Down World, Rebecca Phelps [book recommendations based on other books .TXT] 📗

“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.”

“She’s going to ask a million questions,” insisted Brady.

“I’ll handle this,” Kieren said, still not showing any emotion. “You should go.”

Brady, to my shock, nodded and left the room. What was happening here? Brady taking directions from Kieren struck me as bizarre. The balance of power seemed off somehow. And besides, what were they even talking about? A million questions about what?

“I’ll walk you back to class, M.”

“Kieren, what is going on here?” It still felt odd to look Kieren in the eyes. It was like both a hundred years and no time at all had passed in the same instant.

“Nothing. He’s overreacting. His girlfriend went to visit a friend and didn’t tell her parents first.”

I nodded. That explanation almost seemed to make sense. Almost. Until I started to think about it, and I realized that it left too many questions unanswered. What was DW? Why did she look so scared? And why did Brady? But something deep down told me that I shouldn’t let on to Kieren that I had any doubts about his story. Something was going on here, something that I wasn’t supposed to know about. You could get hurt. That’s what Brady had said. Hurt by what?

“That’s all you need to know, okay?” Kieren was already grabbing his bag from a nearby table. “Come on.”

I hesitated for a moment. I didn’t know why at first, but then I realized it was because I was still a little afraid of Kieren. Afraid that my parents would find out I was talking to him. Afraid that he could hurt me. Because of Robbie. Because of what he had done to Robbie.

Kieren put one hand on the door handle and reached out the other for mine. “Let’s go, M.”

I swallowed hard in order to find my voice. “I can walk by myself.”

He eyed me for a moment, and the darkness in the room obscured his expression just enough that I couldn’t read it at all. Maybe I was being ridiculous. Maybe everything my parents had told me about Kieren, about what had happened that night, was a lie. But maybe it wasn’t.

He stepped out of the way and I walked past him. I almost tripped down the stairs and didn’t feel normal again until I was back in the bustling hallway, all alone in the oblivious crowd.

CHAPTER 3

I was twelve years old when Robbie died. He was fourteen.

That year, Robbie and Kieren would always wait for me after school so we could bike to meet our dads at the train station. I always got a little rush of excitement when I saw them by the bike rack, like they were springing me out of jail.

We felt like royalty then. The coffee-cart girl smiled when she saw us. All Robbie had to do was tell her she was pretty, and she’d blush and toss us some Werther’s candies. All the girls loved Robbie, even if they were too old for him. He had a way of noticing details about you, of really looking at you, that made you feel like you were the only person in the world.

Kieren was the opposite. He barely spoke at that time, but when he did, it was usually to say something that he had considered quite carefully. I didn’t understand Kieren for a long