EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter One

"Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you!"

"Dad, what are you doing?" I laughed. "My birthday's not till next week."

But Dad waved me off and placed the towering vanilla cake—clearly the work of my stepmom, Laura—in front of me, flickering with nineteen candles. "Yeah, but you'll all be back in Boston by then."

He smiled above my head at my brother Robbie and his girlfriend, Piper, who were joined at the hip as always. In fact, the three of us had spent so much time together since I'd moved in with them four months ago that I had started thinking of us as a unit: the O'Connell triplets.

I liked it like that. It felt good to belong to something again. It felt right. And now that we'd been home for Christmas break for the past two weeks, having dinner every night with Dad and Laura, with their new dog Frisky snuggling into my feet under the table, I finally felt like it wasn't all a dream anymore.

I really had my family back. I could breathe again.

But it scared me at the same time. If you can breathe, you can suffocate.

"M, blow 'em out. We're starving," said Robbie, hovering above me with his plate ready.

"I'll grab more plates, Dad," said Piper.

She had only started calling him "Dad" during this Christmas break, and I felt the same way about it as I did with just about everything regarding Piper: annoyed at first, then gradually accepting, and eventually embracing.

She had no family left, after all, except some distant cousins out in Arizona. Who was I to judge her for needing someone to belong to? Besides, it wasn't much of a leap since she and Robbie were practically married at this point.

After Piper's parents had been declared dead in the fall, she'd discovered that there had been a trust set aside for her. She then immediately began using it to buy us all presents: a new car for Robbie so he could drive to his classes at Boston U, where he'd transferred from Oregon State to finish his psychology degree; all my MIT textbooks, which must have cost her over a thousand dollars; a dog house for Frisky.

Robbie finally had to force her to stop. "You'll spend it all," I overheard him chastising her one night in the living room of our Boston apartment while I was pretending to sleep on the couch. "We should save it for our future." "You are my future," she had insisted, and then the argument had ended the way they almost always do—with the two of them rushing up to bed.

I leaned forward over the sea of twinkling candles now, closed my eyes, made a wish, and blew with all my might. The wish was the same as always, and I kept blowing and blowing until every single candle was out.

*

I was in bed around midnight, reviewing the past imperfect conjugations of hacer, and starting to drift off. MIT requires one elective per semester, and I had chosen Spanish, figuring it was as good a time as any to actually learn the language I had been misspeaking my whole life.

Hacía, haciamos, hacían... I used to make, we used to make, they used to make.

I looked around my childhood bedroom, the memorabilia of a life I only half-remembered staring me starkly in the face. In this reality, the one I created when I ensured that my brother wasn't hit by a train at fourteen, I had never gone to St. Joe's for middle school. Instead, those three years had been spent in the same public schools I had attended before Robbie's now-erased accident. The only problem, of course, was that I couldn't remember any of that; it was another version of me who had lived it.

A third-place science fair certificate from the ninth grade, which in this reality happened at East Township High, held a place of honor near my vanity mirror. I, of course, had no recollection of having won it. The edges of the paper had started to yellow slightly despite the thin black frame. It was like the document was daring me to admit the truth: half your life is a lie.

Or not a lie, maybe, but not my truth. What was the difference?

Beneath the certificate, a picture of me with my old best friend Christy, smiling over two heaping ice-cream cones, slapped me with another cruel reality: Christy hadn't spoken to me in months.

It was still hard to process this fact. We lived only miles from each other in Boston, since she was attending her dream school, Berklee College of Music. We had planned it so carefully at the beginning of our senior year—both of us in Boston, both of us still best friends. Meeting up on the weekends to grab lunch, go to a concert, maybe gossip about boys.

But that was yesterday's dream. That was before I'd asked her for the favor.

This was why I hadn't come home since starting school. It was too much being here, seeing the facts of all my deceptions plastered all over the walls, daring me to admit the truth of how my life had been split in two—the truth that even Robbie didn't really know, because he'd been living in Portland for most of it.

Only one person really knew the truth of my life. But I hadn't talked to him in over a year. I stared down at my bare fingers, clutching the Spanish textbook. I'd left all my rings back in Boston.

When my phone buzzed by my side, I made a conscious decision to ignore it. Nothing good could come of the alternative, I reprimanded myself. It had been buzzing like that for almost a week, and I hadn't caved in yet. But there were only two days left in our break, and if I didn't answer it now, I knew I would always wonder.

After all this time, I still wasn't strong enough to turn away.

I looked at the name on the screen, and my heart raced despite itself. There were no words this time, just a symbol: ?

And I knew, as I had known since I first boarded the plane in Boston to come home, that the answer to the question would be yes.

I'll be there in 15, I typed back.

Then I stood up, pulled my thick brown hair into a low ponytail, and stared at myself in the mirror of my vanity. My hazel eyes squinted at their own reflection, blaming me for what I was about to do.

You're just like her, they seemed to say, and it wasn't just the physical resemblance this time—the way my eyebrows arched up into a question like hers always seemed to do; the way my cheekbones were growing more pronounced with the passing months; the way the edges of my full mouth turned down when I was angry.

No, this time, the accusation ran deeper. You're just like her, my eyes admonished. It's exactly what she would have done.

Still, I headed downstairs, grabbed my dad's keys off their hook, and took his car from the garage. No more sneaking out on the bike for me. I was nineteen now. If I was going to make a mistake, everyone might as well know about it.

***

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