Ma Elena shifts her weight from foot to foot. She doesn’t want to leave if it means not seeing Chaz off, but her shift at the nursing home is about to start. Chaz teases her that the patients can live without People magazine and Doublemint for an hour, but when he sees she is tormented by the mere thought, he gives her a big squeeze and tells her to go. “Don’t be a stranger,” she says.

Before she heads off, she says, “You’ll still be here, right? At least for now?”

“Unless I travel back to my time without warning.”

“Ha ha! Not funny.”

“Wait,” I say. “I never asked—how was prom? You worked so hard on it!”

“Honestly? I don’t know. I missed most of it because of what happened. And the photo booth photos are terrible: the moon is glowing, but you can’t see anyone’s faces!”

I resist the urge to say duh and just hug her tightly. And she, too, drives away.

As soon as we are alone, Chaz asks for my help. He wants to have his first real kiss—apparently, I don’t count (tbh, that’s fair)—which will also be Ernie’s first kiss period (as far as Chaz knows), but it has to happen now before his parents arrive. He’s going to ask Ernie out and, okay, it’ll be a little long-distance for a while, but why not? No one has to know.

Ernie should be in cutlery shop by now, so all we have to do is sneak into my old room and get his fractal painting, which Chaz wants to mount inside a frame he has already snuck out of the art department. Then we’re going to sneak it into the empty house on Faculty Row and hang it over the fireplace. I’m supposed to bring Ernie to where Chaz will be waiting. Oh my god, he’s planned this like a promposal! I mean, it’s no “I PROM JUST FOR YOU,” but I’m still a little jealous.

“What do you think?” he says, dying for me to validate the most adorable plan ever.

This is what I think: it has now been exactly a week—maybe the most memorable week of my life—since I landed here, and the place I need to be is on the field. If the portal (if that’s what it is) works, I’ll be listening to the marching band, hoping they disappear from view, then waking up in the arts building with my life back. If there’s even the smallest chance that we were right about the time slip, of course, I want to try.