“Got hung up at work.”
She didn’t stop scrubbing, and so I grabbed my backpack to leave. “I’m gonna go do my homework.”
“Oh,” she suddenly said, her mind landing on something that seemed to surprise her. “I’m sorry. How was your first day?”
“Fine,” I said, maybe a bit too robotically.
“Homework already?”
“Yeah, already.”
“Jeez.”
I could feel the impulse in her to get back to work, as though she were weighing how long she had to feign interest before she could be dismissed.
“Okay, I’m gonna get started, then,” I said, still standing above her.
“Okay, honey.” She turned back to her scrubbing. “Dinner in an hour.”
“Thanks, Mom.” I stood there for a beat, watching her. She was starting to look thin across the shoulders, and her unruly hair had all but escaped the overstretched hairband that had at one point held a ponytail. It was hard to believe that there was a time when she could have won a Salma Hayek look-alike contest. That’s what she’d looked like when she met my Irish Catholic dad, while working as a temp at the hospital where he was a computer tech.
She stopped scrubbing and looked up at me, her eyes momentarily dead before she caught herself and forced a smile.
I forced one back.
I hate her, I thought. I hate her when she’s like this.
“See you at dinner.” I all but ran from the kitchen and took the stairs two at a time, the world turning to a blur until I could be alone in my room.
CHAPTER 2
It was a stupid crush, really. Brady Picelli. The kind of crush that you can’t even think about in public because you’ll start giggling and everyone will know. But I couldn’t shake it. I found myself looking for him every day for the first few months of school, doing a double take when I saw someone with a similar haircut or jacket in a distant hallway. I saw him only twice, both times in school assemblies, but way on the other side of the bleachers. Brady was a senior, so his classes were all in the maroon wing, and mine were in the olive.
I looked for him anyway. Maybe I was just lonely.
I have to admit, I didn’t make very many friends in those first few months. The kids who remembered me from elementary school and who knew about Robbie looked at me like I was cursed, if they noticed me at all. Usually people acted like the dead-brother bad luck might rub off on them if they made eye contact.
The others just resented me. Everybody in town knew that the kids from St. Joe’s thought they were better than the kids from East Township. Which was true, of course. They really did think that.
Sometimes I’d see my old friends in the hallways and we’d half nod to each other. Holland Pfeffer, who had always been a little pushy, was now a cheerleader with a perma-scowl. She looked down whenever I passed her, and once in the cafeteria, I heard her telling a tall girl in purple glasses about my dead brother, and giggling into her palm.
By the time Christmas vacation came, I had basically given up. I spent the two-week break at home, reading Kurt Vonnegut novels alone in my room, while my father paced the hallway and occasionally asked if “things were cool.” Yes, they were, I assured him through the closed door. Though I doubt I was very convincing.
In January I turned sixteen and my dad took me for my driving test. But I hadn’t been practicing at all, and I failed the written exam.
“We’ll try again next month,” he suggested.
“It’s fine, Dad.”
Honestly, I didn’t really want to drive. I had nowhere I needed to be.
And maybe that’s why, when I finally did hear Brady’s voice coming from the art room sometime in February, I had to stop in the hallway and listen. I had been looking for him for so long, I had started to wonder if I had imagined him. But if I had known what was going to happen next, maybe I would have just kept walking.
Brady sounded angry—that was the first thing I noticed. Or maybe just scared, an oxymoron that didn’t coalesce with my idea of the cool guy I had met that first day. If I had to guess, I would have almost said he was pleading with someone. The other voice belonged to a girl—a raspy voice with more than a touch of sadness to it.
Walk, Marina, I told myself. Don’t let him catch you standing here. He’ll think you’re a stalker.
But who was I kidding? I wasn’t going anywhere, not until I had heard what they were saying. I wasn’t eavesdropping, I told myself; just checking to make sure he was okay. I would do the same for any friend.
Only snippets of the conversation came to me. The girl saying, “They’ll find me. They’ll look for me.” Brady then reassuring her, something like, “It’s the only way.” Or maybe it was, “It’s the lonely way.” Then a moment later, the girl: “What if they go back to DW?” And Brady: “Then it will be over. And you can come home.”
The initials DW stuck out to me, because I had seen them before. They were carved into a desk in my social sciences class, deeply etched as though someone had done it with a pocketknife. I figured they were the initials of someone’s ex-boyfriend or something. But then, in the cafeteria, at the edge of the stage, I noticed someone had written in black Sharpie, Going down, down, down, to DW. So apparently DW was a place.
The shriek of the bell caught me completely unprepared, and I realized I was alone in the hallway. Just one more second, I kept thinking. Then I’ll go to my class on surrealist fiction. I pressed up against the wall to keep listening.
But then I recognized the thudding feet of the hall monitor coming my way. I ducked into the nearby handicapped bathroom and waited for what seemed like an eternity before I could clearly hear his footsteps receding.
When I stepped back into the hallway, I realized I could no longer hear Brady and the girl. I whipped around just in time to see them heading for the front of the school, his hand gently resting on her back. She was a tall, thin girl with long brown hair, and despite the circumstances, I couldn’t help but feel a crushing jealousy of her—of her long legs and tiny waist. She was a good three inches taller than me and was wearing what appeared to be designer jeans and a fitted suede jacket.
I remained flattened against the wall until they turned the corner.
Okay, I figured. Now I’ll go to class. But when my feet started moving, it was towards Brady, and the parking lot.
I watched from a window, until I saw them get into a beat-up old Pontiac and drive away. They made a left out of the lot, and then a right onto Clark Street. And since Clark Street dead-ended about a quarter mile from the school, there was only one place they could have been heading: the old train station.
I don’t know why I did it. It wasn’t like me. I was a good Catholic girl. But it was the last class of the day, and if I went back in now, I’d just get written up.
Maybe I knew in my gut something was wrong, because nothing good ever happened at the train station.
After all, that’s where Robbie was killed.
I hadn’t been to the station since Robbie’s “accident,” which was the word my parents used to describe the night Kieren apparently pushed him in front of the train. The word accident always had a certain weight to it whenever they said it—a weight that said, in no uncertain terms, that they believed Kieren had done it on purpose.
Straddling my frozen bike on the sidewalk across from the station, spying on Brady and the girl as they sat in the parked Pontiac talking, I couldn’t help but let my eyes drift down the tracks a bit, towards the part where Robbie was hit, and farther down, to the place where Kieren had made me that flattened penny as the commuter train brought workers home from Proxit Tech. That train didn’t even run anymore. Since Proxit Tech closed, they shut down the commuter line, and guys like my dad had to start driving to work.
Now only the long-distance lines came through the station: one heading west towards Oregon, I be
lieved, and the other one heading east. I had no idea where that one ended up, but I liked to imagine New York City. They were both dream-chasing trains—the kind you get on when you have no intention of ever coming back.
The station looked abandoned now, the white paint muted and chipping, the weeks-old snow that clung to the roof gray from the exhaust of passing cars. The ivy that adorned the walls had died at some point, and the city had removed all the other plants and trees—I guess because they weren’t worth the upkeep. A vending machine had been placed outside, the word TICKETS handwritten across the top.
Brady and the girl finally stepped out of the Pontiac and bought one of those vending-machine tickets. It was hard to tell from where I was standing, but the girl’s face looked numb and distant, as though she had been crying for hours. Brady put his arm around her shoulders and she buried her head in his chest.
They stood that way for a long time, and while I knew I should probably go, my feet felt locked in cement. It was like a foreign film. I didn’t understand the language, but somehow I couldn’t turn it off.
Finally, after about fifteen minutes, the train came. The westbound train. It screeched to a halt and when it pulled away a minute later, only Brady was standing there. I watched him walk to his car and drive away. I had no idea what time it was, but the sky had turned quite dark. If I had to guess, I’d say maybe 4 p.m. It was official. I had cut school.
I wouldn’t be able to take the path that ran along the tracks back to my house, as it was probably coated in a sheet of winter ice. I’d have to take the main road, behind Brady. I waited another fifteen minutes, turning my back to the wind and rocking slightly against the chill. Only one car passed.
I couldn’t wait anymore. Pretty soon I’d barely be able to see the road, and I wasn’t wearing any reflective clothing. I’d have to think up a story to tell my mother about where I’d been after school. I pedaled harder and harder while I thought, the blood rushing through my limbs and finally warming me up. I turned in to my neighborhood of small, identical houses, cold and hungry, anxious to be home.
I wondered where the girl was going to end up, on that train. Did it really go somewhere like Oregon? I imagined her drinking coffee in the rain, my knowledge of Oregon admittedly limited.
It was at this point the headlights first lit up my path, from a car behind me. Someone coming home from work, I figured. I pulled over to the edge of the road to give him room, but he stayed behind me. I turned right onto my street, and the car followed suit, driving slowly. Too slowly. As though he didn’t want to pass me. As though he was following me.
I biked onto my driveway and fumbled with the keypad that opened the garage door. I didn’t dare turn around to see if he was still there. But after the whir of the opening garage door subsided, I could hear it—the faint hum of an engine. A big engine, the kind they put into great old American cars. Like Cadillacs and Broncos. And Pontiacs.
I pulled the bike into the garage. I didn’t turn around. I remained frozen there, like a child who thinks that if she keeps her eyes closed, the monsters under her bed won’t be able to get her.
A moment later, I heard the tires screech down my road. I looked up in time to see the now-familiar taillights of Brady’s car reach the end of my street and then drive away. So he knew I had followed him. And he would obviously be furious with me, prying into his business.
What the hell had I done?
Sitting on the school bus the next morning, staring out at the rain, I felt a great welling emptiness in the pit of my stomach. My palms were damp and I kept forgetting to breathe. I realized I was afraid, terribly afraid for reasons that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Yes, I was afraid that Brady would hate me. But it went deeper than that.
I couldn’t get my mind off that girl on the train. She didn’t have any luggage. Not even a toothbrush. And she was alone—only slightly older than me, and alone. Did she have any money? How would she eat? Where would she sleep? What was so awful here that she couldn’t face it?
I wasn’t sitting in my usual place on the bus, and my eyes fell on an etching in the leather of the seat in front of me—DW I’ll never tell.
“What is DW?” I said aloud. The girl sitting next to me, who was scribbling out the answers on a homework sheet she clearly was supposed to have finished the night before, glanced at me sideways for a second.
“I mean,” I stammered, trying to make it seem normal that I was talking to myself, “like, do you know?”
She just shrugged, then slid farther away from me on the seat.
I buried my head, trying to hide inside my hoodie for the rest of the ride.
When we got to school, I kept my head hung low in the universal “I’m not really here” gesture I had picked up since the fall, but I didn’t make it far.
A hand grabbed my wrist before I’d gone ten feet and dragged me out of the hallway, through a door I had never noticed before. The hand belonged to Brady, and when I realized this, I could feel a fresh coat of sweat forming in my palms. The anticipation of him screaming at me, demanding to know why I had followed him, was too painful to handle. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but think that here we were, ducking into a hidden door and up a short flight of stairs together.
His hand on my wrist was colder than I remembered from that first day when he had led me to class, and he was tugging with no regard for whether or not he might be hurting me, which he was. At the top of the five or six stairs, he opened a door labeled DARKROOM and closed it behind us. The room was, as the sign had promised, quite dark, with only a red light illuminating a bunch of photography equipment and some trays of developing solution. Black-and-white photos hung from clothespins on a line, most of them out of focus.
I was out of breath and shaking. I could barely look him in the eye and instead stared at the ground by his feet.
“Brady, I’m sorry—”
“Be quiet.” He looked around the room for a moment, to be sure no one was there, I assumed. He was angry. That much was clear. His breathing was heavy and overly regulated, like he was trying not to scream. “Did you get a good show yesterday?”
“I wasn’t—I didn’t mean to . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know what to say. I had followed him and spied on him. I had seen something personal, something I clearly wasn’t meant to see. There was nothing to say about it. It was a stupid thing to do. “I’m sorry.”
“That was none of your business,” he almost spat at me.
“I know.”
“You don’t know. You could get hurt.”
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I didn’t know she was going to get on the train.” He glared at me through the darkness in the room, and I knew I was only making things worse.
He sat down on the edge of the table and stared at me for what felt like an eternity. As my vision adjusted, I could see that his deep-set eyes looked haunted and tired. I wondered if he had slept at all. And the thought of him sleeping made me wonder what kind of house he lived in, what kind of bed he slept in. Who were his parents? Were they still together?
“This is serious. You could get hurt,” he repeated. “Is that what you want?”
“No.” My voice was barely a whisper. “It’s okay.” I choked back the fear and dared to look at him.
“You can never tell. You have to promise me.”
“I won’t, I promise.”
Secrets. That’s what this was all about. That girl on the train held them, and so did Brady. Well, I knew all about secrets. The way my parents never talked about my brother anymore. The way his memory hung over our house, over our kitchen. I’ll never tell, I thought to myself. And I couldn’t figure out right away why the phrase seemed so familiar. And suddenly it came to me—DW I’ll never tell.
“Is this about DW?” I asked.
He leaped at me then. He was so quick, I didn�
��t even see him leave the table.
Suddenly he was hovering over me. Brady was much taller than I was, and I felt like a child when he stood next to me like this. A child who had done something very, very wrong.
“Don’t ever mention that!” he screamed. His hands grasped my upper arms so tightly that his nails clawed into my skin. It hurt, but I didn’t want to pull away. His face was inches from mine.
“Okay.”
“Ever!”
“Okay.” I was scared. Scared of Brady, scared of what I had said.
“It’s okay, Brady,” came a voice from out of nowhere. A voice belonging to someone neither of us had been aware was in the room. And out of the shadows stepped a face I knew quite well. Or at least, a face I had once known. The face belonged to Kieren.
Brady, shocked by the sudden intrusion, let go of my arms and seemed to stumble away from me. It was as if the words had hit him with a physical force. His tone changed, and his whole body seemed smaller.
“What are you doing here?”
“Developing film.” Kieren nodded behind him. “What are you doing here?”
“She followed me yesterday. She knows.”
Kieren turned to me, still cool. His voice had changed so much since I’d last heard it. He sounded almost like a man, his tone creamy and low, dipping at the ends of sentences. I wondered if he had been smoking cigarettes. I knew he was a skateboarder, and that seemed like something a boarder would do. Kieren’s mother was a cancer survivor, I remembered. Breast cancer.
There was some secret communication going on between Kieren and Brady—who I hadn’t even realized knew each other—that chilled me to the bone.
“Is that true, M? What do you know?” Kieren calling me by my old nickname brought a pang into my throat—a pang of memory and of loss. Only he and my brother had called me M. And no one had done so since the accident.
“Nothing,” I insisted, though my voice broke in the middle. “I don’t know anything. I just saw the girl get on the train.”
Down World Page 2
