The Center of Everything (7 page)

Victor Veltkamp hands me my glasses, the frames bent, the lenses unbroken. “Good job,” he whispers. “Nice work.”

But the other kids only stare at me, at the blood trickling down my chin now, soaking through my white shirt that was new from Eileen for Easter. Randy turns off the country music. We ride along with no sound, except for Traci’s crying. The bus stops in front of Juvenile Corrections, and when Travis Rowley stands up to get off, I don’t look up.

Randy does not say good-bye to Traci when she gets off at her stop, and he doesn’t say good-bye to me when I get off at mine. I forget the trophy, leave it on the bus.

My mother is alarmed and very nice to me at first. She says, “Oh, baby, what happened?” in a worried voice, and before I can answer, she is pressing a wet washcloth against my mouth. But when I tell her, she narrows her eyes, and takes her hand away from the washcloth so I have to hold it myself.

“You started it?”

“She was saying things.” I touch my cheek lightly, marveling at the swelling that is already there, the tenderness. I will have a swollen lip, perhaps a black eye.

“But you hit her first?”

I say nothing, keeping the washcloth up against my mouth. My mother groans and covers her face with her hands, looking at me from between her fingers.

“And I’m kicked off the bus for a week.”

This part of the story seems the most difficult for her to take in. I watch red, comma-shaped splotches form on her throat and cheeks. “Go stand on the other side of the room, Evelyn. Hurry.”

“Why?”

She exhales, slowly. “Because if you don’t, I may kill you.”

I go to the other side of the room. She walks around the kitchen, her arms moving up and down like she is trying to fly. She counts to ten three times in a row, all ten numbers coming out in just one breath.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Great. How are you going to get to school?”

“I don’t know.”

“Great.”

“Mr. Mitchell?”

She laughs, but there’s no smile in it. “I don’t think so.” She puts another washcloth under the faucet and presses it against my mouth. “He can’t even give me rides anymore, okay? We’re screwed.”

Something is wrong. Usually when I get home, she still smells like Peterson’s. But now she is already wearing jeans and the gray sweatshirt, her hair wet from the shower.

“Why can’t he give you rides?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I take the washcloth off my lip, looking down at the small circles of blood seeping into the cloth. If there was a fight between my mother and Mrs. Mitchell, my mother, younger and taller, would probably win. But maybe not. Mrs. Mitchell’s diamond ring would cut across my mother’s face, leaving blood, a long, deep scratch. My mother has no rings, and would have to fight bare-handed.

“Evelyn, keep the washcloth up.” She pushes my hand against my face hard enough to make my head jerk back, and she moves her hand away quickly and goes back to the other side of the room. We look at each other, saying nothing.

five

I
WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT
day, when she isn’t so mad, to tell her I won the science fair. We are in the bathroom, and she is still wearing her nightgown, dabbing stinging peroxide on the cut on my lip, but when she hears this, she stops and almost smiles.

“Out of the whole class?”

I nod.

“Then stick with lima beans, Rocky,” she says, touching the cotton ball to my lip. “Stay out of the ring.”

She says she will figure out a way for us to get to Topeka when the time comes, and I shouldn’t worry about that at all. But there is no way to get anywhere right now, to work or to school, so when Monday comes, we both just stay home. It should be fun, but it isn’t. All day there is a steady, gray rain that makes me want to sleep. We eat peanut butter and Wonder Bread. We watch game shows that run into each other until the whole day is gone. The school calls in the afternoon, telling her I’m not there, wanting to know why.

“She’s sick,” my mother tells them, switching the phone to her other ear.

They want to know what kind of sick. My mother frowns and looks down at me. “Carsick. She’ll be back next week.”

We walk to the Kwikshop across the highway, and the manager tells my mother no, they aren’t hiring, but maybe something will open up in the fall. She buys milk and a box of oatmeal. At home, she calls restaurants, hotels, and banks. She tells secretaries and answering machines that she can’t type, but she can talk talk talk, to just about anybody, and that she will also need a ride to and from work. She will learn to type, she says. She is a fast learner. No one calls back. After a while, she stops calling and just looks out the window, watching the rain.

On Tuesday, Mr. Mitchell knocks on the door, holding a bag from Taco Bell. “Hi,” he says, his eyes on my mother’s face.

We eat together at the table. He tells me he made the tacos himself, and that the people at Taco Bell let him come in and use their kitchen anytime. My mother laughs, her hand over her mouth. I understand he is not supposed to be here, that his being here is somehow illegal. But he’s here anyway, like Mrs. Mitchell stopped existing, not just here, but anywhere. She didn’t win the fight after all. She made him choose, and he chose us.

The next day, he comes back, this time carrying paper sacks of groceries from his truck, holding a red umbrella between his head and his shoulder. He is wet with rain and breathing hard by the time he gets to our door. “Ho ho ho,” he says, his hand on top of my head.

I take one of the bags from him and look inside. Canned green beans. Frozen broccoli. But also ice cream, chocolate syrup. He lifts a head of lettuce out of another bag, two bars of soap.

“You don’t have to do this, Merle,” my mother says. She takes a dishtowel and dabs at the rain on his cheeks. They are standing close to each other, my mother looking up.

“I want to do this,” he says. He takes the rest of the groceries out of the bag, lifting them out and setting them down carefully, the broccoli, the beans, the soap, the ice cream, the paper towels, and everything else until it is all spread out on the counter before us like a display in a window, so we can see just how much he means this, how much he wants to help.

With the groceries, it’s better, but I still don’t like missing school. I miss the library, and the large, lit globe in Mr. Pohl’s room. I miss science. Ms. Fairchild showed us a movie the week before about a plant growing, the film sped up so much that you could watch the plant grow from a seed to a tall, leafy plant in less than a minute. It looked like it was exploding. I think about my lima bean plants, dying on the ledge by the window, no one giving them water.

I’m worried Ms. Fairchild knows about the fight. Traci is probably not missing school, because her mother has a red station wagon with a bumper sticker that says
PROUD PARENT OF AN HONOR ROLL STUDENT
, and I have seen her drop Traci off in front of the school on the mornings when she misses the bus. I tell my mother this, and she frowns and says life isn’t always fair. Or maybe it is, she adds, because I hit Traci first. Just walk away next time, she says. Turn the other cheek.

Wednesday afternoon the phone rings, and it’s Mrs. Carmichael.

“Do you want to speak to my mother?” I ask.

“No, Evelyn,” she says. “I want to speak to you.” She wants to know if I know that Traci had her clothes stolen from her gym locker while she was playing volleyball today, including her heart-shaped gold necklace that her grandmother gave her for Christmas. Someone, Mrs. Carmichael says,
someone
, walked into the girls’ changing room and broke the lock on Traci’s locker, and walked right out with everything. Did I know that?

“No,” I say. I am thinking about the smooth blue rock I took from Libby’s rock collection. This is all I have. “I didn’t.”

“Can I speak with your mother?”

My mother gets on the phone and listens for a while, frowning, looking at me and then out the window. She tells Mrs. Carmichael that yes, I have been home all week. No, she says, there is no way I could have gotten to school. Yes, she is sure. Absolutely. Yes. Good-bye now. Good-bye. She hangs up while Mrs. Carmichael is still talking.

“What a bitch,” she says. “What? Does she think I’m lying? Maybe someone else hates her brat.”

But I know that I am the only one who hates Traci Carmichael. And it’s hard to imagine that anyone would really be able to walk right into the girls’ locker room and break the lock to steal her clothes, that someone could be that fearless. There is a chance she herself hid them, just to get me in trouble.

The next morning, it’s still raining, a cool breeze lifting the sheets pinned to my window. I stay in bed late because I can, because there’s nothing else to do. I am tired of not being able to go to school, staying home all day and watching game shows.

There is something red on my floor, some unfamiliar cloth. I sit up in bed, squinting. There’s a palm tree on it.

In an instant I am awake, kneeling at the foot of my bed. A red OP sweatshirt lies by the foot of my bed, folded neatly on top of a pair of white A. Smile jeans. There is also a pair of red Keds, friendship pins covering the laces.

I stare down at the shoes, scared to touch them. They shouldn’t be here in the first place, and it seems like they could easily disappear, or maybe explode. There are smiley faces drawn on the white rims of the shoes. I unfold the sweatshirt carefully, tracing the line of the palm tree with my finger. It feels like I did steal the clothes now. My fingers twitch with fear and excitement. There are people who sleepwalk, people who get up in the middle of the night and do crazy things without even knowing it themselves.

The gold heart necklace is in the pocket of the jeans.

I pull back the sheet from the window and look out across the parking lot to Unit B. Mr. Rowley is sitting on his balcony even though it’s raining, drinking coffee and looking down at the pavement.

I was out on a bathroom pass once and saw Travis Rowley walking through the empty hallways, his fingers running up and down the locks of lockers, like someone who plays piano and doesn’t need to look at the keys.

I start to watch for him more carefully. He does not have to go to Juvenile Corrections on Fridays, and the bus drops him off at three-thirty, Randy waving at him from the window. He stops in at the Kwikshop and reappears a moment later, crossing the highway, his arms crisscrossed over his jacket like he is trying to keep something from falling out. Later, he comes back outside and sits on the stairs of Unit B, his curly head bent over a
MAD
magazine, a large Coke from the Kwikshop by his side.

Travis Rowley, thief, breaker of locks, my own dark avenger and first true love.

I hide Traci’s clothes in my bottom drawer, covering them with my old dolls, headless Barbies, the pink-and-white dress that I had to wear to Wichita. But late at night, when I’m sure my mother is asleep, I take them out again. I slip the Keds on my feet and walk around my room in slow circles, the friendship pins glinting in the glow of my nightlight. My own shoes are getting small on me, my toes curled against the canvas, but Traci’s shoes fit perfectly. I wish I could wear them to school, but even wearing them in my room seems dangerous. There is a chance that Travis Rowley did not steal the clothes for me after all. Perhaps Traci planted them here, and she will show up with her mother and the police, and they will fling open the door and say, “A-ha!”

And in the daytime, I have to be careful of my mother, now that she is home all the time, putting away laundry in my room instead of leaving it on the table, opening my door in the mornings to raise my window shade and kiss me on the forehead, saying, “What’s the story, morning glory?”

I realize this is what my mother is really like when she is not tired. When she worked at Peterson’s with Mr. Mitchell, she had to wake up at six every morning. By seven o’clock at night, she was yawning, doing the dishes, standing over the sink with her eyes closed. Now she sleeps in until eight, and she cooks the eggs and bacon that Mr. Mitchell bought, humming along with the radio. She plays hangman at the kitchen table with me after dinner, and we go on walks when it isn’t raining. I was so sad two days ago, but now my mother is in a good mood and there are groceries in the cabinets and Traci Carmichael’s clothes are hidden in my drawer because Travis Rowley stole them for me, and now I am so happy I can’t even remember why I would ever be sad.

When the weekend comes, it’s still raining. My mother gets out her old records—Fleetwood Mac and Elton John. I like the song “Rocket Man,” about the man who travels in a rocket, but he’s sad because he misses the Earth so much and he misses his wife. I wonder what that would be like, to be up in a rocket, so far away from the Earth that you would miss it. Being up by the stars would be pretty in its own way, but there wouldn’t be any trees, or deer, or thunderstorms. Eileen says when she leaves the Earth she won’t miss it at all because she’s going to a better place. But I think I would miss it a lot, even on rainy days like this.

When I go back to school on Monday, there is only a small cut on my lip, already healing over with a maroon scab, and the black eye is gone. When Ms. Fairchild sees me, she puts her hands on her hips and shakes her head. “My goodness, child, where have you been? I’d given you up for dead.”

“Sick,” I tell her.

She looks hard at me. “Five whole days you were gone. That’s too much. Tell your mother if you miss this much again, she needs to call me.”

Traci Carmichael is watching all of this from her seat in the third row, wearing a white OP sweatshirt, not nearly as nice as the red one folded in my bottom drawer. She looks at Libby Masterson, but neither of them say anything. She still has a scratch on her neck, and I am glad about this.
I did that.

We do worksheets, story problems about what time trains will arrive if they are going so many miles per hour. It’s not a contest. Ms. Fairchild doesn’t say anything about the winner being whoever finishes their worksheet first. But today I know I must be the first one done, especially because it’s math, and the answers are always the same. It has nothing to do with people feeling sorry for you. I finish my worksheet, and when I stand up to turn it in, I look at Traci’s paper and see she is only halfway done.

Ms. Fairchild looks over my answers. “Good. Good,” she whispers. “The others are still working, so here’s another worksheet.”

I go back to my desk, and I can see Traci is hurrying now, looking up at me quickly. There.

When the bell rings, Ms. Fairchild touches me on the arm. “Would you stay after, dear? I’d like us to have a little chat.”

“I can’t miss my bus,” I tell her. It seems to me we have already chatted.

She nods once. “This will only take a moment, Evelyn. Keep your seat.”

When everyone else has gone, she sits down in the chair next to mine, crossing her legs. The chair is too small for an adult, and she wears black stockings even though it is late May. Sitting there, smiling, her black legs crossed over each other, with her black helmet hair, she looks a little like a spider.

“You know the science fair is in July,” she says. “In Topeka.”

“I know.”

She nods at me, squinting. “I just want to make sure you’ll be able to make it, Evelyn. Your mother will be able to take you?”

“She will.”

She looks at her fingernails. She bites them, and they are pale and ragged, sickly looking. “It’s a big honor to represent the whole school. You wouldn’t want to miss it. I’d be glad to take you myself.”

I watch her carefully, wondering if she feels sorry for me, if she knows I don’t have a father. “I don’t need a ride. My mom said she would take me. Thanks though.”

I stand up to go, but Ms. Fairchild shakes her head and points back at my chair. “Evelyn, I know your mother cares about you in her own way. But I want to be very clear with you about something.” She pauses, recrossing her legs so I can hear it, nylon sliding against nylon. “You have to understand that you’re not the same as she is. You’ve been given a little gift.” She points to the place where her hair touches the edge of her glasses. “Right here.” She taps twice, and I think of the fairy godmother in
Cinderella,
tapping pumpkins with her wand exactly two times, causing stars to shoot out, wishes to be granted. She leans forward, her breath smelling of coffee, her teeth straight but yellowed. “People who don’t have this gift often don’t understand how important it is to nurture it, to help it grow. Do you see what I mean?”

Out the window, I can see the long block of orange school buses pulling up to the curb, engines idling, doors sliding open. I have been given a little gift.

“So I hope your mother can take you. But if she can’t, you still need to go. You need to call me up, and I’ll come get you.”

I nod. She takes off her glasses, still looking at me. I take off my glasses too, because for a moment I think she is going to place them on my eyes, the way you place a crown on someone’s head when they become queen.
Welcome to being smart. This is how it goes
. But she only rubs her eyes and puts them back on, yawning. “You can’t miss any more school, Evelyn, not with your potential. Your mother is very nice, but you’re not the same kind of people. You have a different future in front of you.” She taps the side of her head again. “You’ve been blessed.”