The Perpetual Motion Club (22 page)

“Sure,” he said.

She stopped for a moment at that word she hated—sure—and then realized that he actually meant it this time. She led him downstairs to the mess.

“I’m doing an exhibit on . . . ”

“Wow!” Jason stepped around her like a guard evading a forward. “This is just like, just like . . . ” He turned to her. “My dad gave me one of these when I was a kid.”

“A perpetual motion display?”

“No, a model train set.”

Elsa laughed. “This isn’t a . . . well, actually, it sort of is.”

“But where’s the trains and the little houses and cotton ball trees?” He began pushing over cardboard boxes and metal plates with his Converse-clad foot, trying to see what was underneath.

“It’s not actually a train set,” Elsa said, pulling him back. His bulk moved gracefully and she surprised herself with her ability to check his movements. He didn’t fight her. “It’s a model of historical machines. Ones that didn’t work. I haven’t assembled them all though.”

“That is really slice.” Suddenly he turned to her somewhat dazed. “You’re pretty smart aren’t you?”

She felt her underarms start to sweat under his gaze. She could feel the blood concentrating in her head making her face turn red. She wished she was a million miles away just then. “You know I could use some help,” she blurted without thinking, without coming up with a better way to change the subject. “I mean, there’s a lot of work to be done yet and well my club members aren’t very . . . good at it.” She didn’t bother mentioning that the team had actually stopped coming altogether. No one but Jimmy had been showing up.

“Definitely I can help.”

Elsa looked at the plans and the parts piled up. No way could two people finish this ambitious project in time. If Jason was good, maybe, but how graceful was he without a basketball? Without a team? Her own team had deserted her. Even Jimmy hadn’t shown up last night.

The gears turned quickly in her head. “You know I’ve been thinking about your brother,” she said, bypassing delicacy and blurting it out.

“What?” he said. His face stopped grinning. This girl was reminding him of the very thing he was trying to forget.

Elsa did not wait for him to get mad and stomp off. “I can help you with that. I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t know much about it, but if I get details from my mom, I can figure out who did it.”

She had not been thinking about Jeremy, she had no confidence that she could do a better job than the police or her mother, but she was grasping at straws. And she did have something gnawing at her about the whole thing. Something that wasn’t adding up. She saw an opportunity and suddenly found courage to make a boast she could no way for sure support. But somehow in the way Jason had said, “You’re pretty smart, aren’t you?” made her believe that he believed. And she remembered the power of believing. She remembered how many people believed in the impossible just because the power was in the believing. And power was what it was all about, wasn’t it?

“I’ve got some angles that no one else is thinking about.” (As if she knew what angles people were thinking about.)

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I just need to . . . talk with my mom and maybe talk a little with you and a couple of other people. I’ll figure it out. I always do. I read mysteries all the time and usually can figure it out way ahead of time. Same with the movies.”

That was actually true. She could usually figure it out ahead of time but that was because they were fiction and the reader was manipulated by the author and Elsa had learned that early on. She no longer read mysteries because of that as a matter of fact, but no matter. She was on a roll.

“That’d be great,” Jason said, confused and still a little annoyed, but optimistic because he really thought Elsa was one of those mysterious brainy types that really did know what a gerund was. He thought she was much higher than him in the world of animals. Maybe even a different species. Something untouchable.

“The problem is this project is taking up so much of my time, I don’t have time to think about anything else, like your predicament. I need time to think. If I had more people doing assembly then I could—”

“My friends will help. We’ll finish it in no time. Just tell me what to do and I’ll get them here.” The unspoken despair he’d been feeling since the day he’d learned of his brother’s death was lightening ever so slightly.

“Really?” Elsa said. She so wanted to jump up and kiss Jason, but he was still Jason Bridges and she was still Elsa Webb, a nobody. But soon, soon. One day soon, he’d be jumping up and kissing her.”

“Is this for that science thing you told me about?”

“You remember me telling you about that?”

“I’m not an idiot you know. Look, what you’re trying to do is pretty simple. You just need a winning plan. You don’t know jack about competition. You’ll win with my, our, help and then maybe you can help me with my—”

“Definitely. There are holes in this thing. The police . . . Listen, yes, you help me, I’ll help you.”

Jason didn’t skip a beat. He was used to fast decision making. When presented with an opening, a chance to break through, he didn’t ask questions. He went right for the open basket. “First off, who’s the competition?” he said.

And so they sat down and discussed Elsa’s strategy. They viewed last year’s winning entry exhibited on the Internet to get an idea of what they were up against. Elsa introduced an asset/debit concept, listing problems (not enough time to finish) as well as advantages (unique, big, style), and gave him the ultimate goal: seven working perpetual motion displays built to scale with movable parts and text included to describe how each machine was supposed to work and why it didn’t.

“This is going to be easy,” Jason said. His excitement transported her to the same plane an upcoming game would send him to. He was born for competition and his enthusiasm was contagious. This was going to be easy.

After several hours that passed like minutes, Lainie called from the top of the stairs, “Stop boring Jason with that crap. He needs to get his rest.”

They laughed. “I’m boring him to sleep, Mom.” Elsa called.

They said goodnight and shook on the partnership. Just before Jason retreated upstairs, he turned to her and said, “We’ll get started tomorrow night. Practice is scheduled for seven.”

“Practice?”

“Or whatever you call it. Seven. We’ll bring more players to help.”

Elsa smiled and sat on her cot. She stared at her “crap” for a while as conflicting emotions wrestled in her gut. It was nice to have Jason Bridges, the new, tall boy, here. It felt surrealistic in a way. But now he would see for sure what a loser she was. Somehow she didn’t care. She’d have a few weeks of friendship with him, maybe less once he lost interest in the project, or some new girlfriend called him on the phone, or the graduation parties began kicking in. Jason, no doubt, had lots and lots of things to turn his head. Still, she’d have a few days or a few moments with him to lighten the load. And he needed her, too. That was worth something wasn’t it?

All thoughts of the real club members drifted out of her head, replaced by Jason and the unreality of him sitting in her house, under her roof, in her bed! She was no longer angry with May and jWad and Christine. She wasn’t even aware of their existence.

But then her eye caught the tygon tubes that Jimmy had cut two evenings ago. They lay where he left them, perfectly lined up, waiting for instructions. Jimmy might have been slow, but he had a great eye. Without that artistic eye, this project was going to suffer.

Damn him! How could he abandon her?

He really was a twerp, but she didn’t know whether she should be angry that he was leaving her high and dry or hurt that maybe he didn’t care quite as much as she thought he had.

She shook off the thoughts of Jimmy’s abandonment and returned to the mess on the floor before her. In the center was a transformer that needed tacking to a plywood back. A few stray magnets and heater coils were in a pile over at the far end of the room. She stood up to place them in their proper group. Over by the far wall she spied a main spring she’d thought she lost a few weeks ago. Then behind a stray piece of steel sheeting she saw the missing . . .

By two a.m., after four hours of grouping debris and usable parts into piles of like-minded objects, she fell exhausted onto the cot. Seven work stations complete with components and a drawing of the finished model looked like mounds of sorted laundry. Regardless of who showed up tomorrow night—Jimmy, Jason and his friends, or even May and jWad—she’d be ready with work for them.

***

Six-fifteen on Friday evening, the Dr. Zhivago theme rang out.

“Who on Earth,” Lainie asked as she sat at dinner with Jason and her daughter.

Elsa shrugged.

Jason spoke. “It’s probably some friends of mine.”

Elsa’s heart thudded. The moment of truth. Did Jason intend to help? Or was last evening all she would get from him? Was he going out with his friends or staying in tonight?

Lainie stated the worst. “You’ll be going out, I suppose.” She smiled at Jason. “The prelim went well today and you deserve it. Elsa, go get the door. I’ll clean up here. You go have fun, Jason.”

Jason went to the door with Elsa and together they found two of Jason’s followers, Jake the Shorter and his girlfriend, the statuesque Em Twill who was the girls’ basketball team captain.

“Well, see ya, Jason,” Elsa said at the door, hoping and dreading at the same time.

“Uh, yeah go ahead and get started. We’ll wait up here for the rest.”

“The rest?”

“Yeah, everybody else. I told you we’d get a team together.”

Elsa looked from Jake and Em to Jason and then suddenly turned and ran to the kitchen.

“What’s going on?” Lainie asked as she loaded up the dishwasher.

“Mom, I want to apologize.”

“What is it you want?”

“I’m serious. This whole perpetual motion thing. You were right. It’s kind of a waste, but not really. I apologize for not explaining it right. I didn’t, I don’t know, think you cared, so I didn’t bother taking the time. I’ve had such a hard time convincing people about what I’m doing that—”

“Why do you need to convince people? Me for instance.”

“I didn’t think I needed to, but I need help. The project is huge. I want to illustrate why perpetual motion is not real so I’m making all kinds of perpetual motion machines. It’s kind of, I guess, gotten kind of too big, so . . . Well, Jason and I have been friends for a long time.”

“When were you going to tell me about that? That you were hooked up with him? This—”

“He didn’t do it, Mom. And I’m not hooked up with him. We’re just . . . friends. He has a lot of
friends
and, well, I’ve asked them to help me finish my project. If I can finish, it will be so awesome. It’ll win FutureWorld for sure and then the club will be sanctioned and May can put it on her resume and . . . ” Fortunately she ran out of steam before saying something stupid like: “and then Jason Bridges will fall in love with me.”

“You are making very little sense,” Lainie said. “And Jason needs to keep his mind on his . . . thing.”

“I know. He’s told me all about the . . . thing. But he needs to keep his spirits up. He’s easily depressed. I’m trying to get his mind on other things. He said he wanted to help and—”

“I don’t like this at all, young lady. This boy’s life is in my hands. It’s not a joke.”

“I know that, Mom. I’m being very serious. There’s a lot you don’t know about Jason.”

“Is there something I should know?”

Just then voices from the hallway indicated the gang was all here and they were headed downstairs. Elsa nodded knowingly.

“We’re not through talking about this, Elsa,” Lainie said. She smiled tentatively at the teens as they passed through the kitchen on the way to the basement. Elsa followed behind. She turned before going down the stairs and whispered, “Later.”

She had no faith in the abilities of Jake the Shorter and the statuesque Em Twill, but hands were hands and certainly they could glue, or cut, or nail, couldn’t they? And just by the luck of having Jason’s chutzpah here under her roof, the hands were here to work.

Elsa was too stunned and giddy and not just a little nervous about her promise to Jason, so he did most of the talking at first. He gave a quick overview of the project, its goals, why it was important, how it could not possibly lose.

“This here game is the science competition,” he started. “And we’re going to win.”

Everyone cheered.

“Eth . . . Elsa, here, is the coach. She’ll be running plays by you and keeping track of the score. If you have any questions, go to her. I’m the team captain, so if any of yous are out of line, you’ll have to deal with me. Look here: go in and come out fighting!”

The group cheered again. Elsa was unsure if the locker room speech was fitting, but she cheered along with everyone else anyway.

Finally at the end, Jason said, “So that’s what we’re doing. I don’t know how the stuff works so Elsa’s got the floor. Right?” He pointed to her and she came from off the wall into the center of the circle.

“Well, yes, actually, um, I thought we’d split into groups of two. I’ll be my own group. We’ll work on seven separate mechanisms and they each have their own workstation, which as you can see, is basically just a pile of junk right now. I’ve got preliminary sketches for each one. You can dig through the piles to find them. My laptop is available over on the ping pong table for details. Just select the project at the bottom of the window, or you can go to the appropriate bookmark in MyBrowser . . . or . . .

“What she means,” Jason interrupted, knowing his friends better than she did, “is if you get stuck, she’ll look it up for you.”

Everyone nodded in unison.

“Right,” Elsa looked to him. “Um, do any of you have any experience with a screw gun?”

Once she mentioned power tools, everyone got serious. Goggles and gloves were donned and particulate masks handed around. They spoke in quiet voices, using “please” and “thank you” when requesting items such as glue dispensers and automatic staplers. Somehow the project had gained the respect of a final exam.