Chapter 9

I ran all the way to the wormhole.

“WHY?” I screamed as loud as I possibly could as I came to what I thought was the wormhole.

How embarrassing. I wasn’t in the right spot. Fortunately, no one was around to see that. I had to walk around the area a few times, saying “why” over and over again until I found the right place where the wormhole was located.

I popped out of existence for I don’t know how long. It felt like a quick eternity. Finally I landed in Celeste’s living room. How odd. It was decorated much differently than I remembered.

“Celeste!” I quietly called out. I was afraid to move out of my place in the corner because I didn’t want to get lost in her new apartment. It actually looked somewhat modern for once. Also, the thought crossed my mind that Celeste didn’t live there anymore, and I wanted to stay in the wormhole in case I needed to make a quick exit. Now wouldn’t that be freaky? Some stranger in your living room saying “why” and then disappearing right before your eyes. I know it would freak me out.

Fortunately it was Celeste who cautiously peeked into her living room.

“I thought that was you,” she whispered. “Wow, you have changed.”

She was being very sweet and polite, but I was not feeling the same way. Even with all that weary time travel, I was still a little – no, a lot – spazzed out due to my time travel discovery.

“You sent me to the future!” I screamed like it was an accusation.

“Shh!” She tried to get me to lower my voice.

“You sent me to the future!” I accused a bit more quietly.

“Yes, I know that,” Celeste whispered. “Now keep your voice down. He’s trying to sleep.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about that right now,” Celeste told me. She motioned for me to sit down. “So tell me about your trip. Why did you come back? I thought I finally found a family you would like.”

“Why did I come back?” I asked, perplexed that she’d even bothered to ask me such a thing. “You sent me to the future!”

“Obviously.” Celeste tolled her eyes. “You don’t really think they had toilets and electricity like ours in the 1685 of the past, now do you?” She was being sarcastic, I believed.

That did make quite a bit of sense, now didn’t it? Though the electricity was still a bit fuzzy to me. I stuttered, “I don’t know. I never was very good in history.”

Celeste just stared at me for a few minutes before speaking. “So why did you come back?” she asked.

I looked at her like she was a fool. “Because you sent me to the future. I just saw Mount Rushmore coming out of the ground all half destroyed.”

Celeste looked at me like she was still waiting for my answer.

“Teddy Roosevelt didn’t have a nose!” I told her. I was becoming very much unnerved.

“Yes, that happens,” Celeste said calmly.

“Now I know what happens in the future!” I exclaimed, trying to keep my voice down. “There is a big disaster that, like, destroys the world, and everyone goes back to, like, colonial times or something.”

“Yeah,” Celeste said. “They pretty much had to start over from the beginning. Most people forgot all the technological parts of living because they were so busy just trying to find food and water. Some people didn’t even know how to do that without a supermarket.”

“It was all too much for me, Celeste,” I told her. “I had to come back. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Neither Celeste nor I said anything for a few minutes. I was almost in tears, and Celeste looked like she would rather be doing something else.

“So how did you do with helping out Landon?” she finally asked. For some reason, I had a feeling that this is all she really ever wanted to talk about.

I sighed. “I didn’t know what in the world I was supposed to help him with. At first I thought that I was supposed to help him like Marianne so it wouldn’t be so awkward for him to marry someone that he doesn’t even like…”

Celeste cut me off. “No! You weren’t supposed to help him like her. If Landon and Marianne got married, it would have been terrible!”

“Yes, I know,” I said, this time somewhat cutting her off. “’Cause when I found out that Landon is gay – was gay – will be gay – I thought maybe I was supposed to help him and his family accept that and maybe prevent the marriage. I didn’t know what to do.”

Celeste looked at me oddly with a hint of confusion. “Landon’s gay?” she questioned.

“Um, yeah,” I told her. I didn’t bother to tell her that it took me longer than necessary to figure that out.

“Well, no wonder Marianne wanted to kill him,” said Celeste.

“What?!” I guess I said that out loud.

“If Marianne and Landon got married, Marianne would murder Landon for some reason no one ever knew. Until possibly now.”

“Hundreds of years before it actually happens,” I put it.

Celeste pondered this for a moment. “Exactly.” She went on. “But then Marianne goes crazy because she can’t have a husband – once you’re married, you can never be married again, even if your husband is dead – so she goes around and starts killing every married man she can find. Even her own father! If she can’t have a husband, then neither can anyone else.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s pretty gruesome.”

“Yes, I know,” Celeste said. “And I couldn’t go to keep Landon and Marianne from marrying because, well…”

“Marianne looks just like you,” I finished for her.

“Not only that,” Celeste said, “but she’s a future relative of mine. She is like, my daughter but with many generations between us. I wanted to keep her from being a criminal.”

“So it is going to be a while before this disaster happens?” I asked. “Or am I going to live to see it?”

“Girl, I have no idea. Last September when those two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, I thought that was the beginning of the disaster. But so many records were lost during the disaster, no one know how long the world had been around before it happened.”

I was confused. “Two airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center last September?” I questioned.

“Yes! It was the scariest thing ever. You should be so glad you weren’t here!”

I was still confused. “But I was here last September,” I told her.

“Delilah,” Celeste said slowly, like I was a child. “You haven’t been here in almost three years.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I was only gone for a few days.”

“Delilah,” Celeste said again in that voice like she was talking to a three-year-old. “It’s 2002. You were gone for a while.”

I fainted.

So what else is new? I faint when I get overly freaked out. And when I woke up, Celeste chose to freak me out even more by showing me a mirror. Yes, there I was. And I looked a bit older. And wouldn’t you know it. I fainted again.

“This is an expected reaction,” Celeste told me once I had calmed down a little bit. “I have seen it happen before. I even went through the same thing myself.”

“How did I get so old so fast?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t exactly say that you are old,” Celeste said. “Just older.”

“What difference does it make? How did it happen?”

Celeste looked over at the corner of her living room at the place I called the wormhole. “I don’t know,” she said. “Time goes by differently in there. How long did you stay with Landon’s family?”

“Just a couple days,” I told her. “Then everyone got excited because an earthquake kicked up some more of a rock, which turned out to be Mount Rushmore. And I freaked out and came back here.”

“By yourself?” Celeste wondered.

“Yes,” I told her. “I just ran away from everyone and went straight to the wormhole.”

“I must have gotten there before she did,” a male voice said.

Celeste and I both turned toward the sound of the voice. I just stood there with my mouth gaping open. Celeste became extremely flustered and nervous.

“Landon, please,” she said. “You should go back to sleep. This has to be terribly hard on you.”

Landon paid her no attention. “I see that you have grown p a bit also,” he said. I could not stop staring at him. He did look a little bit older, and that was not a bad thing at all for him. One problem though; he looked like he hadn’t shaved or had a haircut in three years, which was probably the actual case.

“You went through the wormhole?” I asked him quietly.

Landon nodded shyly. “I ran after you, but I took a different way to the wormhole. I knew that’s where you would go, but you weren’t there when I got there. I thought you’d already gone through it, so I went. But I got here before you did.” He sighed. “Now I can understand how you felt. Time travel is a little too much to handle.”

Celeste seemed to be handling the situation worst of all. Now she was the one who was freaking out. “Who else knows about the wormhole?” She asked, trying to keep herself under control.

Landon and I looked at each other. He shrugged. I shrugged.

“Landon’s mom saw me the first time I appeared, but I don’t think she knows how I got there and back,” I said.

“I never told anyone about it,” Landon put it.

“What’s wrong?” I asked Celeste, who was freaked out even more.

Celeste collapsed on the floor. “Someone else is coming through the wormhole. Someone is coming; I can feel it. Someone who isn’t supposed to come is coming, and all of the future is changing.” Her voice was so quiet and her breath was so heavy that Landon and I had trouble hearing her. But we understood what she meant.

Trouble was coming. And it was on its way through the wormhole.

The End

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-Signed and dated December 28, 2002 (But I know I started writing it a lot earlier than that. Maybe I started it in 2001. That would make sense – summer of 2001, I went to New York City to visit family.)

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Author's note: Well, that's it. That's the end. No, really, that's how it ended. I've told you from the beginning that it was bad.

Who was coming through the wormhole? Don't ask me, I don't remember. I didn't even remember that I had named two of my main characters the same thing. Use your imagination and fill in the blanks. Maybe it was Marianne, coming after Landon. And then she comes and kills him in the present. I don't know. Maybe I had planned on a sequel or something, which is a scary thought.

Please review and tell me how horrible the ending was. Because it was. In a funny way. Thank you for reading.