The Center of Everything

by Linda Urban

  “Look!” squeals Carter-Ann. “A Spider-Man Donut!”

  “Spider-Man Donut saves the day!” Willow jumps onto the couch and shoots an imaginary web at her sister.

  “Hey! I’m Spider-Man Donut,” says Carter-Ann.

  “Nuh-uh, I am. You’re the villain—you’re Bran Flakes Man.” Willow is not a fan of breakfast cereal.

  “I’m Spider-Man Donut, right, Ruby? I saw it first!”

  Ruby closes the laptop. There is no way she is going to be able to concentrate here. Besides, the stuff on the Internet is so hard. Maybe she could skip Lucy’s rehearsal today and go to the library in town. Maybe in the children’s room she can find a torus book without such hard math in it.

  Who knows? Maybe she is supposed to go to the library.

  A pillow zings across the room to bonk Ruby on the head. “I webbed you!” Willow hollers.

  She is definitely supposed to go to the library.

  The Order of Things

  It would be possible, if you were standing in the circle in the square or sitting on a cushioned milk crate or resting near the statue of Captain Bunning and wishing you had remembered to bring a hat, not to give a single thought to how this parade came to be.

  But a parade doesn’t organize itself.

  There are volunteers who sell ads for the commemorative program or hand out water bottles at the rec center or decide the order in which the parade entries will march down the route. In Bunning, that last job falls to Patsy Whelk.

  Six miles north of the circle in the square is a small apartment building with four units, one of which is an airy studio rented by Patsy. You might notice the skylight first. Or Patsy’s bright orange couch. Or maybe even the framed posters that lean against one another in the foyer, making it difficult for you to actually enter the studio. But once you had made it inside, you could not help but notice the sticky notes that snake along the circumference of Patsy’s studio walls. There are eighty-six of them, exactly as many entries as are in this year’s Bunning Day Parade. There are blue stickies for the musical acts, and pink ones for the floats. There are purple stickies for each of the town dignitaries, and yellow for the entries that need to be followed by a “pooper patrol.”

  Over the years, Pasty has learned to space out the bands so their music doesn’t clash. She has learned that the cute factor of preschoolers is magnified when they follow a group of senior citizens. People turn thoughtful when the VFW marches by in their uniforms, and even more thoughtful if you put the local Scout troop after that.

  She has also learned that she can’t always predict what will make folks happy or sad or reverent. While the Night Owls in their constellation formations might make most people smile, others might turn wistful, or even wishful, seeing all those stars.

  For weeks Patsy has been arranging and rearranging the stickies on her wall. She walks slowly along the Post-it parade, imagining how it will look on Bunning Day. Some days she switches a few things, remembering how often bagpipes are played at funerals and how that might not set exactly the right mood for Grannies for Groceries. Or how freaked out the barefoot karate people might be if they have to follow the girls from Kennilworth Stables. She switches. She adjusts. A new parade goes by.

  On the day before she is required to turn in the final list, she makes one last change, swapping Head-Over-Heels Gymnastics and the Bunning Historical Society, moving the latter closer to the schoolhouse float.

  Patsy walks the circumference of the apartment.

  This is it. This feels right.

  This is her parade.

  Asking the Right Questions

  The children’s room of the Bunning Free Library has large windows, beanbag chairs, and a cluster of round tables at which, on weekdays, homeschool kids sometimes daydream about passing notes and eating lunches on trays. One of them, Daisy Rangotta, is considering setting up an online business that sells school uniforms and lunch trays and stuff like that—just for homeschool kids like herself.

  This being summer, however, there are no homeschoolers at the tables when Ruby arrives. There is a pair of twins attempting to play Connect 4 and a group of intense-looking kids who say things like “Orc-lord” and “hit points” and “You forget, Panoptocles, that I am a fourth-level mage—prepare to meet your fate.”

  Was that a sign? That boy saying “fate” when she walked in the room? Maybe she was fated to come to the library today. Maybe this is where she’ll really understand tori or homeomorphism or whatever it is that she needs to make her wish work right.

  A cardboard grandfather clock on the circulation desk announces that the librarian will be back in fifteen minutes. That’s okay, Ruby thinks. Torus stuff has to be in either Math or Science, and she can find those sections by herself. Quickly, Ruby heads for the nonfiction section.

  “Hey, Ruby Tuesday,” says a voice.

  “Ruby Tuesday” is the title of an old song she knows from hanging around with the Adelines, but the voice did not sound like it belonged to an Adeline. It sounded like a boy’s voice. Ruby peeks around the History shelf to see Nero DeNiro sitting at a small round table.

  “Hey,” Ruby says back. Dang! She doesn’t have time for Nero. Aunt Rachel had said she could go to the library instead of Lucy’s rehearsal, but only for a half hour. Still, just saying “Hey” and walking away seems sort of rude.

  “The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,” she says, peeking at the cover of the book he is reading. There. That wasn’t rude. Now Nero can say Yes and Ruby can say That’s nice and then she can move on to the Math section and look for torus stuff.

  Instead, Nero shakes his dark hair out of his eyes and makes a raspberry sound. “Says who?”

  “What do you mean? Says the author.”

  The raspberry returns. “She’s just writing about the wonders. Somebody else decided to call them that.”

  Ruby should move on to the math books. She really should. But she can’t help but be a little curious. “Who decided?”

  “Nobody knows for sure. That’s what bugs me. Some medieval guys discovered this list and said it was based on a bunch of other lists from some ancient guys, including . . .” Nero flips to the introduction. “Including a historian dude called Herodotus and another guy named Callimachus, but nobody knows who really decided what the Seven Wonders are. So how come we’re all supposed to just say, ‘Yeah, okay. Those are the Seven Wonders.’ What if there was something else around that Callimachus just didn’t like? Some kind of awesome tomb or statue or something that was made by one of his enemies, so he left it off the list?”

  This is exactly the kind of question that gets Nero DeNiro in so much trouble at school—the kind of question that teachers can’t answer. A couple of teachers liked Nero for it. Mr. Cipielewski, in particular, thought Nero’s questions showed an active and creative mind, but even he had to keep Nero in line, because otherwise they would never get through all the day’s materials, and then when it was time for the assessment tests, it would look like his students hadn’t learned anything, even though they had learned many amazing nonassessable things.

  “Also,” says Nero, “how come nobody gets named Callimachus anymore?”

  Ruby can’t help laughing. “Would you want to be named Callimachus?”

  “I don’t want to be named Nero,” says Nero. “That’s the trouble with names. You don’t get to decide your own. Somebody else picks them.”

  Ruby likes her name. She is Ruby Giselle Pepperdine. The Ruby part has pep and the Giselle has elegance. When she goes to college, she thinks, she might ask people to call her Giselle. Until then, she’s fine with Ruby.

  “Maybe superheroes,” says Nero. “Maybe superheroes get to choose their own names. And villains. I mean, what parent is going to name his kid the Green Goblin?”

  “They named him Norman,” says Ruby, who saw a lot of superhero movies during Uncle Dave’s shifts watching Gigi.

  Nero grins. “I never know what to expect from you, Ruby Tuesday.�
�

  Is he joking? She and Nero aren’t friends or anything, but they have been in class together for three years in a row. Everyone knows what to expect from her. That’s why people always pick her to bring notes to the office or to help take care of little kids. They expect her to do what she’s supposed to do. Everybody says so. Her parents. All her teachers. Lucy.

  “Are you making fun of me?” Ruby asks.

  “Blue color-wheel paper. Essay Girl. Norman Goblin. All unexpected,” Nero says. “I was giving you a compliment. Now you say thank you.”

  He is making fun of me, Ruby thinks, and she gives him a raspberry, which makes him laugh. “See what I mean?”

  There is a ringing sound, like an old-fashioned alarm clock, and Nero pulls a phone from his pocket. “Break’s over,” he says. “I have to be at Delish with my mom most days, but she lets me play Frisbee in the park or come here for an hour in the afternoon. She says she does not want me gallivanting around town.”

  Ruby nods. “I guess I understand that.”

  “You understand that? Ruby, I have never gallivanted. Have you gallivanted?”

  “I don’t think I’m the gallivanting type,” she says.

  “Nobody is. It’s just a thing that moms say. Why do they say that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it before,” Ruby admits.

  Nero leaves the Seven Wonders book on the table but picks up a novel, The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs, from a YOU MUST READ THIS display. “Maybe I’ll see you here tomorrow?”

  “I have to do errands with my aunt tomorrow,” Ruby says.

  Nero shrugs. “Another time,” he says as he heads for the circulation desk. The grandfather clock is gone, and Ruby can see that the librarian has returned to her station.

  How long has she been talking with Nero? Ruby checks her phone. Dang! He did it. Just like in school, Nero has sucked up all the time she was supposed to be doing something else. Maybe she can come back on Thursday. She has promised Lucy that she won’t skip another of her rehearsals (I do better knowing you’re there, Lucy had said), but maybe she could come by earlier? Nero wouldn’t be here to distract her, and she could focus. She had to focus. By then there would be only two more days until Bunning Day.

  B home in 5 minutes, she texts Aunt Rachel. Quickly, Ruby grabs A Wrinkle in Time from the YOU MUST READ THIS shelf and checks it out. She arrives at Aunt Rachel’s at 4:26—exactly when Aunt Rachel expected her.

  It isn’t until 8:12, after Ruby has gone home and eaten dinner and taken a shower and sat down with A Wrinkle in Time, that she thinks again about her wish, and that terrible not-yet-finished feeling returns. Thanks to Nero, she is no closer to figuring things out. Was she supposed to understand tori? Or something else?

  In the Pepperdine Motors service center, right next to the time clock, Gigi had hung a poster: IF YOU’RE NOT GETTING THE RIGHT ANSWERS, MAYBE YOU’RE NOT ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS.

  Ruby has been pretty good at knowing what questions to ask in the past. People didn’t sigh when she asked them, or shake their heads, or tell her to stay on topic, like they did with Nero.

  But what if wish questions are different? Ruby runs her finger around the edge of the book’s award sticker while she thinks. What if figure-out-how-a-wish-works questions are wild, off-topic, spinning-out-of-control questions that she doesn’t know how to ask?

  And then she understands.

  It was fate that brought her to the library.

  She may not know how to ask those kinds of questions—but Nero DeNiro does.

  What Matthew Bennet Wishes

  If Matthew Bennet had known that he would be the only boy his age who was trying out for the play, he would not have done it. He didn’t really want to be Hansel. He was thinking maybe he’d be the dad. Or one of those gingerbread kids. But he was loud and a fourth-grader and a boy. So the director said he was Hansel.

  Which was kind of okay until he found out that he had to be in the parade, too.

  It was like a promotional thing, all the kids from the Hungry Nation Youth Theater walking in the parade and handing out flyers so that people would know about the show. And that was kind of okay too. He had even told a couple of friends that he was going to be in the parade and they could look for him.

  That was before he knew about the lederhosen.

  Lederhosen are shorts, except not normal shorts. They are dorky green leather shorts and they’re scratchy and tight and they have these crazy ladder-looking suspenders with flowers embroidered all over the place. Like the kind an organ grinder’s monkey might wear. Only stupider on anyone who is not a monkey. Lederhosen are what Matthew Bennet is wearing as he walks down the middle of Cornelius Circle.

  He wishes he had never tried out for the stupid play.

  He wishes he had never agreed to be Hansel.

  He wishes that there was no such thing as leder-stupid-hosen.

  It is not just the lederhosen that look stupid either. His whole costume is stupid. He has on a floofy white shirt and a hat like Peter Pan’s—with an actual feather in it. He has on knee socks. Brown knee socks. And brown lace-up shoes, too. He is carrying a fake loaf of bread.

  But that’s not the worst of it.

  The worst of it is all the little kids watching the parade. The ones who can’t read yet. Who can’t figure out that the words on the banner carried by the gingerbread dancers say HANSEL AND GRETEL AT HUNGRY NATION YOUTH THEATER.

  The kids who see gingerbread and think only of Christmas.

  “Look!” they say. “It’s an elf! It’s Santa’s elf!”

  “I’m not a stupid elf!” Matthew had yelled at the first kid who said it. “I’m a stupid German kid!” But his director had dashed up and told him to be quiet and smile and wave.

  He was being quiet now, anyway.

  It would be easier if Gretel were here. More people would know they were Hansel and Gretel if they walked together, probably. Even if he and Lucy looked nothing alike. They’d be dressed the right way, and, anyway, Lucy was such a good actor, everybody would know just from looking at her who she was.

  It wasn’t fair that she got to do karate instead.

  He didn’t blame her, though. He’d be kicking stuff if he could.

  At least he knew his lines. Lucy didn’t yet. She was always messing them up onstage. One minute she’d be all Gretel-like, and the next minute her face would crack like one of those boards she was kicking and someone would have to tell her what to say. And then she’d say it six different ways, like she was hoping one of them would stick. But then she’d forget again.

  If that happened in front of an audience, it’d be really embarrassing.

  Almost as embarrassing, he thinks, as wearing lederhosen.

  “Hey, elf!” yells a kid.

  I’m freakin’ HANSEL! Matthew wants to scream. I’ve got a stupid fake loaf of bread! That’s it. The next kid who says anything about Santa or what they want for Christmas, he is chucking the loaf at them. He doesn’t care.

  “It’s Santa’s elf!” someone squeals.

  Matthew tightens his grip on the loaf and looks for the source of the squeal. It is a little girl with chocolate on her face. She is grinning ear to ear. Rats.

  And standing behind the chocolate-faced girl is that friend of Lucy’s who comes to some of the practices. Double rats.

  Matthew sees Lucy’s friend bend down to say something to the little girl. “He’s Hansel,” it looks like. The kid’s face changes from a grin to a frown.

  “Elf!” she yells at him.

  This parade cannot end soon enough.

  Another Rehearsal

  The stage lights are on, but the Hungry Nation auditorium lights are not. Ruby covers her phone so that when she checks the time, the actors won’t see its glow. In three minutes Nero should be at the library.

  For the past two days Ruby has been thinking that his crazy questions might be the key to figuring out what else she might need to do to make her w
ish come true. But yesterday she had been stuck helping Aunt Rachel with her errands, and as soon as Ruby woke up this morning, Lucy had called, reminding her about that afternoon’s rehearsal.

  “I’ll be there,” Ruby had promised, and she had kept her word. She is here.

  Up on the stage, Inner Gretel shivers. “It’s getting late,” she says.

  “But you mustn’t go,” says the witch. “I have more treats for you inside.”

  Lucy’s Inner Gretel looks cautious, but her pretend brother dashes across the tape line that indicates where the door to the witch’s gingerbread house will stand once the tech department has finished painting it.

  “Hansel!” Inner Gretel calls. She peers around the imaginary door frame as if she cannot see Matthew Bennet’s Inner Hansel standing right there in front of her. A long silence follows.

  Ruby checks the time again. Nero is at the library now.

  “‘Don’t go in there,’” the director says in a tired voice. “Lucy, your line is: ‘Hansel, don’t go in there.’”

  Lucy blows out a deep breath. “Sorry. Okay. Hansel, don’t go in there. Hansel, don’t go in there.”

  Ruby should go to the library. Obviously, she isn’t helping Lucy by sitting here. And if she’s quick, she can be back before Lucy even notices she’s gone.

  She finds a flyer for violin lessons on the floor under one of the theater seats and scribbles a note on the back of it, just in case.

  Returning library book. Be right back!

  When she gets to the library, she spots Nero at one of the round tables, reading intensely.

  She shouldn’t interrupt him—but Bunning Day is only two days away. This might be her only chance. Ruby picks up a copy of When You Reach Me from a nearby display. Okay. If she drops the book, then Nero is bound to look up. If he says hi, then that is a sign that she should go over to his table and talk to him and listen to his questions and—