Someday We'll Be Together

Chapter 3- Say Cheese!

It was a Sunday morning, and like every Sunday morning, the Fontana family was deep in their morning sleep, except Lena. She quietly grabbed the box from under her bed and went downstairs, putting on her shoes without making a sound. That's when she noticed her lucky bracelet wasn't on her wrist. Unexpected events always happened to her without it. Lena took off her shoes and silently went back upstairs. While searching for her bracelet in her room, she accidentally bumped into the DVD player on her desk, causing it to fall to the ground with a loud crash.

"Damn it!" Lena whispered. She hadn't found her bracelet in her room anyway. Quietly, she went back downstairs again. But there was something she hadn't accounted for. Max, awakened by the sound of the DVD player hitting the ground, heard the front door closing. Suspicious, he went downstairs and saw Lena walking outside. He quickly grabbed his jacket, put on his black beret, and dashed outside. Jumping onto his bike parked in front of the garage, he pedaled after Lena. Max followed Lena to the market until she met Tyler. Seeing them together, Max grinned triumphantly. He took out his Canon PowerShot A70 camera from his pocket. Just as he was about to snap a picture of Tyler and Lena, he heard Samantha's voice from behind:
"Max? What are you doing here at this hour?"
Max turned around and saw Samantha, trying to come up with an excuse. Then he suddenly became suspicious: "What are you doing here at this hour?"
"Me? Oh, uh... nothing."
"Nothing?" Max looked at his girlfriend strangely. Samantha seemed to be hiding something.
"Listen, Max, there's something I need to talk to you about-"
Max cut Samantha off: "Not now, Sam. I have something important to do."
"You're doing it again. Just when I need to tell you something important, you brush me off for something else."
Max, indicating his annoyance, interrupted Samantha: "Just tell me. I'm listening."
"Okay, I'm breaking up with you, Max," Samantha said angrily. Then she slapped Max in the face.
Max, holding his hurting cheek, looked at Samantha. "Hey! What was that for?"
"You deserved it," Samantha said, then turned and started walking away.
"As if I didn't know you slept with Roger from the beginning," Max suddenly said.
Samantha turned back to Max: "What? H-how do you know that?"
"Rule 1: Best friends don't keep secrets from each other. You thought you could fool me by thinking I'd never figure out you cheated on me. Now you're trying to blame the breakup on me to save yourself."
Max reminded Samantha of the "Best Friends Rules" they established years ago when they were friends.
"We're not friends, Max. We gave up on that to be together as a couple. Now I have to go. Roger is waiting for me."
Samantha walked away without listening to Max any further.
"Giving up our friendship was the biggest mistake of my life," Max said to himself as he watched Samantha walk away.
Knowing that Samantha had cheated on him, Max thought their breakup was for the best. Now he had more important things to deal with. When he got angry at losing track of Lena and Tyler, he suddenly saw Lena getting into a black car parked in the opposite parking lot and completely forgot about Samantha. He hopped back on his bike and started following the black car. The car turned onto the road leading out of town into the forest. "Of course, they must be looking for a secluded place," he said to himself. He pulled his hood over his head and followed the car from a distance, making sure Lena and Tyler didn't see him.

Unaware of everything, Lena and Tyler were having a conversation in the car.
"Do you think we can find it? It's really important to me. Oh, how stupid of me! Why didn't I check if it was on my wrist or not?" Lena muttered as if she had lost someone instead of her lucky bracelet.
"Chillax, Lena, I'm sure when you got lost in the forest, the bracelet must have slipped off your wrist," Tyler reassured her.
"What if we can't find it? You don't know how important it is to me. It was my mother's gift. She used to wear it in her youth. Oh, if I can't find it, something terrible will happen to me. It's a bad omen!"
"For God's sake, Lena, calm down-" Tyler tried to speak, but Lena continued, overpowering his voice:
"Something terrible is going to happen to me, I can feel it. Not having it on my wrist means we're in danger at any moment. We could have an accident at any time, for example."
Just as Lena said that, the car abruptly slammed on the brakes.
"This is it! Our end!" Lena covered her face with her hands in panic.
Tyler lifted his head from the steering wheel and turned to Lena: "For God's sake, I can't focus on the road. Just calm down a bit."
Upon hearing this, Lena opened her eyes and looked around. They hadn't had an accident. They had reached the entrance to the forest. She took a deep breath and grabbed the woman's belongings and her own computer from the box.
"I'm just warning you. We could be in danger at any moment," Lena said as she got out of the car.
Max, meanwhile, had lost track of Lena and Tyler and was soaked from the sudden downpour.
"This was the last thing I needed!" he muttered. He decided to go back. He had almost proven that Lena had a boyfriend. Max was thinking this when he angrily kicked a stone on the ground. As he went back, he stepped into a gap and slid into the pit. Lena and Tyler, hearing the noise coming from the bushes, turned around.
"We're going to be torn apart by a bear! This shouldn't be happening!" Lena said, clutching her hands to her face in distress. Just then, Max came out from the bushes.
"Max? What are you doing here?" Lena asked, looking at Max with a mixture of surprise and anger.
"I came to find out what you and your boyfriend are were onto," Max said, grinning.
"But Lena is not my girlfriend," Tyler said.
"Don't lie, you weirdo. I know perfectly well what's going on between you two," Max said, grinning.
"Look, whatever you think we're doing, you're wrong. We came here to do research for homework. The history teacher put me and Tyler in the same group. That's all," Lena explained.
"Don't lie anymore, Lena," Max said.
"She's not lying. We came here to do research," Tyler said.
"Okay, what kind of research is this? Are you doing some weird research project for history class? Is research done in the forest? Look, it's obvious that this is another lie," Max said, insisting on not believing that something strange was going on.
"Should we tell him?" Lena asked Tyler.
"If he doesn't believe it, we should," Tyler agreed.
Lena explained," Well, yesterday we found this mysterious box I'm holding here. It contains a photo camera from 1983, a scientist's notebook, and a cassette. We went to the library to research about the owner of the box. Turns out it belonged to a woman named Margaret Lincoln who disappeared in 1983."
"The name of this forest comes from the name of the woman who disappeared in the forest," Tyler added.
"Lincoln? I thought the name of the forest came from Abraham Lincoln or something," Max said in astonishment.
Lena and Tyler looked at each other oddly.
"Anyway, what does this woman's history have to do with your research? She disappeared years ago, clearly gone. I hope you didn't try to find the woman," Max said.
"We've already found the woman, or rather, she found us," Tyler said, pointing inside the cave.
Max turned around and let out a scream when he saw the skeleton inside the cave.
"What you're doing is nuts! I wouldn't stay here for another second after seeing this skeleton," Max exclaimed.
"Listen, Max, you're not going to tell anyone what you heard," Lena said sternly.
"Is there more?" Max asked, expressing his discomfort. Lena moved away from the skeleton and went to the base of a tree, opening the box. She showed the Polaroid to Max:
"What I'm holding here is a time machine."
Max burst into laughter, "Oh my God! What else is there? Who could be bored enough to try to invent a time machine from a simple Polaroid in their backyard?"
Tyler walked over to Lena, "I also said it's ridiculous. If you're going to invent a time machine, you should use a spacecraft or something, not an old photo camera."
"No one asked you, weirdo, but what you're saying makes sense. Trying to invent a time machine from a Polaroid is like trying to read minds with a toilet seat," Max said, looking at Tyler.
"It's written in the woman's notebook, I'm not making this up," Lena added. She placed the photo camera on the ground and took the notebook from the box next to Tyler. While Lena flipped through the pages of the notebook, Max began examining the photo camera on the ground.
"There are strange numbers like in The Matrix," he said, seeing the numbers appearing on the screen when the camera was opened.
"But it still works."
He aimed the camera at Tyler and Lena and pressed the shutter button forcefully.
At that moment, there was a flash of light, and Lena, Tyler, and even Max closed their eyes. After the white light faded, Lena blinked her eyes open and looked angrily at Max:
"What do you think you're doing? It's not a toy!"
"Oh my God, Lena, it's not like it's going to launch us into space or something. It's just an antique photo camera. Be thankful it still works," Max said.
Max took the photograph that came out from under the camera. Lena and Tyler were in the same frame, rummaging through the box.
"This is great! I can show it to my mom," he said triumphantly.
"You'd see what would happen if it had fuel in it!" Lena said angrily.
Meanwhile, Tyler interrupted the siblings' argument, "Hey, look, the rain stopped."
Lena and Max looked up at the sky in astonishment.
"The weather is as clear as if it hadn't rained at all," Lena said.
"This is great, if the rain has stopped, I can go home right away," Max said.
Tyler looked puzzledly at the ground, "Wait a minute, why is the ground bone dry? It was raining like in the Amazon rainforest a moment ago, now it feels like desert weather, and even the ground is dry."
"Don't be ridiculous, look, the leaves are still wet," Max said, pointing to a tree where Lena and Tyler had just rummaged through the box.
"You're wrong, only the leaves of this tree are wet."
Lena went to another tree and showed its dry leaves. "Okay, this is really strange. But I'm sure it can be explained by some physical law," Max said, unwilling to accept that something odd was happening.
"They explained such instant weather changes in an episode of Backyard Science*," Tyler said, agreeing with Max's view.
"Yeah, that's it. We're just under the influence of a weather change coming from the Amazon rainforests," Max confirmed.
"Stop the nonsense, we're not in the Amazon rainforests. We're just in Lincoln Forest," Lena said, maintaining her seriousness.
Meanwhile, Max took out a photo of Lena and Tyler from his pocket and his face took on a new expression as if he had discovered something new. He walked to where the wet tree was and showed the photo to Lena and Tyler:
"Look, only the areas within this frame are wet!"
Tyler and Lena couldn't believe what they were seeing as they looked at a photo frame and then at the wet area of trees. Lena started pacing around:
"This can't be happening. That machine couldn't have just thrown us anywhere in the space-time continuum. It doesn't even have uranium in it. It can't work without fuel."
"Uranium? Is this thing nuclear too?" Max looked horrified at the photo camera.
"Give it to me quickly." Lena said, taking the photo camera from Max's hand. Then she tried to take a photo of a dry tree trunk, but the camera didn't work. It sounded an alarm, and the small screen on the fuel tank started flashing.
"Look, the uranium tank is empty," Lena said, confirming herself.
Meanwhile, Tyler pointed to the inside of the cave with a frightened voice,
"Guys, we have a bigger problem than all this."
Lena and Max saw that the entrance to the cave where the skeleton was found was empty. Now all three of them were looking at each other in horror.

*Backyard Science: 2004 TV-Show