The Center of Everything (24 page)

But if she isn’t lying, then Eileen is. And then that means that maybe Genesis is a story that somebody made up. But if you start to believe that, then you also might think there is a chance that no one is upstairs, wearing headphones and looking out for us, choosing good from bad. Maybe we are just on our own. But then if we aren’t, and you listen for a minute to what Ms. Jenkins is saying and start to wonder, and you happen to get run over by a bus just at that moment, well then.

It would be easier, maybe, if you just didn’t think at all.

My mother is doing this stupid thing all of a sudden where she is letting me do whatever I want. I have emphasized repeatedly to her that not just Eileen is coming to pick me up for the school board meeting, but Pastor Dave and Sharon as well, and people coming up from Wichita.

“The people from Eileen’s church,” I say again, slowly, so she can understand. “And Pastor Dave. From the Second Ark.”

“Huh,” she says. But she only looks at Sam. He has been coughing for the last three days, and she is trying to get him to swallow a spoonful of Robitussin. He doesn’t want it, and he keeps turning his head, swinging at her with his good arm.

“They’re coming to pick me up in a van,” I add, thinking this will somehow scare her more.

She turns to me, holding Sam’s arm away from her face. “Evelyn, are you saying you don’t want to go?”

There is something about her face when she says this that infuriates me. Maybe it’s just her nose, but I feel like she’s laughing at me, or like she will, the second I leave the room. One of the cats moves in a slow figure-eight pattern around my feet. “I’m saying I thought you didn’t want me to go anywhere with them. Geez. Make up your mind.”

She cups her finger and thumb around Samuel’s chin, forcing him to open it wide enough for the spoon. “If you don’t want to go with them, you can just tell Eileen. Just call her up and tell her you’re not comfortable.”

“I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that I’m not comfortable.”

Sam screams when he tastes the cough syrup, and tries to spit it back out, but she tilts his chin up and gives him some water from his sippy cup. “Well, good then,” she says. “Have a nice time.”

My surprise is a blue T-shirt that says
LIGHT
on it in white letters, so big on me it goes down almost to my knees. Eileen slips it over my head before I am in the van.

“Perfect,” she says, leaning down to kiss me on the cheek. “Just perfect.” She is wearing a T-shirt that is exactly the same, only hers says
BE
.

When she opens the door for me, the interior light comes on, and I see that everyone else in the van has a blue T-shirt also, each with a different word printed on the front. The woman sitting next to the window has a shirt that says
THERE
, and the man next to her has a shirt that says
LET
.

“Let…there…be…” I read, trying to sound excited.

“Light, kitten,” Eileen says, buckling her seat belt. “That’s you.”

Sharon is sitting in the passenger seat, and she reaches back to squeeze my hand. “Evelyn, honey, it’s so good to see you! Are you sure your mom doesn’t want to come?”

“I’m sure.”

Pastor Dave is in the driver’s seat, and he says the important thing is that I am here, especially since I am
LIGHT
. “We’d look pretty silly without you,” he says, winking at me in the rearview mirror. His shirt says
GOD
, and Sharon’s says
SAID
. He tells Sharon to show me the back. She leans into the aisle between their seats to show me a picture of a monkey wearing glasses and reading a book. There’s a slash through the whole picture, like in the ad for
Ghostbusters
. I reach behind my own shirt to feel if this picture is ironed onto the back of mine. It is.

“I like your hair,” Sharon says, turning back around so she can see me. “It’s really cute.”

This is a lie, what Sharon is telling me. My hair does not look cute. Deena convinced me to let her try to do a home perm on my hair, and the rods she used were too small. Now my hair is so thick and curly on the bottom that it sticks out like a Christmas tree, like Gilda Radner’s. It’s okay for her because she’s trying to be funny, but I’m not.

Deena and Travis are not coming to the school board meeting. Deena said no way was she going to school any time she didn’t have to, and Travis, pulling her onto his lap, even though we were sitting in the cafeteria and Dr. Queen had been on the intercom just the week before saying there should be no public displays of affection on school grounds, said he was sure I would be fine on my own.

But I won’t be fine. I can see that now, sitting in the van with all of them, Eileen’s thin arm around my shoulders, her hands tapping along to the radio on the back of the seat. I won’t be fine, and I’m not on my own.

I know that sometimes when you are really worried about something, it ends up not being nearly as bad as you think it will be, and you get to be relieved that you were just being silly, worrying so much over nothing. But sometimes it is just the opposite. It can happen that whatever you are worried about will be even worse than you could have possibly imagined, and you find out that you were right to be worried, and even that, maybe, you weren’t worried enough.

There are more people at the meeting than I expected, people in suits I’ve never seen before, people in suits with notepads in their laps. There are newspaper reporters, and also two television news teams, one from Topeka, another from Wichita. When we come in, a photographer for one of the newspapers sees our shirts and asks if we can line up together for a picture before the meeting starts. I tell Eileen I have to go to the bathroom.

“Sure, honey,” she says, smoothing my hair. “Go.”

I don’t really have to go, and when I get to the bathroom, I lock the door behind me and just stand there for a while, looking at myself in the mirror. The T-shirt is too big for me, and the blue is too bright. I look pale and washed out underneath it, smaller than I really am. The letters on the front are backwards in the mirror, and it looks as if it doesn’t spell anything at all.

Someone knocks lightly on the door. “Evelyn, honey?” Eileen asks. “Are you okay? The meeting’s about to start.”

I open the door, looking up at her face, her crooked mouth, her worried eyes. She is already opening her knitting bag to look for an aspirin or a Tums or whatever I might need. I could ask her for anything. I could say, “Eileen, give me all of the money in your wallet.” And she would. I could take the sweater she has been knitting for the last two months out of her bag and unravel it right in front of her, and she would only look at me and say,
Why are you doing this, kitten?
She has always loved me this much.

“I’m fine,” I say, trying to smile.

The gym is completely full by the time we get back. Every chair is taken, and now people are lining up along the walls, sitting on the floor. But Pastor Dave was able to secure eight chairs in a row so people would be able to read our shirts in one complete sentence, left to right. Sharon waves to us, pointing at two empty seats, her pink coat spread over them.

I see a lot of parents, but not too many kids. Robby Hernandez is in front of us with his parents and little brothers and sisters, a priest on one side of them, two nuns on the other. Traci Carmichael sits on the other side of the aisle, between her mother and father. Her mother is frowning at us, wearing a skirt and matching red jacket, her blond hair up in a french twist. Traci’s father wears khaki pants and a black sweater. His face is just like Traci’s, the same thin lips and steady blue-gray eyes. I can feel all three of them watching us, taking in the T-shirts.

You are on the good side
, I tell myself.
You are on the good side; they are on the bad. There is no reason for you to be embarrassed. Traci Carmichael has always been a bad person
.

The five members of the school board sit up front at a long table, facing a podium with a microphone. Dr. Queen is the first person to go up to the microphone, and even though she is usually frightening, people just keep talking and taking pictures, even after she has been standing there for a while, clearing her throat. She finally has to clap her hands together and say,
“Hey!”
and then the room goes quiet and everyone looks up.

She smiles, lowers her voice again. “I want to thank everyone for coming out tonight. If you signed up to speak, you’ll get five minutes, and I’ll wave this white flag when your time is up.” She waves a little white flag over her head, still smiling, as if she were at a football game or a parade. She is dressed up, I notice, wearing a blue suit, and her hair looks like it’s been recently clipped, the gray stripe exactly in the center. “I hope this meeting can be a productive exchange of ideas, and not a shouting match. I think we can do it if we try. My father used to tell me that it was important to show respect for others, particularly those you disagree with. I hope we can all remember that tonight.”

Everybody nods and seems to agree with this, but Ms. Jenkins is the next person to go up to the microphone, and before she even says anything, people forget all about Dr. Queen’s father and start booing. I hear Sharon humming “Onward Christian Soldiers” under her breath, and after a few notes, Eileen joins in.

“If you’ll let me speak,” Ms. Jenkins says, pushing her glasses back up on her face. She looks around the room, at our row of bright blue. I try to lean forward, hiding behind one of the nuns. “Listen, people,” she says. “I’m just trying to teach your children what’s commonly accepted in the larger scientific community, okay? Most scientists agree that
Homo sapiens
have been walking around on Earth for over half a million years, only after having evolved from simpler mammals through a process of natural selection. That’s it, pure and simple.”

Mr. Leubbe is sitting with his wife in the third row, and although Ms. Jenkins has said “
Homo
,” this time he doesn’t even smile. But people start to boo again, and Mrs. Carmichael has to turn around, her fingers to her lips, and say, “Let’s be adults.”

I feel bad for Ms. Jenkins getting booed up there, dressed like a teacher, in a brown jacket that doesn’t really match her pants, her hair sticking up the way it always does, so you know the people who don’t like her are going to make fun of her for that too. She scans the audience with her small eyes, talking about carbon 14 and the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, not even having to look down at her notes. She speaks slowly, the way you would talk to someone either very young or not very smart, saying “Okay?” after each sentence. Every now and then, Traci’s mother nods her french-twisted head and says, “Exactly.”

I understand that what Ms. Jenkins is saying makes sense, but if I nod my head, even once, I will be on the same side as the Carmichaels, and on the opposite side of Jesus and Eileen. I try to map it out in my head the way you can do with a story problem in math, hoping to find a space on the same side as Eileen and Ms. Jenkins and Mr. Goldman, but not with Traci and her mother. But there is no space like that. The lines keep crossing over one another. They would have to be curvy to make it work.

“I’m just giving facts now, people, okay?” Ms. Jenkins says, holding up her hands. “Those are just facts, which is what I’m concerned with, as a science teacher. I don’t barge into your churches Sunday mornings, so please, don’t barge into my classroom.” Dr. Queen waves the white flag then, and Ms. Jenkins walks away from the podium, but she keeps talking on the way back to her chair. “They’ve found fossils, okay? Nobody’s making this stuff up.”

Pastor Dave goes next. He begins his speech by thanking Ms. Jenkins for her illuminating introduction, but he says “illuminating” in a way that you know he didn’t really think it was. He tells the school board they are making an important decision, that they are standing at a crucial fork in the road.

“The wisdom of thousands of years and the faith in a higher power is this way,” he says, holding an arm out in one direction, “and some half-baked theory that tells children they come from slime is the other.” He holds his other arm in the other direction, so that both are raised, and he stands just like this for a moment, like he is getting ready to hug someone, or maybe do a back flip. The newspaper photographers take pictures of him like this, and I know it is because his T-shirt says
GOD
, and he is standing by himself, his arms spread wide like that. Tomorrow people will look at the newspaper and think that Pastor Dave thinks he’s God, not knowing that we’re all down here making up the rest of the sentence.

Mr. Goldman goes up to the microphone next, and the Carmichaels clap and smile even before he says anything at all. He is wearing a white shirt and a bright green tie, but it’s hard to tell if he tried to dress up or not because he looks exactly the same way he does in algebra, crisp and polished, smiling down at us with his straight white teeth.

“Good evening, folks,” he says. “Um, I know I’m a newcomer, but still, I have to say right off the bat that the fact that this is even a controversy is…flooring me.” He opens his mouth again to say something else, but for a moment, no words come out. “I’m…I’m having a hard time understanding how there can really be a debate in this day and age.” He looks at us as if there should be some reaction, but there isn’t. Everyone just keeps looking back at him, waiting. They don’t know what side he’s on.

“Of course we have to teach evolution,” he says. People catch on, start booing. But Traci and her father clap, and Mrs. Carmichael, to my surprise, puts two fingers in her mouth and whistles.

“Look,” he says, raising his voice, his hand over his heart, “I’m a religious person, too, okay? But you can’t pretend those fossils don’t exist. They do. You can’t tell your children they don’t and call it religion. You can’t call it anything but lying. What about truth? What about intellectual curiosity?”

Eileen touches me on the knee. “Evelyn, honey, what’s that man’s name?”

I know, right away. I know about last names now. I pretend I don’t hear her, even though she’s right next to me, her nicotine breath warm on my cheek. I keep looking at Mr. Goldman, and I am thinking about Anne Frank, about whether Eileen would say she doesn’t have any eyes and ears either.