Edison’s Alley Read Online Free Page A

that place now. The best he could do was be near the
machine. Nick felt a growing need to tend to it.
    To complete it.
    Just as Caitlin had said—before shooting him down in flames—Nick intuitively knew how the objects fit in the larger machine, although he had no idea what each object’s specific
function in the device was, and with each part he added, the pull to completion grew. The closer he got to finishing Tesla’s Far Range Energy Emitter, the more it seemed the machine
wanted
to be finished.
    Nick’s feeling of urgency was far preferable to the humiliation Caitlin had left him with. And so, secret and alone, he stood as close as humanly possible to the unfinished machine, trying
to somehow resonate with its purpose, and longing for the day he could finally fire it up and see what it did.
    Caitlin didn’t even remember the walk home from Nick’s house that day, she was so filled with frustration and anger. Long before she reached her front door,
however, she realized she was angry at herself, not Nick.
    The tape recorder that Nick had so coldly brought up had given her enough insight into herself to know that he had every right to be upset with her. Perhaps they
were
growing into more
than friends. And if she was leading him on, there was a reason. Admittedly she liked him, even if she admitted it to no one but herself—but dating carried the kind of baggage that neither
she nor Nick could afford right now.
    In Caitlin’s experience, a boyfriend was someone you thought you really liked, but once you got to know him, you spent all your time figuring out how to escape. Caitlin figured that dating
would be like that until she finally got the hang of it. Only then would true love set in; only then would she find her soul mate.
    She suspected that Nick might very well be soul-mate material, but turning him into a Theo would ruin that. Was there something wrong with her, that she would keep dating a boy she didn’t
want to spend time with, and keep spending time with a boy she was afraid to date?
    “Caitlin, honey,” her mother said as she walked into the house, “Theo’s here.”
    And there he stood in the doorway, her ex/not-quite-ex-boyfriend.
    Caitlin sighed. “Of course he is.”
    “Did you forget we were studying for science today?” he asked.
    “Sorry,” she said. “There was something I had to take care of.”
    Then she sat down, and they pulled out their science books and got to work.
    Yes,
thought Caitlin,
there definitely is something wrong with me
. And she wondered if, in the entire world, there could possibly be a more mismatched couple than her and Theo.
    In fact, there was.

W hile Petula Grabowski-Jones waited in rapt anticipation, Mitch Murló suppressed a sigh.
    “Okay, here she comes,” Petula said. “Watch—this is gonna be good.”
    This wasn’t Mitch’s idea of a good time, but he was willing to suspend judgment since it seemed to make Petula happy. And he wanted to keep her happy, because this was their first
date that didn’t involve the blissful silence of a movie theater. It meant they had to acknowledge each other’s existence for an extended period of time, and actually converse. Such a
thing is not easy. It had taken a while to settle on a nonmovie date that worked for both of them. She had nixed bowling as too lowbrow, and fine dining was inconceivable with Mitch, because,
according to her, he had “the table manners of a lemur with brain damage.”
    It was thinking about himself as a lemur that made Mitch suggest the zoo. Petula had accepted, but, like everything else she did, it was for her own unique reasons.
    Mitch couldn’t quite say why he liked Petula. Maybe it was the charmingly irritating way she introduced herself to people (“It’s PETula like SPATula, not PeTULa like
PeTUNia”). Or maybe it was the way she parted her hair and braided her pigtails with quaint, yet terrifying, mathematical precision, so that even their faintly lopsided