YesterWorld (Book 2 of the Down World Series)

Original Edition: Chapter Twenty-Eight

"Far out," my mom said after a beat. "You look exactly like my abuela."

"Really?" I couldn't help but ask, imagining the great-grandmother in Mexico I had never gotten a chance to meet. I was torn between wanting to stare at my mother and not being able to look at her. It was too surreal, and a part of my brain that had become used to such things simply couldn't handle this level of absurdity.

And the strangest part of it all was that I was mad at her, not for how she would end up treating me so many years down the line, but in this exact moment—I was mad that she didn't immediately know who I was. It was a ridiculous thought, as this version of my mother would never even have me. But still, I wanted to believe that a mother's intuition would somehow at least make her feel warmly towards me. And yet no warmth seemed to radiate from those almond brown eyes.

After all this time, after the year and a half I'd spent in purgatory without my friends, after the horrifying way she'd dismissed me when I met her in that palatial hotel from which she reigned, I think this was the moment that hurt worst of all.

Did I even exist if I could be standing here, face to face with a woman whose DNA made of up half of my body, and she could think I was just some random girl who happened to look like her grandmother?

It was John who broke the awkward moment up by entering the room more fully. At seventeen, he already possessed some of the alpha male swagger that had made all the girls follow him, and I could sense it immediately. It was some sort of pheromone he was giving off. Adam had the same thing, I now realized, and I wondered if they had gotten along when Adam first went down and met Jenny. After all, a pack can only have one alpha.

"Who are they?" John asked Sage, eyeing Adam with the wariness I had anticipated.

"They're nice," Jenny said before Sage could speak, taking a step closer to me. "They came to Cherie's house and they're spending the day with us."

"Why?" John asked.

"Why do you think?"

"Hey, Jugs, you don't make the decisions here."

"Don't call her Jugs," Dave insisted, and it was the first time I'd ever heard him speak. He pushed John aside and walked up to put his arm around Jenny.

"You can be such an asshole," Jenny said, her eyes not wavering from John.

"Enough," my mother now insisted, and I was impressed with the way everyone, even John, seemed to obey her by shutting up. Sage had told me once that my mother was the real brains behind this operation; she had been the ones to put the signs on the portal doors, the one who had figured out how to make that pink goop that created portals in the first place.

The goop that Adam had stolen to get us here.

She walked up to me now. "What's your name?"

"Mara," I repeated the lie I had told Cherie back at the house, having decided when we first got here not to use my real name. I wasn't sure why, but maybe it was just because I didn't want any of these versions of my mother and her friends to have any other association with the name Marina. It was mine, not theirs. My real name was the only thing I could say I still owned.

"And who's he?" my mother continued, nodding slightly towards Adam but still looking at me.

"He's her history teacher," Jenny answered for me, but there was something in her tone once again that told me she was messing with me somehow; that Adam and I hadn't fooled her for a second.