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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.