The Center of Everything

by Laura Moriarty

  “I’m really sorry,” she says.

  I keep doing sit-ups. I don’t want her to say this to me.

  “I’m really, really sorry,” she says. “I guess I was being a dumb little kid. I just didn’t know any better. I didn’t even know I was being mean.”

  I give her a doubtful look. She is not counting anymore, and that’s her job. 35 Satan 36 Satan 37 Satan.

  “I mean, I know I shouldn’t have said that. I wouldn’t say that to you now.” Her fingers are light on my shoes, barely touching them. “I don’t even know your mother. And I know about your brother—”

  I sit up quickly enough to make her lean back, lifting her hands from my ankles.

  “You still don’t know anything about anything, Traci. Don’t even talk about my brother. Don’t even bring him up.”

  Mr. Leubbe blows his whistle, pointing at us from across the gym. “Troops,” he says, “settle down.”

  “You don’t talk about Samuel,” I whisper. “You don’t understand anything about that. And don’t try to be nice to me. I know what you are.”

  She winces, and now I can see the beginning of tears. But I don’t care. I have never done sit-ups so quickly in my life. I feel amazingly energized, unsprung. I could do sit-ups all day.

  “Why do you hate me so much?” she sniffs. “I haven’t done anything to you since then. And I’m sorry. I said I was sorry.”

  I am open-mouthed, almost laughing at her nerve, her evil, Traci Carmichael nerve. “I’m not going to vote for you, Traci.”

  She shakes her head. “That’s not what this is about.”

  “Of course it isn’t.”

  Her small, even features freeze, and I think for a moment she is going to start really crying, right there in the gym. But she doesn’t. Maybe she can’t pull it off. When it’s her turn, she does her sit-ups without complaint, me holding her feet and counting. Mr. Leubbe blows the whistle, and we go back to the locker room to shower and change.

  I come home from school to see my mother still in her bathrobe, sitting with Samuel at the kitchen table, in the exact same position they were in when I left in the morning. The only difference is that now there is oatmeal everywhere. There are clumps of oatmeal in her hair, in his hair, drying on the wall, on the table. A carton of vanilla ice cream, half melted, sits on the floor, held steady between my mother’s bare feet. Samuel is writhing and screaming, his face red with anger, pointing at a bowl of ice cream just out of his reach.

  She nods to me when I come in, but that’s all. No smile. Samuel thrashes in his chair, his good arm swinging in my mother’s direction. The cats are all under the table, licking oatmeal off the carpet with their quick little tongues. I set my backpack on the counter. “What’s going on?”

  She picks up his thick-handled spoon, pushing it into his hand. “C’mon, baby, show Evelyn what you can do,” she says. Her voice is hoarse, almost gone. “You almost did it just now. Do it again.” He screams again, rocking so hard in his chair that my mother has to put one of her legs behind it so he won’t tip over. He reaches for the ice cream, his fingers almost touching the sides of the bowl.

  I put my hands over my ears. “Why won’t you just give him some?”

  “If he wants ice cream, he has to use a spoon.”

  Samuel groans and lets his head fall over the back of his chair. He is worn out. I can see the pulse in his neck, thumping beneath his pale skin. “That’s mean, Mom. What if he can’t? What if he’s hungry?”

  She shakes her head. “He’s had lunch. I’ll feed him if he wants more carrots and oatmeal, and he knows it. But if he wants ice cream, he has to get it himself.”

  I step away, watching her face. A combination of many factors—the oatmeal in her hair, the look in her eyes, and the way she is speaking—makes me nervous. I have seen her be crazy before—that day she laid down on the sidewalk when I was little—but this, what I am seeing in her now, looks like an entirely different kind of crazy. She looks like an entirely different kind of person.

  “He almost did it,” she says. “Just before you came in.” She closes his fingers around the spoon. Samuel yells, throwing the spoon on the ground. She picks it up again, sets it by his hand.

  “Mom, I don’t think—I think he needs a rest.” I wait. “I think you need a rest.”

  Samuel’s chin is shiny with drool, but she cups it in her hand, turning his head toward hers. “Listen,” she says. “You can have all the ice cream you want. But you have to use the spoon. Okay?”

  “I’m going to my room,” I say, no one listening to me. Even down the hall, even with my door shut, I can hear him howling, his fist banging on the table. I turn on the radio, lie down on my bed. Madonna is singing, “Open your heart.” Deena has this song on tape, and she has been saying she will make me a copy, but it’s two months now that she’s been saying this, and she hasn’t yet.

  I look up at my wall, at all I have tacked up on it over the years to cover up the bad walls of my room, the peeling paint, the corners water-stained from the apartment above us. I still have the star chart Eileen gave me tacked to my ceiling, the ends of it curling up and almost over the red thumbtacks. I bought a calendar, The Ends of the Earth, 1987: Postcard Pictures from Around the World, and I cut the pictures off the top, hanging each of them up on my wall like posters, faraway places that look nothing like here. In these pictures, there are people who do not know us, people who have never heard of Kerrville, Kansas, wearing berets and carrying bread; there is a beach in Mexico, palm trees shading the sand; there is a castle in front of a blue lake in Switzerland, mountains towering high above. I close my eyes, imagine myself walking alongside the lake in Switzerland. If you are good at imagining something, it can be almost like it is happening. In a way, there is no difference at all.

  But just as I am thinking this, the door swings open, and now I know I am not in Switzerland but in my room, looking up at my mother, her eyes wide, chocolate syrup on her cheek.

  “What?” I say. “What is it?”

  “Evelyn. Evelyn.” She leans down and grabs my arm, pulling me up off my bed.

  “What? Is he hurt?”

  We run down the hallway together. Samuel is not hurt. He is sitting in his chair, his mouth covered with ice cream and chocolate syrup. It’s dripping off his chin, onto the napkin tied around his neck. He gazes out the window, his spoon moving down to the bowl of ice cream in front of him on the table, slow and steady.

  He brings the spoon back to his face. It hits his cheek first, then finds his mouth.

  “Oh my God,” I whisper, not even thinking, and my mother touches my hand.

  His spoon moves down to the bowl again and back to his mouth. He groans, eyelids fluttering. I can hear my mother breathing next to me, smell the oatmeal in her hair.

  “You were right,” I say, still watching him. “You were right.”

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I was.”

  He keeps going, the spoon trembling in his hand. He spills more than he swallows, but my mother and I stand perfectly still, not talking, not doing anything. We watch until we hear him scrape the bottom of the bowl. He starts to cry, pounding the spoon against the table.

  “You want more, baby?” my mother asks, moving toward him. “You can have all you want.”

  His napkin is soaked, sticking to his shirt. Globs of chocolate syrup hang down off his chin, his hair, even his ears. There is ice cream and chocolate syrup on the carpet, and it will be difficult to clean. But I say nothing. I know this is amazing, what I am seeing before me. It is just a small thing, him feeding himself, just a little something he has learned, something she has taught him.

  But if she could teach him this, then there is no telling what else is there, wrapped up inside him like a present, and outside of him as well.

  sixteen

  CHRISTMAS BREAK COMES AND GOES, but for Deena, it just stays. She gets sick on the first day of January and misses the entire first week back at school. Travis says she is faki
ng.

  When I stop by to give her her copy of Lord of the Flies for English, her grandmother answers the door, fully awake but squinty-eyed, wearing a dress with a zipper that goes from the hem at her knees to her throat. “Deena sick,” she says, shaking her head. “No play.”

  But Deena comes out of her room, pale and coughing, wearing one of Travis’s sweatshirts. “I’m so sick,” she tells me. “I feel like crap.”

  Her grandmother says something sharply to her in German. Deena apologizes.

  “Maybe it’s mono?” I ask. If it is, she won’t be able to come to school for weeks, maybe months.

  “Just the flu.” She swallows, looking pained. “Have you seen Travis?”

  “Not really. In class, I mean, and on the bus. But that’s it.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “Not really.” This is a lie. Travis and I got to work as partners in geometry today, taking a timed test. We beat Traci Carmichael and Brad Browning by five minutes, and high-fived each other on the way out the door.

  “Me neither,” she says, coughing again. “I’m here dying, and he doesn’t even care.”

  She’s sick again the next day, and again, it’s just me and Travis on the bus. He’s the oldest person on the bus now, the only junior, and also the tallest. When he walks down the aisle, the yarny ball on top of his ski hat skids along the metal brackets of the ceiling. “Someday…,” he says, sliding in next to me. “Someday I’ll have a car. When I’m old and have money, I’m going to find some poor kid who’s in high school and still has to ride the bus and give him a car.”

  “A car-lorship,” I say, making room for him.

  “That’s right. A car-lorship.” He takes off his hat, his curly hair springing out from under it. He has a red scarf, a hat, and mittens, but that’s it. All winter long, he has gone without a coat. I can’t tell if it’s because he thinks coats are stupid or because he doesn’t have one.

  Through the windows, we watch Adele Peterson’s red Honda Prelude pull out of the parking lot, Traci Carmichael in the passenger seat. Adele Peterson is a junior, and she lives next door to Traci and across the street from Libby in another brick house with too many windows. Adele got this car for her sixteenth birthday. I know this because Traci talked in a loud voice in geometry about how she was there when Adele first saw the car. Her father had parked it in the driveway the night before, and tied a white ribbon around it while Adele was inside sleeping like the little princess she is, her last night of being fifteen. And when she came out in the morning for school, there it was.

  “She came outside,” Traci said, talking just to Brad Browning, really, but loud enough for everyone to hear, “and she was like, ‘Oh my God.’”

  Adele gives rides to both Traci and Libby now, and they pass us on the bus when the road goes to four lanes on McPhee Street. They look like the Go-Go’s in a music video, the radio playing loud, the windows rolled down even when it’s cold out. Traci sits in the passenger seat every day, no matter what. Libby is taller than Traci, but she sits in the back. She has to put her feet up on the seat so her chin rests on her knees, and when they go past the bus, she looks up at us from the backseat like she is looking up out of a basement.

  “You notice it’s a red car,” I say, nudging Travis, and this makes him smile. We have expanded on our joke that Traci Carmichael is actually the Devil, sent down in the form of a fifteen-year-old girl to challenge good with evil. We have taken note that she wears colored contacts now: some days her eyes are blue; some days her eyes are brown. Travis says that at night, when no one is looking, her eyes turn red, and if you look directly into them, even in the daytime, you can go blind or crazy. This, Travis says, is how she won student president.

  “You know Deena wants a pair of colored contacts?” he asks me, pointing at his own eyes. “She wanted blue ones for Christmas.” He shivers, making a face. “They creep me out. Your eyes should be the color of your eyes.”

  I nod in agreement, although if I could make my eyes look different, not so sleepy-looking, I probably would. “Have you talked to her?” I ask. “She’s really sick.”

  “Yeah, she’s real sick. She was healthy all through break, you notice.”

  I think of Deena, wrapped in her quilt and coughing. I know she really is sick this time, but I don’t say this to Travis. She has faked being sick other times, and this is really the point. “She says you haven’t gone to see her.”

  “Not true. I went over there three days ago. If she even is sick, she’s probably contagious, right? I’ll get whatever she’s got.” He rolls his eyes. “I’ll catch laziness.”

  I say nothing. He picks at the green covering of the back of the seat in front of us. “She has to understand that I can’t just sit around with her all the time.” He puts one of his mittened hands over his eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you guys in a fight?”

  “No. No. But you know I’ve been talking to Goldman. I’ve been thinking about stuff, stuff I want to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” He reaches over me and slides open the window. “I want to go to fucking Australia.”

  “I hear it’s a wonderful town,” I say.

  He smiles again, the second time on just this bus ride, because of something I’ve said. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s just weird. I just keep thinking that this is always how it is. People try to drag you down.”

  I nod, waiting for him to say it. But he doesn’t.

  “You think Deena’s dragging you down?” I ask.

  He waits. “No. Maybe.” He glances at me again, lowering his voice. “This is going to sound weird, but, okay. I guess I keep thinking that this was how my dad felt when he left, you know? Like I’ve been so mad about it, my whole life, thinking he didn’t have to leave us just to stop drinking. But I don’t know. Maybe he did.”

  I think back to Mr. Rowley, when he used to fall asleep on our doorstep, setting his own clothes on fire. “You didn’t make him drink, Travis. You were just a little kid.”

  He nods, still picking at the seat cover. “I know. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Deena’s not a bad person, but it’s like, I don’t know. I want to get through school, maybe even go to college or something. But she’s mad because that’s not what I promised her six months ago. And now I can’t get it back. It’s like she’s locked that into her brain.” He has succeeded in pulling off an entire section of the seat in front of him.

  I have to work to keep my face the same. “You might break up with her?”

  “I’m just talking. Don’t say anything to her, okay? But whatever happens, it’s over when I graduate.” He looks up at me, and he doesn’t look away until I am embarrassed.

  “Anyway, I miss getting to hang out with just you.”

  Oh.

  And now, coming from the inside of my own head, there is a small, electric hum, steady and pleasant, and I think about the terrible night in the McDonald’s, the night Travis met Deena and they wouldn’t stop looking at each other, the force field between them lighting up their eyes.

  Perhaps this is how it feels to be inside of it.

  Deena lies on my bed, Lord of the Flies open and resting on top of her face. She is only on page fifty-four, and the test is tomorrow. “I hate this book,” she says, her voice muffled under the pages. “I hate it so much.”

  “It’s good,” I tell her. “And it’s fast, too. If you start reading now, you can finish.”

  She shakes her head under the book. “There aren’t even any girls in it. And there’s no way I can finish it by tomorrow.”

  I know in Deena language, this means she wants me to tell her what happens in the book so she can write her essay tomorrow. I am tired of doing this for her. I have done this for her with Billy Budd, Of Mice and Men, and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I am considering making something up this time, telling her that the book is about the boys on the island learning to be nice to one another, startin
g their own business selling seashells to people who stop by on their boats. But I look at her lying there underneath the book, her thin arms flailed out to her sides, and I know I won’t really do this.

  Lately, I have been feeling sorry for Deena. Her eyes are still large, but instead of thinking of them as just beautiful, now I think of them as looking a little bewildered. Her irises are such a deep, dark brown that it is difficult to tell where the pupils in the center end, and so this makes her look as if her eyes are dilated all the time, like she is one of the cats, trying to see in the dark.

  She takes the book off her face and sets it down on the floor. “Do you know why Travis is being such an ass lately?” She pouts, scooting the book farther away with her foot. “He’s always in a bad mood. He’s always busy.”

  I say no without looking up from my book, trying to make the moment of my answer pass quickly. I’m not doing anything to her. It’s just that things are starting to shift. Travis tapped on my window last night, and I am still sleepy because we stayed up so late, sitting on the roof in our hats and mittens, the knee of his jeans grazing against the knee of my leggings, maybe accidentally, maybe not. Which one is that one? Polaris. Which one is that one? He did not mention Deena once.

  She yawns, tracing her finger along the edges of one of my calendar posters, a blue-and-gold picture of the pyramids in Egypt against a cloudless sky. “He wouldn’t even help me with my homework tonight,” she says.

  “You don’t need Travis to help you read a book, Deena.”

  “Actually, I don’t need to read that stupid book. That’s what I don’t need.”

  “You’ll need it to graduate.”

  She looks out my window, frowning. It is almost spring, but a winter storm moved in last week, covering the ground with a watery snow that has already frozen into hard clumps, caked with dirt from passing cars. The landscape of Treeline Colonies has not improved much, and in the winter, I get depressed just looking outside, at the leafless hedges planted by the doors, the frozen drainage ditch by the highway.