“Hang on. I’ll be right back,” Owen says, and he takes off running. A couple of minutes later, he’s back with a big wool blanket from the truck. He flings it around us both, and we stand next to each other under it, pulling it tightly over our shoulders like a giant cloak.

“Okay. So if you could go back in time and prevent any historical disaster, what would you pick?” he asks as if he’d never left.

“Hmm.” I think of something Mr. Escalante told us in English the other day. “I think I’d save Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife from burning to death.”

“What? Who?”

“Longfellow. The poet. His wife—her name was Fanny. I guess she spilled sealing wax on this lacy, ruffly dress she was wearing, and somehow it caught fire and she was immediately engulfed in flames.”

“God.” Owen shudders.

“Right? He tried to save her by wrapping her in a rug just like this,” I tug on the blanket. “And then he just flung his arms around her, but it was too late, and she died of her burns the next day, and he was permanently scarred by burns on his face and hands, so he grew a beard after she died. You know, to”—I realize that Owen is regarding me with a kind of horrified bemusement—“to cover up the burns,” I finish, rather weakly.

“Seriously?” he says. “CJ, do you even know what a disaster is? The Titanic, World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Rwanda, Syria. Those are the disasters you could prevent, and you go with Longfellow’s wife?”

“What? It’s tragic! Did you know he courted her for seven years? For seven years, she said no to him, and then finally she said yes and they got married and had six kids and a blissful life together until it literally went up in flames—and needlessly, I might add. They could have been so happy together for such a long time! I thought you liked happy endings.”

“Yeah, but come on. You could save millions of innocent people in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, wherever, and you choose to save Fanny freaking Longfellow. Why? Because it’s a tragic love story.” He smiles at me. “You’re a romantic, after all.”

“Hey. You didn’t say it had to be a great humanitarian choice. Anyway, those other disasters are so huge. Like, one single person could not have prevented World War II from happening.”

“You could poison Hitler’s coffee, and he could have died. That would have prevented the Holocaust. And possibly World War II.”

“You didn’t say we got to bring special tools with us and use super sneaky spy tactics. That’s not realistic. Besides, I couldn’t kill anyone.”