How does that saying go?

Brilliance and madness are separated only by degrees of success.

Of course, that’s it.

I hunched over my science fair project, carefully prodding the thing in front of me with the soldering iron. It was harder with the thick welding gloves on, but after four burns on my fingers in the space of an hour, I’d just learn to adapt.

            The lights in my high attic room were all on, illuminating the exposed nails in the joists and roof planks above my head. I’d had no trouble walking around in my room when I first moved up here in fifth grade, but in the four years since I’d grown quite a bit. I learned rather quickly to walk stooped, to keep from hitting my head.

            My empty hand habitually reached up to touch the thin white scar just inside my hairline where I’d run into a nail when I was 13. I’d been more careful since then.

            “Is this thing really going to work?” my best friend Rebecca called from my bed. She’d been sitting there for the last hour, watching me work in near silence. She wasn’t as interested in science as I was, so she didn’t have a project of her own to occupy her Sunday night. And she since she’d been grounded and had her cell phone taken away, she’d come to watch me for lack of better things to do.

            I snatched up an old stuffed penguin from my desk and used it to wipe away a bead of sweat from my forehead. Mister Suit-And-Tie had gotten me through many hard nights work. “Of course it will! I found the instructions on the internet!”

            “That’s what you said about the macaroni and cheese recipe,” Rebecca replied, trying to hide a smile from her face.

            “But this design came from a reputable website!” I argued, snatching off the thick gloves and pushing my glasses back up on my nose. As I stood (carefully), I caught a look at myself in the full-length mirror. I was tall for a girl; five-foot-seven in shoes, apparently too tall to effectively live in an attic bedroom. I kept my brown hair cut short above my shoulders, and it was pulled back and out of my way with a purple paisley bandana tonight.

            Rebecca stood, and I was briefly jealous; at five feet and change, she didn’t need to worry about the low-slope ceiling. She took a stack of printed pages off of my workbench and flipped through them. “But Sara, these aren’t even instructions. There’re more like… doodles!”

            “They’re diagrams!” I pulled a page from the bunch in her hand and stabbed at it with a finger. “Diagrams drawn by the best engineers in the world! When you have diagrams this good, you don’t need schematics!”

            Rebecca looked at me skeptically.

            “What? You don’t.”

            “Did any of these engineers actually try to make this thing?”

            My confidence stumbled. “Well, no. But that’s just because they couldn’t get big funding for it. None of those big-brains will do any work unless they have a huge wad of cash to throw around. Which is why it’s up to someone like me to be the first.”

            Rebecca turned a sheet over in her hand, examining the drawings on it. “But what IS a rail-gun, anyway?”

“Not ‘rail-gun’, Becca. Railgun.” I corrected.

“Well, it’s got ‘gun’ in the name. What if you get in trouble for this?”

I dropped the piece of paper I was looking at onto the desk and dropped onto the bed. The sheets smelled a little bit musty, but to me, it smelled like home. “I’ll just have to take it outside when I demonstrate it. Which reminds me, I need to add the casters.” I leaned over the edge of my bed and yanked a cardboard box from under it. After a few minutes, I found the ping pong ball sized wheels that I’d need to attach to the base of my machine.

“Demostrate it? You mean shoot it!?!” Rebecca looked a little pale.

“No, no, not shoot, per se,” I assured her, retrieving the cordless drill from the box as well. I’d asked for it the Christmas that Rebecca has asked for the Barbie Powerwheels. After it had broken, she’d given me the pieces of the electronic car to tinker around with. Some of them were now in my railgun. I call that a good Christmas. “All it’s really going to do is sort of throw whatever you drop into it.”

Rebecca walked over to the machine and examined a large gray funnel I’d attached to the end. I’d written “intake” on it in black sharpie. My dad would probably be pissed when he found out I took his funnel, but the deadline was tomorrow. She picked up Mister Suit-And-Tie with an inquisitive look.

I saw it coming before she’d even said anything. It was written all over her face. I started toward her.

“Like this?”

Before I could open my mouth to protest, she opened her hand, the fist-sized penguin doll tumbling into the funnel. I hit the deck.

There was an odd sound- sort of like the noise it makes when you open a Pringles can, but as if someone had cranked up the volume about a hundred decibels. It was followed by an incredible rush of wind, and a white and black blur cut across my vision. Next, there was an explosion, as if someone had torn the roof from the house barehanded. The lights blinked once, and then shut off. A thick cloud of dust and fiberglass insulation rained down, and I coughed and covered my eyes. I could hear Rebecca screaming, and then I felt her fingers grasping at my arms frantically. She’d fallen to the ground in the commotion.

At some point, Rebecca stopped screaming. Moonlight was spilling into my room, revealing the chaos that remained of my once cramped yet tidy living space. A coat of yellow fiberous insulation and thick gray dust bunnies coated everything. Before my eyes was a hole in the roof nearly as large as my school bookbag. The tiny projectile had managed to miss the rafters, but blew a clean hole through the plank and asphalt roof. Slowly, I bent to look at the flecks of dust coating my bed. My fingers toyed with it; it was too soft, and attic dust should should've been... well, dustier. A horrifying thought brushed my mind. It wasn’t dust at all. It was cotton fluff.

There on my bed; a tiny red bow tie. And on my desk, a scrap of black fabric with a tiny brass button, barely holding on by a thread.

She’d disintegrated Mister Suit-And-Tie.

Rebecca looked at me with a rather sheepish grin. I could hear dogs barking and neighbors beginning to shout. Somewhere next door, a car alarm was going off. My dad’s voice thundered from below me somewhere.

“Yes, Becca. Like that.”