

At this point, we noticed that Sage was still quiet. She was standing at her desk, facing away, holding up a pair of reading glasses with only one stem as she read the diary page. I heard her sniffle, and I stood up.

“Where did you . . . ,” she began, but once again, she let the sentence die.

“Sage?” I asked as I approached her.

“Where did you find this?”

“Behind the boiler room,” I said.

She nodded and finally turned to face us. She had been crying, and made quite a show out of wiping her eyes and grabbing her purse to dig through it for a tissue.

“I haven’t seen this in a long time. I have to find . . .”

“You wrote it?” I asked again.

She stopped messing around with her purse then and simply leaned against the desk. “I was probably your age,” she said. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Ah,” she nodded. “I was a bit older than you, then. Your mother and I were seventeen—it was senior year of high school.”

I stiffened a bit when she mentioned my mother, and I became aware that Brady had stood up beside me.

“You two have been behind the boiler room?” she confirmed, and we both nodded. “And you’ve been down?”

Brady put his hand on my back in the same protective gesture my father always used, and I suddenly felt like a child who was supposed to remain silent while the grown-ups talked. “Yes.”

She chuckled then. “And we thought we were being so smart. We thought when they blocked off all the old science rooms, that it would be over. We should have known. Now you’re showing up in droves . . .”

“In droves?” Brady asked. “Was there someone besides Piper?”

“Just a boy named Adam. But he’s . . . he’s different.”

“Different how?” Brady asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Sage said, distracted again.

“I think it does,” Brady insisted. “I knew Adam. He was a senior when I was a freshman. Do you know where he is, Sage?”

“No.”

“Do you know where Piper is?”

Sage looked at Brady, almost as if seeing him for the first time. “I get it,” she said. “You’re the boyfriend.” She turned to me. “And the two of you thought if you came here, I could help you find her.”

“Can you?” I asked.

“No, sweetheart,” she said, turning kind once again. “Piper was here, but she . . . well, she went down. I tried to talk her out of it, but once you cross the River Styx . . .”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “Down the river?”

“Sorry,” she laughed, shaking her head. “That’s what we used to call it. What do you kids call it now? Down World? That’s cute.”

“So you do know about the portals?” I asked.

“Yes. We discovered them.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me. John. And a few of our friends.”

“You mean my mother, don’t you? Has my mother known about the portals this whole time?”

Sage hesitated only a moment, and then seemed to realize that by hesitating, she had already confirmed it. “Your mother was the first one in.”

“And what about my brother, Robbie? Does she know that Robbie is in there?”

“Yes, she knows. She wrote to me right after it happened.”

“Why?”

Sage looked to Brady, unsure if she should continue.

“He knows everything,” I assured her. “Just tell me.”

“To see if we could find a way