The Center of Everything (9 page)

The kids from the Playground Day Camp are Hula-Hooping down Cornelius Circle. Twelve kids, sixteen hoops. Some are rolling them. Some whirl them around their middles or on their arms. One girl, Serendipity Olmstead, spins a hoop around one ankle, skipping over it with every step. She has been doing this since the beginning of the parade, and even though her legs are super tired, she will continue to kick and skip all the way around Cornelius Circle and up Main Street and into the rec center parking lot, because she has a bet with her brother Chance that she can, and when she succeeds, Chance will have to call Serendipity “Your Majesty” for a whole week.

“I want a circle!” Carter-Ann yells.

“It's a Hula-Hoop,” says Willow.

“We have one at home in the garage,” Aunt Rachel says. “Maybe Ruby will get it out for you at the cookout. I hope I have enough ribs.”

Every year after the Bunning Day Parade is over, the entire family—Mom's side and Dad's—gathers in Aunt Rachel's backyard, where Uncle Jay has spent the whole day preparing a cookout feast. Eve-ryone eats and talks about who was in what car and what the mayor said to the Bunning Day Queen and whether any of the city council members spoke to any of the other city council members until, for a little while, everyone stops talking and chews. And then they talk some more, and then Gigi brings out ice cream and a huge pan of her famous apple crisp.

Ruby wonders if Uncle Jay will be making the apple crisp this year. She doubts it. Gigi didn't leave behind a recipe. It was one of those things, like how to fix a Fiat or where to find the Seven Sisters constellation in the night sky, that Gigi knew by heart.

Ruby sorts through her note cards again. She should have learned her speech by heart. Maybe she was supposed to have. Maybe she was supposed to say her speech exactly right—not a stumble, not a mistake. What if she messed it up? Would her wish get messed up too?

 

Then he came here. It was just a big field and some woods and not many people, but he was tired of drifting around. He

 

Across the street the red-haired family bob their heads in time with Serendipity's Hula-Hoop, much the way people who are watching Olympic ski jumpers lean forward or bowlers curve their bodies as their ball arcs toward the pins.
Why do people do this when they know it won't change what happens?
Ruby wonders.

This is not the sort of thing Ruby used to wonder. But this wish has her thinking about things like that. This wish, and being around Nero.

Once, Ruby remembers, Nero even questioned Mr. Cipielewski about a circle being 360 degrees.

Mr. Cipielewski taught them about degrees in math. A triangle has 90 degrees. A circle has 360.

“What,” Nero had said, “if you only have 359 degrees?”

“Then you do not have a circle,” said Mr. Cipielewski.

“What do you have?”

“Nothing,” said Mr. Cipielewski. “Nothing we have a name for, Nero. Nothing we're going to learn about in sixth grade.”

But it couldn't be nothing, could it? All that effort of going around and around and just missing things by one degree? Then it would be
nothing?

Ruby peeks over the bobbing red heads and at the Delish tent, just as she has seventeen times before, every time there is a break between parade entries or someone walks by with a bag of donuts. Sometimes she sees Nero looking at the parade and sometimes he is looking at his dad and one time he was looking straight up at the ceiling of the Delish tent. But always, every time, he is not looking at Ruby.

Which is her own fault.

A week ago he had been just another boy in her class. Then a few days later they were friends. Or about to be friends. Like 359 degrees of a friendship. But that was before Ruby said what she said.

Was it possible that now they really were nothing?

When Ruby enters the children's room at the library, she finds Nero at one of the computer carrels. “Look at this,” he says, pointing to the wiki page on the screen in front of him. Right in the center of the page is an illustration of a torus. It looks like a blue donut with a small black spot on its side.

“It has a hole poked in it,” Ruby says.

“I know. Sit down.” The other computer carrels are full and the rest of the chairs have elves and Orc-lords in them. Nero scootches over. He is skinny enough that they can share a seat, though his shoulders bump against hers and threaten to knock her off the chair.

Nero clicks on
ANIMATE
, and the illustration on the screen changes. The small black hole opens wide and stretches back over the rest of the torus, like it is swallowing it. The lining of the torus—which is orange in this picture—flips out and the blue side disappears. “The outside becomes the inside, and the inside becomes the outside,” Nero says.

Ruby watches as the hole stretches and the torus turns inside out again. It's kind of cool, except that . . . “No matter which side it's on, it's always got that hole poked in it.”

Nero takes his eyes off the computer and looks at Ruby through his bangs. “There'd be no way for it to go inside out otherwise. The hole is what lets it change.”

Poke. Poke.

They are sitting very close together, and Nero's eyes look bigger than usual. “Is that the time travel part?” Ruby asks quickly.

“It's related. I think.” Nero scrolls to another animation. This time the torus is white. The left side swells and stretches while the right side gets skinnier, until one side looks as fat as a coffee cup and the other as thin as its handle. “That's homeomorphism. The shape can stretch, but it keeps certain properties—it's still a tube-y, torus kind of thing.”

Ruby watches as the shape slowly returns to its original donut form. “What does it have to do with time travel?”

“Okay, so, how I read it is this: Einstein said that time is relative, right?”

Ruby has heard that before—on a coffee commercial. “Right.”

“And time moves in a line, right?”

Ruby has seen timelines. There is a timeline mural in the lobby of city hall.

“And tori—they're like lots of lines in a donut shape, right?”

Like the webbing illustration. Like Spider-Man Donut. “Right.”

“Okay, so, what this says is the space inside a torus can stretch in one place and shrink in another, and that shifts the relationship of the lines to one another. Some get closer and some get farther away. And space and time work together and change together, and, um, after that I don't really get it.”

Ruby reads the words on the computer screen. She doesn't really get it either.

But at the end of the page there is a quote from Albert Einstein. “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity.”

That
she gets.

Her last minutes with Gigi sped by so fast, they were hardly minutes. But since Gigi died, since Ruby made her wish, they have stretched so much that it feels like they are still happening. In her thoughts. In her dreams. In the poke, poke, poke of right now.

“It's all coming together,” Gigi had gasped. Ruby hears it like it is happening again right now, like she is in her living room standing in front of the recliner. “Listen,” Gigi says. And Ruby hears her, exactly as if she had stepped back in time.

This is why Ruby does not notice the door to the children's room swing open.

It is why she does not see Lucy come in.

It is why she is startled out of her seat when Lucy says “Aha!” in an Inner Stepsister voice. “This is where you sneak off to!”

Ruby gets to her feet. Her voice is wobbly. “Didn't you see my note?”

“Your note said you were coming here to return your books. It didn't say you were coming to meet your boyfriend.”

“He's not my boyfriend.” He is
not
her boyfriend. He isn't. They hardly even know each other. “We hardly even know each other.”

“But instead of helping me like you promised, you come here to be with him.”

Ruby feels a rush of heat on her face.

“We're working on her wish,” Nero says. Ruby's hand claps to her mouth, even though she did not say a word.

“Her
wish?
What are you talking about?”

Ruby does not look at Nero, but out of the corner of her eye she can see that he is looking at her.

“You're supposed to be my best friend,” Lucy snaps.

“I am.” She cannot lose her best friend. She cannot. She and Lucy have always been friends. Rucy and Luby. She can't lose Gigi and Lucy. Not both.

“But you told your
boyfriend
about some important
wish
and you didn't tell me?”

“He's not my boyfriend,” Ruby sputters. “We're not even friends. He's just here at the library at the same time I am.”

Over at the round tables, an elf shouts with glee. “You are dead, Panoptocles! You are an ex-druid.”

“There's no wish,” Nero says. “I made it up. I'm weird like that.”

Lucy's eyes burn on Ruby's, then she turns and stomps away.

Without a word Ruby follows, hurrying down the stairs and out of the library. “Wait!” she calls. She finally catches up to Lucy on the lawn.

“What wish?” says Lucy.

“I made a wish. On my birthday. It's about Gigi.”

“Go on.”

“I can't tell you,” Ruby says. “It might—”

“But you can tell
him?
”

“I didn't—” Ruby starts to say, but Lucy cannot hear her.

“He didn't even know Gigi!” Lucy yells. “
I
did. We're
supposed
to be best friends! I tell you
everything
and you didn't tell
me
anything!”

Ruby searches for something to say, something that has calmed Lucy down before. “Mind like water,” she says.

“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 runs off, but Ruby does not know if she should follow. She has no idea what she is supposed to do. Where she is supposed to go.

She turns and looks back at the library, up to the second-floor window where the children's room is—just in time to see Nero turn his back and walk away.

Ruby shuffles through her index cards one more time.

She reads her essay one more time, although when the sixth and seventh cards stick together, she doesn't notice.

Maybe it is supposed to be this way. Maybe in order to get her wish she has to be friendless. It doesn't seem particularly fair, but maybe Captain Bunning isn't about fair. She didn't say he was fair in her essay. She said he was famous. She said he built a school. She said he started the town.

 

from the woods, he salvaged beams from his beloved
Evangeline
and built a school.

Then he went traveling again—this

 

The redheaded family must be getting uncomfortable on their milk crates, because most of them have stood up. Ruby cannot see the Delish tent now.

When her wish comes true, it will be worth it. It has to be worth it.

Things will be back how they were supposed to be.

Ruby will have listened and Gigi will have explained. Or something. And then Ruby wouldn't have needed to make a wish at all. And Lucy would be her friend. And Nero—well, probably she wouldn't have gotten to know Nero. Or be Essay Girl, either. And maybe there are some other things that might be bad about it. Or different—

If only she had a sign to tell her things were going to work out. Not a formula or a question or a webbed-over donut. A sign. A clear, simple, un-mix-up-able sign.

Most of the year Mr. Victor Gomez is accounts manager at New Hampshire Bank and Trust. He wears a dress shirt and tie, flat-fronted pants and cordovan shoes. His desk is tidy. Shipshape, people might say, in part because next to his desk lamp is a bottle with a ship in it.
Evangeline.
Mr. Gomez loves
Evangeline.
He also loves Captain Bunning.

This is why, on Bunning Day, Mr. Gomez does not wear his dress shirt and tie, his flat-fronted pants and cordovan shoes. Instead, Mr. Gomez puts on black boots and saggy wool pants and a dark wool coat with brass buttons. He pulls a wool cap down tight on his head and slips a pipe between his teeth. When he looks in the mirror, he does not see Mr. Gomez, accounts manager. He sees Captain Cornelius Bunning. He can almost smell the sea.

Perhaps this is why, while all the other members of the Bunning Historical Society's parade contingent are sweating in their almost historically accurate period costumes, Mr. Gomez looks cool as, well, an ocean breeze.

All around him, ladies dressed as Leticia Bunning carry pails filled with donut-shaped coupons that will grant the bearer free admission to the Bunning Historical Society Museum.

All around Ruby, kids wave their arms frantically, calling, “Me!” and “I didn't get one!” This despite the fact that every year, every school-aged one of them will visit that museum at least once on a field trip. Later, when the parade is over, this coupon, along with the bumper stickers for state senate candidates and some kale-flavored candies from the food co-op, will be left on the floor of their parents' car.

Mr. Gomez does not mind the frantic children. He sees the parade through different eyes, imagining it, as he always does, a welcome parade for Captain Bunning—a cheering crowd in awe of his mastery of
Evangeline
in the face of a freak storm. Through Mr. Gomez's eyes, it is possible to see this crowd without its soda cans and helium balloons. It is possible to see them in jerkins and laborer's cloth, some of them still holding the tools of their trade. With Bunning-like majesty, Mr. Gomez waves at them. The farmer and his wife. The miller and his redheaded family.