Jump: A Beatles Fan-Fiction

Chapter 1: October 9th, 1995 || Albany, New York

"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.