"I did know your mother, it's true," Mr. Martel offered as soon he could see that he had my attention, that I wasn't going to try and run again. "I met her when she was in high school."

The wording of this took me a moment to process. My mother was in high school in the nineties. Unless... "How old are you?"

"I'm twenty-three, like I said."

"So then you were, what? Just visiting?" He must have meant he went through a portal to the nineties. But why?

"Something like that."

Mr. Martel's eyes scanned the stark, well-lit lobby and fell upon a coffee machine in the corner that Mr. Chu kept for parents. "Look, it's cold, right? Do you want a coffee?"

I didn't usually drink coffee, but I had to admit that something hot would be very welcome right about now, if only to warm my still shaking hands. I nodded a bit and watched him go find a clean mug on a small rack and plop a pod into the machine. When the whirring subsided, he came up and offered me the drink, the handle side facing me so I wouldn't have to touch him in order to take it.

It was like he was trying to make up for the way he'd been a minute ago, to signal to me that he was safe. I still wasn't sure I was buying it, however. "Tell me more," I insisted, blowing on the hot liquid and feeling its warmth tickle my upper lip.

"I was a curious kid, I guess...like you."

I nodded, watching him make his own drink while he kept talking. His voice was different than it had been in class. Younger. Like he wasn't pretending anymore, wasn't playing a part. I could see the kid he had been, not that long ago, dying to break out.

"Have you told anyone else this?"

"No."

"Why are you telling me?"

"Let me finish?" he asked, deferential to me. Like he needed me, somehow, to give him permission to continue. What was he hoping to get from me?

I sat down on one of the bean chairs in the lobby and motioned to him to do the same, a task which he pulled off with surprising agility for such a muscular guy. It struck me that maybe he'd been a gymnast or something at one point.

"I hadn't meant to stay in Yesterday as long as I did. Honestly, I just wanted to see how it worked. Once I figured out how to open the doors, I wanted...I wanted to see everything."

"That's a dangerous game."

"I know that now."

"You met my mother, you said?'

"Yes."

"Did you—is she why you stayed so long?" Images of my mother in high school zipped through my mind, mostly from the photo album that was still somewhere in the back of her closet. The album that showed her with her old high-school friends, Sage, George, Jenny, Dave...and John, her boyfriend at the time, and her husband in this reality. John who was obsessed with DW, who made into a cult almost. A cult that none of them knew how to leave.

"No, it wasn't like that," Adam answered my question in a softer tone.

Relief flooded over me. It was hard enough to imagine my mom with John, but to think of her with this guy...

"It was for her friend, Jenny. Jenny and I..." he let the sentence trail off.

Jenny. That made sense. Jenny who wore the tiny polka-dot bikini in those old photos by the beach. Jenny who was dating Dave. And a memory from long ago came back in a flash—my mother's voice: They won't come back up.

In the old reality, before I had gone back into Yesterday and stopped the lake portal from being built, Jenny and Dave had been the first ones to go through it. They dove into the lake right after it was formed, and, in that timeline at least, they had never been heard from again.

But we were on a different timeline now—one in which they'd never had a chance to go under the lake. And so Jenny probably went on to live a normal life somewhere.

"I went back again and again," Adam continued. "Each time I told myself it was the last. And each time I couldn't stay away. I realize now that what I had with Jenny wasn't healthy. She had a boyfriend and we...well, all she ever wanted to do was go through the portals with me. It was like a drug for her...and for me."

"You went through a portal while you were already in a portal? Are you crazy?" I wanted to be mad at him for risking the balance between the dimensions like that, but I couldn't. Hadn't I done the same and even worse? Hadn't I used to the doors behind the boiler room like my own personal Do Over Machine? Who was I to judge?

He shrugged. "I thought I could conquer it."

"Okay," I sighed, "so what do you want from me? Why are you telling me this?"

"Because..." he steadied himself. "The last time I saw Jenny, she was twenty-three. We had plans to meet up a few months later. She was going to leave Dave. We were...talking about getting married. I was going to stay in the past to be with her."

"Jesus," I sighed, "You would have thrown off the balance of everything. And for what? Some girl who was cheating on her boyfriend, and would probably cheat on you."

"Well, I didn't get a chance, did I? Because she never showed. I looked for her everywhere. Every portal. Every existence I could imagine her living in. I was down for over a year."

I swallowed hard, an ill feeling stirring in my gut.

If Jenny wasn't in the underlake world, where was she? She was sort of obsessed with DW, I remembered Sage telling me. Thought of it as a game. Did she go in another way? And if so, where had she been living all this time?

"I need to find her again, Marina. I need to know she's safe."

I struggled to think of what to tell him. I knew how he was feeling, of course, and I hated to sound selfish, but the truth was it just wasn't my problem. Maybe Jenny just got sick of him and ditched him somewhere. For all I knew, she'd settled down in another state, or another country—living a life that had nothing to do with him.

"I don't know how to help you," I finally said, trying to excuse myself from the conversation.

"You have to. Your mother was the only one Jenny would listen to, the only one who could have found her. I begged Rain to do it, but she wouldn't. Said she would never go into a portal again. Even though..."

"Even though what?"

"Even though it meant losing Jenny...forever."

The words hit me like a punch. He wasn't acting like a guy who just missed some girl he'd fallen for. He sounded more desperate than that.

I couldn't pretend not to know what he was going through, and I really did sympathize. Obviously I did. But if I had to live without the people I loved the most in the world, the people I would give anything to be with again, then he could live without some girl he'd had a fling with.

He looked up at me with eyes rimmed with exhaustion and grief. I could swear he was almost begging. Maybe he really did love Jenny after all.

"Will you help me find her?" he pleaded.

All of a sudden, something occurred to me that had been dangling just inches from my consciousness, and now sprang into clear relief. Something Brady had told me once, on the bus heading to Clatsop to see the Mystics. "There was a guy named Adam who went down a few years ago but...he never came back."

"Oh my God," I breathed. "You're Adam."

His eyebrows screwed together, questioning.

"Brady told me about you."

"Brady?" he repeated. "Brady Picelli? That little freshman who was always following me around when I was a senior? You know him?"

"We're friends," I asserted, silently trying to picture Brady as a 'a little freshman.' He had always been the tall, confident older boy I'd fallen hard for when I first got to school.

"Will you help me, Marina?" Adam asked again, bringing me back into the moment.

"Why should I?"

"Because I can give you what you want."

"And what is that?" I asked, honestly not sure what he might think the answer was.

But he only smiled at me, a coy smile, toying with me. He took another couple steps, and was now just inches away. I gulped down some spit, feeling awkward being alone with him, standing too close. "Don't you know by now?"

And before he turned away, he grabbed my hand from where it dangled by my side and pressed something into it. "Let me know tomorrow," he said casually before grabbing his umbrella and heading out the door. The bells jangled as the door slammed shut, a sound which continued to reverberate for a couple seconds after he left.

I looked down at my hand and stared helplessly at the flattened penny Adam had just pressed there.