My whole body was sore.
That was the first thing I became aware of when I woke up in my own bed, the harsh mid-morning light illuminating my opaque green curtains. The remainder of our trip into Yesterday hadn't actually been any more physically exerting than the first time I'd done it, but the tension I had held in my body was now showing its effects in my tight muscles and aching forehead.
But relief also flooded over me as I remembered that the rest of our excursion had gone as planned: once we'd made it to the beach behind the Portland hotel, my friends had gone to hide in the woods while George and I buried the beaker that would have created the underlake portal.
There had been a brief moment of panic when it was time to return home and Brady could not be found anywhere. But he had reappeared a moment later, having wondered off to get away from Piper and Robbie.
And then we'd all returned through the door that George opened for us, which led us back to that night eighteen months ago. I had to wait until I'd reassured Kieren a dozen times that I didn't need him to walk me home, and after Piper and Robbie had headed back to her place to sleep, before I was able to break away and return to the school.
I was so exhausted at that point, I couldn't even think to be scared. I simply used Adam's coin to return to present day, retrieved my bike from where I'd left it outside the school, and came home to pass out in this bed.
My only regret was that I didn't get a chance to talk to Kieren or Robbie more that night, while we were all in the same time and place. Now my fingers itched to reach for my phone, to call and check in with them, to make sure it hadn't all been a dream. But I had to slow down, reminding myself that for them, a year and a half had passed since that night. I was going to have to play catch-up on that time, figure out what exactly I had missed.
Of course, I'd been down this road before, the first time I'd come back from Yesterday, when I'd been plunged into a world where Robbie had been raised thousands of miles away and Kieren had no memory of me. It had taken me weeks to put the pieces of my life together then, sitting silently at the dinner table while Laura and my father acted out a strange new reality in front of me.
No one had caught on that time. I had played my part well. Would I be able to do so again?
I grabbed my phone out of its charging station and started to open Instagram so I could see what they'd been up to, but I didn't even get a chance to start scrolling.
"Marina?" Laura called gently from the stairwell.
"Yes?"
"Aren't you going to work today, sweetheart?"
I looked at the clock on my bedside table. Shit. It was ten-thirty on Saturday. I was supposed to teach the junior-high class at eleven.
"Be right down," I called, throwing my phone on the bed and heading for the bathroom to brush my teeth. My image in the mirror was less than impressive, with blue half-moon shadows under my eyes and matted hair plastered to my cheeks.
I brushed with one hand and combed with the other while using my foot to open up the top drawer where I kept my concealer. I didn't even know what today's lesson plan was. Not that it mattered much to the thirteen-year-olds. We could convert the Lego robots into a drum kit and just bang away at it for half an hour, and they would be perfectly happy.
"Shall I make you a Pop-Tart?" Laura cooed from outside the door.
"Yeshh plesh," I called back through a mouthful of toothpaste.
Finishing up in the bathroom, I darted to my room to dig through the clean-clothes pile for a bra.
"Oh, your ride's here!" came Laura's voice, this time muffled from somewhere in the kitchen.
My ride?
I usually biked on Saturdays as my dad had the car with him at work. And then a realization shot through me like an electric charge: What if it's Kieren?
I whipped my backpack over my shoulders and tripped down the stairs, all while squeezing my feet into my Keds. I could feel my sweaty palms slip-sliding over the banister. A tall silhouette awaited me on the other side of the wavy yellow glass in the front door.
Laura appeared from the kitchen, a brown paper bag in her hand with a Pop-Tart-sized rectangle wedged inside.
"Thank you," I breathlessly whispered while my shaking hand opened the door, bright sunlight flooding into my eyes that felt, for a moment, as though I were entering another portal.
But this was no portal. This was real life—my real life now, as I must have wanted it to be. Because in front of me stood Brady, a smile wide as Texas on his lips.
"Hey, beautiful," he said.
"Hi," I stuttered, my brain frantically trying to make sense of why he was here. Were we friends? Did he give me a ride to work on his way to the gas station?
But my questions were answered when he leaned down and kissed me. There was no trace of cigarette smell on his breath, only mint gum. A waft of the lemon-scented detergent his cousin used to use on all his clothes filled my nostrils with a nostalgic, warm sensation. And though my brain had not yet caught up with my body, I couldn't help but get excited to kiss him back.
Things end up the way they're meant to. That's what my mother had said.
Is this what I had really wanted all along?
"You ready to go?" he asked, reaching out for my hand.
And having no idea what else I could possibly do, I took Brady's hand and headed for his car.
*
Brady scrolled through radio stations as he drove, not satisfied with anything. He lingered for a moment on a pop song before changing it again. Meanwhile, I stared out the window, trying to process what was going on, Laura's breakfast lying unopened by my feet.
Is this what I wanted?
Yes, there had been a time when being with Brady, feeling his soft lips on mine as they had been just moments before, and knowing that he truly wanted me back, was all I could think about.
But that was before Kieren. Or after Kieren, I guess I should say. After he'd held me and kissed me the whole night when I got back from Portland. After I'd forgiven him for my brother's accident.
The next thought made me squirm a bit in my seat, flustered and grappling with my memories. Because the morning after Kieren and I had spent together in my bed, that was when he'd tried to hurl himself in front of the oncoming train. And pushing him out of the way, I had gone in to the train portal instead of him.
I never blamed him for that morning. How could I? It led me to my brother. But is that why we weren't together now? Was I somehow still resentful of Kieren? Did I still not trust him?
Brady turned the radio off, his hand resting for a moment on my knee before returning to the steering wheel so he could make a left turn.
"You're being quiet."
"Am I?" I adjusted myself in my seat, trying to seem more open to him. Whatever had happened between me and Kieren, it wasn't Brady's fault. And though I was dying to scan my phone messages to try to piece together the past year and a half, I also didn't want to miss this moment to indulge in my current reality: sitting next to Brady, watching the sunlight dapple his brown T-shirt through the windshield.
"I'm just thinking about work," I improvised. "I'm not sure what I'm teaching the kids today."
Brady laughed.
"What?"
"It's just you usually have it planned out to the second. Isn't that what the bullet journal was for?" he asked, nodding towards my backpack.
I opened my bag and pulled out a large spiral bullet journal, a picture of Marie Curie glued to the cover. Opening it up, my eyes fell on the inside front cover: "For the smartest girl I know. I love you. Congrats on finishing junior year! Brady."
Hot blood rushed to my cheeks, both of embarrassment and something else—something like anger. Not at Brady, but at myself. I had been with Brady since at least June?
What the hell had I done to myself? Brady and I had apparently already said "I love you." What else had we done? I didn't even know. Jesus, had we had sex? I had always thought that that was something I wouldn't do until college, or at least until I turned eighteen in two months. But then again, I had apparently made a whole bunch of choices lately that I hadn't been expecting.
What made me think this was a good idea, to rob myself of all these experiences?
I wanted to cry, to scream. I had been so desperate to reclaim what I had lost that night I had gone into Yesterday without my friends, I didn't really think about the consequences of undoing it. Every question just begged a million more questions, and no one would be able to fill me in on what I had missed. No one except...maybe Adam.
If he even made it back alive.
I could feel my breath straining, my fingers clenching. Would I always be on a slightly different path than everyone else? Would nothing ever just feel right?
"What's that?" Brady asked, his eyes falling on my lap.
"Hmm?" I asked, trying to sound as normal as possible. I realized that, while grabbing the journal, I had also snatched up something else—a stack of papers, now jutting out from beneath Brady's thoughtful gift. Moving the journal out of the way, I could see in thick black ink:
MIT Admissions. Part One. Biographical Information.
Sorting through the stack, I saw that I had already made dozens of hand-written notes on the print-out, highlighting certain questions and putting exclamation points in black Sharpie next to the parts I still needed, such as SAT results and Letters of Recommendation. "Mr. Chu?" was scrawled in red ink next to that last part.
So distracted was I with the forms, I didn't even notice at first that Brady had pulled the car over. I looked up, expecting to see the small storefront of Kids' Science Lab, but found instead that we were on the shoulder of the main road, still several minutes from work.
Brady removed his hands from the steering wheel and glared down at the forms on my lap. "I thought we were going to talk about that. You said you hadn't decided yet." His voice sounded tight.
"I—I haven't. I mean, they're just notes."
"That's a lot of notes. So you are applying then?"
"I don't know."
"Jesus."
Brady sat back and ran his fingers through his hair. I still thought he was one of the most handsome boys I'd ever seen, with his caramel-colored eyes and broad shoulders. Although I guess "boy" wasn't really the right word for him now. He was twenty years old. Did he still live with his cousin? Work at the gas station? Was he happier now than he'd been before?
"I mean, you said you were going to stay..." he said in a very soft voice, looking at his lap. "With me."
"I—" What could I say? The look of pain on Brady's face was killing me. First Piper had left him, and now me. Why would I have filled out this application if I'd told him I was staying? "I mean, you knew I'd go to college."
"Yeah, but you said state school. Or somewhere local."
"I can't study robotics at community college, Brady. I mean, not like I could at MIT."
"State school then."
"It's just an application!" I shouted, not sure why I was suddenly so upset. Did I even want to go that far away? I hadn't been sure before. What had changed my mind?
Brady sat silently, watching the cars go by.
I realized in that moment that what I'd said about MIT was true. If I really wanted to study robotics, engineering—if I wanted it to be my career—then I couldn't limit myself to staying here. I had been so afraid for so long to leave my father, to leave the only family I had left. But now that I looked around this town, I couldn't help but think about the fact that it had brought me nothing but misery.
We were less than a mile from the train that had killed Robbie the first time, a few hundred feet from the ice cream parlor where I'd run into Kieren last year and he'd walked right by me. And now? Now I had a boyfriend that I couldn't even remember my first real kiss with. The more I thought about it, the more I knew that I wanted to get the hell away from this place. Get on one of those dream-chasing trains to the coast and never look back.
"Why did it have to be Boston?" Brady asked.
"Because that's where the school is."
"No," Brady laughed, shaking his head. "That's not it. You're going to live with them, aren't you?"
"Them?"
"You know what I mean," he shouted, looking right into my eyes now. "You're going to live with your brother...and Piper."
I stared at him, my voice choking in my throat. Robbie and Piper? They lived together in Boston?
It was just as she had always wanted, just like she had talked about that night when she asked me if I would live with them by the sea. It looked like maybe Piper had gotten her color-coded boxes all in a row after all.
"I would live with my aunt Amalia," I protested, but it came out a beat too late to be convincing.
Brady put the car back in gear. "You'll be late for work." He didn't say another word while he drove the rest of the distance. And neither did I.
****
Keep reading for chapter 12! XO- Rebecca