Down World

by Rebecca Phelps

This was my only chance. That suitcase was somewhere in the apartment upstairs, and Sage’s keys were surely in her purse. I ran up and grabbed the whole clunky, heavy bag, bolting up the stairs while I frantically searched through her collection of tissues, receipts, and lipsticks.

  I found the keys jangling together at the bottom of the bag and got lucky on the first try as I heard the lock click open.

  Bounding into their apartment, I discovered the suitcase by the bathroom. I knelt down to open it, all while glancing intermittently at the door. How much time before Sage discovered her purse was missing? One minute? Maybe two?

  I opened the suitcase and let the top of it fall back. Inside was a small glass jar, like a beaker, narrow at the top and plugged with a cork, wedged into some Styrofoam padding that had been cut specifically to fit it. A pink solution sloshed around inside. It had a glow about it, an iridescence. I picked it up and stared at it, and I could see the liquid splash against the glass enclosure as my nervous hands shook.

  The footsteps on the stairs were muffled at first, but then I could hear Sage’s bracelets clinking together. She was humming to herself, obviously convinced that she had left her purse upstairs.

  I stood, clutching the beaker to me, and ran for the front of the apartment. There was nowhere to hide, as it was all one large room. I eyed the bathroom furtively, but I knew I’d never get there in time. Instead, I pressed myself against the wall by the door. If she opened it all the way, I would be hidden behind it.

  But when Sage came in, she only opened the door enough to pass through. I was completely exposed behind her. She was distracted, at least, looking around for her purse. So once she was a few feet into the room, I turned and ran out the door. I could sense her spinning to see me.

  “What the—” she started. “Stop! Someone’s in here! Thief! Someone stop her!”

  Luckily, as Sage’s apartment occupied the whole top of the building, there were no other guests nearby to hear her. I flung myself down the stairs, hearing her jewelry clucking like a scared hen behind me.

  I knew she wouldn’t be able to catch me. I ran so fast, the world turned into a blurred soup, and I didn’t stop until I was deep in the woods, halfway to the lake.

  There was only one person who could help me now. One person who might know how to destroy the solution inside the beaker, and that was George. I had no idea if he would do it or not.

  As I ran, the weight of my actions hit me with full force. In a world where Robbie grew up in Portland, thousands of miles away from me, I wouldn’t know Kieren. We were only friends because of Robbie. Without him in our lives, would we have ever even met?

  I wouldn’t have gone to St. Joe’s, which I only did as a reaction to Robbie’s death. Those three years on the hill, my friendship with Lana, reading books under the cypress trees, all gone in a flash.

  I might have still been lost on my first day of sophomore year. After all, the second-year classes were in a completely different part of the school than the first-year ones. So it’s possible Brady still would have helped me find my class, that I would have followed him to the train station that day and that we would have eventually become friends.

  But our trip to Portland? I only went on that trip because of Robbie and my mother’s disappearance. And Brady went because Piper didn’t come back from seeing the Mystics. But with no lake portal to go into, Piper would have come back. She never would have met my brother on that timeless DW train, which he wouldn’t have been on in any event. She and Brady would have gotten back together. They’d be in Colorado by now.

  My whole life transformed before my eyes like a photograph left out in the sun, fading into oblivion. Had I been completely defined by my brother’s death? Who would I be without it? Without Kieren? Games of Monopoly in Kieren’s rec room. Robbie and I breaking into the pyramid house. M&M’s swiped from a vending machine.

  Kieren once said that DW demands a balance. No two versions of the same person can exist at once. A life for a life. He was willing, at one point, to sacrifice himself if it meant saving Robbie.

  Was I willing too?

  “You don’t belong here,” came a man’s voice behind me. I whipped around and saw George approaching from the beach. I stood, clutching the beaker in my arms like a wounded baby.

  George came up and took a closer look at me, seeming to be confused. “Rain?”

  I shook my head. “I’m her daughter. My name is Marina.”

  George seemed to understand immediately. A profound sorrow took over his face. “Why are you here?”

  I held out the beaker, delicately, like an offering in my palms. “Can you help me destroy this?”

  He looked down at the beaker, nodding to himself in a knowing way, and let a silent whistle escape from between his dry lips.

  “Yes,” he said at last.

  “The truth is,” George began, as we sat on log stumps surrounded by a circle of lanterns, “it’s already destroying itself.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s a natural process with radioactive material.” He shrugged, gesturing vaguely to the air. “The nuclei are unstable. Proteins escaping and being repelled. There’s nothing you or I can do about it, really.”

  “But . . . can it still make a portal?”

  “For now, it can. But eventually, as it degrades . . . no.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “A long time,” he said, placing the beaker gently by his feet.

  “So what do we do?” I asked.

  He scratched his head, letting out a deep sigh. “We dig a hole.”

  George popped into his would-be cabin and emerged with two shovels, handing one to me. “Not here,” he said. “In the woods.”

  It took over an hour of digging through moss-covered ground and gnarled tree roots before George considered the hole satisfactory. It was maybe ten-feet deep by then. A bone-chilling cold seeped out of the rock-hard earth that surrounded it. When George finally let his shovel fall to the ground, and indicated to me that I should do the same, I couldn’t hide my relief.

  He gently lowered the beaker, wrapped in a blanket with a long rope tied around it, into the deep hole. He then threw the whole length of cord in after it, and motioned to me to pick my shovel back up. We filled the opening in silence, and George gently patted some ivy back on top of the upturned soil.

  “And now?” I asked.

  “Now I stay, and I watch, to be sure.”

  I nodded, my body all but collapsing with exhaustion.

  “You can go home now, child,” he continued.

  “Home,” I repeated. The word sat like a death sentence, floating in the space between us. There was an old saying: You can’t go home again.

  I started to walk towards the boathouse, but I turned back before I had gone too far. “Do you believe in heaven, George?”

  He continued to stare at the ground, his eyes unwavering. “Depends on your definition of the word, I guess.”

  “A place where we all see each other again.”

  He nodded. “Maybe,” he conceded. “There might be a heaven and there might be a hell. But on this earth, there’s just the choices we make, and the way we live with them.”

  I took a deep breath, steeling myself for what I had to do.

  Leaving George sitting there by the freshly buried beaker, I walked around the back of the boathouse. The brick door was waiting there for me. I slid the coin into the slot and waited for the bricks to melt away into yellow light. And then I walked forward, back into Today.

  EPILOGUE

  Six months passed, and another spring was upon us. I biked to school early every morning so I could feel the cool air tickling my forehead and waking me up to each new day.

  I still didn’t have my license, as I had never gotten around to taking the test again. So every day after school, Dad would ta
ke me to the abandoned field where the old grounds used to be, out by the gas station, to drive the car in loops. I had no trouble mastering parallel parking, but he would often call me out for stopping too suddenly at the makeshift stop signs he had set up.

  “I know you’re anxious to get your license,” he told me one day. “But I think you should practice for a while longer.”

  “No problem, Dad. I’m not in any hurry.”

  “Hey, let’s stop by the drugstore on the way home. I want to get your stepmother an anniversary card.”

  “Okay,” I said, careful to put on the turn signal and look both ways before leaving the lot.

  The town was somehow quieter since I’d gotten back, or maybe it just seemed that way to me. There had never been curfews in this reality, but still the streets felt empty at night. The only exceptions were game nights at the school, when people would hang out in the parking lot until about ten—parents and children—eating takeout and talking about what kind of season the teams were having.

  I would sit with Christy, who was still my best friend. The portals under the school had been bricked up since the previous year, and nobody went down there anymore. It started to seem like a dream I had once had, and sometimes I wondered if I was the only one who had dreamed it.

  But then I’d see a little something, hidden on the bottom of a school desk or etched on the door of a bathroom stall: “Where’d you go, DW?” “I’ve been Down. Have U?”

  We pulled up to the drugstore so my father could pick out a card for my stepmother, Laura. In this reality, they had been married for five years. I was getting to know her slowly, and despite myself, I found that I actually liked her.

  “We should get one for your brother too,” my father said. “He got straight As his first semester at U of Oregon.”

  “I heard. You pick it out, okay?”

  I headed for the magazine rack and I was flipping through something about “miracle skin” when I heard the skateboard scrape across the floor nearby.

  “Not in here, kid!” came the manager’s angry shout.

  “Sorry,” was all the kid said in return.

  I peeked over the magazines to see the top of a head, and I knew it was him. Kieren didn’t know me, of course. I had wanted to tell him a million times about us. We were friends, I wanted to say. We were more than friends. We were almost in love once.

  He caught my eye, and I realized I was staring. I looked away for a moment, embarrassed. He was done with high school now, and I had seen him working at his dad’s cell phone store.

  Where would he go next? To college, maybe? Or to join the military like his father had before him? His parents had never divorced in this reality, the stress of Robbie’s death having never befallen their house. I had seen the whole family together at the high school football games.

  When I looked up from the magazines again, Kieren was gone.

  That night I was on my laptop doing some homework when I heard the beep of a new email. I scrolled over to see it, and I couldn’t help but smile when I saw the name.

  It was from Brady. We’d swapped email addresses after he arrived in Colorado, but I hadn’t heard from him in a while.

  Hey, kiddo.

  Just wanted to see how junior year was treating you. You find your math lab yet? Just kidding.

  Piper and I are loving Colorado. She’s taking some classes. I haven’t found a job yet, but I’m sure I will. I’ve got some leads. The mountains are beautiful. You can see them from our balcony.

  If you’re ever around this way, you should stop by and see us. I think you’d really like Piper. Here’s a pic of us up at a place called Pike’s Peak. It’s amazing up there. You feel like you can fly.

  A picture of Piper and Brady followed, as promised, and they both looked beautiful. Fresh faced and rosy cheeked. The atmosphere up there really agreed with them.

  And here’s a postcard I found at the gift shop. I don’t know why, but it made me think of you, so I wanted to show you the picture. I hope you’re doing good in school. Take care of yourself.

  XO, Brady.

  The picture he’d scanned was one of those postcards I’m sure they sell at every ski resort in the world. It showed a woman standing on a mountain late in the day, her back to the camera, the sun setting before her. She had her arms raised up high above her, the last pink streams of sunlight glowing through her fingers, like she was on fire.

  And just as Brady promised, she looked like she could fly off the mountain. She looked strong. She looked like a warrior.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not exist without the extraordinary community of writers and readers at Wattpad. You discovered my book, you voted for it, you left me thousands of supportive and encouraging messages, and you made me believe in myself and my story. I am profoundly grateful.

  To the nicest group of Canadians a girl could ever hope to meet, the entire team at Wattpad HQ. You plucked my book out of obscurity and selected it as a 2019 Young Adult Watty winner. My wildest dreams have been coming true ever since. I am especially indebted to Deanna McFadden for selecting Down World for publication, and to my brilliant editor, Jen Hale, and copy editor, Sarah Howden. You asked all the right questions and didn’t quit until I found the right answers. The book is infinitely better as a result.

  I wrote Down World in thirty-minute spurts at 6 a.m., while my husband watched over our two kids. Every morning for a year, I’d trudge down the street to the coffee shop, laptop firmly wedged beneath one arm, not sure if anyone would ever read the words I was typing. Thank you to the Aroma Café for making the best muffins—and the strongest coffee—in the world. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for never missing a performance (even when you were the only ones in the theater). And thank you, Steffen, Luna, Levon, and Frenchie, for always believing I could do this.

  About the Author

  Rebecca Phelps is an actress, screenwriter, novelist, and mom based in Los Angeles. She is the cocreator of the website novel2screen.net, which analyzes film and television adapted from other material. Down World, the recipient of a Watty Award for Best Young Adult Fiction, is her first novel. To hear more about the Down World trilogy, follow Rebecca on Instagram @geminirosey, or on Twitter @DownWorldNovel. Happy reading!

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2021 Rebecca Phelps. All rights reserved.

  Published in Canada by Wattpad Books, a division of Wattpad Corp.

  36 Wellington Street E., Toronto, ON M5E 1C7

  www.wattpad.com

  No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the copyright holders.

  First Wattpad Books edition: March 2021

  ISBN 978-1-98936-559-5 (Trade Paper original)

  ISBN 978-1-98936-560-1 (eBook edition)

  Names, characters, places, and incidents featured in this publication are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, institutions, or locales, without satiric intent, is coincidental.

  Wattpad, Wattpad Books, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Wattpad Corp.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request.

  Cover design by Ysabel Enverga

  Cover artwork by © Cosma Andrei via Stocksy and © Joshua Sortino via Unsplash

  Typesetting by Sarah Salomon

  About the Publisher

  About Wattpad Books

  Wattpad Books, a division of Wattpad, is the leader in data-backed publishing. Leveraging billions of daily insights from Wattpad’s global community of 80 million book lovers, Wattpad Books combines the best of art and science, using human expertise and story DNA machine learning technology to identify the trends, voices, and stories that ar
e the future of publishing. By elevating the stories of diverse communities around the world, Wattpad Books is creating new space for writers and fans of every genre.

  Wattpad Books

  A division of Wattpad Corp.

  36 Wellington St. E.

  Toronto, ON M5E1C7

  www.wattpad.com