The Perpetual Motion Club (17 page)

The problem of the failed bid for a sanction faded to the background, as her thoughts turned to Jason. He was not from a wealthy family and although the coach helped with legal fees, Jason soon ran into monumental problems due to the economic restrictions of his birth. In a land prone to viewing inhabitants as guilty until innocence is proven, and without a lot of money to prove his innocence, everyone believed Jason had done the deed. He was suspended from the team. Colleges withdrew full ride athletic scholarships. Since he had no academic achievement to speak of, it soon became obvious Jason Bridge’s post-high-school career was doomed.

He was in school, out on bail, but no longer playing sports. He walked silently to his classes, head down, no eye contact with anyone. His once proud frame slunk into the crowd, trying to fade into the background. But everyone around was aware of his presence and shrunk from him, leaving him a wide berth. He was out in the open more than ever.

Elsa, who had never stopped watching him even when she hated him, saw his pool of hangers-on dry up. She pitied him in his solitude. Perhaps he was as lonely as she. She began smiling at him again like she did back in October, hoping to bring a little light into his darkened life.

It took Jason Bridges a while to realize the smiling person he passed in the hallways might be a friend. Even after he recognized it, he was slow to respond, as if Elsa reminded him of all that he had lost. Instead of finding relief from his trouble in this one little soul in a school full of false friends, he shrank from her. As if touching her would make the nightmare turn out to be true.

She didn’t let that bother her. One day she found an opportunity when he was walking alone after school. The winter’s snow had melted by now and the warmish weather allowed for a slow walk. He swung along listlessly, bookless and friendless. For a quarter of an hour, she followed him, gradually quickening her pace until she was right behind. Then steeling herself, she softly said his name: “Jason.”

He stopped and turned.

“Hi,” he said.

Words failed her. She wasn’t prepared. She had no idea she was going to have nerve today. She had no idea he would say “hi,” or anything.

He abruptly resumed his walk home. She caught up with him.

“I’m sorry about your . . . ” she blurted.

“I didn’t do it,” he said, without turning to her, without slowing his pace, without acknowledging her in any way. He could easily have been talking to himself.

“I, I know that,” she said.

“How do you know that?” he asked without raising his eyes from the ground.

“I mean, I believe you,” she said. And then quickly she added, “I wanted to . . . ”

“Invite me to your perpetual motion club?”

“Uh, actually I hadn’t thought of that. How did you know about that?”

“Everybody knows about that.”

Elsa’s insides froze. She began to feel ill and wanted nothing better than to get out of wherever it was that she and Jason had found themselves. She wanted to give solace to the poor guy and all she was doing was blubbering on about her own insignificant life—her dreams that to her were everything but were so nothing in his eyes.

“Yeah, well, I gotta go,” she said. “I’m working on a project for the FutureWorld competition.” She hurried forward and turned to give a quick “bye” with a silly grin while skipping nonchalantly backwards.

He raised his head and asked “You need help?” He cocked his head slightly to the right as if he didn’t care one way or another. The offer was there if she needed it, he didn’t need anything. He was Jason Bridges, after all. All that was said in the slight tilt of his head.

She stopped abruptly. Too quick for the one-time basketball star to step around and so he ran into her, knocking her flat on her back on the sidewalk full of leaves. It was a repeat of their first encounter, but she did not remark upon it.

“What?” she said from the ground.

He held his hand forward to help her up. “It’s just that you look like you don’t know anything about competition and that’s all I know.”

She pulled herself up with his help and stood for a few moments looking at him, her heart beating and the blood rushing to her head.

Her vision cleared and she took a deep breath. “It’s not a sports competition,” she finally said, brushing herself off.

“I know what it is. Doesn’t make a difference. If you want to win, you have to have the right head. You don’t have it.”

He continued his walk and she followed.

“This competition is not about being the biggest or the strongest or the quickest,” she said haughtily. And then remembering the poor boy’s plight, she quickly added, “although those are commendable characteristics. To win this one you have to have the most sophisticated project.” Emphasis on project.

“For the brainy type, you sure are stupid,” Jason said in a somewhat mean-spirited tone.

“What do you mean? I mean, what do you know about it?” she asked.

“I
mean
winning is only partly talent, it’s mostly psyching out the competition.”

“So what happened to you? You seem like you’re losing all of a sudden.”

Jason stopped. The color rose in his face. His eyes followed as Elsa continued walking. “I didn’t do it,” he said in a quiet voice.

She turned and hit her head with her hand. “I know, I know, I know. That’s not what I meant.”

“Damn sure sounds like what you meant.” The haughtiness was returning.

“What I meant was. Why did you . . . ?”

“Get arrested?”

“Yeah, and . . . ?”

They resumed walking together.

“I guess because I didn’t report that Jer was missing.”

“And why didn’t you do that?”

“I figured he just ran away. He did that all the time. He’s only a couple of years younger than me. My dad is, well, he’s a . . . Anyway, Jer was gone a long time but I figured he was with Mom. She lives in Chicago. He’s gone there before. I figured he was better off there. She’s cleaned up now and anything’s better’n here. I don’t have time to watch him.”

“Why do they think you did it if he was in Chicago?”

“He wasn’t in Chicago, he was here, in that . . . place by the river. They think I did it because we’d had a fight and I said . . . something.”

“What’d you say.”

“That . . . I would kill him if he . . . ”

“If he what?”

“It’s stupid now that I think about it. If he joined that group of protesters. The anti-rids.”

“Rifs.”

“Yeah, them.”

“Looks like he did join them and now they killed them.”

“Maybe. I know I didn’t do it.”

“Do you need help? I mean, I know a law . . . ” She stopped before reminding him of her second rate mother. Her face flushed as if he’d caught her without her clothes.

“Coach is helping me. He’ll figure it out.”

Elsa nodded but said nothing, racking her brain for a way to change the subject.

“Well, in the meantime can you help me with my project? You said you could. I’d like you to help.”

“No you wouldn’t. You just want to get into my pants.”

“What?”

Jason walked past her. “Girls are all the same. They only want one thing: a guy with money.”

Elsa turned and spoke to his back. “I don’t. I don’t even think about guys. I’m a slow learner or something.”

“Yeah, something.” Jason was half way down the block. He called over his shoulder. “One of those kind.”

“I’m not,” Elsa argued, not even knowing what ”one of those kind” was. By this time Jason had reached the public transportation stop. He stood waiting for the bus that would take him to his own neighborhood. She watched him go. The old flame rose in her heart, a combination of pity, anger, and budding sexual feeling. She saw the one chance she had for love head down Decker to the bad side of town.

***

For two solid days after that surprise encounter, Elsa’s thoughts departed from her perpetual motion project. By this time she had taken over the basement completely. The ping pong table was awash in resister wire, soldering implements, shiny plastic laminants, green boards, transistors, transformers, and tiny screws. Leaning against the wall, various-sized pieces of polyurethaned plywood held mechanical components with stickies attached listing their function in some machine’s scheme. Hollow prototypes that never worked stood completely naked waiting for The Next Big Idea.

But now, during two lost days, Elsa did not even step down to her laboratory. Something always came up to lure her away. First she went shopping for shoes, borrowing money from Dad and pestering May to go with her to Shoe-Rite at the mall. The trip proved to be a disaster due to a disaffected jWad hanging around on the chairs while Elsa, with a light heart, picked out the most popular, yet comfortable, pair of red patent-leather maryjanes on the rack. He only became sociable when she suggested they head over to Pizza-A-Go-Go afterwards. There he ate like a refugee and neglected to pay his third. Elsa didn’t mind, she offered to buy him a second glass of Jetstream.

On Sunday she went to church, a long-neglected ritual that now for some reason seemed right to do. For the rest of the day she went about the house humming “Holy Manna.”

Monday found Jason returning her smile and “hello” like never before. She floated on air the rest of the day and after school ran home, with newly inspired energy. She headed for the Internet immediately and traveled to the recently neglected PM path to a site describing charge storage through the use of electrochemical reactions. She needed to get going on something that would require help from a willing and lonely tall boy.

Always while she searched, though, the thought of Jason’s threats to his brother and his brother’s eventual demise ran through her thoughts. As if perpetual motion and murder were somehow connected. But it wasn’t the murder that connected the two separate lines of reasoning. Something else bothered her about Jason’s story. He wasn’t guilty, it wasn’t that. There was just something that didn’t click. Why would you take a kid seriously if he said he was going to kill someone? Kids say that all the time. It’s just juvenile rhetoric. Logic would tell you the last person on earth to kill someone is the person that said they would out loud. With witnesses around. How could he be guilty?

***

February 19, Elsa’s birthday, loomed. Disregarding her wretchedness, she resolved to use the occasion to move forward and possibly beyond the desolation life had turned into. Her failures, Jason’s predicament, Jimmy Bacomb’s betrayal were all pushed to the back of her mind as she put together a wish list: Mig welder, various sizes of flat steel stock, gift certificate from Radio Shack, and a suede jacket, form-fitting, supple, and short waisted in the style of the time.

“What exactly is a Mig welder?” Lainie asked, scrolling through the list Elsa had sent to her pocketMailer on the Sunday before. She was leaning with one hip against the kitchen table, reading by the morning light streaming through the window. She had on her red-rimmed reading glasses and a cynical face.

“It’s used for welding small steel plates. I just need a portable one. Uses electricity instead of gas so we won’t need a license to have it on the premises. Of course we’ll all have to attend an online welding safety class, even those who won’t be using it. It’ll only take about an hour and we can sign off with thumbprint scan. It’s free from Rigid because they want you to buy—”

“Elsa, are you nuts? What do you need that for? Never mind. We’ll think about it. What’s a suede vest? Don’t tell me. It’s a lead nanoparticulated material for wearing when you’re working with your homemade MRI device. I don’t suppose you’re going to need a PET scanner as well. How about some fissionable material or, Hey! Here’s an idea: a surgical microscope for work on teeny, tiny perpetual motion.”

Elsa was laughing by now, of course, in spite of her inner turmoil. Somehow or other for a moment, her mother at least seemed to be on her side. She’d even regained a semblance of her sense of humor. She was poking at Elsa’s stomach, tickling her a little.

“Oh, mom,” she said. “It’s a vest for wearing. Suede is, I don’t know, some weird material. Animal product, I think. May wears them sometimes. She gets them off the vintage clothing racks at Target. Only I want mine brown instead of white like hers. And no weird colors like you wear.”

“You don’t want purple?”

Elsa laughed again.

Lainie watched her from over the rims of her glasses. How could she argue? Her nuclear physicist wannabe daughter had just asked for a piece of clothing for her birthday.

On February 19th, Elsa found a box of unwrapped, beribboned steel stock in various sizes, a $500 gift certificate from Radio Shack, and a suede vest, brown.

“What, no mig?” Elsa said, not entirely disappointed because the Radio Shack gift certificate was more than she expected. And migs only cost a couple of hundred. She didn’t bother pointing out the plates were useless without the welder, but oh, well.

“Yeah, well, I think that pile of metal is more than enough to make up for it. And may I make a suggestion?” Lainie asked but before Elsa could answer, continued. “Why don’t you clean up the basement?”

“I can’t,” Elsa said. “Where would I put everything?”

“How about in the garbage?” Lainie said and then left Elsa’s room for breakfast. And just like that Lainie’s sense of humor was gone and the black cloud that hung over the mother/daughter relationship returned.

“It’s annoying her,” her father said. “You working down there.”

“Why should it bother her? We never use that space. Nobody ever even goes down there.”

“It’s your insistence in this thing, I guess.”

“You know, Dad, all my life she’s been preaching about doing the right thing, not following along with the crowd when I know it’s wrong. So now I’m doing just that and I get no credit for it.”

“Are you doing this for credit?”

“I don’t know. I guess not.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“I guess because . . . it’s the right thing to do. She’s always been behind me before. Why is she against me now?”

“Probably because you never had such ideas before.”