The Center of Everything (2 page)

beams from his beloved
Evangeline

 

—even as the cards bounce off her fingertips and scatter on the sidewalk.

“Oh, Willow!” Aunt Rachel cries.

“It's okay. I've got it,” Ruby says, but there are a couple of cards she can't reach without leaving the circle in the square.

That couldn't really mess things up, right? What kind of wish would go flooey just because somebody stepped outside of a chalk circle? Who knows, maybe she is
supposed
to step outside the circle. The truth is, she still hasn't figured all this wish stuff out yet—even though she has spent the past four days trying.

Ruby is careful not to wish that someone would tell her what she is supposed to do. She has read enough about wishes to know that greedy wishers always have things backfire on them. People end up turning their daughters into gold or getting sausages stuck forever on the ends of their noses. No way will she mess up her real wish by asking for something else.

As much as she'd like to talk to someone about how uncertain she's feeling, she doesn't wish for that, either. Besides, who would listen now? Not Nero, she bets. Certainly not Lucy.

Ruby grabs the last of her index cards and steps back into her chalk circle. Too bad Ms. Kemp- Davie hadn't suggested she number the cards. Okay, which came first? The one about the empty field or the bit about
Evangeline
?

Whoop-whoooOOOooop!

“It
is
coming!” Willow pushes in front of Ruby to stand at the curb. She cannot see the parade yet. No one near the circle in the square can. Officer Imus is still on Elm Street, whooping his siren to warn people out of the road. It will be two more minutes before he makes a right onto Cornelius Circle, and another five before he makes his way around Memorial Park to the spot in front of the circle in the square. From there he'll continue to Main Street and turn right again, whoop-whooping for another mile, until he reaches the rec center, where the parade ends and where the floats will remain on display until after The Hole Shebang—the Bunning Day fireworks show—that evening.

By then Ruby's wish will have come true.
Everything will be fixed
, she thinks,
and nobody will be mad, and everything will be back to how it is supposed to be.
Of course, technically, the wish has until midnight to work, but if she has it figured right, things should happen long before that.

Then again, ever since the day Gigi died, few things are going like Ruby figures they should.

She shuffles through the cards, searching for the one that begins her essay—the one with
destiny
and a chocolate fingerprint.

 

Some say it was destiny. A brave sea captain, a freak storm, and a platter of puffy dough balls.

 

Across the street, there are people sitting on the milk crates now: a family of redheads is eating donuts and fanning themselves with parade programs. Beyond them, Ruby can see Nero at the Delish tent. He is tall and skinny, with knobby shoulders that make it look like his T-shirt still has a clothes hanger in it. His dark bangs are tucked up under a Delish cap, and he is clacking a pair of metal tongs like castanets, filling waxed bags with old-fashioneds and crullers and éclairs.

Somewhere near the parade check-in area, Lucy is still fuming—Ruby's pretty sure about that. But Nero doesn't seem upset. He is wearing the same carefree smile that all the DeNiros wear, watching Mr. DeNiro juggle five cider donuts in his plastic-gloved hands.

Maybe Nero has forgotten about yesterday. Maybe he isn't mad after all.

Ruby watches as Mr. DeNiro tosses the donuts one-two-three-four-five high in the air, one after another, and Nero catches them one-two-three-four in a white waxed bag, each donut landing exactly where it is destined to be.

Until, that is, Nero glances in Ruby's direction, and his DeNiro smile slides away. Donut number five drops not into the white waxed bag but at his feet.

Destiny: squirrel food.

Twenty yards behind Captain Imus's whooping patrol car, four flag girls from the high school carry a wide banner with blue felt letters that spell out
BUNNING DAY.
Behind the banner is the rest of the flag squad: six girls in matching sleeveless sweaters and pleated skirts. In November they will wear those sweaters over turtlenecks and wave their flags at football games and wish that they were warmer, but now, in the late-June heat, the girls have lobster-red faces and each is using her own favorite curse word to swear she will never try out for flag again.
Next year
, thinks their captain, Talia O'Hare,
I am joining show choir instead.

Behind the flag girls marches the school band, playing a nearly recognizable version of “Louie Louie.” Behind the band are (in no particular order) eighteen floats, nine Pepperdine Motors convertibles (decorated with Ruby's tissue-paper flowers) carrying a slightly larger number of local dignitaries (undecorated), ten more bands, the Greater Bunning Sweet Adelines, a set of Shriners in tiny cars, thirty-four horses, two Brown Swiss calves, three Scout troops, an array of antique tractors, a shopping cart brigade from the local food co-op, four different daycare groups, two dance schools, one gymnastics studio, a couple of unicyclers, several veterans organizations, Okeda Martial Arts (where Lucy is), the Hungry Nation Youth Theater (where Lucy would have been otherwise), a formation of belly dancers, two magicians, the Bunning Humane Society Dogs of Distinction, a drumming group, the Night Owls, a dozen fire trucks from all over southern New Hampshire, and—near the end of the parade—a replica of Bunning's original one-room schoolhouse, settled on a flatbed trailer and equipped with a powerful sound system.

In years past Ruby would be looking forward to seeing Lucy doing karate moves or watching for whatever group Gigi was marching with. But this year Ruby is thinking about the schoolhouse.

It is the schoolhouse that will stop in front of the circle in the square, in front of the Bunning Day Essay Girl or Boy.

Ruby has seen this happen eleven times— though she only remembers the past five or six. She knows that when the schoolhouse trailer stops, the school librarian, Ms. Olive Kemp-Davie, is supposed to hop out of the pickup truck that tows it, open the schoolhouse window, and turn on the amplification system inside. She will take the microphone out of its case and use it to introduce this year's Essay Boy or Girl, who will step up onto the float and, in 180 words or less, say something about the Legacy of Captain Cornelius Bunning.

Ruby sorts her note cards again.

 

Some say it was destiny.

 

She hasn't really read her essay since she printed it on her cards. She was so busy trying to make sure she had things figured out. Now she thinks that maybe she should have practiced a little. How would Lucy read the words?

 

Some
say it was destiny?

Some say
it
was destiny?

Some say it was
destiny?

 

Some say it was destiny that Ruby and Lucy became best friends.

They were alphabetical pals in kindergarten. O came before P, so Okeda sat next to Pepperdine at circle time. Destiny.

They stayed friends, too, even when they didn't need to be alphabetical, sitting side by side at lunch and being field-trip buddies and partnering for class projects. They were together so much that teachers sometimes called one Luby and the other Rucy. Neither one minded.

In the summers Ruby would help Lucy learn her lines for whatever Hungry Nation Youth Theater production she was in, and they would stay up late at each other's houses, telling secrets and making plans for what they would do when they grew up (most of which involved moving to New York, where Lucy would be a famous actress and Ruby would be her agent and help her learn her lines).

Ruby knows that if you had somehow met them individually, you wouldn't have pegged them for friends. Probably, you would have guessed Lucy was pals with McKenzie Monk and those girls, because, really, Ruby and Lucy are quite different from each other. Lucy is tall; Ruby is average. Lucy has dark skin; Ruby is pale. Ruby has every-color hair, which means that most people call it brown, the same as her mom's. Lucy's hair is copper colored and curly. Neither of her dads has hair like that. Mr. Okeda's hair is as black and shiny as his lawyer shoes. Mr. Fisch has no hair at all, but there is a picture of him at Lucy's house from when he was a boy. In it his hair is yellow and he is wearing a karate outfit.

Not an outfit, Lucy would say. A
gi.

Ruby knows that Lucy will be wearing her
gi
today as she walks in the parade with the other students from Okeda Martial Arts. Mr. Fisch always has his students march in the parade, doing kicks and stunts. This year Lucy will be breaking boards—Mr. Fisch will hold them up and Lucy will kick them. She'll get to yell, too. Not
Hi-ya!
like in cartoons.
Kiai!
is what she'll yell. Loud. You have to put your spirit into your words, Lucy says. She knows because she read it on a poster in the Okeda Martial Arts lobby.

Lucy says other poster things too, like “Move and the way will open” and “Mind like water,” which is about being calm and having reactions that are appropriate to the circumstances—like if you drop a pebble in a pond, the ripples are the right size for the pebble. Drop a big pebble, you get big ripples. A small pebble, and the ripples are smaller. Mr. Fisch says Lucy is a big rippler. An overreactor.

Ruby is an underreactor, Lucy says. So they are like yin and yang—which are not the names of twin zoo pandas, like Ruby thought at first, but two opposites that fit together.

Lucy is dramatic; Ruby is calm.

Lucy is impulsive; Ruby takes time to figure things out.

Ruby does what she is supposed to do, and Lucy? Well. “I count on you for balance,” Lucy always says.

Which is why they are friends, Ruby thinks.

And which is why she hasn't told Lucy how out of balance she has felt since Gigi died. Instead, Ruby pretended things were normal. That she was normal.

And it worked.

Mostly.

Until yesterday.

“We're
supposed
to be best friends!” Lucy had said. Yelled, really. Her eyes had been slits, her voice as loud as it had ever been on the Hungry Nation Youth Theater stage. “I tell you
everything
and you didn't tell
me
anything!”

Ruby's stomach hurts remembering what she had said back. “Mind like water.”

“This is not a stupid pebble, Ruby Pepperdine! This is a meteor! You have hurled an enormous
meteor
into the lake of our friendship. You've caused a tsunami!” Lucy had balled her fists and dashed away, and Ruby was left bobbing stupidly in her wake.

Ruby has to hold Willow's hand to keep her from hopping out into the street. Six years ago, when Ruby was Willow's age, Ruby had been the one hopping, though Aunt Rachel did not have to hold her hand. Even back then Ruby was good at figuring out what she was supposed to do.

In preschool, for example, she figured out that the good kids played in the classroom, and the really bad kids got time-outs and calls home and didn't get to play much at all. But the in-between kids? The ones who were mostly good but might be having a “difficult moment” got to go to the special playroom with the climbing wall and the cushiony floor and the things to swing around on until they cooled off a little. The preschool teachers didn't need you to be perfect—just mostly good. So Ruby had just enough “difficult moments” to get to play in the playroom, but not so many that she'd have to sit in the hall or lose stars from her behavior chart.

In third grade she figured out that if you put your hand up in class when everyone else did, you probably wouldn't get called on, but you also probably wouldn't get called on when nobody put their hand up either. Teachers mostly picked the kids who never put their hands up then, and only once had Ruby been called on when she didn't really want to be. (It was a question about state capitals. It always seemed to her that Detroit should be the capital of Michigan, not whatever it was. Lansing?)

She also figured out how to write a pretty good essay for the Bunning Day Essay Contest. Anybody could've, really. All you had to do was go back and look at the past winners.

First of all, you had to say that Cornelius Bunning was great—brave or smart or an original thinker, it didn't seem to matter which one. And you might mention how glad you were to live in a town named after him—because you wanted to be brave or smart or an original thinker too. It would be good if you could say something funny about donuts. Maybe a pun like they're “holey original” or like “you have a ‘hole' lot of opportunity here.” You could say “what goes around comes around” or something like that. And your essay had to be about a minute long and the sort of thing people knew to cheer for when it was over. The kind of thing that you could read out loud from the back of a parade float and not bore everybody to death. One hundred and eighty words. That's it.

 

It is nearly the end of the school year when Ms. Kemp-Davie sets the winning essay down on the stack of travel brochures that always covers her desk in May. It is an anonymous submission like the rest and requires a code key to determine the identity of the writer. The result surprises her, and she has to double check to make sure she has not been distracted by the brochure photos of cruise ships and ancient ruins. But, no, she is correct. The essay belongs to Ruby Pepperdine.

Ruby is a sweet kid and a great reader, but Ms. Kemp-Davie has always thought of her as one of those middle-of-the-pack children, and for a moment she can't help but wish that it was Ruby's friend Lucy who had won the competition. Lucy does theater in the summer, doesn't she? She could have given a dramatic reading at the parade, full of emotion and spirit. Instead, Ruby Pepperdine will probably read her essay like most of the past winners: too fast and too quietly for anyone to hear.