The instructions finished with…

"Be advised that if any part of any other being is captured, it will travel to that same set destination."

At the bottom of the wrapper was a big warning, stained by some of the juice from the honey roasted ham:

THIS PROTOTYPE SUPPORTS ONLY A LIMITED NUMBER OF TRANSPORTS

That was really scary. It didn't say how many passages we got. I guess if we weren't careful, we could get stuck somewhere in time. I imagined zapping back in time to see Abraham Lincoln give one of his famous speeches and then the phone saying, "OUT OF TRANSPORTS." Stuck in the 1800s . . . that would suck. I was pretty sure they didn't even have lightbulbs back then.

Sure, we wanted to travel to the future and find the cure to cancer, but the plan had always been to get back home—and there were a hundred reasons why. For one, my lacrosse team could go to the national championships this year.

With nothing else to do but hide, I sat on the bench and tried to figure out who that private number could've belonged to.

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