Okay, I admit it, I'm impatient. I'll post the third chapter.

Chapter 3: I Found Her

Two months later, my dad called me into the basement. I hoped it was what I thought it was. “Yeah, Dad?” I asked. “You wanted me?”

“Yes, Jason,” he replied. “You won’t believe what I discovered.”

“What? What did you discover?”

“You probably already know,” he said. “I found her.”

He had found Kat. I couldn’t wait to see her again. “So what do we do now?”

“Now,” said Dad, “you look for her.”

How exactly would I do that? Open up another portal, waltz in, and say, “Hi Kat”? She might not call herself Kat. She might go by Kathrine. Or that might not be her name at all anymore. “Okay, but what about the error last time? What was that about?”

“Well,” Dad said, “as it turns out, too much normal radiation was absorbed into the portal. ‘Normal radiation’ being the low levels that hang around each room in the house. Certainly not deadly, but the radiation is there.”

Hmm. “Does this mean that it will collapse like that every time?”

“Yes, but not for a few minutes. Unless, of course, unauthorized objects pass through the portal. But you, Jason, will be authorized, and so will I.”

“You mean you’re coming, too?!” I shouted.

“Why, of course,” he replied, grinning. “What better an opportunity to observe how this girl works without her giggling all over you!”

Giggling all over me? “What?” I asked.

“Oh, you'll see,” he replied casually. “Why are you so concerned all of a sudden?”

“Nothing,” I said. But something did concern me. Did he mean that Kat liked me, too? I thought better than to ask. Even if she did, how did my dad know and not me? Then I remembered that he specialized in studying behaviors in all sorts of animals… could he detect love better than most? Another thing I wouldn’t mention.

“So, dad, if the American dollar really is losing its value… then how much money should we bring with us?”

“Another good question. Things will be more expensive in the future, so we better take plenty of money,” Dad replied.

“Which won’t be a problem,” I said.

“No, it won’t,” Dad agreed.

Well, this seemed like it wouldn’t be hard. Then a thought occurred to me. “When you said you ‘found her’ how exactly did you find her?”

“Well,” said Dad, dragging the “ll” too long. “I found what time frame she would be living in, and she lives in the same town, too. But I didn’t find exactly where she lives. That’s tricky. We’ll have to go by each of the high schools in town and ask where she lives.”

“What, we’ll walk in there and say, ‘Hi, I’m Kathrine’s best friend from the past, here’s a picture, where does she live?’” I guess I’m big on sarcasm.

“Definitely not,” Dad said. “We’ll have to pretend we’re relatives visiting and we lost her address. We’ll talk to the principal.”

“Well, first you’ll have to change out of that lab coat. Get some normal clothes on, and maybe we’ll be lucky and this year’s style will be retro,” I said.

“Since when have you been a fashion stylist?” asked Dad.

“I’m not. I just know how to fit in. One last question: how will we know which school she goes to?”

“We won’t,” he replied, and walked out of the basement.

Well, wasn’t that just perfect.

* * * * *

About twenty minutes later we were ready to go. We didn’t pack anything except money in our wallets – we weren’t planning to be gone long, but just in case, we had brought a lot of money. Stuff could be expensive in the future. We walked into the basement and Dad started typing stuff on a computer.

The floor shuddered and the portal opened again along with a strong wind. This time, though, papers didn’t fly around because Dad had tacked them down beforehand.

“Ready?” Dad asked me.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I replied.

I took a deep breath and walked through.

The world suddenly changed and I was standing in a futuristic town, with cars hovering a foot off the ground as they went by and huge skyscrapers made of steel and glass. Every lawn was perfectly manicured and every house had some look to it that made it seem different. There was one house that was completely made of glass on the outside and one that was so small I would’ve thought it was for a mouse. But as I watched, ten people walked inside there with no problem.

“I love the future,” I said as Dad stepped out of the portal.

“Wow! Floating cars! Although these cars aren’t flying yet. They’ll get there, I’m sure. This is just amazing,” Dad said as he looked around us.

“Well,” I said, “let’s get looking.”

We decided to start looking at Westview High School. Walking through the lobby, we asked the lady at the front desk if we could talk to the principal. “I’ll tell her you asked for her,” the secretary said, then told us to sit on some uncomfortable benches while we waited.

Finally we were led to a conference room with a big long table in the middle. A chair on one end of the table was bigger than the rest, which I assumed to belong to the principal. Then a lady walked in who I thought to be strangely familiar. Who was she?

“Hello,” said the woman, “I am principal Jones.”

Then it dawned on me, just as her eyes widened with surprise as well.

“Jenny?!” I shouted, astonished that the girl who was in my English class would eventually become the principal of my school.

“Jason? What… ah, your dad. Should’ve known he’d discover time travel. Why was I surprised? Anyway, what’s your problem? Why are you even here? Surely you didn’t invent time travel just to find out if I became principal or not,” she said in a voice I vaguely recognized.

“That’s why we needed to talk to you,” said Dad. “We’re looking for a girl named Kathrine. Red wavy hair, green eyes, freckles, imperfect teeth. Here’s a picture,” he said, pulling out a piece of paper and handing it to Jenny.

“Hm,” said Jenny. “I know this girl. She’s a good student. May I ask why you want to meet this girl?”

“Time travel business,” said Dad very simply. He obviously didn’t expect me to recognize the principal, or for her to recognize me. The “pretending to be relatives” plan was out of the question.

“I can’t just give you information out of the blue,” said Jenny. “That would be against regulations.”

“Time travel is against regulations,” said Dad. “We shouldn’t even exist in this time frame at this age, yet we do. We just want to know where she lives.”

“Wait,” I said, “I have a question. Is school still going? It isn’t summer vacation yet?”

“No, not yet, sir,” she replied. “At this point I cannot give you more information unless you give me more.”

“Okay, you asked for it,” I said. “Kathrine was my best friend since forever, until Dad invented time travel. Kathrine had come downstairs into the room the first experiment was in progress, and accidentally got sucked into the portal. Then she was erased from our timeline and was born twenty years later than she had first been. Apparently the only people who can remember her are those who were in contact with her before the accident, which would be my dad and me. We need Kat – sorry, Kathrine – to come back to her own timeline and live her actual true life with her real parents.”

There was silence for quite some time.

“You expect me to believe that?” asked Jenny.

“You believed that we came here via time travel,” I retorted.

Jenny grumbled something that I couldn’t make out. “Fine. Here’s her address. Do you even know her last name?”

“Probably not,” said Dad.

“Her full name is Kathrine Elizabeth Thomas.”

“Huh,” I said. “Wonder where she lives. Got the exact same name.”

Dad was just looking at her information. “Does this address seem familiar to you? I recognize it, but I don’t know where from.”

I took a look at it. “Huh. Wouldn’t you know it, she lives in exactly the same place that she did twenty years ago. What are the odds of that?”

“It seems she might have an older brother, then. I’m guessing… twenty-five?”

“Wow,” said Jenny. “That’s spot-on. Are you psychic or something?”

“No, we just know who lived in that house twenty years ago,” I said. “So… Kat must be about ten years younger? Is that right? Is there really that much of an age difference?”

“We’ll just have to find out,” Dad said. “That will be all, Mrs. Jones.”

We got up and walked out of the school. “Okay, so now what?” I asked.

“Well, we could stop by our house. We got the keys. Besides, we’ll probably be expected,” said Dad.

“And if we aren’t?” I asked.

“Then we’re in trouble,” he replied.

So we walked to our house. I waited impatiently as Dad fiddled with the keys. “Dad, why are we even stopping by here? Couldn’t we just go by her house right now?

“No,” Dad said as walked inside. The house hadn’t actually changed much, except for the fact that no one was inside it currently. “In case you didn’t know, there’s a dance tonight.”

“So?” I said. “What does there being a dance tonight have to do with anything?”

“So, you’re going to swing by and ask her to go with you,” Dad replied with a smile. “She’ll say yes, without a doubt.”

“How do you know?” I asked, skeptical of the reasons.

“I just do,” he said, concluding the conversation. “Now, you’ve got to get ready. You’re going to a dance!”

Four hours later, I was all dressed up and ready to go. It was already dark. I walked along the sidewalk, trying to figure out what to say. I shouldn’t call her Kat, because she might not go by that nickname. But what should I say? What words could get her to like me again?

I looked up and realized I had arrived. I took a couple shaky breaths, then went up the stairs and knocked on the door.

I waited as I heard some hurried shuffles as someone tried to reach the door from across the house. Finally someone opened the door.

A girl appeared, obviously just come from the shower, wrapped in nothing but a towel, her hair still slightly dripping. She blushed. I blushed.

“Kat.”

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 Here's the second chapter of no straight lines. It's a little shorter than the first one, but it's here anyway:

Chapter 2: Something is Wrong

“Dad!” I shouted as I walked through the door. “Something is wrong!”

“Something is always wrong,” my dad replied, his voice coming from the general direction of the kitchen, slightly muffled. “Global warming, starvation in Africa, economy problems. But, I’m guessing you mean something is wrong that wasn’t wrong, say, yesterday.”

“Yes, Dad. That’s exactly what I meant,” I said, trying not to roll my eyes too obviously. Sometimes you had to be patient with my dad.

“Well, then, what’s the problem?” Dad asked, walking out of the kitchen holding a cookie with a bite out of it. “These are a bit undercooked.”

“Yeah, that tends to happen when the oven shuts off because of a power short out,” I replied. “The problem is that Kat doesn’t seem to exist anymore.”

“Who’s Kat?” Dad asked.

I gave him a skeptical look.

“Okay, okay, how do you know this?” he asked. “What kind of hints have you gotten that Kat doesn’t exist anymore?”

“Well,” I started, “Mrs. Thomas has a son. Kat is an only child. And she said she didn’t know me. When I mentioned I was a friend of Kat, She said, ‘We don’t own a cat.’ Like she didn’t know I was talking about the person Kat. The last thing I should mention is that Kat’s mom works all day, same with her dad. So why any of her parents are at home at all is beyond me.”

“Fascinating,” said Dad, a spark of curiosity appearing behind the deep emerald green in his eyes.

“What do you think happened?” I asked him.

“Well, it seems she might have been erased from our history timeline,” he replied.

“Meaning…”

“Meaning that she has now been born somewhen else in time. Although I have no idea how that would be possible, seeing as her parents… anyway, as far as we know, she could now be living happily in ancient Greece or be far in the future with no memory of any of what has happened in her fifteen years of life in this town.”

Did he just say, “somewhen else in time”? Didn’t Carl Sagan say that or something?

“Is there any way to narrow it down, so we know where to start looking?”

“Not off the top of my head,” Dad replied. “But let’s go downstairs to investigate, shall we?”

When we reached the basement, Dad walked over to one of his computers and started typing. “I’m going to try to figure out what exactly the computer did and see if it had anything to do with where she ended up.”

“Okay,” I said, kind of following what he was doing. When I graduated from high school I was definitely not going to be a scientist.

Dad sat down and stared at the screen, apparently reading something. He pressed a button on the keyboard a few times, still staring intently at the screen. Suddenly his eyes lit up. “Aha! Apparently what the computer did was follow Kat’s thoughts and take her where she was thinking of going. Amazing! I didn’t know my computers had the ability to do that! The question is: where is Kat now? It doesn’t say what she was thinking.” He started typing vigorously on the keyboard.

“Um,” I said, “I remember she liked to think about the future. It seemed to hold unlimited possibilities to her. She said that it helped her think about what will be possible, not what is proved possible now. She said something like scientific procedures have been proved wrong before and she wished they could be gotten right the first time. She had always dreamed of traveling to the future, where things have been tested enough times to be actually right. I think.”

“Good,” my dad said. “That narrows it down considerably. From this point on to about… hmm, the end of the world.”

“That’s, like, four billion years or more!”

“Exactly,” Dad confirmed. “But, keep in mind it’s a lot easier to travel forward in time than backward. In fact, we’re traveling through time right now! At a normal rate, that is. Traveling to the future in a time machine is just speeding up the normal passage of time. But going backwards in time… First you have to slow down, then stop time, turn the order of time around, and then you can start going. It requires a lot more energy. Then there’s the possibility of making a paradox. So, you just saved us a lot of trouble by telling me we should go forwards in time.”

Well, great. I had narrowed it down.

“So can we start looking for her now?” I asked.

“Sure,” Dad said, “I’ll get started right away. It might take a couple months to actually pinpoint her location. Is that all right?”

“Yeah,” I said, disappointed. “The sooner, the better.” This was going to be another boring summer. At least, for the first couple of months…

“Keep your fingers crossed,” Dad told me.

     Okay, so I've been taking a break from making comics and stuff. I've been writing instead. I was going to wait to post them on here until I had fixed more stuff in them, but Little Miss Impatient kept insisting. So here it is. I'll be posting a chapter a week, or something. I've gotten pretty far. Tell me what you think. Here's the first chapter:

No Straight Lines


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Chapter 1: My Dad Makes a Revolutionary Discovery

It was a normal day.

         Okay, maybe not really normal, but it started out that way. I went through my daily morning routine like usual, waking up at six, eating breakfast, and catching the big yellow school bus like I always did.

         Everyone on the bus was hyped up and excited when I got on, and I knew why. It was the last day of school. High school, as it turned out, ended a little later than the other schools in the district and all the kids were excited to leave. The seniors had left the day before, but I was only a freshman, and my first year of high school was coming to a close. I couldn’t wait for it to end.

         You see, it wasn’t high school that I didn’t like. The concept was more like middle school than you’d think, and I liked my teachers fine. It was the way the other kids treated me, like I was some toy they owned and if I didn’t work right, they’d take their hammers and whack me to find what the problem was. It was the most immoral thing I had come across since middle school. I couldn’t talk to the counselors or teachers or principal because they were just puppets, too.

         High school. Nothing was better.

         The bus lurched to a stop, making all the students sway in their seats. No one complained, though; these kids had been riding the lurching bus for years, some even the entire time they went to school. I had been riding since kindergarten, a total of ten years.

         I ducked as a paper airplane almost hit my forehead. “Watch it, Ryan!” I shouted at the quirky blond kid that smirked when I said his name. He thought it was funny. Well, it wasn’t. I was about to tell him that when I glanced over and saw Kat getting on the bus. My heart stopped, as it always did when I saw her. She was gorgeous. Her curly red hair always seemed to have a kind of glow to it, and it always went where she wanted it. Her stunningly deep emerald eyes flashed with determination. The freckles that always peppered her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose were becoming more vibrant now that summer had begun. She didn’t use makeup of any kind, and that proved that she didn’t want to change herself by anyone else’s standards. She was a more “broken” toy than I was, constantly bothered by the “puppeteers”, the girls teasing her that she didn’t get an “A” on the latest test when they didn’t pass themselves.

         Anyways, she was beautiful and spunky. Okay, I admit it. I liked her. Maybe more than just liked. But what could I tell her? The other guys were always telling me to ask her out, but it would have been strange for her. Why?

         She thought we were best friends. I mean, we were best friends, and that was cool. I doubted she knew how I felt, seeing as I treated her the same as she did me. For now, we were just friends. But it was getting harder to hold back those thoughts that didn’t deserve a space yet. Or maybe they did deserve a space. Maybe I should tell her how I felt…

         Kat walked briskly down the aisle and sat down next to me in one swift move. She smiled, and the metal in her mouth flashed in the newly arrived sunlight. She had braces, imperfect teeth, and it was just another thing that I adored. The rubber bands that held the wires in place were alternating between green and blue, the colors of summer. Ah, she loved summer more than me…

         “So, Jason, what are your plans for the summer?” she was saying, but I barely heard her. I was still in awe.

         “Uh, I’m not – I’m not sure yet… I was kinda hoping – “ I stopped there, pausing for a second to collect my thoughts. She was asking me what I was planning for the summer. Invite her over. Don’t say anything stupid. “I was hoping you could come over after school, so we could, like, enjoy the last day, or somethin’…” My tongue was going numb. My brain started to shut down again. Man, that sounded really dumb coming from my own mouth. I expected her to make fun of me, or even get up and leave, but instead she just laughed. Threw her head back and let out a clear, low, bellow of a laugh that sounded almost as beautiful as she looked.

         I couldn’t believe I was sitting there with her. Even though I had been for years.

         The bus lurched forward again, turning onto a street where some of my other friends lived.

         “Jason, you know my only plans every day are to be with you!” she said, smiling, and her braces flashed again.

Looking back on it, I guess I should have taken what she said as a sign. But I missed it. And that afternoon, I would regret missing that sign.

“Oh, yeah… right,” I said. I felt like such a dork, forgetting what had been the same for years. My cheeks started to burn more fiercely.

         “Listen, Jason…” said Kat, the light around her face dissolving. “Remember how my parents have always sent me to some fancy summer camp every year? Well, at the beginning of this year my parents decided to give me a break and not enroll me.”

         “That’s great!” I said, smiling to show that I was proud of her. But she wasn’t smiling. “That’s great, right? Kat, why aren’t you happy?”

         “Because something came up. Something came up and now I have to go anyway... and… I don’t even know if I’m coming back at all! Oh, Jason…” her voice trailed off. She was truly upset now. Her eyes were starting to water. Suddenly the tears rushed down her face and she shouted, “And no one understands, Jason! I can’t tell anyone why I’m leaving because of ancient rules but I feel like I have to anyway! WHY?! Why do I feel this way?” Kat was truly crying now, and we were getting strange looks from the people around us.

         “I don’t know why,” I said. Ancient rules? “But y’know what I do know?”

         “What?” Kat asked, sniffling.

         “I know how to make peanut butter and snickerdoodle cookies, your favorites. Will that cheer you up, if you come by after school today?” Kat didn’t know it, but those were the only kind of cookies I knew how to make. Not that I had even tried to make any other kinds.

         “It might,” she sniffled, trying to smile so I knew she appreciated what I was doing.

         “Look.” Kat pointed out the window, and I saw that we had arrived at school. So soon? Why did I live so close to school?

         The bus lurched to a stop, and the door opened. Immediately everyone on the entire bus stood up, and tried to shove their way into the aisle to get off. Kat and I, though, stayed sitting down. We knew we couldn’t get into the aisle with all the hustle and bustle, and we didn’t want to get hurt.

         “Meet you by the willow tree,” said Kat. There was a willow tree in the front courtyard of the school, and it was where we met when we needed to talk about something, since we didn’t have any classes together.

         “Sure thing,” I said. “See you then.” We didn’t need to tell each other when we would meet. After school one of us would just wait there until the other showed up.

Both of Kat’s parents worked, and she was an only child, like I was. As long as she got home by six, she could do whatever she wanted. My mom worked, and my dad was a scientist who was always locked up inside his laboratory, and they didn’t care where I was as long I was home when dinner started. We both had a phone in case of emergencies.

         The aisle finally cleared out enough for us to walk out. We both waved as we walked our separate ways in the directions of our first period classes. When I walked through the door of the classroom, I pulled out my homework. I know what you’re thinking: Homework due on the last day!? Yes, welcome to high school! Exciting, right? Not really.

         The bell rang, first period began, and the first thing we did was turn in our assignments. Then we cleaned out everything that belonged to us, and in our spare time handed yearbooks around to be signed. Some students gave the teacher gifts, cards, or candy. We had taken finals yesterday, and today was just a day to clean everything up. I didn’t really have anything to do. I love to write, when it’s not for an assignment, and so I pulled out my notebook, trying to make sense of what Kat had said on the bus. She was going to be gone this summer. Again. But this time, she was going somewhere else. Where? I found I couldn’t concentrate, so I eventually just gave up on writing anything and got up to get my yearbook signed. But I was careful to save plenty of space. For Kat.

         The rest of the day was pretty much like that, cleaning up, signing yearbooks, trying to solve a mystery without all the clues.. Very busy, for a boy my age.

It was so boring I could barely stand to sit through it all. But, somehow, I managed.

         When the final bell rang, I quickly stood up and ran out of the school, hurrying to meet Kat at the willow tree, but my last class was on the other side of the grounds. Kat was waiting for me when I finally arrived.

         “So,” I asked, “Where are you going this summer?”

         “Oh,” Kat replied. “we should go to your house.”

         I agreed. We picked up our stuff and turned towards my house, making sure no one was stalking us. Believe me, that had happened before to us, and we didn’t want it happening again. A very complicated story involving rabid lemurs and cupcakes. Don’t ask. We walked the way the bus had come that morning, talking and having fun.

         Turning a corner, we came to my house. We stomped up the steps of my porch, and I opened the door. Stepping aside, I said, “Ladies first,” and, giggling, Kat walked in.

         As I followed her inside, I checked to make sure my dad hadn’t blown anything up. He was a scientist that did experiments with all sorts of stuff: chemical reactions, cures for cancer, machines that will make certain jobs easier, new species, prosthetic limbs, phone technology, and some advanced stuff that was predicted not to happen for years. Some things he did just for fun, because he wanted to know what would happen, and others he did because he was paid to. He was paid very well.

There was one project he had been working on for years, though; he said it could change history, that it would be a revolutionary advancement in technology, but he wouldn’t tell anyone exactly what it was. He was paranoid about that kind of thing; he expected everyone to steal his ideas before he finished them. I myself had that aspect in my writing, but that’s just about where our similarities ended.

         I walked into the kitchen, which was pretty much tile, and Kat rested on the couch in the living room. She picked up a remote off the glass-topped coffee table and turned on the sixty-four inch flat screen TV. Immediately the Phineas and Ferb theme song blasted through the five giant-sized speakers, scaring me out of my wits and making me momentarily deaf. When I could finally hear again, Kat was shouting, “Sorry!” She turned it down about twenty notches. It was still pretty loud, though. I had a hard time thinking straight, but at least it wasn’t deafening anymore.

         Did I mention how much my dad gets paid for what he does? Honestly, I didn’t know TV’s came in that size until my dad bought one. He said it would improve our "family time," whatever that means.

         I pulled my head back into the kitchen and made sure I had all the supplies for making cookies. Two cups of flour, one cup of sugar… I tallied off the supplies as I went, tossing the ingredients into the automatic mixer. After all the ingredients were mixed together, I shaped the dough into cookies, put them on a cookie sheet, and stuck them in the oven.

         While they were baking, I went over and sat on the couch with Kat. I looked around me. This house appeared fairly normal, with a few of Dad’s knickknacks lying around. But in the basement, in Dad’s laboratory, it seemed like a totally different world, with all sorts of things, broken, old, or dysfunctional. It was almost like an entirely different house underground, the basement was so big.

         “So, about summer…” Kat’s voice trailed off. I knew she was just as upset as I was.

         “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll do the same thing I do every year. The question is, how are you going to be?”

         “Oh, Jason… there’s something I wanted to tell you. Something I should have said long ago. I just never had the nerve to tell you, because I never thought that you would… Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I—“

         There was suddenly a very large shudder that vibrated the whole house. The TV screen fizzed with a rainbow of colors, and then went black. The oven turned off. The ceiling fans above our heads slowly spun to a stop. This was definitely not good.

         “Dad,” I said, glancing across the room at a door in the wall that led to the giant basement. I didn’t want him to be in trouble down there, but my gut told me something was definitely wrong.

         “We should go see what happened,” Kat decided. I would have objected, but for some reason I couldn’t say anything, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

         She got up and ran to the door to the basement, flung it open, and hurried down the steps. I was close behind her. There was some kind of purplish-blue light coming from down at the bottom of the stairs, and I could feel a breeze blow around my face. Whatever Dad had done required a lot of power…

         Kat had reached the bottom of the stairs now, and stood gaping, staring at the source of the light. Kat’s hair floated around her face gently, and she looked so beautiful, however scared she was. Her face was frozen in shock, and when I finally got to the bottom of the stairs I probably looked the same way.

         Hovering in the center of the room, about two feet above the ground, was an ovular shape that glowed with alternating blue and purple light. It was hard to tell if it was three-dimensional, like a totally warped ball frozen in one of its bounces, or if it was a flat object, like a piece of paper suspended in air, tied to some invisible string.

         “What is that?” I shouted over the noise of papers fluttering, scientific instruments flying, pieces of equipment rolling everywhere, and the constant low but loud hum of what I guessed was the glowing object.

         “That, Jason, is a time portal,” my dad boomed. “It will lead you into a different place in time, although I’m not sure when exactly, or where, you will end up. This is just a prototype, so don’t just jump in there. I still need to figure out how to control the variables. For all I know, you could end up in the Peloponnesian war, or at the end of the world, or two seconds after you jumped in.”

         Kat seemed even more mesmerized than I as we stood there, watching the portal shift colors. It was amazing that Dad had been able to do this. No, it was incredible. How had he done it? How much time had he put into this project just to get this far? Most likely, more than he had counted. Dad never really paid much attention to time. That was certainly ironic, especially after he had just invented a time machine.

         Suddenly I registered movement. I’m not sure how I picked it out of all the debris flying around, but my eyes caught a sofa being pulled towards the portal at a dangerous angle. I had just enough time to shout, “Kat, MOVE!” before the sofa came hurtling at us, and I barrel-rolled to the side.

Kat was still dazed, though, and looked lazily in the direction of where my voice had come from. She muttered, “Uh?” and then her eyes widened as she realized what was about to happen a fraction of a second before it actually unfolded. The sofa hit her square in the chest, and she screamed, “Jaso-uuuh,” as the air was knocked from her lungs, and her feet were picked up from under her as she was dragged closer to the portal. Just before she was about to be sucked in, she managed to roll off of the kidnapping sofa, and I breathed a sigh of relief, though no one heard it.

Kat clung to the floor as the now hurricane-speed winds tried to pry her off, pulling at her summer dress and hair, trying to separate her from the ground. I could see that she was using all her strength, that it was spending her energy too quickly and she wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer.

“DAD!” I shouted. “We need to disengage! Turn it off! NOW!” The only way to get through to my dad is to use scientific words. With some occasional shouting tossed in, too.

 “I’m trying,” he replied, pressing a number of buttons attached to a desktop he had set up. “I really am!”

“ERROR,” a mechanical voice suddenly proclaimed, probably coming from the computer. “A FATAL ERROR OCCURRED. AN EXCESSIVE AMOUNT OF RADIATION ENTERED THE PORTAL. AUTOMATIC SHUTDOWN IN TWO MINUTES. DURING THAT TIME, YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO PERFORM ANY ADDITIONAL REQUESTS OR JOBS.”

Great. We had two minutes, and, judging by the look on Kat’s face, she wouldn’t be able to hold on that long. I watched helplessly as Kat took several deep breaths. Then she said something I couldn’t make out over the noise, and let go.

In seconds she was gone.

“ERROR,” said the voice again. “UNAUTHORIZED OBJECTS PASSED THROUGH PORTAL. IMPLOSION WILL OCCUR IN THREE, TWO, ONE.”

Suddenly there was a shudder and a strange whooshing sound. The portal evaporated, collapsing into itself before disappearing. There was a giant clatter as all the objects that had subdued to the pull of the portal fell to the ground. Then it was silent.

The sofa was gone. The portal was gone. Kat was gone.

Kat was gone! And I never got to tell her how I felt. What had she tried to say before we went downstairs? And what had she said right before she got sucked into the portal?

I slowly stood up. I looked at my dad, and I could tell he had no idea how to fix this problem. This is just a prototype, he had said. I knew from experience that prototypes can be unstable, and that something could go wrong at any time, like the time Dad had exploded the backyard by accident. That was when we decided he should move to the basement.

Dad shook his head and walked over next to me. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You should be the one to tell her parents.”

I nodded, and walked back up the steps to the living room. The smell of partially cooked cookies filled my nose, and I remembered that I had started a batch cooking before Kat and I had headed down to the basement. I went over and took them out of the oven, not having the heart to eat any of them.

I decided to go to Kat’s house right away. It would be easier to get over talking to them about Kat sooner rather than later.

Walking out the door, I turned to the left. Deep in thought, I remembered memories that Kat and I had shared.

Once, when we were about five, Kat and I had a fight over a pen. Don’t ask my why, but we both wanted it really badly, and we wrestled over it like five-year-olds do. I finally gave up after a few minutes of hard-core toddler fighting, and let go of the pen. It went flying, and Kat tumbled backwards. Suddenly, she landed on her feet exactly right, and stood to her full height, thrusting an arm into the air. The pen came flying down, landing perfectly upright in Kat’s tiny hand. Then, smiling a mischievous smile, she proclaimed, “Raaaahh! Fear me!” She thrust her hand forward, brandishing the pen as if it were a sword, and I backed up out of staged fright. “I am the mighty and feared demon of evil!” she squealed, jumping up high and doing a karate kick. Then she swung her pen around. “I am—“ Her mother had pulled Kat up into her arms, taking the pen and tossing it out of sight.

“Kathrine Thomas,” shouted her mother, “I don’t ever want to see or hear you play games like that again!”

“But, Mom, it wasn’t like I was telling him about—“

“ENOUGH,” her mother had concluded. “Time for us to leave.”

I hadn’t really thought about that memory much, but now, it might have something to do with why she had to leave on such short notice.

I walked on.

Another memory I had was from more recently, in about seventh grade. For some reason, a food fight had broken out at lunch, and Kat and I were doing our best to eat our food without getting covered in anyone else’s. Suddenly, out of practically nowhere, a porcelain plate flew directly at us. “Kat, watch out!” I had shouted, and I ducked underneath the table. I was good at avoiding things; even deadlines for assignments. I have never been sure why. Kat had turned around, faced the plate head on, and karate-chopped it neatly in half. Everyone at lunch saw it, and after the shards hit the ground, the food fight was pretty much over. Kat was tough, and I still couldn’t figure out why Kat would let anyone treat her as the “puppeteers” did.

I looked up and realized I was at Kat’s house. Taking a few shaky breaths, I walked up the stairs and knocked on the door. Kat’s mom answered, which I thought was strange. She should have been at work. Today she had straightened her hair, as she always did on a workday.

“Hello,” said Mrs. Thomas. “How can I help you?”

“Mrs. Thomas,” I answered. “Hi. I wanted to talk to you about—“

Suddenly a small redhead boy appeared next to Mrs. Thomas. “Who’s that?” he asked. That was wrong. No little boys lived here; Kat was an only child like I was.

“I don’t know, honey,” replied Mrs. Thomas, “but he seems to know me.” That was wrong, too. She knew who I was, or at least, she was supposed to…

“Well, you should know me,” I continued. “I’m Kat’s friend.”

“No, you’re mistaken. We don’t own a cat.” Mrs. Thomas looked confused now.

“Your… never mind,” I said, stopping myself before I said anything that was even more stupid. I turned around and walked away, angry that I thought this might even possibly work at all.

“Wait!” shouted Mrs. Thomas, coming out the door and waving an arm in the air. I was already crossing the street.

Something was totally wrong.