The Center of Everything

by Linda Urban

  They could have called her at school to tell her, but they didn’t. They let her come home on the bus. All those cars in the driveway. PEPPERDINE MOTORS, PEPPERDINE MOTORS, PEPPERDINE MOTORS on every plate. Nobody had to tell her what had happened. Ruby figured it out.

  Ruby Will Be Fine

  There is a tap on Ruby’s shoulder. “You’re the Essay Girl?” It is Patsy Whelk, assistant coordinator of the Bunning Day Parade. She has a clipboard that she taps in time with “Amazing Grace,” which is being played now by the Graniteers Regional Pipe Band.

  “That’s me.” Ruby holds up her index cards as proof. The heat of her hands has warped them, and they curve like the sail of a ship.

  Patsy Whelk nods and presses a button on the headset she is wearing. “Got her,” she says into it. Then she looks back at Ruby. “You all set? You know what you’re supposed to do?”

  “She knows,” Aunt Rachel says.

  “No no no no no no!” Carter-Ann does not like the bagpipes.

  “Cover your ears, sweetie. Sweetie? Cover your ears. They’ll be gone in a minute,” Aunt Rachel says.

  “Okay. Couple of things. Speak clearly into the mike.” Patsy Whelk taps her clipboard. That saved—tap—a wretch—tap—like me—“Got a phone on you, turn it off. Don’t want someone trying to talk to you while you’re up there.” Tap, tap, tap.

  Yes, I do, Ruby thinks as she pulls her phone from her pocket and turns it off.

  “All right, then. Any questions? You set?”

  “I have to get my cards in the right order.” She has been so busy watching the parade and, well, thinking about things, she has almost forgotten about her speech.

  “Get them ready. Don’t want to mess this up.” Patsy Whelk taps twice more on her clipboard. “I’ll be back,” she says, and then she disappears into the crowd.

  “Ruby will be fine,” Aunt Rachel says to the spot where Patsy Whelk used to be. “She always is. Aren’t you?”

  Ruby smiles for Aunt Rachel.

  “They’re going, honey. Look. See?” The bagpipers’ backs are to the circle in the square now, their kilts swishing side to side with every step. Carter-Ann lifts one hand from her ear and then smooshes it back down. They might be going, but she can still hear their music.

  Ruby sorts through her cards. Patsy Whelk is right. She should not be thinking about Nero or Lucy or anything else. She should be thinking about not messing up. Okay, the destiny card is first, but what comes next? Ruby finds the card near the back of the stack and slips it in where it belongs.

  Donut holes made him famous, but being a sailor was what Captain Bunning loved. When he and his ship grew too old to sail,

  How Ruby Knew

  If you are a sixth-grader at Bunning Elementary, the last three weeks of school are likely to be so busy that you might not even tell your best friend about your quarter sailing through Captain Bunning’s bronze donut. She might be busy with her auditions for this summer’s Hungry Nation play, and you might not want to distract her. And if you did tell her about the quarter, she’d ask what you wished for. And you’d have to tell about the day Gigi died. About messing everything up. And how maybe you aren’t as good at figuring things out as you’re supposed to be.

  Besides, you might not be entirely sure your wish is going to come true.

  You might have messed up the wishing, too. Maybe you miscounted and said your wish eighty-nine times or ninety-one times instead of the exact right ninety. You have no proof that a wish is in the works. Nothing felt different after your quarter went through the donut. Nothing, as far as you can tell, has changed.

  So you don’t say anything. You focus on the end of the year. There are tests to take, after all, and final projects to present and desks to clean out and assemblies to attend. The kindergarteners will host a “Goodbye, Sixth-Graders” picnic, and you will eat egg salad sandwiches and try to remember what it felt like to be six and have your whole life ahead of you.

  There will be a field trip to the middle school, where you’ll tour the classrooms and the hallways and meet the school principal and the counselors and a librarian who seems nice but who tells you this is her last week of school too. That she is retiring in order to spend more time showing her champion corgis. And you will try not to stare at the middle school students, who look so much older and taller and bigger and cooler. You will wonder if they remember what it feels like to have just turned twelve.

  And then it will be time for graduation. There’s a ceremony a few days before the rest of the school lets out, and if you are a girl like Ruby Pepperdine, you will sit in a folding chair up on the stage with your classmates and look out at all the parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts. Speeches will be made about your past and your future, and your teachers will hand out awards. Outstanding Student in Mathematics. Outstanding Student in Language Arts. Outstanding Musician.

  Your student council leaders, McKenzie Monk and Mark Davis, will announce awards voted on by your classmates: Funniest. Friendliest. Most Dramatic (which goes to your best friend, Lucy). Most Likely to Succeed (which goes to McKenzie Monk and Mark Davis).

  If you were Ruby Pepperdine and knew that none of these awards was going to be given to you, you might find yourself thinking about something else, like how your family would be going out to dinner that night or about the tiny hole you just discovered in the pocket of your dress. Or, more likely, you’d be looking out at your parents and thinking how weird it is that Gigi isn’t here with them. How weird everything is now that Gigi is not here. You might even get that poke, poke, poke feeling just as Bunning Elementary School librarian Ms. Kemp-Davie steps up to the microphone to announce the Bunning Day Essay winner.

  And even though you are very good at figuring things out, you would not expect to hear your name and could not be more surprised if Captain Bunning himself had made the announcement. Which might make you think that maybe he did. Or that he had something to do with it, at least.

  And then you would know it, as sure as you know Orion’s Belt. The reason you have been selected as the Bunning Day Essay Girl is not because your essay is so great.

  It is because of your wish.

  This is the way that your wish will come true.

  Ruby’s Dream

  It goes like this:

  Ruby is alone on the roof of Pepperdine Motors.

  Above her are the constellations, but instead of resting still and quiet in the night sky, they zip about like kids on a playground. Taurus and Leo chase each other in circles. The Big and Little Dippers cross handles like swords.

  Orion is absent.

  Ruby knows, in the dream, that it is her job to sort them out, to stop their wild swirling.

  “Stop!” she commands the stars. “Go back!” The stars don’t listen.

  Finally, she spots a wayward Cancer. She raises her hand to catch his claw, and as she does, her feet lift off the rooftop. She rises higher and higher into the night. She drifts, lost and alone in the dizzying blackness.

  Wishes and Work

  Four nights in a row Ruby has the dream. Four mornings she wakes with the unsettled feeling of not-yet-finished homework.

  Being Essay Girl is the first step toward her wish coming true, she is sure of that. But on the fourth morning she can’t help but wonder. What if her dream is trying to tell her something? What if there is something more she is supposed to do?

  In most of the books that Ruby has read, people stumble upon a genie or an enchanted fish and—poof!—their wish is granted. But every once in a while there is a story in which a wish can’t happen until the wisher accomplishes certain tasks. Puts in a little elbow grease. Maybe he has to figure out that the coin he is holding will give him only half of what he wishes for, or he needs to solve a riddle before things kick into motion.

  What if a Captain Bunning wish is an elbow-grease wish?

  She can’t know for sure, but Ruby Pepperdine is a strong believer in extra credit. It can’t hurt to try. And so, as she s
its down to eat her breakfast in front of the laptop her parents keep in the kitchen, she begins to look for signs that will tell her what else, if anything, she needs to do.

  It seems like a good idea to start with Captain Bunning. Between bites of cereal, Ruby searches the Bunning Historical Society website. There are whole pages on Captain Bunning, of course, but the word wish does not appear on any of them. The word donut appears a lot.

  “Are you still here?”

  Ruby jumps in her seat. Cheerios and milk splash onto the floor. “Mom!” Ruby says. “You scared me!”

  “Just a second, Lois,” Mom says into her cell. “I’m sorry, honey. I thought your dad took you to Rachel’s already.” She grabs a roll of paper towels. “Lois? Hold on. I just have to—”

  “I got it.” Ruby takes the towels from her mom, who mouths a silent thank you.

  “Okay, Lois, what did Maurice do now?” Mom steps back into the living room while Ruby wipes the milk up off the kitchen floor. “A week’s worth of headaches—and it’s only Tuesday,” her mother says.

  Ruby drops the soggy paper towel in the trash can and returns to the laptop. Instead of the Bunning Historical Society site, the screen now shows an enormous cruller and the words Giving the Donut Its Due: A Blog of Donut History and Culture. She must have accidentally clicked on something when her mom startled her, Ruby thinks, and she is about to click back when another thought occurs to her: What if she is supposed to read this page?

  What if destiny made her click on it and there is something on this blog that she is supposed to know?

  Ruby skims the History of Donuts page. Greeks. Mayans. Vikings. There is one sentence about Captain Bunning. She reads about donut ingredients and donut dunking, and then she sees something that surprises her. It is a description of donut shapes.

  Donuts have always been circles to Ruby. In preschool, when they learned about shapes, pizza slices illustrated what a triangle was and sandwiches were squares. Rectangles were chocolate bars and ice cream sandwiches. A donut was always a circle.

  But Giving the Donut Its Due says the donut—the round kind with a Captain Bunning–style hole in the middle—is not a circle. It is a torus. A three-dimensional shape. Like a ring. Like a tire.

  A tire is like a wheel, Ruby thinks.

  And a wheel sometimes has spokes. Like radius.

  What if this is her sign?

  Mom paces back into the kitchen, the phone still up to her ear. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she says. Ruby can hear the whine of Aunt Lois’s reply, though the only words she can make out are “Maurice” and “exhaust pipe.” Mom rolls her eyes. “Lois? Lois. I’ll be—I just have to take Ruby—”

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Ruby says. “I can walk.” It’s not a long walk, really. And she can use the quiet to think.

  “You don’t mind? And you’re going to Lucy’s this afternoon, right?”

  “To her rehearsal. And then back to Aunt Rachel’s. And then home.”

  “You, Ruby Pepperdine, are an angel.” Mom glances at the kitchen clock. “Okay, Lois. I’m on my way. I know. I know. We’re running out of time.”

  Ruby shuts down the computer and grabs her backpack. She is running out of time too. Bunning Day is on Saturday. It has taken her twelve years to learn that a donut is not a circle. How is she to figure out what else, if anything, she is supposed to do about her wish in only four days?

  Inner Gretel

  When the Happy Days preschoolers began the parade a half hour ago, most sported tiny toy drums that they proudly beat in unison. By the time they reach the circle in the square, however, there is little united about them. Many have handed off their drums to parent volunteers, and several more have given up marching entirely, happy to be pulled along in wagons. One of them, Titus Finch, is pretending he is in the Indianapolis 500, which is difficult to do when the person pulling you refuses to run. Still, Titus makes engine noises and from time to time contents himself by squealing around imaginary curves.

  His Inner NASCAR Driver, Ruby thinks. That’s what Lucy would say.

  Lucy had explained it the other day as they walked to her first Hansel and Gretel rehearsal. “It’s like I believe so much that I’m Gretel that when I see my reflection, I really expect to see a German girl in pigtails and a dirndl. That’s a skirt.”

  Ruby knew what a dirndl was. Gigi had one. It was her only skirt. Mostly she wore pants.

  “During a performance, it’s an even stronger feeling,” Lucy went on. “Like last year, when I was Cinderella’s stepsister? I totally was that stepsister. It was like there was just enough Lucy left to keep me from crashing off the edge of the stage when I was pretending to leave a room.”

  “Is it scary?” Ruby had asked.

  “It’s a little scary right before I go on, but when I’m onstage and everyone’s watching, that totally goes away.”

  Lucy meant that performing was not scary, but that was not Ruby’s question. “Is it scary not to be yourself?”

  This made Lucy laugh. “It’s not like some alien comes out of nowhere and takes over your body. It’s that there’s this stepsister inside of you, but you don’t even know it until you need her.”

  “You think I have an Inner Stepsister?”

  “Not you, goofball. Me. My Inner Stepsister. An actor’s Inner Stepsister.”

  “You think I don’t have an Inner Stepsister, then?”

  Lucy had looked at Ruby like an easy-peasy math problem—the kind you’re grateful to see on a test. “You are Ruby Pepperdine, through and through,” she said, wrapping her arms around her friend. “That is why we love you!”

  Carter-Ann waves at Titus Finch, who is now roaring down an imaginary straightaway, headed for the checkered flag. “That boy’s a racer!”

  “He sure is,” Ruby says, tugging one of her cousin’s curls.

  Willow corrects them both. “He’s just a kid. Real-life racers have helmets.”

  That is why we love you, Lucy had said. Because she was Ruby Pepperdine through and through. But what if she wasn’t the Ruby they knew? What if Lucy and Aunt Rachel and everybody else found out she had an Inner Ruby who had totally messed up? Then what would they think of her?

  What You Need to Understand

  When her parents are at Pepperdine Motors, Ruby goes to Aunt Rachel’s to help out with the girls. Aunt Rachel keeps a laptop on a desk in the living room, and sometimes Ruby uses it to play games. Willow usually watches, and sometimes Carter-Ann does too. How come that guy with the mustache won’t let you get the banana? Carter-Ann might say, and Ruby will explain. Well, how come you can’t touch the oranges? Willow will ask, and Ruby will explain that, too. All through the game, questions and explanations. It keeps her cousins out of Aunt Rachel’s hair, but it is not the best way to win a game.

  It turns out that it is not the best way to learn about a torus, either.

  “That’s a donut.” Carter-Ann points to a drawing on the computer. Ruby has opened a wiki page, and the screen is covered in blue things and red things and long definitions and a few diagrams, like the one that Carter-Ann has spotted.

  “An old-fashioned,” Willow says in the know-it-all voice that Carter-Ann hates. “The kind that tastes like cake.”

  “Actually, it’s a torus,” Ruby says.

  “Does it taste like cake?” Carter-Ann asks.

  “It’s a shape. It doesn’t taste like anything.”

  Carter-Ann folds her arms in disgust. “It should. Everything should taste like something.”

  “Air doesn’t taste like anything,” says Willow.

  “It does too,” snaps Carter-Ann. “It tastes like snow.”

  “Does not!” says Willow.

  Carter-Ann reasserts that it does too, and Willow counters with her belief that it does not. This continues long enough for Ruby to read the torus definition on the screen. She reads that the plural of torus is actually tori, and that tori look like donuts or tires, which she already knows. She also reads
that a torus is a topological space, and has to click on topological to find out what that is.

  Topological has a lot of definitions, one of which is “the study of a given place, especially its history as indicated by its topography.” This is not particularly helpful.

  Another definition, a mathematical one, says: “The study of properties of geometric figures or solids that are not changed by homeomorphisms, such as stretching or bending.” Ruby is tempted to find out what homeomorphisms are but decides that all this clicking is distracting her from the task at hand, and returns to the torus page.

  “I want pictures,” says Carter-Ann, squeezing into Ruby’s lap. “That’s just words. I can’t read words.”

  “I can,” boasts Willow. “There’s a the and there’s a the and that’s the, too. Go downer, Ruby, so I can find another the.”

  “You guys, I need to concentrate,” Ruby says, but Carter-Ann is pushing the DOWN key, sending the words scrolling past. Willow yanks Carter-Ann’s hand from the keyboard, and the screen goes still again.

  “What’s that?” asks Carter-Ann, pointing.

  The screen is covered in long formulas with squiggles and symbols all over the place. “That’s math,” Ruby says.

  Willow shakes her head. “No, it isn’t. That’s got letters. Math is numbers.”

  Ruby likes the kind of math that Mr. Cipielewski teaches. You start with numbers or even a story with some numbers in it, and you do what you’re supposed to do and you get the answer, the one right answer. But she has no idea what you’re supposed to do with math that looks like this. “It’s calculus,” she tells her cousins. “Or trigonometry or something.”

  “See?” Willow says to Carter-Ann. “Not math.”

  Ruby continues past a few more complicated-looking squiggles until the screen shows some diagrams that look like donuts with webbing on them.