"Haley, would you please just set the tools down for tonight?" My dad asked while holding a plate, impatiently tapping on it. "We're all waiting for you."
"Can I just have five more minutes? Please?" I asked. "You guys can start without me. I'll come to dinner in a minute."
He sighed and walked back up the stairs. It's not easy being a 9th grade genius, I wanted to say. My parents never approved greatly of my machine work. Sure, if it would have been on cars, they probably wouldn't be so irritable about it. But here's the thing- it wasn't on cars.
Explanation? Fine. It had all started two years before, when I was on the brink of wanting to get myself expelled from 7th grade. Everything just seemed impossible. The hormones, the bullies, the teachers, the math… Oh, and P.E. Never ever let anyone tell you that P.E. is fun. I'm sorry, but sweating drops, getting pelted with hard rubber dodge balls, and all the while having a gung-ho man yelling at you to be more aggressive is not my idea of amusing.
Anyway, it was at this time when my dad cleaned out our attic and found a box of his favorite childhood books. See, my dad was no ordinary kid. The absolute only thing he read was science fiction books. Nothing else at all.
"I'm sure you would like this one," he'd said. He gave me a book about time travel that was the least dusty of all of them. "It was my favorite."
I had thanked him rather unenthusiastically. However, that night, I opened the book on a whim….
BAM! Within the very first page, I was hooked. Absolutely hooked. Out of the four-hundred and seventy-nine pages I was more than three quarters of the way done with it before my eyes decided to shut on their own. As soon as I awoke in the morning, I was dying to know how it ended. That became the first day I'd ever skipped school.
Sometimes a book is all it takes to change a person's viewpoint on life. And oh boy was mine changed. I began checking out every single time travel book that the library had in their district. And when I'd read every possible thing in my county, I began taking the half an hour walk to the adjoining district and reading all of their time travelling books as well. Along the way, I'd picked up a gold mine of information. 8th grade left my science teacher astonished at how much I knew. It was then that I decided, What is there to stop me from taking this to the next level?
Time travel has been tried and been failed a million times- the only successes are in sci-fi books. But I had complete determination, nearly six hundred books, and a handy best guy friend at my disposal. How hard could it be?
The answer: hard.
It took six months alone to even design the software. And don't take those six months for granted. It was two and a half months of working full time through summer vacation, and three and a half months of barely even attending school during my freshman year. I asked my dad's opinion whenever I could, but he couldn't even understand what I was talking about most of the time. I knew the words "I shouldn't have given her that book" went through his mind every time he saw me.
The people at school laughed once the word got out that I was attempting to build a time machine. I couldn't even walk up and down the halls without hearing the words "science", "time", and "nerd".
But I would just have to show them.
It was now six o'clock on a cold day in late November. Every heater in the house was on except for the one in the basement A.K.A. my laboratory (or as my twelve year-old brother called it, "Haley's mad science lab"). The actual machine part of the time machine was currently in careful construction. I had let my friend Josh go home two hours ago. He helped with most of the building. Even though he knew that the whole machine idea would probably fail, and even if it didn't, that he wouldn't get to use it because of the level of his software knowledge, he still pledged himself one hundred percent to helping me achieve my dreams. I was seriously thinking about giving him more than half of the Nobel prize money I won when this thing was finished.
I tightened a washer as much as it could be on the base board of the machine. I stepped back for a minute and wiped my forehead with my arm. The machine was looking much unfinished, and yet I knew there wasn't much more that needed to be done to get it up and running. I'd taken two cushions from an old couch that my mom insisted we get rid of and had attached them to the already-finished bench of the machine. There was a backboard on the seat that was almost four feet tall. And under the cushions and the thick wooden board they were attached to was the most important part of the machine; the wiring. A box the size of a computer tower sat in the middle, but hundreds of colorful cords went out of it in every direction. The cords attached to everything from the levers up front, to the buttons, and to the small solar panels that sat securely behind the seat, taking power from any kind of light.
"I probably should have put in a weight controller," I mumbled to myself. I was only half-serious though; it would have taken at least two months just to make a weight controller.
Who am I kidding? You probably don't even know what a weight controller is.
I used up the rest of my five minutes wrapping neon duct tape around each of its respective handles. The pink went one the overall activate switch, the blue went on the "Choose Time Destination" lever, and last but certainly not least was the orange, which was basically your ticket to another time period.
"Haley!" I heard my mom call. "Your time is up!"
"I'm coming, mom!" I said, standing up and calling it quits for about thirty minutes.
Throughout dinner, I felt everyone in my family casting nervous glances on me. What? It's not like I'd tapped into their finances on this whole project. But I think that's what scared them the most- that I was "blowing" my own money. That I would spend my whole life being "ridiculed". That I would always be trying something new and rebellious like I already had.
Really, family members can overreact about things that are so simple- like rocket science, which was actually a miniscule part of what I was putting in to this whole time machine project.