The Perpetual Motion Club Read Online Free

happened.
    Most everyone had experimented with iHigh once or twice. The truly devout tuned in regularly. Elsa was devout. She loved the pleasurable high. Not so over the top she couldn’t react to the world around her, but capable of taking the edge off having to hang around a bunch of people she didn’t know, the single most horrific experience Elsa could imagine enduring. Even the fact that her pal, May, would be with her tonight and maybe even a tall, new boy, was not enough for her to go it alone without a dose.
    The underfunded station emitted a staticky flow of signal. Nevertheless, she felt the endorphins immediately kick in as she walked out the door with a “Bye Mom!”

CHAPTER FOUR
    Jimmy Bacomb had floppy, red-tinged hair and a profusion of freckles that had not gone away in the nine years that his schoolmates had discovered them. He was a dreamy kid, not bright, yet oddly curious.
    He may very well have been the only student less popular than May Sedley. Not very talkative, he was also thin and the two components together rendered him invisible. Worse, he was a creative person. While he performed marginally in most of his history, English, and math classes, he excelled in drawing and paper-making. In his free time, he studied the lost arts of painting and sculpture, eschewing the Photoshop world as something too limiting. “It’s easy to create something using the computer, but all you get is virtual 3-D,” he was fond of saying. To himself, of course, because no one else was ever listening. He was wicked with a welder’s torch and his parents’ home had copies of miniature Calders all over the front lawn. His own creations were in the backyard because nobody understood them and he didn’t want to get teased.
    Jimmy liked Elsa because she was the only one who ever argued with him about his ideas. While everyone mostly just ignored his mass-of-ganglia model under the maple tree in the back, Elsa correctly identified it as Captain Rage on drugs. She gave him feedback, suggesting he drop the comic book motif for more serious subjects. Nobody else even knew he was doing derivative art. And certainly no one ever bothered to look closely.
    Odd thing about Jimmy was that as unpopular as he was, he had accumulated a broad camp of sponsors. Of course his ASW portfolio and Strathmore backpack drew little attention because nobody had ever heard of those companies. He was simply one of the students in school lost between the three pillars of academic achievement: sports, science, and rock music. His art classes were few. No drawing clubs or found art jam sessions existed on campus.
    As Elsa walked to the sidewalk, Jimmy was also leaving his house two doors down with his large drawing portfolio. The streetlights kicked on as they sensed the two students leaving their homes.
    “Hello,” Jimmy called to Elsa. “You heading to school?”
    “Yeah,” she answered back. “You?”
    “I’ll walk you to the corner, I’m heading over to the . . . you know.”
    She did know. The cemetery. He was taking embossings of headstones there. Creating a wall collage in the Bacomb’s basement.
    “Why do you go at night?” she asked when he met up to her on the walkway. “It’s creepy.”
    “It’s the only time I have time.”
    “Can’t you wait until the weekend?”
    “I’m not scared, Elsa.”
    “You should be, those anti-Rifs are everywhere. They probably have séances and conjure dead spirits in the . . . you know.”
    Jimmy giggled. He was a giggler. Too nervous to laugh outright, too unslice to remain aloof and above it. “They’re not so bad, you know,” he said.
    “Hm,” Elsa replied.
    By that time they’d reached the corner, motion detecting streetlights engaging as they went. “Anyway,” she said. “I have to go meet May. You got your cell in case anything, you know, happens?”
    Jimmy giggled again. “See you later,” he said before loping off in the opposite direction.
    Elsa watched him go,