“You both were here,” I said. “And I’m here now.”
“Two hours late,” Reid said.
“I’ve spent every free second thinking about getting back. What have you done?” I yelled. “You can’t give me two hours to do something that might make me feel good about what I’m doing here?”
“I don’t care if you feel good,” Eli yelled. “We need to get home!”
“Maybe we’re never going to get home!”
It wasn’t the first time I’d thought it. For six years we’d been trying to replicate what got us here, with just half of Reid’s father’s notes. It was hard to not feel doubtful sometimes.
It was the first time I’d put that doubt into words, though. It was the first time I’d uttered them out loud. For a long time I’d taken the lead on this. I’d promised them both we’d figure out a way to get back.
Now I’d just admitted I didn’t know if I’d be able to deliver, and it stunned all three of us into silence.
I needed to take it back, but as soon as I opened my mouth, Eli tackled me. I hit the ground hard, my shoulders slamming against the concrete floor of the garage. My insides twisted from the impact, and the wind fled from my lungs. I blocked Eli’s incoming punch with my forearm, but he swung a second time and connected with my jaw.
Then his hand came down on my chest, and I felt energy rip through me.
Above us Reid moved in, to help Eli or to pull him back, I couldn’t be sure. I put a hand up, stiff-arming Eli to keep him off me.
Like that, with the three of us emotionally charged and wrestling for some kind of control over our lives, I was overwhelmed by a memory of home.
It was Christmas Eve, the last one I spent at home. The house smelled like pine from the Christmas tree and vanilla from the cookies my mother was baking. There was soft jazz holiday music playing—my father’s favorite. I knew all the words to every song, because I’d heard the album so many times. Our dog, Hope, was wearing a bright red bow around her neck, chewing a bone shaped like a candy cane. I had my hands wrapped around the warmth of a mug filled with eggnog. It was the first time my mother had let me have some.
“I know what all your presents are,” Derek whispered in my ear. “But I’m not going to tell you.”
I turned to look at him, and I didn’t need him to tell me. From the smile on his face, I knew I was going to get everything I’d asked for.
Suddenly the energy inside my chest flared, like a dam breaking open. It burst out of me, throwing Eli off me, making the lights flicker.
A chill swept through the room, the air smelled damp, and with a flash a black hole opened up in front of us.
One second it wasn’t there, and the next it was.
A portal.
I pushed to my feet. We stood there for what had to be a full minute, just staring at it.
It looked exactly how I remembered: huge and unnaturally black, like a pool of oil. Yet something about the portal made it seem like a living thing. I couldn’t help wondering if it remembered us, too.
Eli was the first one to speak. “Holy shit.” He reached out to touch the rippling black.
I caught his hand. I wasn’t sure what touching it would do.
“It’s a portal,” Reid said.
“Yeah, we caught on, dude,” Eli said.
I didn’t say anything. I just stared at it. After six years of trying to replicate that stupid machine, here we were, standing in front of a portal we’d created on our own. We didn’t need a machine. We might have been able to click our heels and go home at any point during the past six years, and we were too thick to know it.
“So why are we standing here?” Reid said. “Should we go through or what?”
It was a good question, but I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know where it would take us.
Eli must have been thinking the same thing. He looked at me and asked, “Can it get us home?” and the hope in his voice gave me pause.
“I don’t know if it’s that easy.”
“Why not?” Reid asked.
I didn’t know how many universes there were. This one wasn’t parallel to ours—at least it didn’t seem like it was. We had portaled out of a garage and into the Pacific Ocean. Landmarks were different; societal structure seemed different. We’d never seen a double: anyone who looked like us or our parents or even anyone we knew. That all suggested there had to be more than just two universes. There could be hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of universes out there. There was too much I didn’t know, so I settled for what I did. “I don’t know where it goes.”
“So what?” Reid asked. “We can just go through and figure it out.”
“And then what?” I shook my head. “If it doesn’t take us home, it could take us someplace worse.”
Eli nodded. “We’ll figure it out.” Suddenly he let out a laugh and punched me in the shoulder. “You just opened a fucking portal with your mind!”
It wasn’t really my mind that did it, but this wasn’t the time to argue with him. We’d opened a portal for the second time in our lives. We might not know where it would take us, but if we could get a portal open, we were halfway there.
Halfway home.
I smiled. We had a shot: We could really get home.
I’d been playing the optimist and saying it for six years, making promises and assurances that I would figure out a way to get us back. But for the first time, I actually believed it.
We were going to get home.
Somehow, even after opening the portal, getting home ended up feeling farther away than it ever had before. For 148 days, I had done what I was supposed to do. I’d stayed away from Janelle and spent every free moment of my spring and summer with Eli and Reid trying to figure it out. But at the end of those 148 days, we still had more questions than answers.
How many universes were out there?
How could we open a portal that would take us home rather than somewhere else?
What kind of side effects would there be this time?
Would we even make it alive?
We’d opened a dozen more portals. That had gotten easier, but the problem was once the portal was open, we didn’t know what to do with it.
It felt hopeless. I wasn’t even sure what we were trying to accomplish anymore. Each time we opened a portal, it was just . . . there.
This was our last chance. We had to do something different. We couldn’t keep living in two worlds: physically in one and mentally in another.
We couldn’t keep killing people, either.
Dude,” Eli said, glancing back at me from his bike. “Do you really think this will work?”
I didn’t know. That we were so close and yet home was still so out of reach wasn’t lost on any of us.
“I don’t,” Reid said, as we pulled onto the dusty shoulder of Highway 101.
“I wasn’t fucking asking you,” Eli said. “I was talking to Ben.”
I didn’t need to answer him, though. I’d told him what I thought at least a hundred times. Saying it again wasn’t going to make it sound any more hopeful.
I got off my bike and pushed it behind some of the random shrubbery up there. Eli followed suit, while Reid took his bike across from us, on the other side of the bushes, like he wanted to be separate.
I’d chosen this spot. We’d tried to get out in the water once, but it was summer and people were everywhere. Even at night, there were bonfire parties and midnight surfers. We’d all snuck out and come here at three in the morning a few weeks ago, but nothing had worked right. It was too hard to concentrate and work to stay afloat offshore. Plus, there were jellyfish everywhere, and once Eli got stung, he refused to go back in. So we were here, because it was as close as we could get to where we needed to be without being seen.
“I’m just saying,” Reid explained. “This isn’t even where we came through.”
“What, asshole, you got a boat we don’t know about?” Eli asked.
Reid didn’t answ
er.
“Then how the fuck can we do this in the middle of the ocean?”
“I’m just saying—”
“Shit that doesn’t matter. Let Ben do the thinking.” Eli punched Reid in the shoulder. It was meant to be light and friendly, but I’d been on the other side of Eli’s punches before and it didn’t feel good.
I looked at Reid and tilted my head toward Eli, making my “he’s being stupid” face, trying to offer an apology. After all, Reid was right. When we opened the portal the very first time, we fell through and ended up here: Torrey Pines Beach, about a hundred yards offshore.
“I don’t have a better idea,” I said.
It wasn’t the heat making sweat run down my spine, and not just nerves making my hands shake. It was the way Eli rubbed his hands together, the smile on his lips when he said, “Let’s do this.” It was the pressure, the fact that I knew that in just minutes we would be home, dead, or without hope.
Eli was tired of opening portals and not doing anything. He was tired of not making progress and tired of being stuck in this fake life. He wanted to open a portal and go through.
I thought that was a risk we couldn’t afford to take. There were too many factors, too many things we didn’t understand. I didn’t want to end up somewhere worse, or dead. What if a portal opened five hundred feet off the ground? What if it opened up somewhere freezing or in the middle of a civil war? Going through a portal, we could literally end up anywhere. We had been lucky to end up here the first time. There are worse places, much worse.
But Reid sided with Eli, and I had been overruled. We were going to open a portal, and one of us was going to go through to see what was on the other side. We were essentially experimenting with ourselves. Trial by fire.
Despite the risk, a small part of me was eager to get it over with. We’d been stuck in the same repetitive rhythm for too long. I needed answers, and if this was the only way to get them . . .
Since we were taking that risk, I wanted us to be as close as we could to where we’d come through. Maybe that would make a difference.
Reid was shaking his head, though, and I knew nothing I said was going to matter. He was frustrated with me, with the rules and restrictions I put on us, and with how much faith Eli put in me. I didn’t blame him. He was stuck here because of me.
I blew air into my hands. No need to prolong the inevitable.
I looked around one last time. Highway 101 ran right against the coast. It was flat, almost even with sea level for about three miles where Torrey Pines State Reserve sat, but then it sloped uphill at a steep angle as the cliffs sprang up along the coastline. We were about a quarter mile from the base of the hill, two lanes from the cliffs, with marshland to our backs.
If we had to live a fake life somewhere, this wasn’t the worst place. There were probably an infinite number of worse places to be, but it had been seven years since I’d seen my family, and this place wasn’t home. No matter how long we were here, it would never be home.
“Is this going to happen today, or what?”
I didn’t answer. I needed a minute. To calm my nerves, to say good-bye, to send out a prayer to whatever higher power there could be in the multiverse. I wanted to be ready for whatever was going to come next.
Reid could wait.
The last few weeks, he’d been pissed. At me, at his girlfriend, at his foster parents, at everything. The fake life was finally getting to him. He was usually so good at it. There had even been times when I thought he liked it here. He ate dinner with his parents; he did his homework and got good grades. He’d dated the same girl for almost six months. He had even gotten involved with student council.
That feeling, the restlessness that comes with knowing you belong somewhere else, it never seemed to affect Reid. It consumed me, turned me in on myself. I’d grown quiet and singularly focused on the couple of things that mattered to me. It had eaten away at Eli, turned him into an escapist with a short temper and a quick fuse.
Only it was Reid with the quick fuse right now. I’d known him my whole life. We knew more about each other than anyone else ever could, but I couldn’t pretend I’d ever understand him.
The beach below us was still crowded, even though the afternoon sun was already fading. Girls in bikinis, with their coolers and beach umbrellas, their blankets and towels spread out on the sand. Surfers in their wet suits were in the water. Maybe even a few kids with bodyboards and flippers, maybe a girl in a pink bathing suit, like the one who pulled me out of the water seven years ago.
“You’re not going to be able to see her,” Reid said, reading my mind. It wouldn’t have been hard for him. I was a pretty open book when it came to that girl. “Stop staring. You’re giving me heartburn.”
I didn’t respond. I wasn’t about to deny something they both knew was true.
This place wasn’t home, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something good here. Something I would miss.
Rather someone.
Janelle.
She was lifeguarding down at the beach; at least she probably was. She had been there most of the days this summer when I’d gone to the beach to stare at the waves, though I still hadn’t spoken to her. Still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to say something, anything. Now that I could be about to go home, I wanted more time.
Time to tell her that she made this fake life bearable.
But I never got the chance. I flexed my hands and headed over to the people who knew me.
Eli clapped me on the back. “Don’t worry, my friend. There will be plenty of hot chicks in bikinis at home.”
The if we get there hung in between us. He thought we would. I didn’t, but I was willing to try anyway. I had to. I owed it to my parents and to my friends who were here because of me.
“Ready to do this?” I asked, hoping that for some reason being here would change their minds.
Eli jumped around a little and shook his arms. He was actually smiling, something he didn’t do all that often.
“What’s the plan?” Reid asked. “You’re just going to open the portal?”
“No.” I shook my head. “We should all do it. Just like the first time.”
“The second time,” Reid corrected.
“You know what I mean.”
“Who cares?” Eli cut in. “We put our hands together, we focus, and we open a fucking portal. Once it’s open, we go through.”
“I’ll go first.” I didn’t want to, but it was only fair. I’d gone first the last time. “Take it slow. We can’t rush this.”
I swallowed hard. The plan was for me to go almost completely through to the other side. I would leave only my hand behind, for Eli and Reid to hold on to. If I made it somewhere else, I would give them a thumbs up and keep going through. If I died . . . I wouldn’t.
I left something out before when I said we didn’t know anything new since we opened that portal 148 days ago. We opened more portals since the first one. Now we weren’t sure how or why we had made it through the portal the first time and if we could really go through one now.
Because the last portal we’d opened had come at a price. Collateral damage, Eli called it.
I called it a person. We’d brought a person into this world. We’d opened a portal, and a person had come through.
A person who was dead.
I didn’t know if we had killed him or if it was something else, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to risk putting more people in danger.
This was the last portal I was going to open.
We would get home, or the portal would kill us, or we would be stuck here forever. This last portal was all I had left in me.
We stood facing each other in a half circle and put our hands in front of us, like it was some sort of partial huddle. It would have looked weird to someone else and it felt weird to us, but it seemed the most logical way to do this.
“So we just fucking hold hands and think of home, or what?” Eli said.
“Click your hee
ls first,” Reid replied.
I didn’t know if there was a right formula. “Thinking of home makes the most sense,” I said, even though I wasn’t really sure that it made sense at all. The truth was I didn’t understand what we could do any better than they did, but I supposed thinking of home couldn’t hurt.
“All right, let’s do this,” Reid said.
All six of our hands came together.
I gathered the energy in my body into my chest, and I tried to think of something from home. Of my parents or my brother, of anything really, but for some reason a strong memory wouldn’t come. It had been so long since I’d been with them, it was hard to remember their faces, and I sometimes worried the memories weren’t real.
I pushed the energy through my arms and out my hands and I imagined a wormhole opening up in front of us. I had done it enough times now that it was starting to feel almost natural.
It started slowly. In front of our hands, the blackness seemed to open up from nowhere, and as it expanded, the wind picked up, like the portal was swallowing everything around it and sucking it inside.
“Keep concentrating on it,” I said. In front of me the portal grew into a wide circle, taller than I was, rippling and black. It looked like it was full of nothingness, the absence of space, like if you got sucked into it you would cease to exist, but I knew different.
I took a deep breath, held it, and stuck my arm right through.
“What the—” Eli said, but I ignored him.
My arm felt cold and a little numb, and the portal rippled around my skin. I felt compelled to keep going, like the portal itself was somehow urging me into it. Almost like a suction, it held on to me and pulled on me. I wasn’t sure what dying from a portal would feel like, but this wasn’t it.
I glanced back to remind them both to wait for a sign before jumping through, but I didn’t get the chance. Around me the portal seemed to shiver, and from the other side, I heard a rumble.
I pulled my arm out. “Something isn’t right.”
“I’ll go through,” Eli said, but I shook my head.
The portal was still growing, still spreading out, expanding, like it was going to swallow as much of this world as it could. It didn’t look like the portal we had originally gone through back when we were kids. It wasn’t still or steady. It looked like it was vibrating as it grew, and the edges weren’t clean. They looked like they were fraying, little tendrils of the portal spinning off and dissolving into the air.