There was this kid, Michael, at my school and everyone including me thought he was a nerd. I just never realized just how nerdy he was!

He came up to me one day and started talking to me.

“Trisha,” he said “you have such beautiful eyes.”

“Uh, thanks?” I thought that was utterly gross that he said that because at that moment, a little line of snot was slowly making its way down to his lip.

“Do you think that maybe you could come over to study at my house or something?”

“Me? At your house?” I was pretty popular and I didn’t really want his nerd rubbing off on me, if you start hanging out with a nerd, your cool sunglasses turn square and grow tape, your beautiful long hair is suddenly full of knots and in a ponytail, and you start having a nerd urge to buy a pocket protector.

“Uh, yeah.”

I was just about to say no when his eyes did something weird and I was inclined to say yes.

“Umm, I guess.”

“Ok see you after school!”

Then I started wondering why did I say yes? It was like he Jedi-mind tricked me or something. I was thinking about that all through school and I couldn’t concentrate.

So instead of walking back to my house I went over to Michael’s.

When I got there, he opened the door and let me in.

“We’ll be studying in the basement.”

“Ok.” Was all I could say, I was utterly shocked by the nerdiness of his house. There were science trophies, pictures of him with various inventions, the various inventions, and the most nerdy of them all was the Star Wars replicas.   There were little Jedi figurines and ships hanging from the ceiling. It almost made me believe he had figured out how to do Jedi-mind tricks and then used them on me to make me come to his house!

“You coming?”

“Uh, yeah.”

When we got down to the basement it was a little better, at least there were no Star Wars things. There was a suspicious looking thing draped under a cloth though.

“What’s that?” I asked him.

“That, is the reason I invited you over here.”

“I thought we were going to study.”

“Well, I needed to tell you that or else you would’ve thought I was crazy.”

“Trust me I already thought that.” I muttered under my breath, but he didn’t even notice. He was looking at the cloth thing like a mad scientist would look at his latest invention, which I notice now that was exactly what he was doing.

“I only invited you over so I could finally test my latest invention.”

“What do you need me for?”

“Well I’m not going to test it myself! It could kill me!”

“Then why would I want to test it?” I said as I started inching toward the stairs.

“You may not want to but you’re going to!” He said as he pulled off the drape and revealed a doorway sort of thing, but instead of a door there was a swirling screen of purple. I was mesmerized by it, which was a bad mistake because while I was staring, he suddenly pushed me in!

I was tumbling through nothing until I hit bottom, and it wasn’t a very soft landing, in fact I think I landed on some rocks.

I got up and looked around and saw the most incredible thing ever. Dinosaurs!

“Oh my god…”

It would’ve been a pretty awesome moment if the dinosaur hadn’t been a T-Rex, and if it hadn’t noticed me. It started running for me and the only thing I thought of was that the time machine actually worked. But that only lasted about a minute and then I dove back into the time machine and started falling again. I expected to go back to my time but instead when I landed it wasn’t the scratchy carpet of his basement, but the feeling of soft, warm grass.  I thought that maybe he moved the time machine outside, but that didn’t make sense because that thing looked like it weighed a ton.

I was outside surrounded by trees that smelled deliciously like maple syrup and freshly baked cookies.

After looking around I decided that I must be in a small forest. Since there were no extreme dangers around I thought I would explore a little, since obviously I must be in the future and not the past.

So I started walking around and soon realized that the forest wasn’t all that small, because no matter how far I walked it wouldn’t end.

I climbed a tree to get a view of how far the forest went and what I saw was nothing. Just absolutely nothing but a wide plain with some odd looking rocks here and there. But as I looked closer, I realized they weren’t rocks but something different, something I knew I had seen before but couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

So I walked out of the forest and inspected the strange rock things and it hit me, they were bones!

Human bones by the look of it and they were everywhere! I couldn’t help myself from screaming.

Some sort of thing must have happened between my present time and now that wiped out all of humanity!

I couldn’t stand it anymore; I ran back to the time machine and jumped in.

When I got back I was on Michael’s scratchy floor and he asked “So what was it like?”

“It was horrible! You’re horrible! We’re all horrible!”

And with that, I ran out of his house and all the way back to mine.

After thinking about it I realized that I knew why the future was like that, the news people always are saying that you need to recycle, and feed the needy and stop global warming. The earth finally must have broken down and stopped giving people oxygen or something.

But that didn’t explain why there were a whole bunch of trees. Because trees need oxygen too, so maybe the earth fought back and the trees took over!

But then I just started thinking I was crazy.  Finally, I did go crazy and I was in a rubber room.   Wait this isn’t right…nobody ever took me into a rubber room!

And then I woke up. 

After that dream I never spoke to Michael, and I started recycling and helping out at homeless shelters and stuff. That dream made me realize that earth is our home and we needed to take care of it.