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Authors: Sue Lange

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BOOK: The Perpetual Motion Club
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Elsa inhaled, collected her thoughts. Why exactly didn’t she want to join? She wasn’t sure she had a reasonable reason.

“Science, yes,” she began her rebuttal. “But the Science Society is about…computer technology.” She gathered steam as her argument formed in her head. “Science and computer technology are not the same thing. I’m not interested in programming: if, then; repeat until, blah, blah, blah. When do you get to go out and build something? Do something fun?”

“Well, you’re setting yourself up for a tough time. I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist.”

“What? I thought this was a free country. Didn’t you tell me you fought for choice! This is so macabre.”

“Elsa, why hold yourself back? You have the potential to do anything you want.”

“What I want is to not join the Science Society. I wanna, I don’t know, try . . . other things.

”What ‘other things?’ That’s what the college entrance board will be wondering.”

“College! I’m only a sophomore.”

“Nowadays, kids need to start thinking about college the day they enter kindergarten.”

“You always said it’s terrible how parents push kids to mature so early. That’s what you always said.”

“We’ve never put pressure on you, but now you need to start thinking about your future. You need an activity. You’re not interested in working with those anti-Rid kids—“

“Rif, mom. Rif! Anti-Rif.”

“Whatever, at least—”

“They’re all drug addicted drop outs. They almost raped us tonight.”

“What!” Lainie stood up, her eyes wide, her brow pinched. “Did you call the—”

“Well, not really,” Elsa backpedaled. “They came up to us and . . . sort of . . . ”

“What?”

“Lit May’s cigarette.”

“Elsa, if you’re having trouble with kids teasing you again, you need to tell me. It’s against the—”

“Mom, I’m not in grade school anymore. I’m all growed up. I can take care of myself.”

“Yeah, right, perjuring yourself with a false rape story? Lying to the—?”

“We’re not in court.”

“You definitely need an activity. Your imagination is . . . I suppose I could sign you up for catechism.”

“No way,” Elsa yelled. “I’m . . . ”

“What?”

“I’m gonna . . . ”

“Yes?”

Elsa jumped up to rinse out her empty soda can, her mind panicking, searching for a way out. “I’m starting my own club,” she suddenly blurted.

Everything came to a stop. Just as Lainie was about to forward her position more, put down her motherly foot and insist on getting her way, Elsa’s illogical statement stifled further argument.

“Club?”

“What club?” May asked quietly. She didn’t want to interpose in the mother/daughter quarrel, but couldn’t help herself.

Elsa turned from the sink and looked from May to Lainie whose faces were at a loss. “The Perpetual Motion Club,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I did not understand the directive,” the sink stated, not knowing how to handle what it thought was an order.

In that moment of mother/daughter tension, a tension shown throughout the world to be a coagulating force capable of changing hearts and minds, moving mountains, and otherwise just pushing things along, in that crest-falling moment without the benefit of star-gazing, time-stretching, or calculus-inventing, the Perpetual Motion Club was born.

The Club came about not because of months spent mulling over the topic, going nuts to solve a problem. The Club was born not because there was a gap in the extra-curricular program at Northawken High and a pool of eager students anxiously seeking something to fill that void and their blank resumes, but because Elsa needed a retort, a trump card, something to shut her mother up.

Funny thing though, as soon as she said it, Elsa actually went for it. She liked the idea. She may not have had much faith in perpetual motion, but she certainly had a lot of faith in a perpetual motion club. Especially since it would get her out of the Science Society meetings which she was sure now that no tall, new boy would ever in a million years attend.

“What?” May said. She looked over at Lainie. Lainie sat blinking, her soda bottle poised mid-air and threatening to spill over her front.

“Perpetual Motion Club,” Elsa said, leaning away from the sink so as to not confuse it further. She tossed her bottle to the recyclable bin underneath and turned to May. “We’re starting it.”

Silence as Lainie returned her bottle to the safety of the tabletop. She looked toward May who had no idea what Elsa was talking about but wanted to cover her pal’s back if at all possible. May was intimidated by her best pal’s parents, but had to follow the unwritten and all-important rule to get her best pal’s back whenever called upon to do so.

“Well,” May answered. “We don’t actually have any officers yet, but . . . ”

“It’s a non-hierarchical organization: no officers, just elders.”

May’s eyes widened at the word ‘elders.’ “Slice!” she said.

Lainie turned to where her daughter stood leaning against the sink. “It’s not the same,” she said, tightening her lips. “The Science Society is a recognized entity. Every high school has one. College administrators recognize it. Anyone who gets accepted into it is on a faster track to get into a good school.”

“Oh Mom! Don’t start with that. You mean to tell me nobody gets accepted into school unless they’re a member of the Science Society?”

“Not good schools.”

“I’m not going to a good school. I’m going to—”

“Elsa,” Lainie said calmly. Her teeth ground across each other so she could choose her words carefully. She stood up and very quietly, very deliberately, said, “You are not going to Community College.”

Elsa tightened her lips just as Lainie had. “Oh, so now all of a sudden it’s okay to be privileged,” she burst out. “I heard you telling Jackson Sayles he was lucky to get into Northawken Comm.”

“Jackson Sayles is a convicted felon. All he has is a GED. You are a gifted student. You have potential and responsibility. Your place in society is different than Jackson Sayles’ place. Do you want to end up in jail?”

“Oh, so we’re not all created equal.”

”We’re all created equal. What we do with ourselves after we’re created is the difference. You are just . . . lazy.”

Lainie’s clenched jaw and pinched eyebrows positioned against the word “lazy” angered Elsa. She’d performed as the dutiful child—cleaning up after herself, receiving excellent grades in school, never getting into trouble, and now she was “lazy?” No different than a convict? Why? Because she had her own ideas? Because she was discovering the walls and halls of school were opening and the world beyond them was wide with possibility? After how many years of her obedience to the unwritten rules of school and parents, why call her lazy now, now that morning had broken and Elsa had come up with an idea.

Elsa accepted the unfairness with the poise of the truly stubborn. “Thank you,” she said, standing away from the sink. She cocked her head and smiled. “I’d love to hear details about that, but I’ve got to go and prepare for a meeting.” She stepped over to May and pulled her arm, lifting her out of her seat. “C’mon, I’ll walk you home.”

“Bye, Ms. Webb,” May said as the two girls retrieved their outerwear from the closet and exited out the front door.

Lainie said nothing. She remained frozen in her stance by the table, staring at the empty space by the sink where Elsa had just been defying her.

***

Outside in the fall night, May pulled her cape tight around herself. “So just elders, huh?” she said enthusiastically. “This is going to be a great coven.”

Elsa ignored the statement and continued her own thoughts. Although she hadn't bothered to zip her coat, she felt no pain as her brain raced along.

“We’ll have regular meetings, just like that stupid Science Society,” she explained more to herself than May. “And we’ll visit Gerry Martin’s website and we’ll have field trips out in the real world.”

“Oh, yes! We can go to Salem.”

“I was thinking more of the Museum of Spectacular Science. And we’ll get other members. Anybody who wants to join can. No rules, no invitations, no secret rites.” The thought of other members was an abstract one. She couldn’t imagine herself actually asking anyone.

“What is it going to be about, though?” May gave her a skeptical look bordering on annoyance. She pursed her lips and blew out rhythmic puffs of vapor, entertaining herself. Finally she rifled through her back pack and extracted the real thing, lighting up as they walked along.

“Perpetual Motion,” Elsa said. She glanced for a second over at May knowing May would stand with her even if the club had nothing to do with pentacles and chalices, but also knowing that, despite the evening’s Bhaskara demonstration, there was a good chance May had no idea what perpetual motion was. ”We’ll build a perpetual motion machine, a PMM. Enter it into the FutureWorld competition. It’ll win easily because nobody’s ever done it before. If we win FutureWorld nobody—”

May stopped walking. “You’re kidding! That’s just stupid. Mr. Brown himself said that perpetual motion is a hoax.”

Elsa turned and dramatically tilted her head sideways in an impatient “please!” look with accompanying eye rolls. Meanwhile she racked her brain for an answer.

“Lots of people are working on it for real,” she said. “They’re not all fakes.”

Then she hit her stride. “The problem is that they need to be more innovative. Old Man Brown hasn’t kept up with what’s going on with the new scientists like Gerry Martin. There’s crazy new physics out there. Quantum mechanics, string theory. Brown doesn’t subscribe to the right chatzines.” She stepped forward to emphasize the next line: “He doesn’t know.”

“Oh, and you do.” May exhaled smoke as she said it. “Anyway, I’m joining the Science Society and you should too.”

“Really? You haven’t even been invited yet.”

“If I get invited.”

Elsa grunted and said, “I’ll make a deal with you. Join my perpetual motion club. Try it out and see what you think. If you don’t like it and still want to join the Science Society after you get invited, I’ll join with you.”

May turned and said, “Really?”

Elsa said, “Yeah. For sure. It’ll make my mom happy anyway. I don’t really like Brown. He’s so, I don’t know, smug, or something.”

“Mr. Brown is great. He’s so funny.”

“Yeah, yeah. But you promise you’ll join my club now, right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

They’d reached May’s brownstone by now. May leaned over for a quick hug and then ran up the steps and was gone. Elsa turned back toward her home and suddenly felt the cold biting at her midsection under the sweat shirt. She zipped up her coat and walked home considering the potential of the new idea. She popped a quick dose of iHigh which immediately incited visions of table top working models, room-sized machines, social media announcements going viral and eventually finding their way to the iphone of the tall, new boy.

Meanwhile at the edge of town, down in the marshy area where the Northawken River makes an abrupt turn west, in a shack constructed of corrugated tin and asphalt shingles and overgrown with multiflora roses, a boy lay dying of a knife wound to an area just behind his right ear.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The school kids, the parents and teachers, the religious leaders of the Northawken community talked of one thing alone: the dead kid down by the river. Who did it? A pedophile? A satanic cult? A robber or kidnapper? They conjured every film noir scenario produced since the beginning of time. The details in their minds were so lurid, they even imagined the scenes in black and white.

Civic organizations called for more surveillance cameras. Every square inch of town should be watched 24/7, they said. Sadly no one voted to raise taxes. There was no money to implement the ideas.

After days of hysterical hand wringing, the theories congealed into one substantial pointed finger: it was the fault of the anti-RFID movement, the anti-rifs. Had to be. They’re the ones with the horrid initiation rites. This was one of those rites gone bad. Didn’t the autopsy reveal the chip had been mangled?

Of course the death was fodder for the movement itself. “You see!” they shouted in their muddled groups hanging about on street corners and around the public InterConnect booths. Their argument was that if there were no RFID chips there would be no reason for someone to do such a thing. They repeatedly stated it was not one of them that had committed the crime. No one believed them.

The anti-Rifs called for an organized protest along with a manifesto to be sent to the state Senators and Representatives. Being terribly disorganized, their cries barely made it to Harrisburg. The best they summoned was a one-week online flashup consisting of ongoing testimonials from all corners of the anti-rif globe sent to local elected officials. The event produced a slight blip in a daily swarm of emails flooding the barely monitored in-boxes of congressmen. Not bad for a group of drug addicts and dropouts, but still not much noise.

The parent organizations had their own informal protest going: the anti-anti-Rifs. As is the way with the strongest members of society, they did not need to gather in numbers. They simply put their foot down. “You will not hang around with those thugs!” they shouted to their underlings, their children. “They’re sick and depraved,” they all said simultaneously over the dinner tables across the city. The parents added details left over from their own childhoods when they still had imaginations, portraying the anti-Rifs as blood thirsty devil worshippers who danced around the dead bodies of their sacrificial lambs. Which of course made the kids even more interested in the group than before.

BOOK: The Perpetual Motion Club
10.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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