The Perpetual Motion Club by Sue Lange Page A

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.