The Center of Everything (20 page)

She leans in close to me, sniffing me, like I’m a flower in a vase. “Evelyn, have you been drinking?” “No.”

She holds my chin steady and moves my face from side to side, looking at me from different angles. She looks puzzled, almost amused, her eyebrows high on her head. “Evelyn. Have you been smoking pot?”

I laugh, turning away. But inside, I am scared.
She has extra-sensory powers,
I think.
She really does
.

She turns me back around, sniffs my hair. She steps back. “Evelyn?”

“I didn’t. God. Everyone else did. But I didn’t. It was too cold to roll down the windows.”

She sort of falls backwards when I say this. Luckily, the couch is behind her. “I’m having a nightmare,” she says. “Oh my God. You’re fourteen.”

“Honest, I didn’t. It was because of my bad aurora.” I point at my head, laughing. I can see how this is funny now, this whole night. You’ve got to be able to see the humor in things, I realize, and I do now. I really do. “Can you see it? My aurora? My evil vibe?”

Her eyes are slightly crossed, staring hard at me, but I can tell, just by looking at her, that she doesn’t see the humor in things. She is no longer amused. “You’re so grounded,” she says. “You don’t even know how grounded you are.”

“We’re all grounded, Mom,” I tell her, walking back to my room. I’m not sure what I mean by this exactly, if I mean anything at all. “We’re all grounded now.”

The next morning, she is standing over me, still in her robe. I try to close my eyes again, to make her go away, but she doesn’t. She walks back and forth alongside my bed, one hand in her hair, the other one stretched out in front of her, as if she were a blind person, feeling for walls.

“Okay,” she says. “Let me just start off by saying that even without the pot thing, I feel like I don’t understand you at all. I don’t know you anymore. I know I used to have this nice girl, this nice little girl. And now, you’re…” She stops walking and looks at me as if she has just realized that I am really from Mars, or Russia. “One minute you’re reading the Bible for three hours a day in your bedroom, which is weird, okay? And then you come home last night, and you’re high. You’re talking about
vibes.
”

I pull the covers over my head. She pulls them back down.

“So, as your mother, I’m having a little trouble keeping up, Evelyn. I was wondering if you could help me out. Is this a completely new personality, or just an extension of the old one?”

I start to close my eyes again, but she claps her hands in front of my face.

“I didn’t smoke anything. I told you that. I was just in the car with them, and the windows were up. It was cold out.”

She nods. “Who were the boys?”

I shake my head, saying nothing. If I tell her it was Travis, she will call Mrs. Rowley. More humiliation. Even more. It is unthinkable.

She waits. But I wait too, and we both know, from experience, that I can wait longer than she can.

“Well,” she says, “whether or not you want to tell me, we still need to talk.” She sits down on the foot of my bed, rubbing her eyes with her thumbs. “I didn’t think I’d have to talk to you about this yet. But you’re out with older boys, doing drugs, and I don’t know where you’ve been.”

“Mom, I didn’t smoke anything.”

She makes a quick, cutting motion with her hand, like a conductor telling an orchestra to stop playing. “Just let me talk, Evelyn. Okay? Shut up for a second, and let me talk. I want to tell you that I’ve learned some things the hard way, especially lately. And I would rather you not learn them the hard way too.”

I am horrified, suddenly realizing where this is going. She is going to talk to me about sex. About morals. My mother, adulteress, welfare queen, not a horse but a whore, is going to talk to me about morals. I stare at her, waiting, wide awake now. This should be good.

She looks up at the ceiling, at the star chart above my bed. “I know you think I’m a bad person, Evelyn. You’ve made that clear. Maybe you’re right. I’m aware that you’ve seen me do some pretty stupid things, and that of course makes this conversation that much harder.” She looks at me. “But I’m still your mother, and I still care about you, and I’m going to tell you something that I wish someone would have told me when I was your age, whether you like it or not.”

“Can I eat breakfast first?”

“No. When I was your age, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what I was worth to other people. Exactly how beautiful I was. Like if I had a boyfriend who loved me, or said he did, it was going to fill up this worry in me, this nagging in me that I wasn’t worth all that much.”

Samuel starts to cry from their room. “You woke up Sam,” I say.

She waves her hand, her eyes still on me. “He can wait. Just this once, he can wait. Look Evelyn, I’m not even talking about virginity and all that crap. That’s not what’s so precious, okay? It’s you. You are precious. I know it doesn’t always seem like it. I know that other people may make you feel like you aren’t. And I even know that maybe there have been some times when I have made you feel like you aren’t. But you are, okay? You are.”

I say nothing. I am still glaring at her, still rolling my eyes. But in my head, I am again wondering if she really does, in all her evilness, somehow have ESP, or a surveillance antenna on top of her head that follows me wherever I go, or a mind that can decode my cryptic reference to the bad aura, eyes that can see right through me.

“I know we fight a lot right now, and I have to tell you, Evelyn, in my opinion, you’ve been pretty hard to take as of late. But you’re precious to me. And you’ve got to see yourself as precious. If I would have known that at your age, if I would have really been able to feel that, things would have been very different.”

“You mean you wouldn’t have had me.”

“I would have had you later.”

“But maybe it wouldn’t have been me anymore.”

She waves her hand again. “And maybe it would have been. Water under the bridge.”

“And then you wouldn’t have had Sam.”

She looks irritated. “Right. You get my point. But here you are, and I love you. I know you’ve been pissed off at me for a very long time, and maybe I deserve it, but still, I want you to know that.” She is looking at me, waiting for a response. I try to avoid her eyes, to avoid having to reply to all of this one way or the other. My head feels fuzzy and light, and I don’t have a response. But she is looking at me, waiting, and even though I am usually the one who can outwait her, something tells me that this time, she will not look away until I answer, even if we both have to sit here all day.

“Okay.”

“You’re sure? You’re sure you understand what I’m saying?”

I nod. “Yes. God. Are we done?”

She tells me I am grounded. No McDonald’s for a month. After that, she says, we’ll try it with a curfew, and see how it goes. Samuel is still crying, louder now, and she starts to move toward the door, then stops and turns around. Without warning, she dives toward me, a firm hand on each of my cheeks, and kisses me on the forehead.

After she leaves, I do not go back to sleep. I can still feel where she kissed me, a tickle on my forehead, just above my eyes. I raise my hand to wipe it away and then stop, decide to leave it.

twelve

I
T’S SPRING NOW, AND
T
RAVIS
and Deena are still in love. They have to be holding hands at all times, as if one of them is really a helium balloon and will float away if the other lets go. Travis is especially obsessed with Deena’s hair, and even when I am standing right there trying to talk to one of them, he has to reach over and push it out of her face or pick imaginary objects out of it in a way that reminds me of a television special I once saw about chimpanzees.

Deena and I still eat lunch together, just the two of us, but even then she looks at the clock on the wall and says things like “Only three hours and forty-five minutes until I get to see Travis.” Next year, we’ll all be in high school, and they’ll get to be chimpanzees together all day long. No more interruptions.

But Deena is my only friend. Star left last year, at the end of seventh grade, because it took that long for the insurance money to come through and to build a new house to make up for the one that the hurricane got. After she moved away, she wrote me letters for a while, on pink stationery that smelled like Love’s Baby Soft, her loopy handwriting, with large hollow circles over the
i
’s, telling me how happy she was to be back in Florida, how sorry she felt for me in the snow and the cold. “It’s so much fucking better here!” she wrote. She sent me a picture of herself, standing on the beach in a lime green sundress and matching sunglasses, her skin tan, her long hair cut short. She wrote once a week, then once a month, and then the letters stopped, but I thought of her when I was sick of the snow in the winter, a lime green Star standing in the warm sand, making up more lies to tell, the tide swirling around her feet.

But Betsy, the lunch attendant, says Star was pregnant when she went back to Florida. I tell her no, that’s a lie, because I still have the picture of Star in her sundress, standing on the beach. But Betsy says it sometimes takes a while for a pregnancy to show, especially on a body that tiny, only thirteen years old, and that I can’t possibly know these things because I’m still an innocent. Betsy says Star’s parents didn’t know and didn’t know and didn’t know, and when they did know, her father wanted to know who who who and Star told them it was her uncle back in Kansas, and that he had made her.

And they couldn’t believe it. Neither could the teachers in the teachers’ lounge. But Betsy the lunch attendant could.

“It happens,” she says, shrugging. “It happens all the time. Count yourselves as lucky.”

The uncle cracked when they called, Betsy tells us, crying to his wife, saying he was sorry, saying she had made him do it, that she had egged him on since they moved in, but that he was so sorry, so very sorry.

What a load of crap, Betsy says.

So they let her get rid of the baby. An abortion. But then, Betsy says, get this: it turns out she’s pregnant again, and this time, she can’t blame it on the uncle, because she’s been back in Florida now for over a year. This time she can’t cry and say none of it was her fault. But still, she’s only fourteen, so messed up from what happened in Kansas, and her father wants her to be able to get rid of this baby too, and they’re fighting it out in courts, and nobody knows what will happen.

When I tell my mother this, she stares at me for a long time, her hand over her mouth. I ask her if she remembers Star, and she says, yes, oh my God, of course.

The summer of 1986 is the summer of the cats—too many of them, with nowhere to go. People have been leaving dogs and cats in the field across the highway from Treeline Colonies, I guess because they don’t want them anymore. I’ve seen this happen. Cars stop, and someone pushes a dog out the door, or someone gets out and puts a blanket down in the middle of the field and hurries away, and the blanket starts to move after the car is already gone. The dogs try to chase cars, and sometimes they get smashed flat on the highway with the possums and the skunks and the raccoons, and sometimes they stand around the parking lot of the McDonald’s, eating out of the garbage and barking until somebody calls the pound.

My mother has been getting madder and madder about this, and lately she has been going over the line. She runs outside now when she sees it happening. “Irresponsible!” she yells, throwing rocks with one hand, holding Samuel with the other. Her aim is bad, and she’s always too late to actually hit anyone, but still, she shouldn’t be trying. When she comes back in, she says things like ‘“How the fuck can people do that? Don’t they feel bad?” Even though it’s pretty obvious already that no, they don’t.

I tell my mother that maybe she should spend her time worrying about bigger problems, people for instance. There are children starving in Ethiopia. You see them on the news. My mother says she does feel sorry for the children in Ethiopia, but it doesn’t help them out for her to not care about the animals getting run over right in front of our own house. It’s not like you have to choose which one to be worried about, she says.

My mother doesn’t like my French teacher, Mrs. Blanche, because she lets her lab, Daisy, have a litter of puppies every year. Last autumn, Mrs. Blanche sent each of us home with a card that said
FREE PUPPIES TO A GOOD HOME
!, her phone number on the bottom. My mother saw the card, and I had to grab it out of her hands and tear it up into little pieces so she wouldn’t call Mrs. Blanche and tell her to get Daisy fixed.

“Tell her I’ve got a whole field of free puppies,” my mother said, pointing across the highway, Samuel’s eyes following her hand. “Tell her to come scrape them off the highway and we can see how she likes free puppies then.”

I relay this message to Mrs. Blanche, in much softer language, and she tells me, in French, that she lets Daisy have puppies because it’s nature, and because she wants her children to witness the miracle of life.
“La miracle de la vie!”
she says, her hands cupped under her pointy chin. And, she adds, in English, Daisy is a good breed. People want her pups, and are willing to pay for them. The mixed breeds, she says, are the problem.

My mother doesn’t believe this. “The miracle of life,” she mutters, hoisting Sam up in her arms. “That’s great. Tell her to come down here and I can show her the miracle of death. What a smart woman. I’m so glad she’s your teacher.”

“She just teaches French.”

Now every time we see a dead animal in the road, my mother points at it and says, “Look, Evelyn, ze meeracle of life!,” trying to do a French accent.

But some of the cats make it across the highway. They hide in the crawl spaces under the stairs of the apartment buildings, creeping around only at night, their bones jutting out of mangy fur, their green eyes shining if you catch them with a light. We hear them mating sometimes, and my mother and I agree it sounds like someone getting murdered. In the morning, garbage bags lie scattered in the road, torn and gutted in the night for milk cartons and TV-dinner trays.

So now someone has started poisoning them, and it’s pretty gross. They go into convulsions before they actually die, their cat legs sticking out straight and stiff, flies buzzing around their mouths. When this happens, my mother pulls the sheets down over the windows and tries not to look.

“People make me sick,” she says, no French accent this time. “They really do.”

She gets mad about things more now, even about things that have nothing to do with her. She is still mad about the nuclear bombs, and now she’s also mad about the Contras. The Contras are in Nicaragua, fighting the Communists, and Ronald Reagan says they are like America’s founding fathers and that we have to do whatever we can to help them. I think so too. We can’t have the Communists in Nicaragua, or they will come into Texas and that will be the end. The Contras are good, and the other people, the Sandinistas, are Communists.

My mother says no, Evelyn. You can’t believe everything Ronnie says. It’s not that simple. The Contras are bad, too. They blindfold people and shoot them, just for being in the way, even old men and little children. They kill nuns and cut off women’s arms in front of their children, and we shouldn’t be giving them a dime.

I don’t know what to think. Maybe that’s what founding fathers have to do. Maybe the mothers were Communists. But still, it seems pretty mean, and if I could see them doing this, cutting off the arms of mothers, I would make them stop. Even if the nuns and mothers were Communists, you can’t go around doing things like that.

On the first day of ninth grade, Deena and I walk past two dead cats on the way to the bus stop. One is an orange tabby, the other black with white spots.

“Grody,” Deena says, turning away. “Gross out!”

But I feel bad just leaving them there, lying in the road. I push both of them into the grass, and stretch them out so it looks like they are just sleeping, except for the bloodstains around their mouths. Deena says I will get rabies.

“Fleas too,” she adds.

Travis is already down at the bus stop. When we walk up, he takes his cigarette out of his mouth and pulls Deena close to him. They get started right there, hands groping, eyes closed, at the bus stop at seven-thirty in the morning, right in front of all the little kids with their brand-new Big Chief tablets and unsharpened pencils squeezed against their chests, right in front of all the cars passing on the highway. One car honks.

“Are you guys sure this is the best place for that?” I ask, shifting my book bag to my other shoulder. “It’d be a shame if you misplaced your tongues on the first day.”

They stop and look at me, both of them smiling. But they are still holding hands, Travis’s thumb rubbing Deena’s palm. They are so in love that everything is funny, especially me.

“It’s kind of gross,” I say, looking down the highway.

Travis winks at Deena. “Sorry, Ev.” He takes out another cigarette, and Deena asks if she can see my schedule.

“Hey!” She wraps her finger around the belt loop of my jeans, pulling me closer. “We’re all in algebra together at the same time. All three of us! That’s so cool.”

“You’re still in algebra, Travis?”

He looks at me, long and steady, the flicker of hurt there for me to see. “Yes, Evelyn. I am.”

I say nothing, pretend to just watch for the bus.

“It’s not that it’s hard,” he says. “I actually don’t mind algebra. I just don’t like going.” He frowns. “Sellers is a terrible teacher. I’m serious. I passed all the tests last year, but he won’t let me out because of poor attendance. He has to let me out this year, though. He has to. It’s getting ridiculous, being in there with all those little kids.”

I want to point out to him that the little kids are ninth graders, and that Deena is in ninth grade, and that right at this moment, he has his hand in the back pocket of her jeans, which really, if you think about it, looks dumb at any age.

But I don’t. I don’t say anything. I have already hurt him once this morning, and that’s enough. If I do it again, we would all know that it was just my unhappiness talking, the scratching claw reaching out from my own sad little heart.

Travis was right about Mr. Sellers. He’s not a very good teacher.

He looks smart: he has gray hair and glasses that make his eyes look larger than they really are. On the first day, he wears a three-piece suit, with a used Kleenex poked in one of the buttonholes. He has a glass of water on the chalk tray, which he does not actually drink out of, but uses to occasionally rinse his mouth out, spitting the water back in the glass after swishing it between his teeth.

We watch him do this, saying nothing.

“My name,” he tells us, looking at us with his enlarged eyes, “is Mr. Sellers, and I have been educating young people at this institution for over thirty years.” He stops and picks up the glass of water, and still we are silent, half hoping he will gargle again in front of us because it is so disgusting that we still can’t believe he did it the first time, half hoping he won’t for the same reason. “So I know all the tricks,” he says, wagging his finger. “Don’t try anything funny.”

“Like this?” Ray Watley asks. He waves his hands up by his head, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. It is supposed to be a joke, and though Ray’s jokes are usually bad, this time it’s a little funny. But Mr. Sellers doesn’t laugh. He turns around and stares at Ray with his bug eyes until Ray looks back down at his desk.

He starts writing equations on the board. He doesn’t talk very much, and when he does, we can’t really hear what he’s saying because he is still facing the chalkboard, so we all just sit and watch.

Class goes on like this the next day, and the day after that. Since he never turns around, it’s like study hall, and we can do what we want. People talk, play hangman. Ray takes naps, his arms flat out in front of him as he drools on his desk. I do my homework, and so does Traci Carmichael. Twice, Travis gets up and walks out without Mr. Sellers’s noticing. Deena follows, and he doesn’t notice that either.

But after the first test that even I get a C on, people get mad. They are not mad because I got a C; they are mad because they are failing. Deena, who would have a hard time in algebra with a normal teacher, is terrified of Mr. Sellers. She tried raising her hand to ask a question once, but since he was facing the board, he didn’t see. She sat there with her long, thin arm raised for fifteen minutes, her hand hanging this way and then that, then slowly going back down, giving in to gravity until it fell on her desk with a thud.

Traci Carmichael is the one to finally say something. “Mr. Sellers?” she says one day, tapping on her desk with her pencil to get his attention. She has cut her braids off into a fluffy bob, and she wears glasses too now, gold-rimmed. They make her look smart, like a young journalist.

He turns around, startled, like he has forgotten we are there.

“Mr. Sellers, I don’t understand some of the things that are going to be on the test on Friday. I don’t know what we’re even working on right now.” She holds her hands up, gesturing at the rest of us, sitting silently around her. “
No one
knows what we’re working on right now.”