The Center of Everything

by Linda Urban

  In years past Ruby would be looking forward to seeing Lucy doing karate moves or watching for whatever group Gigi was marching with. But this year Ruby is thinking about the schoolhouse.

  It is the schoolhouse that will stop in front of the circle in the square, in front of the Bunning Day Essay Girl or Boy.

  Ruby has seen this happen eleven times— though she only remembers the past five or six. She knows that when the schoolhouse trailer stops, the school librarian, Ms. Olive Kemp-Davie, is supposed to hop out of the pickup truck that tows it, open the schoolhouse window, and turn on the amplification system inside. She will take the microphone out of its case and use it to introduce this year’s Essay Boy or Girl, who will step up onto the float and, in 180 words or less, say something about the Legacy of Captain Cornelius Bunning.

  Ruby sorts her note cards again.

  Some say it was destiny.

  She hasn’t really read her essay since she printed it on her cards. She was so busy trying to make sure she had things figured out. Now she thinks that maybe she should have practiced a little. How would Lucy read the words?

  Some say it was destiny?

  Some say it was destiny?

  Some say it was destiny?

  Some say it was destiny that Ruby and Lucy became best friends.

  They were alphabetical pals in kindergarten. O came before P, so Okeda sat next to Pepperdine at circle time. Destiny.

  They stayed friends, too, even when they didn’t need to be alphabetical, sitting side by side at lunch and being field-trip buddies and partnering for class projects. They were together so much that teachers sometimes called one Luby and the other Rucy. Neither one minded.

  In the summers Ruby would help Lucy learn her lines for whatever Hungry Nation Youth Theater production she was in, and they would stay up late at each other’s houses, telling secrets and making plans for what they would do when they grew up (most of which involved moving to New York, where Lucy would be a famous actress and Ruby would be her agent and help her learn her lines).

  Ruby knows that if you had somehow met them individually, you wouldn’t have pegged them for friends. Probably, you would have guessed Lucy was pals with McKenzie Monk and those girls, because, really, Ruby and Lucy are quite different from each other. Lucy is tall; Ruby is average. Lucy has dark skin; Ruby is pale. Ruby has every-color hair, which means that most people call it brown, the same as her mom’s. Lucy’s hair is copper colored and curly. Neither of her dads has hair like that. Mr. Okeda’s hair is as black and shiny as his lawyer shoes. Mr. Fisch has no hair at all, but there is a picture of him at Lucy’s house from when he was a boy. In it his hair is yellow and he is wearing a karate outfit.

  Not an outfit, Lucy would say. A gi.

  Ruby knows that Lucy will be wearing her gi today as she walks in the parade with the other students from Okeda Martial Arts. Mr. Fisch always has his students march in the parade, doing kicks and stunts. This year Lucy will be breaking boards—Mr. Fisch will hold them up and Lucy will kick them. She’ll get to yell, too. Not Hi-ya! like in cartoons. Kiai! is what she’ll yell. Loud. You have to put your spirit into your words, Lucy says. She knows because she read it on a poster in the Okeda Martial Arts lobby.

  Lucy says other poster things too, like “Move and the way will open” and “Mind like water,” which is about being calm and having reactions that are appropriate to the circumstances—like if you drop a pebble in a pond, the ripples are the right size for the pebble. Drop a big pebble, you get big ripples. A small pebble, and the ripples are smaller. Mr. Fisch says Lucy is a big rippler. An overreactor.

  Ruby is an underreactor, Lucy says. So they are like yin and yang—which are not the names of twin zoo pandas, like Ruby thought at first, but two opposites that fit together.

  Lucy is dramatic; Ruby is calm.

  Lucy is impulsive; Ruby takes time to figure things out.

  Ruby does what she is supposed to do, and Lucy? Well. “I count on you for balance,” Lucy always says.

  Which is why they are friends, Ruby thinks.

  And which is why she hasn’t told Lucy how out of balance she has felt since Gigi died. Instead, Ruby pretended things were normal. That she was normal.

  And it worked.

  Mostly.

  Until yesterday.

  “We’re supposed to be best friends!” Lucy had said. Yelled, really. Her eyes had been slits, her voice as loud as it had ever been on the Hungry Nation Youth Theater stage. “I tell you everything and you didn’t tell me anything!”

  Ruby’s stomach hurts remembering what she had said back. “Mind like water.”

  “This is not a stupid pebble, Ruby Pepperdine! This is a meteor! You have hurled an enormous meteor into the lake of our friendship. You’ve caused a tsunami!” Lucy had balled her fists and dashed away, and Ruby was left bobbing stupidly in her wake.

  Wonders

  Ruby has to hold Willow’s hand to keep her from hopping out into the street. Six years ago, when Ruby was Willow’s age, Ruby had been the one hopping, though Aunt Rachel did not have to hold her hand. Even back then Ruby was good at figuring out what she was supposed to do.

  In preschool, for example, she figured out that the good kids played in the classroom, and the really bad kids got time-outs and calls home and didn’t get to play much at all. But the in-between kids? The ones who were mostly good but might be having a “difficult moment” got to go to the special playroom with the climbing wall and the cushiony floor and the things to swing around on until they cooled off a little. The preschool teachers didn’t need you to be perfect—just mostly good. So Ruby had just enough “difficult moments” to get to play in the playroom, but not so many that she’d have to sit in the hall or lose stars from her behavior chart.

  In third grade she figured out that if you put your hand up in class when everyone else did, you probably wouldn’t get called on, but you also probably wouldn’t get called on when nobody put their hand up either. Teachers mostly picked the kids who never put their hands up then, and only once had Ruby been called on when she didn’t really want to be. (It was a question about state capitals. It always seemed to her that Detroit should be the capital of Michigan, not whatever it was. Lansing?)

  She also figured out how to write a pretty good essay for the Bunning Day Essay Contest. Anybody could’ve, really. All you had to do was go back and look at the past winners.

  First of all, you had to say that Cornelius Bunning was great—brave or smart or an original thinker, it didn’t seem to matter which one. And you might mention how glad you were to live in a town named after him—because you wanted to be brave or smart or an original thinker too. It would be good if you could say something funny about donuts. Maybe a pun like they’re “holey original” or like “you have a ‘hole’ lot of opportunity here.” You could say “what goes around comes around” or something like that. And your essay had to be about a minute long and the sort of thing people knew to cheer for when it was over. The kind of thing that you could read out loud from the back of a parade float and not bore everybody to death. One hundred and eighty words. That’s it.

  It is nearly the end of the school year when Ms. Kemp-Davie sets the winning essay down on the stack of travel brochures that always covers her desk in May. It is an anonymous submission like the rest and requires a code key to determine the identity of the writer. The result surprises her, and she has to double check to make sure she has not been distracted by the brochure photos of cruise ships and ancient ruins. But, no, she is correct. The essay belongs to Ruby Pepperdine.

  Ruby is a sweet kid and a great reader, but Ms. Kemp-Davie has always thought of her as one of those middle-of-the-pack children, and for a moment she can’t help but wish that it was Ruby’s friend Lucy who had won the competition. Lucy does theater in the summer, doesn’t she? She could have given a dramatic reading at the parade, full of emotion and spirit. Instead, Ruby Pepperdine will probably read her essay like most of the past win
ners: too fast and too quietly for anyone to hear.

  Ms. Kemp-Davie sighs.

  It is then that she decides that she is going on that cruise after all. She has been at the Bunning Day Parade twenty-three years in a row. This year, she thinks, snatching up the glossiest of the brochures, they will have to get a substitute. She will be in the Mediterranean.

  She is finally going see the Wonders of the Ancient World.

  A Long Line of Cars

  The redheaded family is still clapping along to “Louie Louie” when the first of the Pepperdine Motors cars comes into view.

  “There’s your mom!” Aunt Rachel says, but Ruby is already waving.

  Mom waves back quickly and then returns her eyes to the road. Her car carries the mayor, who is sitting up on the trunk of a tissue-paper-flowered premium Mustang convertible, his legs where a passenger’s back should be, his feet on the seat.

  Ruby never puts her feet on the seat of a Pepperdine Motors car. She sits like her parents expect her to. Feet on the floor mats. Seat belt on.

  Dad’s car follows Mom’s. He’s driving three members of the city council, one of whom keeps turning to wave at people on the Delish side of the road and elbowing her fellow councilwoman in the ribs. This is not unintentional.

  “Knock ’em dead, Rubes!” Dad calls as he drives past.

  Ruby waves her cards at him. “I will!”

  After Dad comes Ruby’s teenage cousin Fiona and then her cousin Fletcher. Then Uncle Jeff, Uncle Troy, Troy Jr., Aunt Lynn, and finally Uncle David, who wanted to drive the Bunning Day Queen, but Aunt Lynn said he couldn’t because he always got too chatty and didn’t stay in the center of the road and the spectators got scared half to death thinking he was going to run them over. Aunt Lynn drove the queen. Uncle David got the town manager.

  The only other time Ruby Pepperdine has seen more Pepperdine Motors cars off the lot and all lined up was for Gigi’s burial. They drove, single file, from Saint Bart’s to Bunning Cemetery in a line so long that Ruby’s parents were already parking at the gravesite before the last of the cars—Mrs. Agnes Sigfreid’s white Ford Taurus—was pulling out of the Saint Bart’s lot.

  If you had been standing at the edge of Cemetery Drive, you could have watched them all, all the cars. You could have looked in the windows. Seen the drivers. The passengers. Seen Gigi’s old friends in the Pepperdine Motors vans that Troy Jr. and Fletcher drove. You could have seen their sad gray faces. How the ones at the windows peeked up to the sky, through the naked branches, to the places of blue patched between. Seen that their faces had questions on them, but you would not have known if those questions were about Gigi, or about themselves, or about whether the snow just might hold off after all.

  You might cry at the cemetery. That would be okay. Everyone would expect you to cry there. Lucy, in fact, bawled so hard her dads had to take her home.

  After that, for a few weeks, you might tear up or sniffle, and that would be okay too. But then Lucy would have moved on to thinking about her upcoming karate tournament, and the city council and the Night Owls and the Adelines and the Grannies would have gone on with their regularly scheduled meetings, and your parents would be back at Pepperdine Motors, working like they always did.

  Actually, even more than they always did, since nobody else really understood how Gigi had run the service center and that guy Maurice they had hired was lazy and ate more donuts than the customers, and there was all that legal stuff about how Gigi’s ownership shares were to be divided among all her kids and grandkids and even some of the employees who weren’t related, which was something Gigi had never talked to them about, that was for sure.

  By then everybody else was back to normal. By then, Ruby figured out, you were not supposed to be so sad.

  So she wasn’t.

  Instead, she went underwater.

  That’s what it felt like, at least. Every action, every movement, took twice as much effort, as if it were happening in slow motion. Voices sounded farther away, and it took such work to make herself heard that Ruby stayed quiet.

  Her family, being so busy, didn’t really notice. “You okay?” Lucy had asked a couple of times, but after that she didn’t bug Ruby about it. That’s the kind of friend she was.

  For almost three months Ruby stayed underwater, still doing all the things she was supposed to do. She had to go to Aunt Rachel’s after school now, instead of hanging out with Gigi or Lucy, so she helped with her cousins while she was there. At home she did her chores—folding the towels and taking out the kitchen garbage—and did her homework and wrote her Bunning Day Essay. Some things she did a little better than she had before. You can fold towels more neatly if you are slow about it. Write better essays, too, sometimes.

  It is possible that Ruby Pepperdine could have stayed underwater forever.

  If it hadn’t been for Nero DeNiro’s color wheel.

  Wheels and Spokes

  When you are a sixth-grader at Bunning Elementary, you have Art with Mrs. Tomas, who has you make a color wheel. You can use whatever medium you want: crayons, pastels, paints, colored pencils. Your color wheel can be whatever size you want too. As big as a door or small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. You only have to follow a few rules. You need to include at least twelve colors. You need to keep them in color-wheel order, like a rainbow, with red turning to orange and then to yellow, green, blue, purple. And you need to identify in some way which colors are complementary.

  Complementary colors are the ones directly across the color wheel from each other. Orange and blue, for example. Or purple and yellow.

  Ruby’s color wheel fit on a regular-size sheet of paper—though the only unlined paper she could find at home was light blue. It didn’t matter, though. She did the assignment. She included twelve colors. She used lines—like bicycle spokes—across the middle to show the color complements, exactly like the example on Mrs. Tomas’s bulletin board.

  Most of her classmates did the same. Some of the wheels were a little messy. A few had clearly been done during indoor recess, when people suddenly remembered the assignment. Lucy had made hers poster-size, nearly big enough to cover the art table.

  When Nero sits down next to Lucy, however, it is Ruby’s color wheel that he notices. “Blue background, huh? Nice touch.”

  “Look at this!” says McKenzie Monk, sliding Nero’s color wheel over to Ruby.

  Ruby had figured out Nero a long time ago. He always did his assignments in a way that nobody else would and asked questions that nobody expected—especially the teachers, who then had to stop whatever lesson they were supposed to be giving and go off on some weird trail that Nero had started. Ruby knows his color wheel will be different, and it is.

  He had printed twelve pictures of himself in a T-shirt and pasted them in a circle, like a clock. With markers, Nero had colored in the shirts and added little thought bubbles that showed the complementary colors—with real compliments. “My, Nero. Don’t you look dashing in red?” floated above the head of the green-shirted Nero picture. “Hubba hubba. Yellow brings out your eyes!” bubbled up from purple Nero.

  Ruby had expected Nero’s color wheel to be different, but she did not expect that it would make her laugh. Ruby laughs a real out-loud laugh, which is something you can’t do underwater.

  When she stops laughing, all the little Nero faces start to blur. And Ruby has a bunch of thoughts.

  One of them is that there is something wrong with her eyes.

  Another is that there is something wrong with her ears, because when Lucy says, “Are you okay?” it sounds like she’s using a speakerphone.

  And another is that maybe there is something wrong with her hands, because they have dropped her pencil to the floor, and even though it makes sense for her to bend over and pick the pencil up, her hands are not moving. They are just sitting there on her color wheel, covering up all the complement lines. And there are drops of water landing on her hands and on the painted squares of color, too, and the
red and the orange are mixing all up into some other color that Ruby doesn’t have a name for and for which there is no complement on her color wheel, and she knows she is going to get a bad grade now.

  “Ruby?” That’s Mrs. Tomas talking. “Ruby? Did you hurt yourself?”

  She did not hurt herself. She hurts, she realizes, but she did not hurt herself.

  “Would you like to go see the nurse?” Mrs. Tomas again.

  Ruby would not like to see the nurse, but it does seem like she ought not to stay here. Like she should not be crying in Mrs. Tomas’s art room and ruining her color wheel.

  “Why are you crying?” asks the nurse, whose name Ruby doesn’t know. She is just the nurse.

  “I don’t know,” says Ruby. As she says it, she realizes that there is only one thing she could be crying about, and that is Gigi. But she hadn’t been thinking of Gigi. She was just looking at Nero’s color wheel and then . . .

  “Are you sad?” asks the nurse.

  Gigi being dead is a sad thing, and thinking about it now makes Ruby feel sad—but she wasn’t feeling sad when she started crying. Still, Ruby Pepperdine, who is good at figuring things out, understands that this answer will not be useful to the nurse. And so she says yes. She says that she had been thinking of her grandmother, who had died just a few months ago, and that she got sad.