Hope Everett sat on her bed, crying. It wasn't fair. Not that her mom could lie to all her to-be-friends, not that she didn't have a dad anymore. Besides, it was spring, 1982, and she was twelve. Shouldn't this be a new and exciting part of her life? Half a year, she knew, and she still wasn't over it, but the way she saw it, she had perfectly good reason to still be angry. People teased and bullied her every day, calling her Half-Parent Hope. Even worse, when people brought up her dad, they called him Hopeless Harvey. That was only the tip of the iceberg. Mean notes, getting beat up, and gossip haunted her everywhere she went. She felt like she was about to burst. Revenge. She wanted revenge. On her mom, on her classmates, on her teachers for knowingly letting this happen to her. She balled her hands into tight fists and brought them up like she was ready to fight. That was when she noticed it. Her hands had a lime green glow around them, softly radiating from her fists. She almost forgot about all her anger, about all the things that followed her. Something felt wrong...but oddly right at the same time. And then it died down. Dad. Dad had worked with energy, didn't he? Or was it his coworker...it didn't matter. whoever had done it, they probably had left some writings or something that could help explain what happened. She had walked to the lab endless times before to memorialize him, so she knew the way. "I'm headed to the lab," she told her mom on the way out. Her mom didn't hesitate to let her go. Mom was trying to be really nice to her recently, to make up for what she did, Hope assumed. It wasn't enough. It didn't stop kids from being mean, didn't stop how worthless she felt every day. If she could make it stop, Hope would forgive her. But not until she undid what she had done. And that wasn't going to happen anytime soon. Hope arrived at the lab earlier than she thought she would. It was as if the path had gotten shorter than it usually was. She hadn't seen the stone pile, or the big tree, or the upside-down fern. Weird. But what was to come was much weirder. As Hope looked around for something, some clue to what happened, she didn't find what she was looking for, but something much cooler. A swirly purple film was filling a hole in some device. "Not now," she told herself. "Keep looking." After thirty minutes of nothing, she began to doubt that anything useful was in here, and just resorted to fooling around and having fun. She had just mastered the moonwalk when she tripped over something and fell backwards-but she didn't hit the floor. Soon she was surrounded by purple and.... she realized she had fell into the device, but just before everything went black.
