“Okay . . . ,” she said with doubt in her voice.

“There’s this team of . . . Well, they called themselves multidimensional beings. On skateboards. Only they’re not actually skateboards.”

“Okay . . . ,” she said, no change in her tone of voice.

“Anyway, they’re helping me get things back to the way they’re supposed to be.”

To her credit she didn’t run away screaming. She waited for more, but I knew I had already hurled too much at her. Telling her that I was the current center of the universe might have been too much to swallow.

Now it was time to present her with some evidence she couldn’t refute because it would be from her own mind. “Close your eyes,” I said.

“Why?”

“Trust me.”

And she did. She trusted me. She closed her eyes. That might seem like a very small thing, but to me it was huge.

“I want you to picture someone you don’t know,” I said.

“How can I do that?”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I just said, “Picture Angela Johnson.”

Her face scrunched a bit, then relaxed. “She’s black, isn’t she? And plays a sport at Southside High.”

“No, she plays here.”

Then she opened her eyes and gave me a seriously deep look. “Our school . . . is supposed to have black students, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “It does where we used to come from.”

She looked away from me. I waited. It was like she dove into herself for a moment to dig up the resolve she would need. Then she said, “How can I help?”

Knowing that I had her support, her partnership in this, meant the world to me. “I need you to see things before I do,” I told her.

She laughed at that. “If I could do that, I never would have started dating Layton.” Then seemed to regret having said that.

In the silence that followed that particular revelation, I did something that was a really bad idea, but sometimes when gravity takes over, you have no choice but to fall. I leaned forward and gave her a gentle kiss.

She accepted it—leaned into it, even—but only for a moment before pulling away.

“Don’t,” she said.

I immediately regretted it. But I don’t think I would have been able to undo it in any world. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I wasn’t thinking. I won’t do it again.”

“I didn’t say not to do it again,” Katie told me, without looking at me. “Just don’t do it now.” Then she left me to ponder the million parallel universes of what that meant.

The problem with secret meetings in dangerous places—especially dangerous places that have been the subject of lawsuits from the parents of mechanically ensnared kids—is that they are under constant surveillance to prevent future lawsuits.

But I’ll get to that.