The Center of Everything

by Laura Moriarty

  Star mostly spends her time with boys, because the girls in our class don’t like her. She makes things up, and you have to be listening carefully, or you won’t know. She said her cousin had been killed by a poisonous butterfly, right here in Kansas; she said she once saw a man lick an envelope and get such a bad paper cut on his tongue that it actually rolled right out of his mouth and landed on the floor, and that on the floor, it looked like a large strawberry, one you could pick up and eat; she said when they lived in Florida her dad had killed the most dangerous kind of snake in the world, the dreaded Monty Python, which could kill you just by looking at you long enough to make you look back. Patty Pollo and I are the only two girls in the class who will still talk to Star, and Patty doesn’t really count because she will talk to anyone because she says God loves everyone, even liars.

  Brad Browning walks in, carrying a small flat board with a battery, wires, and a tiny lightbulb taped to it. He’s wearing a new OP sweatshirt, a purple one.

  “What’s this?” Ms. Fairchild asks.

  “It’s a circuit.” He looks up at her, blinking quickly. “My dad helped me.”

  “Where’s your triptych?”

  He blinks again. “My what?”

  She frowns. More people come in, and the ledge by the window slowly fills up with projects. No one else has made a triptych, but they are good projects, some of them, better than mine. Stephen Maefield made an aluminum-can crusher. He says it can be used to crush aluminum cans, but also many other things. Vera Miles has a prism. She takes it out of her pocket and holds it up to the light, and a lovely rainbow appears on the floor, red blurring into orange blurring into yellow blurring into short bands of green, blue, and purple. I think it’s beautiful, but I can see Ms. Fairchild is getting mad because no one has a triptych.

  Ray Watley has a piece of cardboard with dead bugs pinned to it with colored thumbtacks. They are labeled underneath, but they are not even the real names of the bugs. They say things like BUG FOUND IN DRAIN OF BATHTUB and MOTH KILLED WITH SPRAY. There are at least thirty bugs pinned to the cardboard, and when he shows it to Ms. Fairchild, she makes a face and says, “Just put it by the window.”

  Libby Masterson shows up after all, carrying a small velvet bag with a yellow string around the top. It is full of rocks, she says, special rocks, and Ms. Fairchild asks her to take them out of the bag and spread them out on the shelf. Libby doesn’t have a triptych either, but the rocks are beautiful. Some are blue and glossy, smooth to hold. Some look like normal ugly rocks on the outside, but they’ve been sliced open like oranges, and inside they are lovely, full of lavender crystals that sparkle in the light.

  Ms. Fairchild shakes her head. “Libby, did you just go out and buy these rocks? Did you get these at the mall?”

  Libby looks down at her shoes, so many friendship pins on them you can hardly see the laces. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What’s your hypothesis?”

  Libby frowns, looking at the rocks. “Traci’s on her way in,” she says. “Her mom gave us a ride. She’s helping her carry her thing in.” She doesn’t notice that I’m still holding one of the smooth blue rocks. I slip it into my pocket. There’s a knock on the door and a “Hellloooooo?” It’s Traci and Mrs. Carmichael, holding a rectangular-shaped wooden object between them. Mrs. Carmichael is wearing a sweater tied around her shoulders again, a red one that matches the belt on her pants, and she smiles at Ms. Fairchild, making a face like Traci’s project is too heavy for them to even carry. Ms. Fairchild knows Mrs. Carmichael because she’s in the PTA and because when there’s a holiday, she brings cupcakes for our class.

  Ms. Fairchild moves across the room quickly and helps them stand the wooden thing on one end, and then you can see it really is a triptych, made out of wood, five or six times the size of mine, not crooked. There are actual hinges in between the panels, the kind you would see on a door. It still smells like sawdust. I try to imagine Traci working in the garage of her redbrick house, with a chain saw or some other large tool, cutting away at the wood, plastic goggles pulled down over her face.

  “Very impressive,” Ms. Fairchild says.

  Mrs. Carmichael smiles at Traci. “That’s just part one. We’ve got to go back for part two.”

  While they are gone, the rest of us stand around, looking at Traci’s triptych. She has used large amounts of red glitter and glue to write SEISMOGRAPHS AND EARTHQUAKES across the top. Below, she has written what seismographs do and what a Richter scale is. There are color pictures of the aftermaths of famous earthquakes—San Francisco, Italy. Underneath each picture is the number that particular earthquake got on the Richter scale.

  It’s impressive enough on its own. We are all still looking at it when Traci and Mrs. Carmichael come back in, carrying something metal between them with a spring sticking out of the top. Ms. Fairchild goes to help them, but Mrs. Carmichael holds up her hand.

  “It’s not heavy,” she says. “I just didn’t want Traci to drop it after so much work. She’s been a slave to this thing for the last month.” When they have moved the metal thing to the ledge by the window, she turns to Traci, says, “Bye, sugar,” and leaves.

  “What is it?” Ray Watley asks.

  “It’s a seismograph,” Traci says, pushing her braids behind her shoulders. She waits until Ms. Fairchild is looking and then flips a switch. A roll of paper from an adding machine revolves slowly, letting out paper at one end, which Traci holds with one hand. Now you can see that the spring has a pen attached to the end of it, positioned so it makes one long, straight line on the paper. Traci’s blue-gray eyes watch ours.

  “Now jump,” she says, pointing at Libby. Libby jumps, her braids that are supposed to be just like Traci’s but aren’t really flying up behind her. There is a small wave in the line, a tiny bump.

  It’s impossible not to say “ahhh,” though I try not to. Traci smiles. “Now three people jump, and it’ll get bigger.” Three people jump. She shows us the paper.

  “Yours is the best,” Brad Browning tells her. No one says anything, but already, I know it’s true. Traci will get to meet Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan will get to meet Traci.

  Star says she wants to make her volcano go off now, and Ms. Fairchild says fine, as long as it doesn’t really explode the way a volcano would. They are usually enemies. Star goes to her backpack and takes out a bottle of vinegar, red food coloring, and a box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. She pours a little of each in, one at a time, through a funnel into the mouth of the clay mud thing that is supposed to look like a volcano but doesn’t at all. We stand in a circle around it, waiting. Nothing comes out, and she has to keep adding more. Finally, there is a small, oozing trickle of red.

  “That’s gross,” Ray Watley says. “It looks like blood.”

  “More will come out,” she says. “Just wait.”

  While we are waiting, Traci turns to look at my plants and the yellow triptych on the windowsill. Her eyes move slowly over the words, and I try not to watch. I’m embarrassed by it now, how crooked it is, how small.

  “Is that yours?” she asks.

  I nod, watching her carefully.

  “It’s nice,” she says, and turns back around.

  Star finally pours the rest of the bottle of vinegar into the volcano. When she does this, there is a crackling sound beneath, like aluminum foil being shaken, and then finally the mixture comes back out again in red blobs, rolling down the clay mound onto the cookie sheet, dripping onto the floor.

  “It’s like throw up!” Ray yells. He’s very happy about this. “It’s like blood and puke!”

  Ms. Fairchild clears her throat and claps her hands twice. “That’s enough. That’s enough,” she says, reaching for the paper towels. She makes us go back to our seats, warning us not to step in the lava from Star’s volcano, which really does look like blood and maybe throw up. When she finishes with the paper towels, she stands at the front of the room, unsmiling, her hands on her hips.

  “I have to say
I’m a little disappointed. When I gave you this assignment in March, I clearly explained the rules. Only two people actually brought in a triptych the way you were supposed to.”

  Traci looks down at her lap, trying not to smile.

  “And while Traci’s is very impressive, I’m afraid only Evelyn’s follows the procedure outlined in the rules for the Kansas State Science Fair. You have to have an experiment. You have to have a hypothesis, an objective, a method, observations, and a conclusion. You have to follow directions.” She crosses her arms, her black eyebrows pushed down low. “Sometimes I don’t think you children listen to me at all.”

  No one says anything. Her dark eyes rest on mine for just an instant. I am the only one who followed directions, and this is turning out to be the most important thing of all. There’s a chance I could win, and it’s like something sweet almost touching my tongue. Eileen says if you want something very much you can pray for it, and that gets God on your side, which helps a lot.

  So I do. Please, God, let me be the one to go to Topeka. Please. I imagine God sitting in front of a computer with blinking lights, putting on headphones when my voice comes in like a radio frequency from far away. He turns dials, adjusts the headphones, watching words flash on a screen: Bucknow, Evelyn. Kerrville, Kansas, U.S. Fourth Grade. Science Fair.

  “Many of you showed wonderful creativity and imagination with your projects. But I’m afraid many of you let your parents do most of the work.” She looks at Brad Browning. “I’m going to send Evelyn Bucknow to represent our school in Topeka, because her work is clearly her own, and because she followed the rules.”

  I am silent, knowing this is probably the best thing to be right now. But in my head I say thank you to God. I imagine him taking off his headphones, chuckling to himself. No problem, Evelyn. No problem.

  Traci raises her hand.

  “Traci?”

  “It’s not fair,” she says, lowering her hand.

  “Traci’s is the best,” Libby agrees. I stay facing forward. But I can see other people are nodding, looking at Traci’s triptych by the window, standing almost four feet high on its own. Ray Watley stomps his foot, and the seismograph records it.

  Traci crosses her arms and leans back in her chair. She is steady, calm, but I can see tears in her blue-gray eyes. “My parents didn’t do all the work, if that’s what you’re saying. My dad helped me with the wood, but it was my idea. I worked hard on that. I worked really hard.”

  Ms. Fairchild shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Traci. The rules for the contest are very specific.”

  “It’s not fair,” she says again. Ray glares at me and gives me the finger from under his desk.

  I say nothing. It is fair, of course.

  Ms. Fairchild says she wants us to leave our projects by the window for all of next week, and then we can take them home. She takes a Polaroid camera out of her desk drawer and takes pictures of each of our projects, but she takes several pictures of mine, getting a close-up of each plant.

  Before lunch, she goes to her desk and pulls out an envelope, handing it to me with a smile. Inside is a crisp, new twenty-dollar bill. This is good enough, plenty, but then she reaches into her desk again and pulls out a trophy, brassy gold with a small gold statue of a woman holding a bowling ball at the top, SCIENCE FAIR WINNER taped across the bottom. When she gives it to me, she acts like people should clap, but no one does.

  But when Randy, the bus driver, sees the trophy, he’s impressed. “Hey, hey, hey, what have we got here?” he asks, swinging open the doors. “Looks like somebody won an Oscar.”

  “Science fair,” I tell him.

  Randy is the nicest bus driver our route has ever had—he is much better than Stella from the year before. Stella had bright yellow hair with a black strip across the top, and she kept a broom behind her seat. If we got too noisy, or if someone stood up before the bus came to a complete stop, she would stop the bus quickly and bang the top of the broomstick against the metal ceiling and yell that if we didn’t shut up, she would wreck the bus on purpose, and break all of our little necks, and then she would be the only one laughing, ha ha ha. But then Traci Carmichael told her mother about Stella, and the next day, Stella was gone.

  Randy is a big improvement. He brought little paper cups of candy corn for us on Halloween, handing them out one by one as we stepped on the bus. He gave out candy canes at Christmas. He plays country music on the radio, and he sings along to the words, his voice low and deep. Sometimes when we have to stop for a train, he turns off the radio and sings “This Train Is Bound for Glory,” and everyone stops talking and just listens.

  He points at my trophy. “For the plants you had with you this morning?”

  I nod.

  He smiles. He’s missing teeth, but it’s okay, because he’s nice. “Congratulations, honey.”

  Traci and Libby are sitting in the front, and when I walk by, they stop talking and watch me, their mouths flat and small. Travis Rowley is already sitting in the very back seat, reading a comic book, his shoes sticking out into the aisle. One of his shoes says DARK along the toe, and the other one says AVENGER. He does not look up when I sit down.

  Victor Veltkamp asks if he can hold the trophy. He is only a first grader, with a nose that always runs, but he is a little scary because already he knows the names of different kinds of machine guns, and he talks about them and pretends he is holding them, even when he is just sitting in his seat by himself, when no one is listening. “Man!” he says, picking up the trophy by its base, swinging it slowly, like he is a batter, warming up. “This thing is heavy. You could really clock somebody with this thing. I mean, you could just…” He swings it again, “Bam!”

  I am about to take the trophy back from him when I feel someone staring at me, the way you can feel someone staring even before you look. You don’t see them, you don’t hear them, but you know they’re there. I look up and see that Traci has moved to the seat in front of me. She has been sitting there for a while, watching me with her blue-gray eyes, her small, pointed chin resting on the back of the seat.

  Already I can feel my heart starting to pound, my fingers twitching. “What?”

  She is very calm, her eyes even on mine. “It’s not fair that you won,” she says. She looks at the trophy that Victor Veltkamp is still swinging in his arms and then back at me. “Yours was nothing compared to mine. She made you the winner because she felt sorry for you. Anyone can see that.” She is almost smiling now. If I do anything, look away only for a moment, she will think I believe her.

  Victor aims the trophy at her like it’s a gun for him to shoot her with. “She won and you lost,” he says. “Too bad.”

  But Traci ignores him, looking only at me. “All the teachers know you don’t have a dad,” she says. “They feel sorry for you. They know your mom works in a factory making dog food and that your poster was the most you could afford. They know you don’t have anyone to help you.” She shrugs her shoulders. She is wearing her OP sweatshirt today, the blue one, palm trees on the front. “That’s sad, fine. But that doesn’t make you the winner.”

  Everyone is watching. I don’t know how she knows I don’t have a dad, but now she is saying that everyone knows this. I wonder if this is something I should have been more careful about keeping a secret. I think about her seismograph, so amazing, detecting every tremor in the room.

  “I won because I followed directions,” I say, but I can hear the shakiness in my own voice. I don’t even know if this is true. I am very aware of Travis now, of everyone, all of them listening to this, to Traci telling me I am someone to feel sorry for. The bus stops at a railroad crossing even though there isn’t a train, Randy singing “Kansas City, Kansas City, here I come.”

  She shakes her head. “I think it’s okay for teachers to feel bad for you, but it’s not fair when poor people get more than they should just because somebody feels sorry for them.”

  Victor Veltkamp wipes his nose with his hand and looks at me.
“Hit her,” he says. “You need to hit her for saying that.”

  And now, the moment he says this, I know I will hit her. I feel the electricity moving up and down my arms, my fingers twitching, my hand rising up to her face. My hand hits her cheek, and I’m surprised at how much it hurts my hand, how her cheek doesn’t give way.

  “Ouch!” I am the one to say it.

  We stare at each other, both of us stunned. She puts her hand to her cheek, her eyes wide. And then, quickly, she is on me, grabbing my ear with one hand. She hits me on the mouth with the other, her fist solid and sharp. I see a burst of color, red and blue, little sparks going off in darkness. My glasses are gone. I reach forward, swinging. Libby is yelling something from the front of the bus.

  The bus stops, and we roll into the aisle like just one body, her fingernails pushed into the skin of my arms. I have her by the hair, one of her braids wrapped around my fingers twice. Victor is yelling words of encouragement, and I can smell the mud on the floor of the aisle, my face pressed up against it. My free hand moves up and down like a hammer until I feel her teeth biting into the skin at the bottom of my fist.

  And then I feel myself rising, being picked up, one of Randy’s large hands under each of my arms. “That’s enough!” he yells. “That’s enough!” He pushes me into a seat on the other side of the aisle. Traci stands up and tries to come at me again, but Randy pushes her back. She is crying, yelling something. The braid I was pulling on has come unraveled, and half of her hair hangs in front of her face, kinked up and wild.

  “You girls STOP IT! Stop it RIGHT NOW!” He points at Traci, and then at me. His John Deere hat has fallen off, and I see, for the first time, that he is bald. We are all realizing this at the same time, looking up at him. He reaches down for his hat, and puts it back on with a shaking hand.