The Time Machine
Sally Ride and the Guo’s
Chapter 1
“What is this?” I was pointing to a rusty, huge thing in disgust.
My dad answered my question after a few minutes. “I dunno.” He said it very lazily. I said, “Well whatever this is it needs to be cleaned.”
Okay, my name is Steph. Stephanie Guo. I’m 10 years old. I have 2 sisters. Well, annoying ones. Elizabeth is 5 and Angela is 3. Today is Angela’s birthday. Steve is my brother. He turned 6 months 2 days ago. He’s way cuter than Elizabeet and Angeleet. (I call them that to annoy them.) My mom is 37 and my dad is 41. My grandma is 63, I think. We are Chinese.
Now back to the rusty old thing. Everybody came over to see the rusty thing. Even Steve. But grandma had to carry him. I touched the thing and then my family disappeared.
We reappeared at a really windy place. “Where are we?” asked Elizabeth. My mom said, “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like a very nice place.” Steve even didn’t like this. This is how we found out: he started wailing. Then pretty soon he started howling. My grandma said, “Look everyone. He is so smart because he knows that we are in trouble!” At least we had something to laugh at, but not for long because, that only made Steve cry harder. This time grandma asked, “Now do you know where we are?” Nobody answered. Then grandma’s wish got granted because I just caught a glimpse at a newspaper that was flying by. It said, “Disaster on Jan. 28, 1957.” We were supposed to be in the year of 2005! I told my family what I saw. When I was done, mom looked like she was going to faint, dad was shaking his ears as if he had something wrong with them. Grandma told me to tell her over and over, Elizabeth, Angela, and Steve were staring at me with blank expressions.
Just then as we were all staring blankly, somebody came out. It was a woman. She greeted us, “Hi! How are you doing? Isn’t this a windy day? I’ve never met you 7 people before!” She stopped as we stared at her. “Excuse me,” she said as she turned around to clear her voice and almost ending up gagging. When she was finally done she said, “Hi.” This time she said it more businesslike. “My name is Sally Ride. What’s all of your names?” With that, everybody’s jaw dropped open. Steve stopped howling and everybody was thinking the same thing. Is it me, or is it true?
