The Perpetual Motion Club (9 page)

Somewhere in the midst of all that planning and thinking and rationalizing and tooth tapping, Elsa Webb evolved from smug skeptic to open minded optimist on the subject of perpetual motion machinery. Somewhere in the middle of that transition, she made the biggest mistake of her life. She believed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The residents of Northawken were preoccupied with two things: the dead boy’s ID and the basketball scores. What mid-sized American city doesn’t love its home team? In this case, the Northawken High’s Senior Varsity basketball squad. They were especially proud of its college bound, star point guard, Jason Bridges. They talked of him constantly.

Elsa thought nothing of this special attention. She believed all basketball players received the same worship. Jason Bridges was just one of the jocks. Elsa believed these jocks were like other people: interested in the world and how it worked.

Little did Elsa know, not only were jocks not interested in how the world worked, very few non-jocks were interested either. What non-jocks were mostly interested in were people like Jason Bridges. He was quite spoiled, but Elsa had no idea.

Following her failed attempt to speak to him after her debate with the popular kids, she’d had little opportunity to see him. Between periods on his way from the locker room to remedial English class, they both were usually in too big of a hurry to do little more than smile and nod. At those times she fancied he was flirting with her.

She’d held back, certain that if she played coy he’d be even more interested. It seemed to work in
Gone with the Wind
. And Rhett Butler was much more worldly than Jason Bridges, and dashing too, but Elsa was too infatuated to notice. She also missed the fact that Rhett Butler was in love with Scarlet and Jason was in love with a different girl every week. But no matter.

Wednesday before the free energy exhibition at the Red Rapids Convention Hall, time was running out. She found an excuse to be down at the gymnasium end of the hall under the blinking Jetstream sign. She knew Jason Bridges would be returning to class after a mid-morning practice, his hair still glistening from his shower, his face flush from exercise. There was a girls’ restroom there and she faked a need to go there rather than the one at the other end where her next class was.

She’d been there all fifteen minutes between bells, iHigh channel feeding the entire time. Every time the gym door opened, she grabbed the receiver from her ear and pretended to be rushing into the restroom. Three times she pulled the maneuver, three times the restroom’s automonitor registered her entrance and clicked on. It moved to “record” stance just in case a raised voice in the room signaled inappropriate, aggressive behavior. Three times it returned to rest mode as Elsa backed out the door.

Finally a gang of tall, pimply, wet-headed boys, laughing and slapping, burst through the doors of the gymnasium.

They almost ran Elsa over.

“Jason Bridges,” she called when the boys were well past her.

Jason looked up as if a gnat or flea had buzzed past his ear. His face held a question mark.

“Jason. Mr. Bridges!” Elsa called again. The entire gang stopped, as if each one was “Bridges.” As if they’d forgotten their own names and took on Jason Bridges’. As if anything that concerned Jason, concerned them.

They turned as one to see who demanded the tall, new boy’s attention. How disappointing to see only a sophomore wearing a blue and white Penn State sweat shirt, braided pigtails, and jeans. This one wasn’t even worth teasing.

“Huh?” said Jason Bridges.

The gang of others, cackled a few “see yas” and moved on, leaving the star with the gnat.

Once they were out of hearing range, Elsa inhaled deeply. “Um, I just wanted to invite you to an outing,” she said quietly, almost holding the words in her mouth, not quite sure the time was right, but knowing there would be no other time.

“Sure,” said Jason Bridges.

“You want to?” Elsa said, incredulous.

“Sure,” he said, and then turning to go he hollered “wait up!” to his buddies.

“Okay,” Elsa called after him. “We’re meeting in the school parking lot on Saturday at five.”

Without breaking his stride he answered, “Sure.”

The gang laughed together, single hoot. The boy to Jason’s left slapped his hand on the star’s back.

Elsa watched him go, smiling to herself.

Thus did she fall into the great mishap of her youth. She had never failed at anything in her life. Excelled, in fact, at everything academic. Hadn’t she received straight A’s since first grade in all subjects from arithmetic to social studies? She actually got B’s in keyboardship, but she hadn’t had to study that since first grade, so it hardly counted. She was a master of correct behavior when told ahead of time exactly what constituted correct behavior. Once given the object of a game, she attained it. When told the right answer, she spit it back.

Going it alone in the world, however, was another story. The book had not yet been written on that subject. Not
the
Book anyway. Thousands of books on the subject had been written by psychologists, therapists, teachers, clergy, parents, all kinds of such experts. Unfortunately with all those words of wisdom, the only piece of real, true advice amounted to this: just wing it.

And wing it, Elsa did, crashing with a vengeance. Her one and only failure in life turned out to be life itself. She just didn’t get it.

***

Saturday came. Five p.m. came. Six p.m. came.

“What time does this lecture start?” Lainie asked.

“Seven. We still have time,” Elsa said.

“Why would Jason Bridges come to this thing?” May asked. She was wearing a white mohair cape over her woolens. She had nouveau go-go boots on her feet. She’d recently dyed her hair black and bleached some streaks in it. In order to show off the effect, she was going hatless and so was shivering as they waited outside the car.

The parking lot attendant, a robot in a painted-on checkered hat, gray trousers with seam cording, and crossing guard vest, asked if they needed assistance finding a spot. The parking lot was empty except for their vehicle. They ignored the attendant who nevertheless stood at attention, waiting for instruction.

“He said he would come, that’s why,” Elsa answered. Elsa wore a navy blue ski jacket over jeans and combat boots. Her pig tails were tucked up underneath a tight-fitting Dacron knitted hat. She barely noticed the cold.

“If he said he would, why isn’t he here?” Lainie asked.

Seven came, but Jason Bridges didn’t. By now everyone had moved inside the vehicle to stay warm. Outside the banners lining the perimeter and holding pennants with Pennzoil, Michelin, and RainX logos flapped in the October breeze. Light bounced off their shiny surfaces. Their flickering and fluttering movements held the only entertainment for the mute occupants inside the car.

At seven-thirty, Lainie said, “I think we should go. I don’t like to keep the car running.”

“Shut it off, then,” Elsa said.

“Elsa!” May protested. “It’s freezing outside. This is totally macabre.”

“Well, then, you two go. I’ll wait here in case he shows up. I don’t want him to think it was just a practical joke or something.”

“You’re not waiting here alone, so forget it. He’ll understand,” Lainie said, putting her motherly foot down.

“I’m not going,” Elsa said, opening the door to let herself out. “The vid camera is on. I’ll be fine. The robot’s still engaged. I’ll be fine.”

At these words, the attendant hummed a little. “May I help you find a spot?” it asked.

“Forget it,” Lainie said. “What’s that thing going to do, record you as you’re getting your ear cut off?”

“Oh, Mom,” Elsa said.

May finally interjected the voice of reason. “Elsa, he’s two and a half hours late. He’s not coming!

Elsa slowly pulled herself back in the car and shut the door.

“Have a nice day,” the attendant said to the car as it left the lot.

***

Needless to say, for weeks after that no one mentioned the Perpetual Motion Club. May never bothered Elsa about a meeting. Lainie assumed that was the end of it and was glad. It was worth the wasted evening to get Elsa to come around.

Funny thing was, Elsa didn’t actually come around. Certainly she stopped looking for Jason Bridges in the hallway between classes. She was sharp after all. Regardless of her social ineptness, she could actually take a hint when it came in the form of a total blow off. She went out of her way to avoid his known pathways and averted her eyes if he was around. “Asshole,” she would say to herself and then move on.

She returned to perpetual motion with a vengeance, not just to seek solace after the embarrassing incident but also as a way to prove her own worthiness. Yes, she was a silly little sophomore, inconsequential. But this silly little sophomore was on the right track to . . . something and screw Jason Bridges and the entire world of basketball players and the idiots that watched them.

Previously she’d barely taken herself seriously. The club was started as a defense against her mother’s insistence on her joining that elitist other group. Now she was actually getting sucked in by the idea. The perpetual motion machine, with its balanced moving parts and ground edges, was perfection. The only real thing in a world of corporate sponsorships and the idiots that worshipped them.

There were no variables in a PMM. It either worked or it didn’t. You didn’t have to ponder over how much energy to put into its operation. A decision on what to include or leave out was unnecessary. The machine itself was the answer. The work done ahead of time to design it was all that was necessary to prove, to justify its existence. Once it made it to PMM status, it never had to prove itself again. Just the opposite of life with its string of bad decisions, false starts, and empty promises from those who have a hold on you, a PMM would never let you down if only you could uncover its secret in the first place. There was never a lying “sure” in the world of PMM.

Holding the idea of a perfect PMM before her (and of course the FutureWorld trophy), she read through history pages on Gerry Martin’s Perpetual Motion Extravaganza website. She studied up on Bhaskara, the East Indian behind the wheel that Brown had used in his initiation rites. She read about Bessler, Boyle, and Maxwell’s Demon. Da Vinci’s fascination with the topic gave the subject an artistic legitimacy.

She loved the mechanics of it. Down in the basement, she built a little overbalanced wheel using an old tinker toy set she found at a garage sale. She graduated to magnets and water tubes and balloons in a buoyancy system. She went through each historic PMM archetype, building small versions to understand exactly why they failed.

She stored her models in an old footlocker, the contents of which had consisted of previous summers’ beach toys: half-flat volleyballs, dog-chewed Frisbees, holey towels. She tossed all that to the garbage bin to make room for her projects. No point in leaving the evidence of her work lying around for her cynical mother to comment on.

Her gadgets required easily obtainable materials only. More modern PMMs, like those that used photovoltaics and violated the second law of thermodynamics, were inaccessible to her. They called for expensive high-tech parts not available at Radio Shack or mail order hobby suppliers. Gerry Martin could build those, but not Elsa.

She studied historical frauds like Aldrich, knowing they failed only because the technology to make their theories work wasn’t available to them. If she took their basic ideas, their systems of hydraulics and pumps, and used smaller and smaller devices to eliminate friction, Elsa was convinced a self-powering device could certainly be created. Quantum mechanics predicts bits of energy created at the subatomic level out of nothing. This energy simply needed to be tapped.

She joined free-energy chatlists and discussed principles with others like her: believers that anything was possible.

She saw herself unveiling the winning project at FutureWorld. Jason Bridges might blow her off today because she was a nobody, but when she won the prize, became the darling of the school, had her moment in the sun, things would be different. Even the slice—no, interesting—tall, new boy would have to acknowledge her accomplishment. Maybe then he’d take her seriously.

He’d be lucky if she gave him the time of day then. He’d go out of his way in the hallway to find her. He’d raise his voice when talking to his pals in order to catch her attention. Maybe he’d even wait outside the girls’ restroom, drinking at the fountain for fifteen minutes just for a chance to invite her to the upcoming game. He’d offer his letter jacket for her to wear. She’d try it on just to placate him. The sleeves, oversized in masculine length, would go well beyond her fingertips. She’d laugh in his face and throw it on the ground. Next year he’d beg to take her to the prom and then . . .

Sure.

Asshole.

So she read and studied and built and thought. Most of all, she thought. Theorized. And then thought some more. When Lainie quietly opened the bedroom door at night to check on her daughter, she saw Elsa lying motionless with her eyes closed. Lainie assumed she was sleeping soundly and all was well. But Elsa was wide awake, thinking.