The Center of Everything (3 page)

Ms. Kemp-Davie sighs.

It is then that she decides that she is going on that cruise after all. She has been at the Bunning Day Parade twenty-three years in a row. This year, she thinks, snatching up the glossiest of the brochures, they will have to get a substitute. She will be in the Mediterranean.

She is finally going see the Wonders of the Ancient World.

The redheaded family is still clapping along to “Louie Louie” when the first of the Pepperdine Motors cars comes into view.

“There's your mom!” Aunt Rachel says, but Ruby is already waving.

Mom waves back quickly and then returns her eyes to the road. Her car carries the mayor, who is sitting up on the trunk of a tissue-paper-flowered premium Mustang convertible, his legs where a passenger's back should be, his feet on the seat.

Ruby never puts her feet on the seat of a Pepperdine Motors car. She sits like her parents expect her to. Feet on the floor mats. Seat belt on.

Dad's car follows Mom's. He's driving three members of the city council, one of whom keeps turning to wave at people on the Delish side of the road and elbowing her fellow councilwoman in the ribs. This is not unintentional.

“Knock 'em dead, Rubes!” Dad calls as he drives past.

Ruby waves her cards at him. “I will!”

After Dad comes Ruby's teenage cousin Fiona and then her cousin Fletcher. Then Uncle Jeff, Uncle Troy, Troy Jr., Aunt Lynn, and finally Uncle David, who wanted to drive the Bunning Day Queen, but Aunt Lynn said he couldn't because he always got too chatty and didn't stay in the center of the road and the spectators got scared half to death thinking he was going to run them over. Aunt Lynn drove the queen. Uncle David got the town manager.

The only other time Ruby Pepperdine has seen more Pepperdine Motors cars off the lot and all lined up was for Gigi's burial. They drove, single file, from Saint Bart's to Bunning Cemetery in a line so long that Ruby's parents were already parking at the gravesite before the last of the cars—Mrs. Agnes Sigfreid's white Ford Taurus—was pulling out of the Saint Bart's lot.

If you had been standing at the edge of Cemetery Drive, you could have watched them all, all the cars. You could have looked in the windows. Seen the drivers. The passengers. Seen Gigi's old friends in the Pepperdine Motors vans that Troy Jr. and Fletcher drove. You could have seen their sad gray faces. How the ones at the windows peeked up to the sky, through the naked branches, to the places of blue patched between. Seen that their faces had questions on them, but you would not have known if those questions were about Gigi, or about themselves, or about whether the snow just might hold off after all.

You might cry at the cemetery. That would be okay. Everyone would expect you to cry there. Lucy, in fact, bawled so hard her dads had to take her home.

After that, for a few weeks, you might tear up or sniffle, and that would be okay too. But then Lucy would have moved on to thinking about her upcoming karate tournament, and the city council and the Night Owls and the Adelines and the Grannies would have gone on with their regularly scheduled meetings, and your parents would be back at Pepperdine Motors, working like they always did.

Actually, even more than they always did, since nobody else really understood how Gigi had run the service center and that guy Maurice they had hired was lazy and ate more donuts than the customers, and there was all that legal stuff about how Gigi's ownership shares were to be divided among all her kids and grandkids and even some of the employees who weren't related, which was something Gigi had never talked to them about, that was for sure.

By then everybody else was back to normal. By then, Ruby figured out, you were not supposed to be so sad.

So she wasn't.

Instead, she went underwater.

That's what it felt like, at least. Every action, every movement, took twice as much effort, as if it were happening in slow motion. Voices sounded farther away, and it took such work to make herself heard that Ruby stayed quiet.

Her family, being so busy, didn't really notice. “You okay?” Lucy had asked a couple of times, but after that she didn't bug Ruby about it. That's the kind of friend she was.

For almost three months Ruby stayed underwater, still doing all the things she was supposed to do. She had to go to Aunt Rachel's after school now, instead of hanging out with Gigi or Lucy, so she helped with her cousins while she was there. At home she did her chores—folding the towels and taking out the kitchen garbage—and did her homework and wrote her Bunning Day Essay. Some things she did a little better than she had before. You can fold towels more neatly if you are slow about it. Write better essays, too, sometimes.

It is possible that Ruby Pepperdine could have stayed underwater forever.

If it hadn't been for Nero DeNiro's color wheel.

When you are a sixth-grader at Bunning Elementary, you have Art with Mrs. Tomas, who has you make a color wheel. You can use whatever medium you want: crayons, pastels, paints, colored pencils. Your color wheel can be whatever size you want too. As big as a door or small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. You only have to follow a few rules. You need to include at least twelve colors. You need to keep them in color-wheel order, like a rainbow, with red turning to orange and then to yellow, green, blue, purple. And you need to identify in some way which colors are complementary.

Complementary colors are the ones directly across the color wheel from each other. Orange and blue, for example. Or purple and yellow.

Ruby's color wheel fit on a regular-size sheet of paper—though the only unlined paper she could find at home was light blue. It didn't matter, though. She did the assignment. She included twelve colors. She used lines—like bicycle spokes—across the middle to show the color complements, exactly like the example on Mrs. Tomas's bulletin board.

Most of her classmates did the same. Some of the wheels were a little messy. A few had clearly been done during indoor recess, when people suddenly remembered the assignment. Lucy had made hers poster-size, nearly big enough to cover the art table.

When Nero sits down next to Lucy, however, it is Ruby's color wheel that he notices. “Blue background, huh? Nice touch.”

“Look at this!” says McKenzie Monk, sliding Nero's color wheel over to Ruby.

Ruby had figured out Nero a long time ago. He always did his assignments in a way that nobody else would and asked questions that nobody expected—especially the teachers, who then had to stop whatever lesson they were supposed to be giving and go off on some weird trail that Nero had started. Ruby knows his color wheel will be different, and it is.

He had printed twelve pictures of himself in a T-shirt and pasted them in a circle, like a clock. With markers, Nero had colored in the shirts and added little thought bubbles that showed the complementary colors—with real compliments. “My, Nero. Don't you look dashing in red?” floated above the head of the green-shirted Nero picture. “Hubba hubba. Yellow brings out your eyes!” bubbled up from purple Nero.

Ruby had expected Nero's color wheel to be different, but she did not expect that it would make her laugh. Ruby laughs a real out-loud laugh, which is something you can't do underwater.

When she stops laughing, all the little Nero faces start to blur. And Ruby has a bunch of thoughts.

One of them is that there is something wrong with her eyes.

Another is that there is something wrong with her ears, because when Lucy says, “Are you okay?” it sounds like she's using a speakerphone.

And another is that maybe there is something wrong with her hands, because they have dropped her pencil to the floor, and even though it makes sense for her to bend over and pick the pencil up, her hands are not moving. They are just sitting there on her color wheel, covering up all the complement lines. And there are drops of water landing on her hands and on the painted squares of color, too, and the red and the orange are mixing all up into some other color that Ruby doesn't have a name for and for which there is no complement on her color wheel, and she knows she is going to get a bad grade now.

“Ruby?” That's Mrs. Tomas talking. “Ruby? Did you hurt yourself?”

She did not hurt herself. She hurts, she realizes, but she did not hurt herself.

“Would you like to go see the nurse?” Mrs. Tomas again.

Ruby would not like to see the nurse, but it does seem like she ought not to stay here. Like she should not be crying in Mrs. Tomas's art room and ruining her color wheel.

“Why are you crying?” asks the nurse, whose name Ruby doesn't know. She is just the nurse.

“I don't know,” says Ruby. As she says it, she realizes that there is only one thing she could be crying about, and that is Gigi. But she hadn't been thinking of Gigi. She was just looking at Nero's color wheel and then . . .

“Are you sad?” asks the nurse.

Gigi being dead is a sad thing, and thinking about it now makes Ruby feel sad—but she wasn't feeling sad when she started crying. Still, Ruby Pepperdine, who is good at figuring things out, understands that this answer will not be useful to the nurse. And so she says yes. She says that she had been thinking of her grandmother, who had died just a few months ago, and that she got sad.

The nurse asks a few more questions, like if she cries a lot and if she feels depressed and if she wants to talk to a counselor, but Ruby says no. All she wants is a few minutes more to cry in and then she wants to go back to Art and see if she can fix her color wheel.

And the nurse smiles and says take all the time you need, and Ruby says thank you. And she takes some time, which is not all she needs but is all it feels like she ought to take.

 

Later, after school, after Ruby is done helping Aunt Rachel with the girls and has gone home for supper, and done her homework, and taken out the kitchen garbage, she pulls her color wheel out of her backpack to see if she can fix it.

The color wheel is really two circles—an outside circle and a smaller inside circle. Like a car tire. Or a donut. She traces the circumference of each with her finger. Then she traces the complementary color lines, following red to green, orange to blue. All the way across. Diameter.

The lines all meet in the center and spoke out from there.
That's radius
, Ruby thinks.
The line that pokes from the center to the edge.

That is what happened to her today.

She got poked. She was just sitting there looking at Nero DeNiro's color wheel, and she got poked by a memory or a feeling, zipping along a radius line. Poke. Out of nowhere. Or somewhere, another speck of time. Poke. Poke. Poke.

Ruby knows the speck that poked her too. It was the reason she still feels so sad when everyone else has moved on. She had tried to forget about it, but today it reached out and poked her.

And she wishes there was a way she could reach back.

If you are ever selected Bunning Day Essay Girl—or Boy, for that matter (there have been more boys than girls, though in the past nine years the only boy to receive the honor was Connor Litigen, who later became a star football player and, later still, an accomplished shoplifter)—you stand in the circle in the square on Cornelius Circle across from Bunning Memorial Park. There is a statue in that park. You can see it clearly: Cornelius Bunning dressed in his captain's coat, one hand fixed to the wheel of
Evangeline
(not that there's really an
Evangeline
there, but the wheel is, and you can't help but imagine the rest) and one hand holding aloft a donut, perfectly round against the sky.

People come with folding chairs and blankets and ice chests to claim spots around you. Some pass through your sightline, but you can still keep an eye on the captain if you want. You can watch birds land on the wheel spokes and on the cap he wears tight on his curly bronze head. Squirrels climb up too, holding hunks of donut in their teeth. If you were closer, you could see the squirrels nibbling. If you were closer than that, you could see the details of Captain Bunning's coat. The pipe sticking out of his pocket. The carvings on his buttons. And you might even notice tiny flecks on the donut he holds. Sprinkles, it might look like to you.

Of course, if you were the Essay Girl—or Boy—or any kid in Bunning, you would know that those sprinkles are really failed wishes. You would know that each fleck was made by a quarter. Not just any quarter, but a 2001 quarter or a 2004 quarter or even a 1966 quarter if you are really old—a quarter from the year you were born, a quarter you had put in your pocket and carried to Bunning Circle on your birthday, a quarter you had held in that pocket until your hand was wet with sweat, until you had whispered your wish—your greatest wish—ninety times (a quarter of the number of degrees in a full circle, of course). A quarter you had held between your fingers while you squinted hard at that donut and held your breath and aimed and pitched straight like a dart or arced like a softball or spun like a skipping stone . . .

If the quarter went through the hole in Captain Bunning's bronze donut, your wish would come true.

Everybody knows that.

It is hard to whiz a quarter through the two-inch hole of a bronze donut suspended sixteen feet off the ground. Even those with the best aim usually ting their quarter against the donut edge or Captain Bunning's cold metal fingers. And you only get one chance each birthday. You can't stand there flinging quarter after quarter. One quarter, one chance.

Everybody knows that, too.

But if you did it—through luck or skill or fate or whatever—if you did it, your wish would come true before the next Bunning Day was over.

That, Ruby knows, is why she is standing in the circle in the square on Cornelius Circle. Because on her birthday, her twelfth birthday, her quarter had gone through.