"Penny! Penny get up!" my mom yelled from the top of the stairs. I slumped out of my bed and onto the floor. Mornings are not my thing.

I looked at my clock, 6:30. The bus would be at my house in fifteen minutes. Groggily, I threw on my black t-shirt and ripped jeans. I put my long brown hair into a ponytail, and donned my glasses. I tripped up the stairs and into the kitchen.

As I put on my jean jacket and slung on my backpack, my mother shoved a piece of burnt toast into my hand and started babbling, "I can't believe you're already a junior! Try and make some friends! Have fun!"

"Okay mom, love you, the bus is here" I droned, still half asleep, trying to get away from my mother's rambling. Make friends. Ha. That was a funny joke. Friends were never really my thing, I had many people that I was friendly with but no "BFFFFs" or whatever the hell that means.

I walked down the sidewalk to the bus stop outside of my house, and looked upon the big yellow pit of suffering and despair. Climbing onto the bus, I got a spitball to the face (right on schedule) with another timely shout of "four eyes" and "geek" as I took my usual seat in the back of the bus.

I pulled my Walkman out of my bag, and started listening to my mix-tape. The song "Here Comes the Sun" by The Beatles came on. This tune usually would have put me in a good mood, but getting another spitball to the face dulled the cheeriness.

School as a big picture is a good concept; gather the youth of a town into one building, teach them, prepare them, and send them off. Only that isn't really what happens.

School is a place where the youth of a town creates it's own social structure, pissing on the lower class, and where the teachers hand out tedious paperwork without really teaching you anything. If I want to learn something useful I have to figure it out myself at the library.

I suffered through home-ec and social studies, but then it was time for the only class I could survive: Electronics.

Electronics was my favorite class of the day, because it gave me freedom to work on whatever I wanted to do. It was also light on homework, and a fairly easy class if you do what you're supposed to.

That didn't mean that the kids in my class weren't idiots. I was the only girl, and almost all of the guys were hell-bent on trying to explode things, shock each other, or just give our already emotionally unstable teacher a hard time.

Mr. Smathers was a great teacher, but he was going through a divorce. Little things would set him off, and he'd just start crying in the middle of class. It was pitiful.

On top of that, due to me having no friends but an open campus for lunch, I ate in Mr. Smathers' room every day. So he dumped out all of his personal feelings and information about his divorce onto me. I listened, but there wasn't really much that I could do for the poor guy.

Electronics was helping me with skills to work on the project I'd started outside of school. Though I already knew much of the content that we went over in class, it was good practice. Most of the guys didn't even know AC from DC.

I was working on a fairly simple light organ I'd decided to make, while the boys were sticking a copper wire into the outlet.

"Penny, excellent work!" Mr. Smathers said.

"Thanks!" I beamed. That was just about the only self esteem boost that I'd ever get during school, so I greatly appreciated it.

Class ended, and I was released from prison-- I mean school.

Homework wasn't really my number one priority, I had been working on a project.

Sort of a top secret government project. Accept the government didn't know about it.

This is where it gets a little bit complicated.

Stanley Parks, my biological father, used to be a scientist for the government. That's probably why I love science so much. He taught me about science and technology from a pretty young age. But then he decided to do something illegal. I'm not really sure what it was exactly.

One night, when I was about twelve, I woke up to the sound of my dad's paper's shuffling. I crept out of my room and into my dad's workshop. "Penny!" he looked at me, "Sweetie go back to bed,"

I could see the fear in his eyes, "Dad, what're you doing?"

"Honey, I did something bad. And I have to go away for a little while," he told me.

"Okay," I hugged him. I watched him gather his papers and leave. I figured that he'd be gone for only a few days, maybe a week. At first I thought that he'd got a parking ticket or something. I was wrong.

A couple of days after he left, I looked around for a clue to where he may have gone. I crawled behind his work bench and found a file. A day after that some government agents came and inspected my dad's workshop, probably for the papers I had found, but they never suspected they would be in a little girl's room.

Inside it I found plans for a device, some parts for a machine, and research papers having to do with string theory and teleportation. It blew my mind. I read the papers, many of them written by my father, over and over again.

They described the possibility of teleportation using specific device. The device was partially drawn out, but there were parts missing. From what I could tell the device was supposed to display where you were going, and the coordinates so that you didn't end up in the middle of the desert or the ocean. As a bonus it also had the time and date, I assumed for if you were to change time zones.

The machine also appeared to be set on an interval timer, so that once it was charged up again, you would be able to teleport once more.

This was all top secret government GPS technology, and it was in the hands of a twelve-year-old.

When I finally got old enough to start building things, I started to try and create the device. The device that would be able to teleport whoever had a hold of it.

Of course I never explained any of this to my mother. For all she knew, I was getting my parts out of the dumpster behind the video store. She's always been more focused on caring for my little brother since my dad left.

I had most of it together, as I dedicated the entire summer between sophomore and junior year to creating it, and my after school time to working on it. Like I said, homework wasn't really a priority I could do it at lunch, and I pretty much just went in and took the tests, which would have me pass whatever class I was in.

I was working on the machine after the first (and incredibly rough) day of school, when I heard my mom call for me, "Penny, stop fiddling with that thing and get up here for dinner!" I begrudgingly complied and set down my soldering iron. If you haven't noticed yet, my mother and I don't get along all that well. It's not totally awful, but it isn't the greatest either.

I walked upstairs, "It isn't a thing. It's my project,"

"I don't care what it is, just eat your supper."

I looked down at my plate and saw canned spam and asparagus. My stomach lurched as I force the so-called 'food' down my throat. If that wasn't bad enough, I had to listen to my little brother's babbling about his first day of the third grade.

"And Stevie Jones said I was his best friend! But Jerry Nichols wanted to be Stevie's best friends, so..."

I pretended to listen to him as I struggled to clear my plate and asked to be excused, but I was not granted escape.

"Penny I want to hear about your first day of the eleventh-grade!" My mother said, much too enthusiastically, "Did you make any friends? Did you see a boy you have a crush on?"

I think that my mother really wants me to get a boyfriend. She asks me every few weeks if I have a crush, or if I like someone. The boys in my Electronics class are about as attractive as cockroaches, and so are the rest of the guys at my school.

"Yes mother, I do have a crush," I said in just about the most monotone voice I could muster. She didn't seem to understand the sarcasm.

"Well who?" She almost shrieked.

I swear, sometimes I just cannot tolerate her. "Paul McCartney," I said in an equally monotone voice.

"Oh Paul! What a nice name Paul Mc--oh," she realized the joke and then got quiet.

"May I be excused now?" I asked.

"Yes but clear your spot," my mother said in a normal, non-cheery voice.

I went back to the basement, or "the dungeon" as my mother liked to call it, and worked on the project. I had taken it calling it the Jump Reader. In theory it's supposed to tell you where you are, and how long you have there until you "Jump" to your next location.

The Jump Reader was about the size of a television remote, or a graphing calculator. The top half was composed of the digital screen. The bottom half had a keypad, and a large activation button labeled "Jump".

I guess the government didn't want to put the word "Transteleportation" onto one button.

Of course, with all of the unfinished work that I had, and my lack of skill, the chances of it working were about the same as me actually meeting Paul McCartney.

But I kept trying that night. Which was a mistake, because I burned myself with the soldering iron and it hurt like a bitch. I dropped the Jump Reader onto the table and stuck my wounded finger in my mouth. The machine's lights flickered on.

My eyes widened. I had never gotten the machine to actually turn on before, and it looked as though the location was working. The screen read, "Albany, New York: 12:47AM". The activation button lit up as well.

"No..." I muttered and smiled at the red light.

It wouldn't work. I couldn't get this thing to work for a year, and it wasn't going to start today. But I figured I'd press the button I'd label "Jump"  just in case.

I hovered over it for a second, and then closed my eyes and pressed down.

Nothing.

I scoffed at myself for being foolish enough to even try to make the Reader work. I got up to walk back towards my room, but I tripped on the chair and into the table. This caused me to laugh at my own clumsiness, and fall to the floor.

I get slap happy when I'm tired.

The table wobbled, and the Reader fell on top of me. I let out a loud "Ooff," as it fell squarely into my stomach, knocking half the air out of me. I looked down at the screen, it said, "December 5th, 1963, London".

"Okay I have got to get some sleep I just fucked up my entire project," I was agitated now.

I grabbed my machine and tried to stand up, but it started to vibrate. The vibrations became rhythmic. It pulsed, faster, and faster, slowly heating in my hand. Winds started swirling around me, the view of my basement became obscured. A flash of light blinded me, and I was tossed to the ground.

Only the ground was no longer the dirty old carpet that covered my basement floor. It was hard, cold, tile.

I looked up, and I was in a sort of entrance room. The secretary at the front desk was wearing a very old style of clothing, which I found odd because she looked to be only in her early twenties. She didn't seem to notice that I had suddenly appeared in her building.

I tried to think about what had happened, if I'd taken any drugs.

I don't do drugs.

I couldn't tell if this was a nightmare or not. I was breathing heavily and frantic, it felt very real, but then again most nightmares do.

Stumbling around the room, I noticed there were a few hallways leading elsewhere, a set of stairs, and posters on the walls. The secretary was still chatting on the phone and clicking away on a typewriter.

I looked around at the people bustling around with instruments, accompanied by people with headsets, and sound equipment.

Trying to take in my surroundings, I whirled around and slammed straight into a man, causing him to drop all of his papers, "Oh, I'm so sorry I don't know what I'm doing--" my rambling was cut off when I looked up at the man's face.

It was Paul McCartney.