YesterWorld (Book 2 of the Down World Series)

Original Edition: Chapter Nine

"I should have kissed you back...when we were in the lake."

            I blinked my eyes several times, clearing away the residual yellow light that always lingered a moment too long after entering Down World. I took a deep breath and got my bearings.

            I was in Brady's Pontiac, sitting in my driveway. My mother's photo album was resting in my lap. My fingers traced the scalloped edges of the thick paper stock that overflowed from the book, and I dared myself to do what I was dying to: look into Brady's eyes.

            He still looked tired, of course, just like he had at the gas station. But this was a different tired altogether. The eighteen-year-old boy in front of me was tired from a long drive and from frustration—he had just seen Piper holding Robbie's hand. But that kind of tired would pass.

The man he would become, the one I saw in the gas station the day before, just looked bored and defeated, like life had been wearing him down so long he no longer even tried to get back up.

            Looking at Brady now, all the memories came rushing back.

            Brady who'd given me half a jelly doughnut the first time I met him, powdered sugar still rimming his upper lip like a milk moustache.       

            Brady who'd held my hand the first time he had led me down into the boiler room.

            Brady whose idea of how to break into a building was simply to grab a rock and smash in the window.

            And Brady who'd gently kissed the top of my head when I was passing out in his lap after having an allergic reaction to the vaccine pellet in the underlake world.

            He was real and beautiful and in front of me again, staring deeply into my eyes and telling me that he should have kissed me back in the lake all those months ago, when he had kept his distance because he still believed that Piper was out there in the world somewhere, loving him back.

            I remembered this scene from the first time I had lived it. I had been embarrassed and stuttering, feeling guilty because Kieren was waiting for me at the house. That day, I had told Brady to drive to Colorado, knowing that if my plan worked, the world would mold itself to a new reality while he drove; that by the time he reached Boulder, Piper would have forgotten all about her fling with my brother Robbie, and she would be back in his arms.

            I had wanted to give him that as my last present to him, my farewell gift.

            But what had it gotten him?

            The Brady that I met at the gas station was miserable and alone, his heart broken by Piper. But in that reality, he didn't even know why. Would he have been happier if he'd known the truth?

            I knew that I would have been. If I'd been him.

            The first time I'd lived through this conversation in the car with Brady, I'd known what I really wanted to do. But I had been too young and insecure, too guilty to take something that didn't feel like it was mine to take. I was a kid, after all. Sixteen years old. My heart was breaking that day, the precarious plan to save my brother and close the portal to the underlake world hanging in the balance, and Brady's handsome face inches away and a million miles away all at once.

            But now I wasn't a kid anymore.

            It was time to admit something to myself: I didn't have to come back to this moment with Brady. Adam had just said "a moment about two hours before the event." I could have gone back to a moment at Kieren's house. I could have gone back to seeing the Mystics at the Old Grounds, where we had been just prior. But no, I had picked this moment.