The Universal Laws of Marco

WORMHOLES

BUT EARLIER THAT DAY, WHEN Erika texted, I was traveling down that wormhole. I was on that journey because that’s what happens when someone reappears after four years. And suddenly that someone, that her, is standing in the middle of your high school cafeteria as if she had never left . . .

You is what you think. You are here.

And for a second you wonder if you’re hallucinating. Because, let’s be real, you’ve imagined this day more than you’d like to admit. You’ve seen it play out in your head hundreds of times. But when it happens, in your cafeteria—man, of all places, the cafeteria—you stand there, watching her with her lunch tray in hand, eyes searching for a place to fit. For a friendly face. And you can’t move because your feet are paralyzed. You’re holding up the lunch line, and everyone thinks you’re acting weird. But what they don’t know is that you’re traveling.

Through time.

You are a time traveler.

On a mission through a wormhole, the past suddenly connected to the present through a not-so-simple bending of the space-time continuum.

Just one-quarter shy of graduation.

Meanwhile, your responsible girlfriend, the one who never disappears, is texting you. Her unheard words circulate through the machine in your pocket. But those words can’t reach you. Because you’re not in the now. You’re in the then.

You’re with a bottle that spins and a girl who kisses you, a girl who hasn’t yet disappeared, taking your heart with her.

And with all that going on, you forget one of the fundamental truths about wormholes.

A wormhole can kill you.