I hear more people sit down at the table.
“So, Will, before we have any more awkward butt contact, I should introduce you to my friends,” says Nick. He’s loud. Loud enough that I assume much of the cafeteria is forced to listen to his nasally proclamations.
“Friend. Singular,” says a female voice to my right. “I’m retracting my friendship with you, so you’ve only got one left.”
“That’s Ion. We’ve been feuding recently,” Nick says to me. “Argument about time travel. Won’t bore you with the details. She’s just pissed because she knows I’m right.”
“Please. Another dimension is the only explanation that—” says Ion.
“If you had the technology to travel in time, you could obviously figure out how to remain—” interrupts Nick.
“WHOA, WHOA,” I say, overpowering their voices. “Too much talking at once. You are welcome to bore me with the details, but at least take turns, please.”
“Okay,” says Nick. “SparkNotes version: A while ago some geeks made a permanent monument out of stone or whatever that was inscribed with an invitation to a party that would be thrown in honor of time travelers from the future. The idea was that millions of years from now, when time travel exists, the stone invitation thingy would still be around, and humans of the future would see it and travel back in time to attend the party. The only problem was—”
“No one showed up,” interrupts Ion. She continues at what I assume is the maximum words per minute a human is capable of pronouncing without compromising diction or dropping syllables. “From the future, I mean. But that doesn’t mean that time travel will never be invented. Because anyone who has consumed any science fiction knows that there are paradoxes created when you travel back in time and meddle with the past. So it stands to reason that if humans did travel back in time, they would be entering a time line of a parallel dimension. The first dimension would be the way things are now, without time travel. That’s where we are living, obviously. The next dimension would be the version of reality that was created when they traveled back in time. So maybe a bunch of time travelers attended the party; it just happened in a different dimension.”
“Which obviously makes no sense,” says Nick. “Because—”
“It is the only explanation that makes—”
“Wow. So, Ion? Is that your given name?” I ask, trying to change the subject to something less volatile.
“Yeah,” she says.
“No!” says Nick. “Tell him the truth!”
“Why do you always have to tell people this story?” she asks.
“It’s endearing!” says Nick.
“It’s embarrassing. That’s why my parents started calling me Ion in the first place.”
“So your given name is…” I prompt.
“It’s Hermione, all right?” says Ion, eliciting peals of laughter from Nick. “Yes, like in Harry Potter. Only my parents were living under a rock and had never even heard of the books. It was, like, my great-aunt’s name or something. Anyway, after the first movie came out, it didn’t take long for my parents to get tired of hearing jokes about how my baby talk was probably a spell I was casting.”
“I can see how that would get old,” I say.
“Right, so my parents decided to make a nickname out of Hermione. They couldn’t use Her or Nee, obviously, so they used the middle sound: Ion.”
“I like it,” I say. “It’s unique.”
“Thanks,” says Ion.
Nick says, “Will, I still feel bad about earlier, and I want to make it up to you by serving as your eyes at this table. Cool?”
“I guess.”
“So here’s something you should know about Ion: She’s like the nerd chick in teen movies who, if she brushed her hair and put on girl clothes, would suddenly be transformed into, like, a smoking-hot babe.”
References to visual components of cinema are meaningless to me, of course, but I appreciate Nick’s effort.
Ion says, “You realize I’m sitting right here, right?”
“I get that a lot, too,” I say to Ion.
“About being transformed into a smoking-hot babe?” asks Nick.
“No, people talking about me like I’m not here,” I say.
A new voice says, “Speaking of people who are actually sitting right here, Ion’s boyfriend is sitting right here, too, and he’s about to beat the crap out of you, Nick.” It’s male, positioned opposite me, in between Ion and Nick. The voice is deep and resonant, almost musical.
“My bad,” says Nick. “Will, I would like to introduce Whitford.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” says Whitford.
“You too,” I say.
“Now, based on his name and the sound of his voice,” continues Nick, “you’re probably thinking Whitford is a white dude, right?”