The Perpetual Motion Club (6 page)

The class fell silent. Ms. Danforth was painfully shy. Surely, Mr. Brown would not rank out on her. It would be too hurtful to watch.

Elsa wished she could disappear. She hated when Brown went off on students. It was bad enough he won points at stupid kids’ expense. It was bad enough when he used Elsa as an example of what a good student was. But this badgering of someone crippled by shyness was the worst. Sure, Julie Danforth should grow up and get a grip, but Brown was not a child psychiatrist. He wasn’t even a real teacher. It wasn’t his place to force someone to be something they weren’t.

Ms. Danforth hooked the left side of her mane behind her ear, took a deep breath, and with a hopeful questioning look on her face mumbled something.

“What?” Mr. Brown cupped his ear in his hand and stepped to just in front of Ms. Danforth. “I didn’t hear you,” he said.

She whispered something into his cupped hand.

The man stepped back to regard the audience and bark: “Ms. Danforth, can you please say that louder for those of us in the cheap seats?”

The class snickered.

Elsa racked her brain for a way to help Julie Danforth.

Meanwhile, Ms. Danforth, quite sure she’d made a blunder and didn’t know whether to run out of the room now or do as she was told, whispered, “Inertia?”

“Inertia!” thundered Mr. Brown. “Inertia. Class, Ms. Danforth feels that inertia is what’s stopping the wheel? What shall we do with such an answer?”

Regardless of their previous empathy toward Ms. Danforth, they could no longer hold out against Mr. Brown’s wit. They laughed while their teacher stood with his hands on his hips as though thinking about whipping the poor girl for her stupidity.

Elsa could stand it no longer. It wasn’t so bad to tease Cyndy Newman or Gerald Davidson, but Julie Danforth? That was just macabre.

“But she’s right,” Elsa said from the cheap seats.

The crowd hushed immediately and turned to the back of the room. Their laughing faces turned into those of surprise and maybe awe. The initiates up front smirked at what they thought was someone finally putting Brown in his place.

“Ah!” Mr. Brown said, leaping forward to shake the hand of the answerer. Elsa shrank back in her seat, annoyed that she had inserted herself into the drama.

Mr. Brown pulled her to her feet. Elsa looked sheepishly at Mr. Brown. “I mean, rotational inertia, anyway.”

“Yes! Yes!” Mr. Brown screamed. “Rotational inertia! The inertia of a rotating body. The measure of resistance of an object to changes in its rotation. It increases with the distance from the center as the something rotates. Think about a figure skater, kids. What happens when she does her Hamill Camel?”

Mr. Brown ran to the front and assumed the pose of a figure skater mid-Hamill Camel. “She spins lazily with her leg sticking out and then when she leans down, reaches her hands to her feet, what happens?”

Elsa sat down. Let someone else answer.

Ms. Danforth mumbled up front. Mr. Sun spoke out loud. Mr. Davidson and Ms. Newman fairly shouted. The entire room of people, even May, said it: “She goes faster!”

“Yes!” Mr. Brown jumped up and sang out. She goes faster!” With the class laughter egging him on, he spun around, positively giddy that a correct answer had been produced and the trial was almost over.

Suddenly he came to a stop and whispered forcefully: “She goes faster.”

He straightened. “When her extremities come in to the center of the spin she speeds up. The rotational inertia, in this case Dorothy Hamill, is greater when she is spread out, radiating out, so to say. But when she pulls in, her rotational inertia is smaller because the radii of all the little bits that make up her body are smaller. She speeds up.”

He raced to his wheel contraption. “Although there is a momentary increase of torque on the side going down when the lead globs at the top slam over, the rotational inertia for that lead glob is at the same time greater because its distance from the center is greater.” Mr. Brown spun the contraption. “You’ve got torque and inertia fighting each other. The torque wants to speed it up and the inertia wants to slow it down. The thing stops moving.” The thing stopped moving.

He picked up his Georgia Pacific pointing stick and indicated the lead weight sitting at the bottom of the wheel. At its resting place it had the greatest distance from the center.

“Here we have the greatest torque because it’s farther away from the center, but we also have the greatest rotational inertia to overcome to get it back up to the top. They cancel each other out. This pig won’t root!”

Triumphantly he leaned his stick against the whiteboard, picked up a marker and scribbled “Q.E.D.” on the board.

“Quadratic Equation Done,” one of the juniors said. Everyone including Mr. Brown laughed. Even Ms. Danforth the hero of the day, smiled a little. The normal color in her face had by now returned.

Having come to the final conclusion so elegantly, the initiates became full-fledged members of the Northawken Science Society. They donned ceremonial robes and wore them for the rest of the evening over their ads for ibooks and Xplore. They drank a ceremonial Morton salt solution to symbolize the imbibing of scientific knowledge. The president gave each a Print•Write laminated card with the TSS (Twenty Standard Subroutines used in universal applications) and a list of the websites of the biggest software developers (as if any high school student didn’t have that already burned into their brains). Each member scheduled a day of tutoring freshmen in dead languages such as Fortran, Cobol, and Visual Basic. They signed a contract stating they would develop a personal computer game by graduation (as if they hadn’t already done that two or three times).

After listening to the description of the initiation requirements, Elsa wondered about getting involved with the group. She had no desire to spend a weekend in the language lab. She had no desire to program. When Mr. Brown promised to demonstrate
in vitro
fertilization at the next meeting, she moved in a decidedly negative direction. She hated biology almost as much as she hated coding. And these people seemed so cruel. How could they let Mr. Brown go off on everybody like that? It’s not the kids’ fault if they don’t know what they haven’t been told. And did she really want to spend more time around Mr. Brown than she had to? Despite the action-packed demonstration on Bhaskara, the Science Society was obviously no place for her. She couldn’t imagine the real geniuses of the world, people like Gerry Martin, ever being found within a hundred miles of a science society. Why, then, would Elsa Webb? The tall, new boy wasn’t even there.

CHAPTER SIX

Outside the school building, the chill night air nipped at gloveless fingertips and exposed noses. The girls scanned the schoolyard for dark blobs of humanity hulking underneath the trees. They saw nothing. The other Science Society wannabes leaving the school along with May and Elsa gave them added comfort. They weren’t alone. Nevertheless, the girls wrapped their outer wear tightly around themselves and ran the ten blocks to Elsa’s house.

“Enter and be well,” the front door stated when Elsa tapped the code into the lock. “Thanks,” they both answered before going inside.

The girls tossed their outer garments to the bottom of the closet, slamming its door shut over the closet’s assertion that “Your clothing is not properly stowed.” They proceeded to the fridge for the Jetstream. Mom and Dad were both still out.

Sodas in hand, they flopped onto the kitchen chairs and began the giggling and gossiping that sophomores are so famous for.

“Did you see Justin Blaine?” Elsa teased.

“Yeah, he fell asleep again,” May said.

“Boy’s narcoleptic or something. Macabre.”

“Maybe somebody put a spell on him.”

“Yeah, you should rescue him from it.”

“Hm.” May looked dreamily into her can of Jetstream, as if the recipe for a love potion lay in the soda’s secret components. She sighed and looked up at Elsa. “So where was your new boy?”

Elsa shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he got stuck somewhere and couldn’t come.”

“You know he went to practice.”

“We looked; he wasn’t there.”

“Maybe he got sick and couldn’t go.”

“He has health problems,” they said together in the exaggerated accent of Ms. Singh, the biology teacher. When someone skipped class, Ms. Singh always asked whether Tom or Betsy perhaps had “health problems.” The girls giggled until Jetstream Soda threatened to erupt from below.

“What about those creepy anti-Rifs?” May said. “That was close.”

“It wasn’t so bad, you’re just a weenie.”

“Wasn’t so bad? Are you nuts?”

“You’re a weenie. They’re just weird.”

“Oh, yeah. Weird like drug addicts and drop outs.”

“Don’t be prejudiced.”

“I’m not but . . . ” Silence as May worked on a good comeback. Finally she gave up and changed the subject.

“You know who
was
at the meeting, don’t you?” she said in an obnoxious teasing voice.

“I’m going to kill you if you say Jimmy Bacomb.”

May pouted. “He’s so cute.”

“Well then, put a spell on him for yourself.”

“Oh no, oh no. He’s hurtin’ for you, dahlin’.”

“He’s a twerp and he wasn’t there and you know it cuz he’s a twerp.”

“If he’s such a twerp, how come you always defend him when other people tease him?”

“Shut up.”

Jimmy most certainly had a crush on Elsa ever since the time she had taken pity on him in seventh grade and let him copy answers off her test in Mrs. Dawyer’s history class. No one else ever let him cheat and in fact usually ratted him out with a “Hey Frecklehead’s cheating off me.” Elsa had not only not ratted him out, she had turned the paper at an angle that allowed him to see it better over her shoulder. She had been paying the price ever since. She was quite aware of his feelings and never quite sure what to do about them.

The inane conversation ended abruptly when they heard Lainie Webb’s efficient little Road Runner pull into the garage. A fully electric vehicle, it ran strictly to noise control codes and so would normally have a silent approach. But after an evening at the Pip & Squeak, Lainie’s reflexes were a little slow and she had insisted in driving in manual instead of allowing the car to maneuver by itself.

She gracefully ran into the far wall of the garage. No damage, just a nice good “thunk!” as a box of mailing peanuts, possibly stored there in a moment of genius when somebody realized this sort of thing happened often, found itself between vehicle and far wall. Just after the car hit the peanuts, the auto started whining: “Attention! Object ahead! Attention! Object ahead.”

The girls sighed and stifled their mating gossip and waited for Lainie. The door opened and the woman entered.

“Getting nippy out there,” Lainie said in way of greeting. She pulled the scarf from around her neck and head and tossed it onto the counter, and then bent over her daughter and kissed the forehead there. She eased into a seat next to May and gave her a peck as well.

“Yeah,” the girls both said and then Elsa continued, “We froze our butts off coming home.”

“So, now you’re drinking soda to warm yourselves up?” Lainie pulled her arms out of the coat she was wearing and pushed it over the seat back.

“If I had a real mom, she’d have hot cocoa waiting for us upon our arrival,” Elsa said.

“You know where the stove is.” The mother, red-faced from the cold or maybe the bar, leaned an elbow on the table and placed her chin in her hand. She looked across to Elsa and took a deep breath to clear a bit of a fog. “And how did your meeting go?”

Both girls shrugged.

“It was slice,” May said, before Elsa could say it was boring.

“Ugh—‘slice’,” Lainie said. “Such a commercial word.”

“It was interesting then.”

“That’s worse, but never mind. So you’re joining up?”

“Yes,” May interrupted just as Elsa was saying, “I doubt it.”

“What—why? I think we should discuss this,” Lainie said. She reached from her seat to open the fridge and extract a Jetstream. “You know, if I had a dutiful, loving daughter, she’d have heated some milk for me upon my arrival.”

Elsa stared at Lainie’s back. “Why would I join?” she said.

“Because it will look good on your resume.” May and Lainie said it together. Lainie shot May a wink.

Elsa snorted, tilted her head back, drained her bottle and then slammed it down onto the tabletop with an exaggerated “Ahhhh!” just like in the commercial. “Big deal,” she defiantly said after her exhibition of fine table manners. “Mom says with my grades I could go anywhere. Right, Mom?”

“Yes, but grades aren’t everything anymore. They’re looking for well rounded individuals these days.”

“So I take science classes, study science on my own, and join the Science Society,” Elsa said. “How well rounded is that? I think what they mean by well rounded is a genius as well as an Olympic gold medal winner. Have you seen me on the parallel bars? It’s not pretty. Let’s face it. I’m not ever going to be well rounded.”

“Oh, Elsa, that is so not true. Why do you always say such things about yourself? More importantly, why wouldn’t you want to join when you love science?”