by Linda Urban
“Okay,” Ruby says. She knows saying yes and going to the cemetery will make her dad feel better, but—“Dad? How about we go to the roof, too? Of the dealership?”
“Oh, Ruby. I don’t know anything about stars,” he says.
“That’s okay,” says Ruby. “I’ll teach you.”
Ruby’s mom tilts her head in the direction of the Okeda Martial Arts truck. “Did you see Lucy?”
The few times they have argued in the past, Ruby waited for Lucy to calm down and come to her. That’s how Ruby knew it was safe to apologize. Then everything would continue exactly as it had before, Luby and Rucy, exactly how it was supposed to be. If she went to Lucy now, who knew what would happen?
“I see her, Mom,” Ruby says.
She unbuckles.
The Hole Shebang
At first it is awkward.
“Hi,” says Ruby. Or maybe it is Lucy. It doesn’t matter. One says hi and then the other does. “I—” they both say, and then each waits for the other to finish.
“Lucy,” Mr. Okeda says, “we’re going to claim a spot. Are you sitting with the Pepperdines again this year?”
Ruby looks at Lucy. Lucy looks at Ruby. “Yes,” they say.
“Make sure you’re with them before it gets dark,” says Mr. Fisch. Lucy’s dads head for the rec center soccer field. Ruby and Lucy head in the opposite direction.
There are two playgrounds at the Bunning Recreation Center. One has relatively new equipment that is molded plastic and has no sharp edges or rusty bolts or things you can get your fingers stuck in. That playground is mobbed with little kids and hovering parents. A bit farther back, however, is another playground—smaller and much older, built at a time before parents discovered all the ways a kid could get a concussion. There are no little kids here. No hovering parents. There is a swing set with chains hanging from it but no swings. There is a metal slide, the kind that can burn your legs on a sunny day, and a steel carousel that you can run and push and hop onto and spin.
This is where Ruby and Lucy are headed.
“I should have known you wouldn’t be mad at me,” Lucy says, “but I was kind of a jerk.” She keeps talking as they reach the back playground. Reciting, really, as if this is a part she has rehearsed. “I was so stressed out with the play, and I keep messing up all my lines, and I overreacted. Usually, you help with the lines more and I guess I was kind of mad that you kept cutting out on me.”
Ruby sits cross-legged on the carousel, but Lucy cannot sit still. She grabs hold of one of the carousel bars and pushes. “And it’s a really big part, you know? And everything depends on me and—”
If you were Ruby Pepperdine, you would be listening to your friend Lucy, but you might be stuck thinking about that third possibility, too. Wondering how, if it were true, a person could find her place in the world. How things wouldn’t just be wild and spinny and out of control all the time. You might wonder how anyone was really supposed to figure anything out.
And so, when Lucy says, “. . . and then I find you talking about some secret wish with Nero? You’re supposed to be my best friend”—you might not be able to stop yourself from saying what you’ve been thinking all afternoon.
“What if there is no supposed to?”
Which might make Lucy stop talking.
“What?” she might say a moment later. “Of course there is a supposed to. Otherwise people would be, like, stealing and driving a hundred miles an hour and stuff.”
“Those are laws,” Ruby says. “Rules. It’s different than friends. Different than most things.” The carousel has stopped now, but Ruby feels like it is still turning underneath her. “I’m not supposed to be your best friend. I am your best friend. I choose to be your friend. Because I like you. Because you like me.” The last part comes out more like a question than a statement.
“Of course I like you! Geez, Ruby.” Lucy sits next to Ruby on the carousel edge. They can see the part of the parking lot where the parade floats are on display. People wander in and out and around the floats. A red-faced man in a Civil War costume holds a toddler on his shoulders. A cluster of girls pose for a photo in front of a cardboard dairy barn. “Smile, Your Majesty,” they can hear the photographer call.
“No supposed to, huh?” Lucy says, finally.
Ruby shrugs. “I don’t think so.”
“I think you’ve been hanging around Nero too much.” Lucy laughs, and Ruby does too, a little.
“Nero is my friend too, you know.”
“I know,” Lucy says. I know.
“At least, I hope he is.” Ruby cannot help but remember how he’d turned away from the library window. How he hadn’t looked at her as she stood in the circle in the square. Maybe he is not her friend.
There is only one way to find out. Ruby pulls her phone from her pocket. It has been turned off since Patsy Whelk told her to during the parade.
There is one message. It is from Nero.
Well?
Ruby texts back. You at rec center?
Yes
Meet us at old playground.
Us?
Me and Lucy
No thanks
Lucy has been reading over Ruby’s shoulder. “I can go sit with my dads,” she says.
“Stay,” Ruby says to Lucy. Come, she texts Nero.
Three minutes can be a short time when you are sitting with a back-again friend. It can be a long time when you are waiting to find out if you have another.
Ruby watches the parking lot. One after another, people emerge from cars and move toward the soccer field. A boy in a kilt walks beside a girl with a Hula-Hoop. A woman Ruby recognizes from the Night Owls holds the hand of a man Ruby thinks was one of the fire truck drivers. The redheaded family joins a cluster of boys in ball caps. People mix and shift and sort into new groups, new formations. Finally, Nero appears, walking head down, up the hill toward the old playground. When he gets there, he stands close enough to hear conversation, but no closer. He waits. Lucy waits.
“I made a wish on Captain Bunning’s statue,” says Ruby, finally. “It was supposed to come true at the parade, but it didn’t.”
“It didn’t?” Nero looks surprised. “I thought when you got quiet up there—”
“I still don’t know what the wish was,” says Lucy. Her voice sounds hard.
Nero matches the sound. “I don’t either, okay?”
So Ruby tells about Gigi’s last day, about being so sad, about how she made her wish. All the while Nero has been coming closer, until finally he is sitting on the carousel too.
“I stood up there on that float and listened and all I heard was regular stuff. Nothing changed.” Ruby feels her eyes pricking up.
“You know,” says Lucy, after a minute, “it’s still Bunning Day.”
“That’s right!” Nero leaps to his feet. “The wish comes true before Bunning Day is over! There are still more than three hours left! You could try again!”
From the carousel, Ruby can see the schoolhouse float. There are people all around it, including an Event Staff person whose job it is to make sure nobody touches the fake school. “I couldn’t get up there again. Nobody’d let me.”
Lucy follows Ruby’s eyes. “Why do you have to do it up there?”
“That’s why I was chosen Essay Girl. Because of the wish. It was a sign.”
“Maybe it was a sign that you wrote a good essay,” says Nero.
“Tell me again what your wish was,” Lucy says.
“I wished that I could go back and fix things—that I could do what I was supposed to have done and listen to Gigi and know what she wanted to say and what she meant and that our last conversation wasn’t me not listening.”
Nero looks amazed. “You said all that ninety times?”
Ruby shakes her head. “I just wished everything was the way it was supposed to be.”
“Supposed to,” Lucy says. “So that’s—”
“Yeah,” says Ruby. “Kind of a wasted wish.”
Lucy’s brow is squinched up—it is the same look that Ruby gets sometimes when she is working on a difficult math problem. “Gigi said, ‘Listen’?”
“She said, ‘Listen.’” Ruby hears it in her head again. What Gigi said. How it sounded. “And she made a little noise—like a gasp, but she did that a lot on the oxygen—and said, ‘It’s all coming together.’”
“What does that mean?” asks Nero.
“I don’t know. I thought I’d know when my wish came true . . .” It all sounds so stupid. The whole thing. Her wish and what she thought would happen. They must think she’s completely nuts. So much for the girl who figures things out.
“You should try it again,” Lucy says. “Try listening again.”
“I don’t—”
“We’ll listen too. If you want,” says Nero.
Lucy takes Ruby’s left hand and closes her eyes tight. Nero closes his eyes too, and a second later Ruby feels his hand on hers. She is suddenly spinny again, except different. Her feet are firmly on the ground. She is rooted to the carousel, held in place by the hands of her friends.
Ruby closes her eyes. She does not think it will make any difference, but if Lucy and Nero are willing to try, she supposes she could too. “Okay,” Ruby says. “I’m listening.”
In the distance she hears the sounds of little kids at the other playground. Laughter from the soccer field. The clank and clatter of folding chairs. People call to one another across the parking lot, and somewhere a bunch of kids are singing the gingerbread song. Then she hears Lucy, who cannot help but try out Gigi’s lines.
“It’s all coming together. It’s all coming together. It’s all coming together,” she whispers. Each time it sounds different. Each time it means something different. It’s all coming together.
If you were Ruby Pepperdine, you might feel a poke just then. You might hear Lucy whisper, “It’s all coming together.” Hear how it makes the meaning change to something like it’s all about coming together, which is something you can imagine Gigi saying. Like maybe that was what Gigi meant, and maybe that is what she would have said more clearly if you’d have just listened.
And maybe that is not what Gigi meant, and maybe you are making it up because you want so much for your wish to come true.
It’s all about coming together. Ruby and Gigi. Gigi and all her organizations and groups and friends. All the people, all the places, all of Bunning coming together. Gigi would say this, Ruby knows with absolute certainty. Even if it was not what Gigi was trying to say that morning, it is something she would say, and mean with all her heart.
If you were Ruby Pepperdine, you might take a deep breath then.
You might listen extra hard.
And then you might open your eyes.
Constellations
Over the years, Ruby will think about that moment. About Nero and Lucy and about whether or not her wish had come true and she had heard what Gigi wanted to say. She will wonder whether she had done what she was supposed to do. Sometimes she will think that she must have, and other times—like when she has fallen off her bike, or a boy has broken her heart, or she can’t find her house key—she will think she must not have. But most of the time, she will think that there really isn’t a supposed to at all. That all she can do is her best at any particular moment. And that sometimes that will lead to things feeling great, and sometimes it will not. And that is as supposed to as it gets.
That night, while the Bunning Day sky turned dark as the blueberry filling in a Delish donut, things went this way: Ruby sat in the middle of a blanket, her legs outstretched, leaning back on her hands. To her left was Lucy, just where she had always been. And to her right was Nero, whose parents said he could sit with his friends this year.
“Do you remember which one Leo is?” asks Lucy, staring up at the stars.
Ruby tries, but she cannot. She can find the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper and Cassiopeia, but she cannot find Leo.
“Who named the constellations, anyway?” asks Nero. “I mean, really. The Ancient Greeks, sure. But which ones? What were they thinking about?”
Ruby knows this. Gigi had told her. “They were characters from myths. From stories. The Greeks saw their stories in the sky. Probably the Mayans did too. And the Vikings.”
“Well, I’m going to make my own constellation,” says Nero. And he tries. But it is difficult to point out an entire constellation to someone else. Gigi could do it, of course, but Ruby is not about to suggest that Nero wrap his arm around her and point.
Finally, he finds a bright star—one that is a little bit purplish—and Lucy and Ruby and Nero all agree that they are looking at the same one.
“I’m starting there,” he says. “I’m naming that star.”
“Let me guess,” says Lucy. “You’re naming it Nero.”
“It’s a little flashy for me, actually. Looks more like a Lucy.”
“Oh,” says Lucy. She says it only once, but it seems to carry a bunch of meanings. “Okay. And that one to the right of it? That’s Ruby.”
“And the one a little farther over that way,” says Ruby, pointing, “that’s Nero.”
It is not so complicated keeping those three stars in their sights. Lucy, Ruby, and Nero. It is not so hard to imagine the invisible connections between them—though Ruby does not draw them straight, like the lines between the stars in Orion or Leo or Cassiopeia. Ruby’s lines curve.
“Together,” she says, “they are the constellation ‘the Donut.’”
Nero laughs. “Take that, Callimachus,” he says, but nobody hears him. Instead, they hear a BOOM, which rattles in each of their chests and resets their heartbeats. BOOM! And a screeeeeech—and a bright light streaks high above them and crackles like a million billion stars—like a million billion stars exploding into being.
If you had been sitting on the blanket then, you might have seen their faces in the light of those stars, seen their eyes reflecting it all. Seen their mouths open in momentary awe. You might have felt like you understood something at that moment. At the beginning of The Hole Shebang.
Ruby Pepperdine, however, sees none of these things. Her eyes are looking up. Her ears are filled with the crackle of new stars.
If you stopped watching her, you might see it yourself. You might hear it, too. Hear it all coming together.
Listen.
A Note from the Author
I made up the story of Captain Bunning’s invention of the donut hole after hearing about Captain Hanson Gregory, a Maine sailor who, legend says, in 1847 rescued his own donuts in a manner similar to the one described in this book. Other stories claim that Captain Gregory simply got fed up with the undercooked middles of his donuts and proposed eliminating the situation altogether by cutting holes in the dough cakes before frying. There is evidence of holed donuts in times prior to this as well. Should you be spurred to a life of donut-centric archaeology as a result of the desire to learn the true origins of the donut hole, I wish you a fruitful and delicious career.
Since you know now that I made up the whole Captain Bunning donut thing, you’ve probably figured out that there is no Bunning, New Hampshire, either, and thus no statue and no bronze donut through which one might toss a wishful quarter. But here’s the thing about wishes—they don’t really require legends and rules and figuring out. All they need is someone to wish them.
Sometimes we don’t even know how to wish for the things we need most. When I was a sixth-grader, I could not have known to wish for all the wonderful people at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who have made my writing career so fun. Thankfully, the wish wasn’t required and I lucked out—especially with my editor, Jeannette Larson.
I also would not have thought to wish for all th
e talented writer and reader friends who critiqued this story and helped make it better: Myra Wolfe, Susan Stewart, Kelly Fineman, Leda Schubert, Ellen Miles, Loree Griffin Burns, and Kate and Ella Messner. I lucked out there, too.
I know that when I was young, I wished I’d grow up and marry a sweet guy and have a couple of nice kids. My reality turned out so much better than my wish. Julio, Jack, and Claire, you are not only sweet and nice, but funny, curious, inspiring, supportive, and rather good-looking. I am so grateful to be in your constellation.
Uncle Potluck said when he talked to the moon, the moon talked back.
Mama laughed. “Same old Potluck,” she said, but he’d already grabbed his hat. Already looked at Mattie, eyebrows up, saying, “It’s hound dog true.” Already opened the door to the night.
Out they went, out past the bean tepees and tomato cages and the stone rabbit standing guard, Mattie matching Uncle Potluck’s steps in the garden dirt. Out they went beyond the tangle of pumpkin vines and the backyard house Miss Sweet was renting.
“Few more days, you’ll know this place by heart,” Uncle Potluck said. “Won’t need me showing you the way.”
Mattie was not so sure. It was dark out here, without streetlights and golden arches and headlights graying up the sky. Uncle Potluck had grown up in this yard. Mama, too. Likely it would take till Mattie grew up before she could path her way through the night.
Up they went, up the rise to the edge of the woods, to the flat rock ledge by the apple tree. Uncle Potluck looked up and Mattie looked up, up to where the moon ought to be. Uncle Potluck whispered, “She’s hiding behind the skirts of Mama Night, you know?”
Mattie knew.
Uncle Potluck leaped up on that rock. Put his hat to his heart. “Miss Moon,” he called. “Miss Moon, come on out, sweetheart.”
Uncle Potluck waited and Mattie waited till a breeze came by, thinning the clouds.
“You’ve got to trust the moon, if you want the moon to trust you,” he said, handing Mattie his hat.
