The Center of Everything

by Laura Moriarty

  “I don’t know, Evelyn,” she says, massaging his scalp with a washcloth, her hand over his eyes. “I can’t go calling the school every time you don’t get an A.” She is wearing the red glitter hat, and Samuel stares up at it, open-mouthed. His blue eyes look even larger with his hair slicked back and wet.

  “Traci’s mom is calling.”

  “Well then,” she says, reaching for a towel, her mouth curved in a half smile. “I’m sure that’s all you’ll need.”

  But it isn’t true. Mr. Sellers is more difficult to get rid of than Stella the bus driver. The principal, Dr. Queen, is on his side.

  I kind of like Dr. Queen, though I do not tell anyone this, ever. It is not okay to like the principal of the school. I have never really spoken with her, because you have to talk to her only if you get in trouble. But I like that she is principal and everyone is a little scared of her. And I like that she has a name like Dr. Queen. I would love to have a name like that.

  Dr. Queen has black hair with a tight permanent wave and a gray streak right down the middle, and it does not look like she has her hair cut so much as clipped, the way you would clip a hedge. It goes out at least four inches in every direction above her ears, and sometimes people call her Frankenstein’s Bride, but never to her face. She wears business suits with big shoulder pads, and she carries a briefcase to work in the morning. For a long time, I wanted to be a principal, just because of her, but one day I saw her in the teachers’ lounge with Mrs. Evans, and before they shut the door, I saw Dr. Queen fall down on the couch with her hands over her head and say, “Claire, I hate my job. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.”

  Traci said that when her mother called to complain about Mr. Sellers, Dr. Queen told her that he was a respected educator, that he had gotten his degree in mathematics at Duke, that he was in his thirty-fifth year of teaching, almost ready to retire.

  “She wants to compromise,” Traci told us, rolling her eyes. “Principals are total politicians.”

  But Mrs. Carmichael showed up at Dr. Queen’s office the next day, unannounced, on the way home from a tennis game, and escorted Dr. Queen down to our classroom so they could watch Mr. Sellers teach.

  “Just watching!” Mrs. Carmichael said, waving at him from the back of the room, her car keys jangling in her hand. She was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, carrying a tennis racket. Traci turned around, and her mother pointed the handle of the racket at her and winked.

  By the end of the week, we had a new teacher.

  The new teacher, Mr. Goldman, is shorter than Dr. Queen, not even including her hair. He is young enough to be Mr. Sellers’s son, or even grandson, and he has dark eyes and dark hair, cut short on the sides but longer in front. He wears a crisp, ironed gray shirt and a matching gray and green tie. None of the other male teachers match like this.

  “Class,” Dr. Queen says. “Class.” She does not have to clap her hands to get our attention because just her voice is like hands clapping. “Mr. Goldman will be in this room for the rest of the year. He’s going to be helping…learning from Mr. Sellers. He’s from New York City.” She pauses, eyebrows raised, letting this information sink in. “Right, Mr. Goldman?”

  “That’s right,” the new teacher says, his words coming out quick, cut off at the end. He stands beside her, smiling at us. “And now here I am.” His thick eyebrows form almost a straight line just above his eyes. He doesn’t look or sound like anyone I know.

  Dr. Queen turns to the chalkboard to write Mr. Goldman’s name on the board for us, and Libby Masterson holds up a piece of paper for Traci to see: MAJOR BABE.

  “Do you have a question, Libby?” Dr. Queen asks, turning back around. She has an eye like a sparrow, Dr. Queen. Mr. Sellers is already looking at the chalkboard longingly, his arms flapping at his sides. He doesn’t like to be away from it for this long.

  Travis raises his hand. “I have a question.”

  “Shoot,” Mr. Goldman says, tilting his chin up quickly. The eyebrows go up too.

  “Are you Italian or something? Greek?”

  Dr. Queen winces and holds up her hand. “Are there any appropriate questions?”

  “I’m Jewish,” Mr. Goldman says. He points at his face, and then at his name on the chalkboard. “Goldman? You know?” He says this like we are supposed to know that the last name Goldman means he is Jewish, like we are stupid if we couldn’t figure that out by ourselves. But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a Jewish person before. I didn’t know they had special names either. And I didn’t know you were supposed to be able to tell, just by looking at someone’s face. Anne Frank was Jewish, but she just looked normal.

  Eileen says Jewish people are from the land of Israel, and God’s chosen people. Abraham and Moses and all of them, they were Jews. Every time in the Bible when God was helping someone win a fight or a war because they were blessed and someone else wasn’t, those were the Jews. God helps them more than other people. Helped them, actually, Eileen said. Not anymore. They had been chosen, she said, but then they’d messed it up and killed Jesus, so now it was the Christians who were chosen because we had the ears that could hear and the eyes that could see. That’s why there was all that sadness going on in Beirut, she said. Because some people have eyes to see and some people don’t, and when you’ve got that many people who don’t know Jesus living together in one place, of course there’s going to be trouble.

  But Mr. Goldman has eyes and ears, and everything seems to be open and working. He is still smiling at us, his teeth straight and white.

  “Are you really from New York?” Travis asks.

  Mr. Goldman nods. “Manhattan.”

  “And you came here?”

  Dr. Queen says she doesn’t like Travis’s tone, but this does not stop him.

  “Why would you come here from New York? Aren’t there schools in New York?”

  “No shit,” Ray Watley says. Dr. Queen stiffens, and it is clear she heard this word, but not where it came from. She stands in front of the room with her hands on her hips, scanning our faces.

  Mr. Goldman shrugs and shows us the wedding band on his hand. “My wife’s from Kansas. Her father’s sick, and she wanted to be here for a while.”

  Libby Masterson quickly writes another note, holding it up for Traci: THAT IS SO SWEET!

  “So here I am.” He looks around the room again, and the way he is looking at us makes me think of the show Voyager, where the little boy and the man travel around in a time machine, going on missions. Every time they come to a new place, they stand by the time machine for a while, just looking around, not sure yet where they are, what year it is, or what it is they’re supposed to be doing.

  When I come home from school, there is an orange-and-white-striped kitten curled up on the sofa. It looks up at me, yawns, and tucks its head back under its paw.

  “What’s this?” I yell, putting down my backpack. “What’s this cat?”

  My mother answers from the bedroom. “We’ll be out in a minute,” she yells. “Hold on.”

  I sit down on the sofa next to the cat, not seeing the bowl of milk that was sitting on one of the cushions. I knock it over and try to set it upright, but it’s already seeping in under the upholstery. The kitten starts to lick what it can.

  My mother comes out of her room, Samuel on her hip. She is smiling, wearing the glitter hat, jeans, and the gray sweatshirt. “Oh, Evelyn, didn’t you see the milk? I had it there for the kitty.”

  “No. That’s why I sat in it. If I would have seen it, I wouldn’t have sat in it.”

  “Okay, Evelyn. Okay.” She dabs at the wet part of the sofa with her hand and sits down, Samuel’s legs hanging over the edge of her lap. “No use crying over it. Ha ha.”

  I point at the kitten. “What’s it doing here?”

  Instead of answering, she picks up one of the kitten’s paws and makes it wave. “Hi there!” She is speaking for the cat as if it were a Muppet, her voice high and squeaky. “I’m a little kitty!”

 
“We’re not allowed to have pets here.”

  She looks at me like this is my fault. “The Rowleys have had Jackie O for years, and nobody’s said boo about it.” She takes Samuel’s hand and guides it down to the kitten’s fur, her voice going up high again. “My name is Tiger! Pet my fur, Sam! Feel how soft I am!” Samuel screeches, his curled fingers pushing into the kitten’s fur.

  I look at the damp spot where the milk spilled. This is only the beginning, the beginning of so much mess. “Cats smell.”

  My mother frowns. “You’re mean!” she says, still speaking for the cat, making it point at me with its orange paws. Its eyes have taken on the same disinterested glaze as Samuel’s, allowing my mother to move its limbs this way and that. “You’re the mean one! They told me about you!” She stretches the paw forward to tap me twice on the leg. “They told me you would try to throw me out, but you seem to be forgetting who’s really in charge around here.” She points to herself with the kitten’s paw. “She is! And I’m here to stay!”

  I sigh. “I can see your lips moving, Mom. You’re not fooling anyone.”

  She shrugs. “We’re keeping the cat.”

  Of course, it doesn’t end there. The next day, she looks out the window and sees two more orange-and-white kittens darting across the highway, narrowly missing the tires of a passing semitrailer.

  “Here,” she says. “Take Sam.”

  “What are you doing?”

  She puts on dishwashing gloves and runs outside. I watch her through the window, Samuel heavy in my arms and already crying. The kittens have ducked into the drainage ditch between the mailboxes for Treeline Colonies and the highway, and my mother gets down on her knees in the grass, twirling dandelions to get their attention, luring them toward her. When they get close enough, she tucks them under her arms and runs back to the apartment. She pushes open the door, and the kittens fall to the ground, crouching low, eyes wide.

  “You’re kidding.” I hand Samuel back to her. “Mom, they probably have diseases.”

  “I’ll take them to the vet. They’re just babies.” She leans down to touch one of them, and they both run under the couch.

  “With what money?”

  She sighs, and leans Samuel’s head against her shoulder, patting him on the back. “Evelyn, they’re Tiger’s sisters.”

  We sit quietly, waiting. One of the kittens appears from under the couch, sniffing the air, flinching at any sound. It sees Tiger lying in a square of sunlight in the middle of the room and creeps toward him. The other one, half an ear missing already, follows. When Tiger sees them, he flips his tail and rolls over on his back.

  “We’re breaking the rules,” I tell her. “And three is too many. You’re going to become a cat lady. I’m serious. It’s a certain kind of person.”

  She nods and leans over to rub one of the new kittens behind the ears. It closes its eyes, purring. “Okay, Evelyn,” she says, “you go ahead and choose which one you want me to throw out.”

  Within a few days, they have taken over. There is cat hair in the silverware tray; one of them has thrown up behind the couch. They lounge on the sofa, all three of them stretched out so there is no place to sit. If you tell them to move, they get up slowly, looking irritated and vengeful, as if they have just as much right to be there as anyone else.

  Mr. Goldman is a big improvement to fifth-period algebra. Not only is he unusual and therefore interesting to watch, but our collective test scores have gone up as a result of his ability to actually explain things. All through class now, Mr. Sellers sits in the back of the room and reads until he falls asleep, his book, Oppenheimer’s Legacy, facedown on his lap.

  Mr. Goldman uses his hands when he talks, one hand raised at shoulder height, palm facing the ceiling, and he moves it rhythmically, almost like he is juggling. I don’t know if he does this because he is from New York or because he is Jewish or maybe just because, but none of the other teachers move their hands like this. When he turns back to the chalkboard, Libby Masterson performs accurate imitations of him, her hands moving quickly in front of her. Traci ignores her now; she’s serious about bringing her math grades back up. But Libby continues to write notes: HE IS ADORABLE!!!

  The other teachers don’t think Mr. Goldman is adorable, though, I know. My locker is just around the corner from the coffee machine in the teachers’ lounge, and I can hear what they are saying even when the door is shut. They liked him okay at first, but now they’re mad because they think he balks. This is the word they use. He balked about parent-teacher night, because it was scheduled on a day that was a holiday for him but not for us, and they had to reschedule it.

  “I had a sitter lined up,” Mrs. Hansen told Dr. Queen. “If he’s going to balk about every special holiday, this is going to be a pain in the ass.”

  Mr. Goldman also balked about Christmas, about how the proposed title for the annual winter musical was “Christmas Around the World.” I heard him balk about this myself, making photocopies in the teachers’ lounge.

  “Ignoring the fact that the title isn’t exactly inclusive,” he said—and though I couldn’t see him, I imagined his hands were probably moving—“it’s also pretty inaccurate, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Oh Jake,” Mrs. Hansen said. “We’ve done it that way for years. You don’t have to be so careful with these kids. Everybody celebrates Christmas out here.”

  “Well,” Mr. Goldman had said, stacking his photocopies. “I’m here now.”

  No one said anything until after he left. He smiled quickly at me as he passed my locker, shutting the door to the teachers’ lounge.

  “Give me a break,” Mrs. Hansen said. “He’s too sensitive. Nobody’s burning crosses.”

  They wait until he leaves the teachers’ lounge to say things like this. They are nice to his face, and he is nice to theirs. With the other teacher no one likes, Ms. Jenkins, nobody bothers pretending.

  Ms. Jenkins is different from the other teachers in a lot of ways. She is maybe fifty, but she isn’t married, and she doesn’t have any children. All the other teachers eat at one lunch table together, even Mr. Goldman, but Ms. Jenkins sits by herself. I don’t know who started this. Maybe they won’t sit with her, or maybe she won’t sit with them. She does not buy hot lunch, but brings a salad in a Tupperware container in a cloth bag that says JUST BAG IT!, and while she eats she reads magazines that don’t have any pictures. She has a floor-to-ceiling poster of Mr. Spock on her door. She is a vegetarian. Also, she is very tall, and does not wear makeup. She scratches her head when she talks, and her hair stays in the direction that she scratched it, sometimes sticking straight up because of static electricity, even when everyone else’s hair is fine.

  I like her, though. She hands back my lab reports with smiley faces drawn in red ink with words like “Impressive!” and “Quite good!” across the top. She has colorful posters of extinct and endangered animals along one wall of her classroom, and whenever an animal or insect or bird gets taken off the endangered species list, she brings a bag of Snickers to class. Another wall is covered with Far Side comics, and if you finish your test early, you get to go over and read them until the bell rings.

  But the best part of Ms. Jenkins’s room is the beehive. She made it herself. It’s just a plastic container with a tube that leads directly to a sealed-off window, so the bees can go in and out as they please. But the plastic is see-through, so we can watch them when they bring back their honey in round balls they carry with their feet. When they come back into the tube from outside, sometimes they stop where they are and spin in circles. It looks like they are dancing, or maybe confused, but Ms. Jenkins says really they are communicating with one another, telling one another where the good flowers are. Two circles to the right means one thing; three circles to the left means another. If you want extra credit, you’re allowed to stay in during lunch and watch them, taking notes on which way they turn.

  I do this sometimes. I don’t need the extra credit, but I think it’s amazing
, watching the bees. They really do spin in circles the way Ms. Jenkins says, telling one another things, and it’s like watching something secret. I look at bees more carefully now when I see them outside, even when I see just one, resting on a flower. All my life, I’ve seen bees buzz around, and I never really thought they knew where they were going, but apparently they do.

  Deena and I sit at her grandmother’s creaky kitchen table, newspapers spread out beneath our pumpkins and carving knives, careful not to make too much noise. We had to buy our pumpkins at the Kwikshop, and it wasn’t the greatest selection. My pumpkin is bad, but Deena’s is worse. It has a brown scar on one side, the other side is covered with some kind of fungus. She squinted at it for a while in the Kwikshop, tracing the moldy spot with her finger.

  “I’ll make it the mouth,” she said.

  Deena’s good at things like this. Art is the only class she likes. For the pottery unit, we each had to make a vase in the shape of an animal, and Deena made a baby bird, its beak stretched up and opened wide. She had spent hours texturizing the wings with a No. 2 pencil, and by the time she finished, it looked as if a real baby bird had survived the kiln and was still waiting to be fed, its downy wings small and unfolded.

  Mrs. Toss had carried Deena’s bird slowly around the room, cradled in her hands. “Isn’t it lovely?” she asked us. “Isn’t it?”

  I had tried to make a swan, with a long, thin neck, but I made the neck too long, and the head fell off in the kiln. Mine was the only animal without a head, and I got a D–. My mother took it out of the garbage and put it on her dresser, and now she keeps safety pins in it.