Okay, so I've been taking a break from making comics and stuff. I've been writing instead. I was going to wait to post them on here until I had fixed more stuff in them, but Little Miss Impatient kept insisting. So here it is. I'll be posting a chapter a week, or something. I've gotten pretty far. Tell me what you think. Here's the first chapter:

No Straight Lines


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Chapter 1: My Dad Makes a Revolutionary Discovery

It was a normal day.

         Okay, maybe not really normal, but it started out that way. I went through my daily morning routine like usual, waking up at six, eating breakfast, and catching the big yellow school bus like I always did.

         Everyone on the bus was hyped up and excited when I got on, and I knew why. It was the last day of school. High school, as it turned out, ended a little later than the other schools in the district and all the kids were excited to leave. The seniors had left the day before, but I was only a freshman, and my first year of high school was coming to a close. I couldn’t wait for it to end.

         You see, it wasn’t high school that I didn’t like. The concept was more like middle school than you’d think, and I liked my teachers fine. It was the way the other kids treated me, like I was some toy they owned and if I didn’t work right, they’d take their hammers and whack me to find what the problem was. It was the most immoral thing I had come across since middle school. I couldn’t talk to the counselors or teachers or principal because they were just puppets, too.

         High school. Nothing was better.

         The bus lurched to a stop, making all the students sway in their seats. No one complained, though; these kids had been riding the lurching bus for years, some even the entire time they went to school. I had been riding since kindergarten, a total of ten years.

         I ducked as a paper airplane almost hit my forehead. “Watch it, Ryan!” I shouted at the quirky blond kid that smirked when I said his name. He thought it was funny. Well, it wasn’t. I was about to tell him that when I glanced over and saw Kat getting on the bus. My heart stopped, as it always did when I saw her. She was gorgeous. Her curly red hair always seemed to have a kind of glow to it, and it always went where she wanted it. Her stunningly deep emerald eyes flashed with determination. The freckles that always peppered her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose were becoming more vibrant now that summer had begun. She didn’t use makeup of any kind, and that proved that she didn’t want to change herself by anyone else’s standards. She was a more “broken” toy than I was, constantly bothered by the “puppeteers”, the girls teasing her that she didn’t get an “A” on the latest test when they didn’t pass themselves.

         Anyways, she was beautiful and spunky. Okay, I admit it. I liked her. Maybe more than just liked. But what could I tell her? The other guys were always telling me to ask her out, but it would have been strange for her. Why?

         She thought we were best friends. I mean, we were best friends, and that was cool. I doubted she knew how I felt, seeing as I treated her the same as she did me. For now, we were just friends. But it was getting harder to hold back those thoughts that didn’t deserve a space yet. Or maybe they did deserve a space. Maybe I should tell her how I felt…

         Kat walked briskly down the aisle and sat down next to me in one swift move. She smiled, and the metal in her mouth flashed in the newly arrived sunlight. She had braces, imperfect teeth, and it was just another thing that I adored. The rubber bands that held the wires in place were alternating between green and blue, the colors of summer. Ah, she loved summer more than me…

         “So, Jason, what are your plans for the summer?” she was saying, but I barely heard her. I was still in awe.

         “Uh, I’m not – I’m not sure yet… I was kinda hoping – “ I stopped there, pausing for a second to collect my thoughts. She was asking me what I was planning for the summer. Invite her over. Don’t say anything stupid. “I was hoping you could come over after school, so we could, like, enjoy the last day, or somethin’…” My tongue was going numb. My brain started to shut down again. Man, that sounded really dumb coming from my own mouth. I expected her to make fun of me, or even get up and leave, but instead she just laughed. Threw her head back and let out a clear, low, bellow of a laugh that sounded almost as beautiful as she looked.

         I couldn’t believe I was sitting there with her. Even though I had been for years.

         The bus lurched forward again, turning onto a street where some of my other friends lived.

         “Jason, you know my only plans every day are to be with you!” she said, smiling, and her braces flashed again.

Looking back on it, I guess I should have taken what she said as a sign. But I missed it. And that afternoon, I would regret missing that sign.

“Oh, yeah… right,” I said. I felt like such a dork, forgetting what had been the same for years. My cheeks started to burn more fiercely.

         “Listen, Jason…” said Kat, the light around her face dissolving. “Remember how my parents have always sent me to some fancy summer camp every year? Well, at the beginning of this year my parents decided to give me a break and not enroll me.”

         “That’s great!” I said, smiling to show that I was proud of her. But she wasn’t smiling. “That’s great, right? Kat, why aren’t you happy?”

         “Because something came up. Something came up and now I have to go anyway... and… I don’t even know if I’m coming back at all! Oh, Jason…” her voice trailed off. She was truly upset now. Her eyes were starting to water. Suddenly the tears rushed down her face and she shouted, “And no one understands, Jason! I can’t tell anyone why I’m leaving because of ancient rules but I feel like I have to anyway! WHY?! Why do I feel this way?” Kat was truly crying now, and we were getting strange looks from the people around us.

         “I don’t know why,” I said. Ancient rules? “But y’know what I do know?”

         “What?” Kat asked, sniffling.

         “I know how to make peanut butter and snickerdoodle cookies, your favorites. Will that cheer you up, if you come by after school today?” Kat didn’t know it, but those were the only kind of cookies I knew how to make. Not that I had even tried to make any other kinds.

         “It might,” she sniffled, trying to smile so I knew she appreciated what I was doing.

         “Look.” Kat pointed out the window, and I saw that we had arrived at school. So soon? Why did I live so close to school?

         The bus lurched to a stop, and the door opened. Immediately everyone on the entire bus stood up, and tried to shove their way into the aisle to get off. Kat and I, though, stayed sitting down. We knew we couldn’t get into the aisle with all the hustle and bustle, and we didn’t want to get hurt.

         “Meet you by the willow tree,” said Kat. There was a willow tree in the front courtyard of the school, and it was where we met when we needed to talk about something, since we didn’t have any classes together.

         “Sure thing,” I said. “See you then.” We didn’t need to tell each other when we would meet. After school one of us would just wait there until the other showed up.

Both of Kat’s parents worked, and she was an only child, like I was. As long as she got home by six, she could do whatever she wanted. My mom worked, and my dad was a scientist who was always locked up inside his laboratory, and they didn’t care where I was as long I was home when dinner started. We both had a phone in case of emergencies.

         The aisle finally cleared out enough for us to walk out. We both waved as we walked our separate ways in the directions of our first period classes. When I walked through the door of the classroom, I pulled out my homework. I know what you’re thinking: Homework due on the last day!? Yes, welcome to high school! Exciting, right? Not really.

         The bell rang, first period began, and the first thing we did was turn in our assignments. Then we cleaned out everything that belonged to us, and in our spare time handed yearbooks around to be signed. Some students gave the teacher gifts, cards, or candy. We had taken finals yesterday, and today was just a day to clean everything up. I didn’t really have anything to do. I love to write, when it’s not for an assignment, and so I pulled out my notebook, trying to make sense of what Kat had said on the bus. She was going to be gone this summer. Again. But this time, she was going somewhere else. Where? I found I couldn’t concentrate, so I eventually just gave up on writing anything and got up to get my yearbook signed. But I was careful to save plenty of space. For Kat.

         The rest of the day was pretty much like that, cleaning up, signing yearbooks, trying to solve a mystery without all the clues.. Very busy, for a boy my age.

It was so boring I could barely stand to sit through it all. But, somehow, I managed.

         When the final bell rang, I quickly stood up and ran out of the school, hurrying to meet Kat at the willow tree, but my last class was on the other side of the grounds. Kat was waiting for me when I finally arrived.

         “So,” I asked, “Where are you going this summer?”

         “Oh,” Kat replied. “we should go to your house.”

         I agreed. We picked up our stuff and turned towards my house, making sure no one was stalking us. Believe me, that had happened before to us, and we didn’t want it happening again. A very complicated story involving rabid lemurs and cupcakes. Don’t ask. We walked the way the bus had come that morning, talking and having fun.

         Turning a corner, we came to my house. We stomped up the steps of my porch, and I opened the door. Stepping aside, I said, “Ladies first,” and, giggling, Kat walked in.

         As I followed her inside, I checked to make sure my dad hadn’t blown anything up. He was a scientist that did experiments with all sorts of stuff: chemical reactions, cures for cancer, machines that will make certain jobs easier, new species, prosthetic limbs, phone technology, and some advanced stuff that was predicted not to happen for years. Some things he did just for fun, because he wanted to know what would happen, and others he did because he was paid to. He was paid very well.

There was one project he had been working on for years, though; he said it could change history, that it would be a revolutionary advancement in technology, but he wouldn’t tell anyone exactly what it was. He was paranoid about that kind of thing; he expected everyone to steal his ideas before he finished them. I myself had that aspect in my writing, but that’s just about where our similarities ended.

         I walked into the kitchen, which was pretty much tile, and Kat rested on the couch in the living room. She picked up a remote off the glass-topped coffee table and turned on the sixty-four inch flat screen TV. Immediately the Phineas and Ferb theme song blasted through the five giant-sized speakers, scaring me out of my wits and making me momentarily deaf. When I could finally hear again, Kat was shouting, “Sorry!” She turned it down about twenty notches. It was still pretty loud, though. I had a hard time thinking straight, but at least it wasn’t deafening anymore.

         Did I mention how much my dad gets paid for what he does? Honestly, I didn’t know TV’s came in that size until my dad bought one. He said it would improve our "family time," whatever that means.

         I pulled my head back into the kitchen and made sure I had all the supplies for making cookies. Two cups of flour, one cup of sugar… I tallied off the supplies as I went, tossing the ingredients into the automatic mixer. After all the ingredients were mixed together, I shaped the dough into cookies, put them on a cookie sheet, and stuck them in the oven.

         While they were baking, I went over and sat on the couch with Kat. I looked around me. This house appeared fairly normal, with a few of Dad’s knickknacks lying around. But in the basement, in Dad’s laboratory, it seemed like a totally different world, with all sorts of things, broken, old, or dysfunctional. It was almost like an entirely different house underground, the basement was so big.

         “So, about summer…” Kat’s voice trailed off. I knew she was just as upset as I was.

         “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll do the same thing I do every year. The question is, how are you going to be?”

         “Oh, Jason… there’s something I wanted to tell you. Something I should have said long ago. I just never had the nerve to tell you, because I never thought that you would… Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I—“

         There was suddenly a very large shudder that vibrated the whole house. The TV screen fizzed with a rainbow of colors, and then went black. The oven turned off. The ceiling fans above our heads slowly spun to a stop. This was definitely not good.

         “Dad,” I said, glancing across the room at a door in the wall that led to the giant basement. I didn’t want him to be in trouble down there, but my gut told me something was definitely wrong.

         “We should go see what happened,” Kat decided. I would have objected, but for some reason I couldn’t say anything, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

         She got up and ran to the door to the basement, flung it open, and hurried down the steps. I was close behind her. There was some kind of purplish-blue light coming from down at the bottom of the stairs, and I could feel a breeze blow around my face. Whatever Dad had done required a lot of power…

         Kat had reached the bottom of the stairs now, and stood gaping, staring at the source of the light. Kat’s hair floated around her face gently, and she looked so beautiful, however scared she was. Her face was frozen in shock, and when I finally got to the bottom of the stairs I probably looked the same way.

         Hovering in the center of the room, about two feet above the ground, was an ovular shape that glowed with alternating blue and purple light. It was hard to tell if it was three-dimensional, like a totally warped ball frozen in one of its bounces, or if it was a flat object, like a piece of paper suspended in air, tied to some invisible string.

         “What is that?” I shouted over the noise of papers fluttering, scientific instruments flying, pieces of equipment rolling everywhere, and the constant low but loud hum of what I guessed was the glowing object.

         “That, Jason, is a time portal,” my dad boomed. “It will lead you into a different place in time, although I’m not sure when exactly, or where, you will end up. This is just a prototype, so don’t just jump in there. I still need to figure out how to control the variables. For all I know, you could end up in the Peloponnesian war, or at the end of the world, or two seconds after you jumped in.”

         Kat seemed even more mesmerized than I as we stood there, watching the portal shift colors. It was amazing that Dad had been able to do this. No, it was incredible. How had he done it? How much time had he put into this project just to get this far? Most likely, more than he had counted. Dad never really paid much attention to time. That was certainly ironic, especially after he had just invented a time machine.

         Suddenly I registered movement. I’m not sure how I picked it out of all the debris flying around, but my eyes caught a sofa being pulled towards the portal at a dangerous angle. I had just enough time to shout, “Kat, MOVE!” before the sofa came hurtling at us, and I barrel-rolled to the side.

Kat was still dazed, though, and looked lazily in the direction of where my voice had come from. She muttered, “Uh?” and then her eyes widened as she realized what was about to happen a fraction of a second before it actually unfolded. The sofa hit her square in the chest, and she screamed, “Jaso-uuuh,” as the air was knocked from her lungs, and her feet were picked up from under her as she was dragged closer to the portal. Just before she was about to be sucked in, she managed to roll off of the kidnapping sofa, and I breathed a sigh of relief, though no one heard it.

Kat clung to the floor as the now hurricane-speed winds tried to pry her off, pulling at her summer dress and hair, trying to separate her from the ground. I could see that she was using all her strength, that it was spending her energy too quickly and she wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer.

“DAD!” I shouted. “We need to disengage! Turn it off! NOW!” The only way to get through to my dad is to use scientific words. With some occasional shouting tossed in, too.

 “I’m trying,” he replied, pressing a number of buttons attached to a desktop he had set up. “I really am!”

“ERROR,” a mechanical voice suddenly proclaimed, probably coming from the computer. “A FATAL ERROR OCCURRED. AN EXCESSIVE AMOUNT OF RADIATION ENTERED THE PORTAL. AUTOMATIC SHUTDOWN IN TWO MINUTES. DURING THAT TIME, YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO PERFORM ANY ADDITIONAL REQUESTS OR JOBS.”

Great. We had two minutes, and, judging by the look on Kat’s face, she wouldn’t be able to hold on that long. I watched helplessly as Kat took several deep breaths. Then she said something I couldn’t make out over the noise, and let go.

In seconds she was gone.

“ERROR,” said the voice again. “UNAUTHORIZED OBJECTS PASSED THROUGH PORTAL. IMPLOSION WILL OCCUR IN THREE, TWO, ONE.”

Suddenly there was a shudder and a strange whooshing sound. The portal evaporated, collapsing into itself before disappearing. There was a giant clatter as all the objects that had subdued to the pull of the portal fell to the ground. Then it was silent.

The sofa was gone. The portal was gone. Kat was gone.

Kat was gone! And I never got to tell her how I felt. What had she tried to say before we went downstairs? And what had she said right before she got sucked into the portal?

I slowly stood up. I looked at my dad, and I could tell he had no idea how to fix this problem. This is just a prototype, he had said. I knew from experience that prototypes can be unstable, and that something could go wrong at any time, like the time Dad had exploded the backyard by accident. That was when we decided he should move to the basement.

Dad shook his head and walked over next to me. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You should be the one to tell her parents.”

I nodded, and walked back up the steps to the living room. The smell of partially cooked cookies filled my nose, and I remembered that I had started a batch cooking before Kat and I had headed down to the basement. I went over and took them out of the oven, not having the heart to eat any of them.

I decided to go to Kat’s house right away. It would be easier to get over talking to them about Kat sooner rather than later.

Walking out the door, I turned to the left. Deep in thought, I remembered memories that Kat and I had shared.

Once, when we were about five, Kat and I had a fight over a pen. Don’t ask my why, but we both wanted it really badly, and we wrestled over it like five-year-olds do. I finally gave up after a few minutes of hard-core toddler fighting, and let go of the pen. It went flying, and Kat tumbled backwards. Suddenly, she landed on her feet exactly right, and stood to her full height, thrusting an arm into the air. The pen came flying down, landing perfectly upright in Kat’s tiny hand. Then, smiling a mischievous smile, she proclaimed, “Raaaahh! Fear me!” She thrust her hand forward, brandishing the pen as if it were a sword, and I backed up out of staged fright. “I am the mighty and feared demon of evil!” she squealed, jumping up high and doing a karate kick. Then she swung her pen around. “I am—“ Her mother had pulled Kat up into her arms, taking the pen and tossing it out of sight.

“Kathrine Thomas,” shouted her mother, “I don’t ever want to see or hear you play games like that again!”

“But, Mom, it wasn’t like I was telling him about—“

“ENOUGH,” her mother had concluded. “Time for us to leave.”

I hadn’t really thought about that memory much, but now, it might have something to do with why she had to leave on such short notice.

I walked on.

Another memory I had was from more recently, in about seventh grade. For some reason, a food fight had broken out at lunch, and Kat and I were doing our best to eat our food without getting covered in anyone else’s. Suddenly, out of practically nowhere, a porcelain plate flew directly at us. “Kat, watch out!” I had shouted, and I ducked underneath the table. I was good at avoiding things; even deadlines for assignments. I have never been sure why. Kat had turned around, faced the plate head on, and karate-chopped it neatly in half. Everyone at lunch saw it, and after the shards hit the ground, the food fight was pretty much over. Kat was tough, and I still couldn’t figure out why Kat would let anyone treat her as the “puppeteers” did.

I looked up and realized I was at Kat’s house. Taking a few shaky breaths, I walked up the stairs and knocked on the door. Kat’s mom answered, which I thought was strange. She should have been at work. Today she had straightened her hair, as she always did on a workday.

“Hello,” said Mrs. Thomas. “How can I help you?”

“Mrs. Thomas,” I answered. “Hi. I wanted to talk to you about—“

Suddenly a small redhead boy appeared next to Mrs. Thomas. “Who’s that?” he asked. That was wrong. No little boys lived here; Kat was an only child like I was.

“I don’t know, honey,” replied Mrs. Thomas, “but he seems to know me.” That was wrong, too. She knew who I was, or at least, she was supposed to…

“Well, you should know me,” I continued. “I’m Kat’s friend.”

“No, you’re mistaken. We don’t own a cat.” Mrs. Thomas looked confused now.

“Your… never mind,” I said, stopping myself before I said anything that was even more stupid. I turned around and walked away, angry that I thought this might even possibly work at all.

“Wait!” shouted Mrs. Thomas, coming out the door and waving an arm in the air. I was already crossing the street.

Something was totally wrong.