I had it made.

I did, I really did. Sure, I wasn't Homecoming King or the most popular guy in school, but I was popular and on the football team.

Booster scores! Seriously, you don't even know what that feels like. I can't even describe it, but it feels good. Really good.

I was a shoe-in for a college scholarship. I had my life ahead of me. It was bright. It was fantastic.

But we had problems, see? Money problems. I don't even want to talk about my dad. So I screwed up. I gambled, I threw a couple of games, I got kicked off the DC High football team and almost got expelled.

Y'know, life always throws you a quantam data recovery program. A life-ring, I guess. I got detention. Weeks and weeks of detention that I agreed to so I wouldn't be suspended or expelled. What would I say to my kid sister if I never finished High School, huh?

I cleaned up gum around the school, acting as a janitor. Eventually I was uh, voluntold for the library. See, I don't know about your twentyfirst c libraries, but man, ours are huge and complicated, even the high school ones. And DCH's had been around for a couple of centuries. My job was to organize the stuff in storage. I never understood all that! You could look most of it up on the Internet (yes, that's still around). But whatever, I'm not some nerd.

Not that I don't like nerds – What was I saying? Yes, the library.

See, turns out that DCH used to have some, uh, prestigious students, called the Legion of Superheroes. They had, you know, secret identities, so their stuff was hidden among the files as old important things – the Legion Rings disguised as school rings and that sort of thing. I might have dropped the box of rings all over the floor and one might have broken and it might have revealed the L underneath the fake GH. And well, I'm not a total idiot. So I go looking at some of the stuff in that room.

And maybe I see something that says it's a time capsule, but it's too big and I find out that it's actually a time machine. Now here's the creepy thing – the date it says to open it? Specified down to the second. I look at my watch and it's the exact same time. See? Creepy.

I'm not sure if it was destiny or time traveller hijinks or what, but the time machine opened for me right then and there. I swear I haven't had goosebumps like that before.

The idea was simple: grab some of the Legion stuff, take the time machine, go back in time, become a hero, come back to the future as an awesome person and historical celebrity, cue applause. And, in the past, I'd be able to get on the football team again. Win all around.

Yes, yes, I know it was a mindbogglingly stupid plan. Sometimes I am a total idiot.

I wasn't really prepared for the Past, and I didn't really anticipate getting involved like I did.

I just chose a date that sounded good and was after the invention of penicilin and the internet. Turns out it was already programmed into the machine.

Fate. Time travel hijinks. Creepy.

But there's something about the feeling that fate is going along with your plan that makes it seem like it isn't so mindbogglingly stupid.

And I certainly wasn't prepared to meed Ted Kord.

The first thing I noticed about the past was the smog and the trees and the stars. The second thing I noticed was that I had crashed the machine into some sort of building and it was damaged and I had no idea how to fix it. The third thing I noticed was that the building I had crashed into was a much older version of the DC High library. The fourth thing I noticed was that I had almost killed someone.

His name was Ted Kord, though I didn't know that at the time, and if you had told me what he'd come to mean to me I would have dunked your head in the back of a food processor.

There he was, in a blue and another-shade-of-blue sweatervest. I'm not even joking – sweatervest. Glasses askew, books falling out of his arms, bookshelf barely missing him as it smashes to the floor, wind blowing the slightly red mousey brown hair into an even worse hairstyle than usual.

And there I was, in a time machine, wearing very anachoristic clothing, half-destroying the library.

That's how we met.

I scrambled out of the time machine, worried I had killed him because I really didn't need to be locked up in a twentyfirst c jail for accidental manslaughter-by-time-machine. There was smoke and dust and books and pages and paper everywhere and the bookshelves were doing a domino thing you think only happens in the movies.

I helped the kid up and made sure he wasn't dead as he stared from me to the time machine. Finally he raised an eyebrow.

"Did you take a wrong left turn or something?"

I couldn't help it. I collapsed into a hysterical fit of giggles. As I totally lost my composure at the absurdity my life had taken, Could-Have-Been-Killed boy looked over the machine.

"What is this hunk of junk?"

I wiped my eyes. "You won't believe me."

The guy looked at me and rolled his eyes. "You just appeared out of nowhere in a giant glowing glass ball and you don't expect me to believe your obviously outlandish so-unbelievable-it-has-to-be-true story? Wow, that's just – wow. Seriously, what is it?"

I straighened up, scratching my head, looking at him. "It's a time machine."

"A time machine."

"Yeah."

"Okay."

He climbed inside the ruined wreck. I followed him, confounded.

"Okay? Just 'okay'?"

"You look like you're from the future. That was my first thought, actually – 'he looks like he's from a bad sci-fi show."

I played hurt. "...Bad?"

He pushed some of the buttons and examined the control device. "Looks pretty broken to me. Guess you'll have to stay here. Aren't you afraid of changing the past?"

I froze.

He looked at me and I gave a nervous laugh. "Heh, um, yeah, I, uh didn't think about that?"

He gaped a little. "What? You just jumped in a time machine saying 'This'll be fun, screw the consequences on the time continuum?'"

"Maybe."

"..."

"I kinda uh borrowed it. Without permission."

He sighed, clapped a hand on my shoulder and said to me very seriously, "Well, guess you really screwed the pooch on this one, huh?"

He then gave a mock salute. "Nice knowing you soldier."

I admit, I started to panic. "Oh god, oh god, what am I going to do? Oh frag, I'll change time and I'll change history and I'll never be born and I'll kill my great great great grandfather and I'll be my own ancestor and oh man why did I think this was a good idea?"

I tried, uselessly, to put some of the pieces of the time machine back together.

"What're you called?"

"Booster."

"That's a weird name."

"It's a nickname. My real name's Michael Carter."

"...That doens't sound so sci-fi. I thought in the future, everybody had names like Bloodsport or Trinity or Styker or whatever."

I snorted.

"I'm Ted Kord."

Ted crouched down beside me and offered me his hand. I took it.

"Nice to meet you, Booster. Hopefully we'll be able to get this fixed up so you can pop back to the future before you have to hitch a ride on Doc Brown's DeLorean."

I swear I did not wail. "But how're we supposed to fix it? I'm just some dumb jock!"

Ted grinned at me. "Luckily, I'm a genius prodigy nerd."

"How very modest of you."

Ted stood up and wiped his hands on his pants. "Right. First things first, we can't leave this thing here ruining the school library. Let's take it to my lab."

"How're we going to move it? Wait – you have a lab?"

Ted pulled out a cell-phone, what he said later was cutting edge but to me looked obsolete. "Don't worry, I have people."

I frowned. "You're crazy, or you're playing a prank on me."

Ted tsked. "I already said I was Ted Kord. My dad owns KORD Inc. It's a research and development company. Don't worry – everything's going to be fine."

I was about to protest, but stopped. If he believed my story about the time machine, the least I could do was believe his infinitely-more-plausible story about being a smart rich kid.

To my surprise, he really did have people. Smart, fast, strong people who loaded the time machine up onto a truck and hauled it off to Ted's personal lab, which turned out to be his basement. Admittedly, his house was big and therefore the basement was huge. Still a basement, though.

Ted was intensely proud of it, so I didn't say anything. I swear.

"Oh shut up," he said, "It'll do. I'll get to look at your time machine, you'll be able to go back to future, everybody wins."

"You sure it'll be that easy?"

He tapped the side of his nose, walked over to the far corner of his lab where a huge shape was concealed by a dusty cloth and pulled it off. Underneath was a giant... thing that looked very fancy and would probably fit in aestetically with my time. He slapped its side.

"This is the flying machine I've been building. It's top secret though, so don't even tell your mother. It's not done yet, but it can fly."

I put on my best Princess Leia voice. "You fly in that thing? You must be braver than I thought."

I couldn't help it. I smiled. He did too.

"We still have Star Wars in the future. There is hope for humanity."

We pulled up our sleeves, and got to work. What must've been ten hours later, we found out that while we knew more about the machine than we did before, it wasn't going to be nearly as easy as we thought.

Ted just shrugged. "We'll manage it. It might take us longer. Hey, listen, I've got school tomorrow – want to come? I mean, unless it's cancelled due to the library being mysteriously destroyed.

I thought about my Plan; I still could do what I came to do. "Sure, why not?"

Maybe it would be fun, I thought. Maybe I'd get to see a little of the twentyfirst c.

Things... turned out a little differently than I was expecting.