Please help me find a Scifi book I read about 10 years ago

Atypicality

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I will give the best synopsis I can manage given that I was about 8 years old when I read this. The book must be at least 10 years old, but I cannot give an exact range.

****WARNING**** THERE WILL BE SPOILERS BECAUSE I DO NOT REMEMBER THE NAME OF THIS BOOK AND I AM WRITING EVERYTHING I CAN REMEMBER ABOUT IT.

There are two main characters I can recall. A young boy and his sister... These are children. The sister is very ill/scared/weak for some reason, and the brother acts as a kind of guardian for her.

One day, the sister finds some sort of weird thing (turns out to be a portal) in the basement, and the brother goes in to investigate. The first time he enters, some weird creatures from a different dimension (I think) ask him for help. He first chooses to go back out and talk to his sister. She is shocked at how long he was gone even though he estimated he had only been gone for 5 minutes. He devises a test to see the change in time in one world compared to the other.

After planning to help the strange creatures form the other dimension, he travels through their world, but unfortunately discovers that as he moves closer to the center of their world, the rate of time dilation increases. **This is where my memory of the story is completely blank**

After some stuff happens, he meets his aunt (?), and he steals some time altering device from her. By the time he gets back to his own world though, his sister was already 40 years old and died in a car crash.

He gets depressed, and just roams around with his time altering device, but it only affects him. He can make time, for him, travel extremely slowly, like a statue, or extremely rapidly.

Some corporation dude learns about his device and attempts to steal it.

That is all I remember. Any hints/leads would be greatly appreciated. I can't seem to remember the title/author of this book!

Thanks for reading this much, and for any help you can offer.
 
This is Marco's Millions by William Sleator! I think I had nightmares after I read it about leaving on a short trip and coming back to find my family all dead after decades, so I remember it well.

This is apparently a prequel to a book called The Boxes, though I haven't read it.
 

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