The Upper World

by Femi Fadugba

Genres: YA Wizards & Witches

Synopsis

If you had the chance to change your future, would you take it?

Perfect for fans of Neal Shusterman and Jason Reynolds, this powerhouse, mind-bending YA debut follows two teens, a generation apart, whose fates collide across time—and outside of it.

Today

During arguably the worst week of Esso’s life, an accident knocks him into an incredible world—a place beyond space or time, where he can see glimpses of the past and future. But if what he sees there is true, he might not have much longer to live, unless he can use his new gift to change the course of history.

Tomorrow

Rhia’s past is filled with questions, none of which she expects a new physics tutor to answer. But Dr. Esso’s not here to help Rhia. He’s here because he needs her help—to unravel a tragedy that happened fifteen years ago. One that holds the key not only to Rhia’s past, but to a future worth fighting for.

Soon to be a major Netflix movie starring Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya! (Get Out, Black Panther, Judas and the Black Messiah)

Release date: December 7, 2021

Publisher: HarperTeen

Print pages: 368

Sample

Part I:Distance

FROM BLAISE ADENON’S NOTEBOOK

To Esso,

Once upon a time, a group of prisoners lived in a cave.

For their whole lives, they’d knelt in cold dirt, facing stone, with chains wrapped around their necks so tightly they couldn’t even turn around to see where the amber light in the cave was coming from.

So each day they watched shadows flicker and dance on the stone wall, lit up by that hidden light behind them. They studied the shadows, named them, prayed to them.

Then, one morning, one of the prisoners broke free. He turned toward that bright light shining at the far end of the cave and he stared at it in wonder, desperate to know where it came from, where it led.

His friends, still chained, warned him: “Stay, you fool! You don’t know where you’re going. You’ll die if you roam too far!”

But he ignored them.

When he stepped outside the cave, nothing he saw—not the trees, lakes, animals, nor the sun—made sense to him. Energy flowed so freely out there, it almost felt . . . wrong. But over time, he got to grips with his new reality, finally realizing that his entire life, and all he’d ever known in the cave, had been a mere shadow of this bigger place.

A place he named the Upper World.

He sprinted back into the cave, excited to share the good news with his friends. But when he explained what he had seen in the Upper World, they mocked him, calling him insane. And when he offered to break them free from their chains, they threatened to kill him.

A real man named Socrates told that story over 2,300 years ago in Athens. Most people who heard it interpreted it as a whimsical fairy tale, a metaphor about how lonely it can feel to venture into the unknown. But what people overlook, my child, is that Socrates really believed in the Upper World. And that when he told people what he’d seen up there, he was executed.

1Esso

IT TAKES AN impressive mix of stupidity and bad luck to not be in a gang but still find yourself in the middle of a gang war. I’d managed it in less than a week. And that was before the time travel.

I knelt down, resting my elbows on the one corner of the mattress where the sheet hadn’t peeled off. Tired and alone in my bedroom, I was desperate for heavenly backup. But I couldn’t make the call between Jesus, his mum, Thor, Prophet Mohammed (and the big man he works for), that bald Asian dude in orange robes, Jesus’s dad, Emperor Haile Selassie, my granddad’s voodoo sculpture, Morgan Freeman, or that metal slab on the moon in the olden-day film 2001. So, to be safe, I prayed to the whole team.

“Dear Holy Avengers,” I pleaded into my interlaced fingers. “First off, please forgive me for being a prick on Monday. And for lying to Mum about what happened.”

MONDAY (FOUR DAYS AGO)

Before Monday went off the rails, I actually learned something in class. (Was that how school was meant to feel all the time?)

Penny Hill Secondary sat on the border between Peckham and Brixton. That wasn’t an issue in the forties, when they built it, but it became one once the mandem arrived. Now you had kids from two rival ends forced to spend seven hours a day with each other, and the rest of us expected to learn with that cross-borough beef stewing in the background.

Our classroom was arranged in four rows of eight desks. The ceiling hung a foot too low, making you feel like a chicken in a battery cage if you sat near the middle like me. Miss Purdy was head of PE and doubled as a maths teacher. She could teach, though, as in, she actually knew what she was talking about and actually gave a shit. Her class had the fewest fights and highest marks because of it. Even my assignments were coming back with the odd B these days. Maths had always held some appeal with me. The naïve part of me clung to the idea that one day I’d have a boatload of money and maths would have helped me get it.

I’d always just respected the fact that 2 + 2 = 4. I spent most days switching between my African home voice, my semi-roadman voice, my reading-out-loud-in-English-Lit-class voice, and the telephone voice I put on when I needed someone to come fix the router. I liked that all that stuff mattered less in maths class. The teacher could think I was a dickhead all she wanted, but 2 + 2 was still gonna equal 4.

What I couldn’t have known sitting there that Monday morning was that the 3-sided shapes Miss Purdy was drawing on the whiteboard would end up opening my eyes to all 4 dimensions. In fact, if anyone had tried to warn me I’d be moving like a superhero psychic by the end of the week, I’d have told them they were on crack, then shown them the abandoned flat in Lewisham where they could meet some like-minded people.

“Today, we’re revising the Pythagorean theorem,” Purdy said, circling an equation she’d just written on the board. “And we’ll be using it to figure out the length of the longest side of the triangle.”

Purdy waited, arms folded, for the class to quiet down.

“Shhhhhhhhh!” Nadia said, whipping her neck round to glare at two girls chatting behind her.

Nadia wasn’t a teacher’s pet by any stretch, and she didn’t always care that much about class. But we had our GCSE mocks coming up—the biggest exams of our teenage lives so far—and she clearly wasn’t about to get dragged down by kids who didn’t care at all.

Meanwhile, I was staring off in the distance, doing the pouted-lip serious stare I’d practiced in the mirror that morning. Nadia’s eyes had to swing past me on their way back to the whiteboard, and I wanted to leave the best impression possible. No cap: it was straight-up embarrassing how often I did stuff like that for her. I probably spent 60 to 70% of each class either: a) staring creepily at the back of her head; b) glancing at her in my periphery; or c) pouting and hoping she’d pay attention to me, which I never got to confirm either way since I’d always be staring off into the distance like an aftershave model.

Purdy turned to the board with two different-colored markers in hand. “To make this feel a bit real, I’ll use a practical example. Let’s say you’re walking through Burgess Park. You start all the way down here at the south gate and need to get up to the top by Old Kent Road. There are basically two different paths you can take: the first path, up the side and along the top, is what you cool kids might call a ‘long-ting.’”

She waited for someone to laugh . . . Anyone. After a long, cold dose of silence, she moved on. “Tough Monday. So, taking the long path means staying on the pavement and going all the way up one side, then all the way across the top. But the alternative, shorter route just cuts diagonally across the grass.”

After she stepped away from the board, we could see that she’d written numbers next to two sides of a triangle, but left a question mark next to the longest edge. A collective sigh went around the room as we realized she was going to strip-search one of us for the answer.

“Let’s start with the shortest edge of the triangle. Can anyone tell me what number I get when I take the number 3 and square it?”

Nadia’s hand went up, the only needle you could spot in the haystack. Purdy ignored it—she had to give the rest of us a chance once in a while, after all—and turned to someone paying much less attention.

“Rob, what is 3 squared?”

You’d have thought Miss Purdy was made of glass by how Rob looked straight through her.

Please tell me he knows that 3 x 3 = 9, I said to myself. Along with Kato, Rob was my best friend, and I knew maths wasn’t really his thing. To be honest, not much at school was Rob’s thing. But ask him the difference between UK drill, NY drill, and Chicago drill, and he turned into Einstein. Or tell him about a story you heard on the evening news and watch him find an ingenious way to connect it back to the Illuminati and their plot to take down Blacks, Browns, and Eastern Europeans. He was Polish as well. But knowing that didn’t really tell you much about him.

Kato, sitting on Rob’s other side, whispered to him, “Afghanistan! The answer’s Afghanistan—trust me.”

“Afghanistan,” Rob repeated, showing his proudest face to Purdy.

She must have blinked three or four times in confusion. His response was so off it robbed her of words, and she had no choice but to shut her jaw and look away.

Kato was in pieces, using his sleeves to wipe at the tears of joy collecting on the ledges of his eyes. Everything in life was hilarious to that boy. Probably because everything in life came so easily to him.

Rob glared at him, kissing his teeth till the spit ran out. I sometimes worried that if I ever had to leave school for more than a week, I’d come back and find our fragile friendship cracked into three pieces. But ask anyone else at Penny Hill, and they’d swear we were unbreakable—the happy package known as “Kato, Esso, and Rob.” Even when only one of us fucked up, all three of us got in trouble for it. “Kato, Esso, and Rob did it!” As if those were the three names printed on my passport.

“Esso?” Purdy turned to me with desperation in her eyes.

“You just take the number and multiply it by itself, innit?” I replied. I didn’t mean for my answer to come out sounding like a question but couldn’t help my voice squeaking at the end. She tilted her head forward, waiting for me to land. “So, it’s just 3 times 3, which is 9,” I added.

She made me go through each step, releasing me only once I’d given her equation the TLC she felt it deserved. “So, c—the long edge—is equal to 5,” I finally answered.

I’d calculated the final number in my head a few seconds early, and while she wrote it all out on the board, I debated whether to ask my follow-up question.

Miss Purdy had told us at the start of the class that Pythagoras came up with his famous equation 2,500 years ago. 2,500 years ago! I’m pretty sure that was before paper was even invented. But how?

Problem was, regardless of what adults said, there was such a thing as a rubbish question. In fact, most questions I asked earned me that what-a-rubbish-question look from them. At school, a teacher could cuss me for bringing up a topic that wasn’t on the curriculum. And at home, I’d get the same harsh treatment from my mum for asking a question about Dad. Any sentence starting with “why” or “how” is scary to someone.

But once a question took shape in my head I had trouble leaving the hole empty. It helped that Miss Purdy was still smiling at me, and that she usually took it well when the mid-rowers raised their hands. Fuck it, I thought silently, clearing my throat in preparation. What’s the worst that could happen?

“How did Pythagoras come up with that equation in the first place?” I did my best to sound detached when, in fact, the missing answer was a crater that doubled in size every second.

Then came a flick to my ear. Fast and crisp, but light. Was that . . . a ball of paper?

“Neeeeeeeeek!” Kato hollered. I turned to see him circling his fingers over his eyes like glasses.

Rob laughed as well, followed by the back half of the class. I need new mates, I decided. But then Nadia turned to me with an expression that was equal bits surprised and impressed—a look that made all the embarrassment dissolve. I put my R&B pout back on just in time.

Miss Purdy spent the next five minutes showing us how Pythagoras had turned his hunch about triangles into a mathematical law that would have to be obeyed for the rest of eternity, everywhere in the universe.

The second Purdy finished explaining, I felt like a rusty padlock sprang open in my head.¹ And for only the second or third time in my life, I felt like maybe—just maybe—I might live in a world where things made sense.

When she turned her back, I punched “Pythagoras” into Google on my phone. Turns out, like most of the sharp ones, my man was a nutter. According to the internets, he ran some cult where everyone swore never to eat black beans or piss in the direction of the sun. Oh, and they all worshipped the number 10 and believed that if you lifted the bonnet off what we all see as reality, you’d find nothing but maths under the hood—the language the gods wrote the universe in. Apparently.

There were also “related” links to a few of his stans—one guy called Plato, another Socrates—that I didn’t bother clicking. It was all getting a bit too trippy, so I put my phone away, knowing I was lucky I hadn’t been spotted by Purdy. I was in her good books and had no intention of leaving them.

And then Gideon Ahenkroh walked in.

Even with his cap pulled down, you could just about make out Gideon’s eyes as they traced the floor on the walk to his seat. Like every other boy at Penny Hill, he hung his trousers as low around his thighs as he could. Most girls did the same with their skirts, just pulled in the opposite direction.

Rob, Kato, and I exchanged looks. Looks that said, I feel it too. Something’s off. Something hilarious is about to happen. We turned back to make sure we didn’t miss out.

“Gideon, you’re late. Again,” Miss Purdy said. “Also, no hats in class. Take it off and sit down unless you want to go to the headmaster’s office. Again.”

When Gideon lifted his cap, all thirty-one of us flared up in laughter. There were penny-sized patches of hair missing all over his scalp, each one glistening like he’d dabbed glitter into his hair oil. D, who sat behind Gideon, had the best view of the zigzags coastlining the back of his neck.

If the phrase “still waters run deep” could be embodied in a single roadman, that roadman was D. D didn’t chase clout, clout chased him. The few times he spoke up, people either laughed, nodded in agreement, or ran for safety. Everyone in South London generally agreed that D and his little brother, Bloodshed—both part of a Brixton gang called T.A.S.—were the least light-skinned light-skinned brothers ever made. It was like someone had convinced Young M.A to have babies with Fredo, then got a scientist to delete any traces of Chris Brown from their DNA. D was the stockier of the two brothers, but still clipped six foot and could fill any room sitting down.

“Blood, that haircut is poor,” D said. “Just holla at man if you want me to send the mandem to your barber’s house. No one gets to boy you like that, except me.” He sank in his chair, his gold tooth glistening as he laughed at his own joke. After a short pause, we all laughed as well—it was less trouble that way.

An idea for a follow-up joke popped into my head. Part of me thought, No, Esso. Don’t be a prick. Gideon’s already having a bad morning. Just allow him and move on. I was staring at the back of Nadia’s head, knowing she’d be telling me the same. But the remaining 99% of me was shouting, Go on, son. Give the people what they want. This is God’s plan.

“His mum cut it, innit,” I said. “She knows she’s not getting any, so she wants to make sure Gideon doesn’t either.” A much louder rumble of laughter went around the classroom. I was pushing my luck with that joke, considering how rusty my fade and twists were looking, but even D nodded in appreciation. Mission accomplished.

Until year nine, I’d never appreciated how much funnier having power made you. I was only a few feet down from the top of the pole at Penny Hill, which meant people were supposed to laugh at my jokes now, especially if they were funny.

Nadia, meanwhile, wasn’t laughing at all. I should have copped some of her disapproval, but instead, she aimed it all at D, staring at him with eyes that could break vibranium. He blew a kiss back with a smile.

It always cracked me up how much those two hated each other. I remembered the day D’s phone was going off in class and Nadia, seeing Miss Purdy couldn’t do anything about it, walked over to D’s desk, snatched his iPhone, and chucked it out of the first-floor window. She even stood by to watch it skip across the concrete like a pebble on water. D felt like he had something over everyone, and Nadia felt like she owed nothing to no one. So yeah—milk and orange juice.

It turned out Nadia wasn’t the only one not amused. Miss Purdy’s arms were crossed, and Gideon’s head was still sunk into his chest. Poor lad, I thought, surprised at how much I was regretting the joke.

But Gideon Ahenkroh had different plans for how things were going to end. He shot up from his seat, and a split second later, I felt a hard thump against my forehead. I looked down to see a white-and-orange glue stick rolling on the floor.

Did Gideon really just chuck a glue stick at my head?

I hopped out my seat and chased him three whole laps around the classroom. Gideon faked a left, then stepped off in the other direction. By the time I pivoted back, he was out the door.

“It’s on sight, fam!” I shouted into the corridor after him. For some reason, my tough talk always came out high-pitched and weirdly kinda American in the heat of the moment. “What you running for? Come and let’s do this, bro!”

I could hear Rob and Kato cackling behind me. They knew better than anyone that I wouldn’t do shit to Gideon. I was built like a pencil; half the year sevens at Penny Hill could’ve mashed me up.

I turned back to Miss Purdy, whose face was neon pink.

“Get back in here and sit down, Esso! Right now!”

That’s how I got my first demerit.

That’s how the maddest week of my life began.

WEDNESDAY (TWO DAYS AGO)

Penny Hill was too cheap to buy anything but second-class stamps. So the minute I got my demerit on Monday, I knew the letter wasn’t getting home till Wednesday morning, earliest.

When Wednesday morning finally came, I watched the envelope slide through the flap in our front door and snatched it before it even scraped the floor. I didn’t bother opening it, just wedged it in the bottom of the garbage skip outside and kept moving. Mission accomplished.

Well, sort of. The postman had arrived an hour late, which meant I was an hour late for school.

That’s how I got my second demerit.

I wasn’t shook this time either, though. I had a system: Penny Hill would send the demerit letter on Wednesday afternoon, and it would arrive home on Friday morning. Hopefully, the postman would be on point next time and arrive before I had to leave for school. Even if he didn’t, Mum worked nights that end of the week, so I could run home during lunch break and snatch it before she was up.

Mum and I were getting on quite well these days. She’d started opening up about the pranks she pulled when she was my age, and it was cool to see her goofier side. Better still, she trusted me to keep the flat tidy during the day, and double-locked at night, and had stopped asking questions when I came home late on weekends. Why mess that up? Especially since I’d already done the maths on the delivery timing and calculated there was zero risk of her finding out.

When Wednesday evening swung round, I decided to celebrate my newfound invincibility by going shopping in West End with Spark. His new Air Maxes were sick. Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Spark in an old pair of Nikes or wearing anything but a full-body black tracksuit—all-year road uniform.

Spark was handing the size-eight trainers he’d just tried on to the cashier at NikeTown, who promptly rang up his 160-quid bill. Spark produced a card from his bottoms, which, even after he pulled them up, were still too baggy for his short legs.

After the fifth card and eighth attempt, the card reader gave up. It couldn’t have been easy for Spark to keep all those PINs in his head, especially since most of them weren’t his.

The cashier chuckled while turning to me. “It looks like you might have to bail out your little mate here.”

As soon as he said the word “little,” my jaw dropped.

Then my heart sped up.

Spark was my guy. And a nice guy, at least to me. He and I had lived on the same block since we were six, so I knew him well. Well enough that if Mum hadn’t banned me from hanging out with him so many times, we’d be cousins by now. I’d heard this saying once, about how we all carry around a bucket on our heads, and every day, the people around us, whether they know it or not, pile their shit into it. Most of us are born with deep, wide buckets, which means even when we do lose our tempers, things don’t ever get too messy. But then you had a kid like Kyle “Spark” Redmond, who, instead of a bucket, was born with a teaspoon.

I only hung out with him once every couple months, and never this far from our ends, and now I remembered why.

Spark grabbed the open box out of the cashier’s hands and hurled it to the far end of the shop. I moved in quickly, knowing I had to wrestle him away from the counter and out of there before he ruined the night for both of us.

By the time we reached Tottenham Court Road, 15 of Spark’s mates had joined us, each wrapped head to toe in black, clogging up the already crowded pavement. Spark had told me before we went into NikeTown that he had a “few friends” coming, but he hadn’t told me he’d ordered the whole batch. And they were all Peckham yutes—East Peckham, to be precise, an even rowdier group than the T.A.S. guys D rolled with. I’d nodded heads at a few of them over the years but clearly hadn’t left a strong enough impression for any of them to remember my name. The one with crossed eyes and a plaster on his chin wouldn’t stop staring at me, like I was the one who’d crashed the party. I nudged Spark, who whispered a few words to him and got him to go back to ignoring me like the rest of them.

People who aren’t from ends tend to view it in one of two ways. On one side, you have the exaggerators. The ones who make it seem like every time you step out of Brixton station, you’re dodging machine-gun fire. But I knew plenty of people who’d lived in South London their whole life and never seen a crime happen. ...