The Center of Everything (5 page)

four

M
R
. M
ITCHELL IS GOING TO
pick my mother up for work early, fifteen minutes before my bus comes. She has to give me a key to wear around my neck so I can lock the door behind me, and she tells me not to answer the door, not for anyone. She thinks I will die the moment she leaves, that I’ll let people in from off the highway, turn on the iron to start a fire. I remind her that it will be summer soon, and then I’ll be home by myself all the time.

“Don’t even talk about that,” she says, her hand over her eyes. “I can’t think about that now.”

I’m excited because today is the day of the science fair, and I finally get to bring my lima bean plants to school. I used empty milk cartons for containers, and I made a label for each one with red Magic Marker on masking tape:
DARK, IN SUNLIGHT, DARK WITH MIRACLE-GRO
, or
IN SUNLIGHT WITH MIRACLE-GRO
. I planted the seeds less than a month ago, pushing the seeds into the soil with my finger, and already the two that were in sunlight are actual plants, the leaves like small, waving hands. The one with Miracle-Gro in the soil is a darker green, the stem two inches taller than the other ones. Before she leaves, my mother helps me tape them inside a box so they won’t get smashed on the bus.

Ms. Fairchild had been very particular that we should have a poster to go with our project, and it had to be a triptych, she said, a poster folded into thirds so it could stand up on its side. I got a piece of yellow poster board at the Kwikshop the same day I bought the lima bean seeds, and I tried just bending it into thirds, but it wouldn’t stay up. So I cut it into thirds and taped it with masking tape on the back. Now it stands up on its side when it’s unfolded, but it’s crooked.

On the board, Ms. Fairchild had written
HYPOTHESIS, OBJECTIVE, METHOD, OBSERVATIONS
, and
CONCLUSION
. I copied these same words onto the yellow poster board, and I like how they look, very official. Under
OBSERVATION
, I have made a graph charting the growth of each plant in inches per week. So even though my poster is crooked, I’m pleased with the way it looks, and also with the lima bean plants themselves. I am amazed that anything came out of the soil at all, green and healthy, something coming out of nothing. On the bus, I show my poster to a second grader. I explain the graph to her, opening the box so she can see the plants for herself. She says it’s nice, reaching into the box to touch the leaves.

The student with the best project gets to go to Topeka this summer to be in the state Science Fair, and if you win that, you get to go to Washington, D.C., and meet Ronald Reagan. I would love, more than anything, to meet Ronald Reagan, to see him in person, making his jokes. There is a chance that this could happen. I usually have the highest score on science tests. The only person who ever beats me is Traci Carmichael. She is smart, and she is also popular, and usually you don’t get to be both. But she has always been popular, and this year you can actually see it because of friendship pins. They are just safety pins with beads pushed onto them in different colors, and you are supposed to have your own design and then bring them to school in a plastic bag to give to all your friends. I don’t know who started it, but last year no one had them, and this year everyone does. Or the girls do. Boys don’t.

When someone gives you a pin, you stick it on your shoelace, so people will know you have friends. I don’t know who started it, but now you have to have at least one friendship pin if you’re a girl or it looks like no one likes you. I have two: one from Patty Pollo, one from Star Sweeny. Traci Carmichael has nineteen. I count them when she stands by my desk, sharpening her pencils.

She also has four different OP sweatshirts, with matching ribbons for her braids. Other people have one or two of these sweatshirts—Brad Browning has three—but only Traci has four. They are just normal sweatshirts, with hoods and sometimes pockets and palm trees painted on the back, but they say
OP
on them, and this is what matters. I asked my mother for one for Christmas, but she said no. You could get just as good a sweatshirt without a palm tree on it for half the price, she said, and who needs a goddamn palm tree in the middle of Kansas anyway? She said “OP” stands for Over Priced, in her opinion anyway. But it doesn’t. It stands for Ocean Pacific, and I wish I had one.

Traci Carmichael’s house is the last stop the bus makes in the morning. She lives in a redbrick house, a porch swing in front, twelve different windows on just the front side. I can’t imagine what it would be like to live there, in all that space. She doesn’t have any brothers or sisters. I picture Traci at one end of the house, having to call to her mother at the other end, her hands cupped around her mouth.

I know Traci’s mother, and I don’t like her because of registration day. There was a long line to sign up for lunches, and the Carmichaels got there after we did. When Mrs. Carmichael saw the line, she said in a loud voice that she didn’t appreciate the poor management that had led to such a long line on such a hot day, when some people were busy and had things to do. My mother and I were standing behind Robby Hernandez and his mother, and when they got up to the front of the line, Mrs. Carmichael was standing right next to them because of the way the line wound around itself. The Hernandezes had just gotten up to the counter when Mrs. Carmichael leaned forward, jingling her car keys to get the registration lady’s attention, and said, “Excuse me, but don’t you think the people who are actually paying for the lunches should get to go first?”

The registration lady said she didn’t know, and Mrs. Carmichael said it only seemed fair, and then Brad Browning’s mother raised her hand like she was in school and said she had just been thinking the same thing, the same thing exactly. They were both wearing sleeveless shirts and sweaters with the sleeves tied around their shoulders. My mother watched them talking, sweat trickling down her forehead, no sweater. I get free lunches too, and we were next in line.

The registration lady said she might as well finish up with Mrs. Hernandez, since she was already up at the front of the line, but by then Robby had turned what they were saying into Spanish and Mrs. Hernandez went straight to the back of the line, pulling him behind her, without anyone saying another word about it. So we had to go to the back of the line too. Mrs. Hernandez put on a pair of sunglasses even though we were inside, and I could tell she was crying, or at least trying not to, her mouth closed tight like she would never open it again.

When Traci and her mother got to the front of the line, my mother was too mad to talk. She stood very still, her arms crossed, her eyes trained on the back of Mrs. Carmichael’s head as if just by looking at it, she could make it explode.

So when the bus pulls up to Traci’s brick house with the porch swing and she isn’t there, I’m glad, because maybe Traci is sick and won’t be able to be in the science fair. Libby Masterson is Traci’s next-door neighbor, and she isn’t at her stop either, which makes sense, because she does everything Traci tells her to, and if Traci called her and said, “Don’t go to school tomorrow,” Libby probably wouldn’t.

I know you’re not supposed to be glad when other people get sick, but I have been sick of Traci for a long time. And it’s not like you can make someone sick just by wishing for it. Eileen says you can make sick people better by praying for them. But I don’t know if it works the other way.

I’m surprised by how much I like Ms. Fairchild, because she is old, and not pretty and her breath always smells like coffee. She has been teaching at Free State Elementary for twenty-nine years, which is longer than even my mother has been alive, and she has one dress for every day of the week, a Monday dress, a Tuesday dress, a Wednesday dress, and so on. She never mixes up the order. Star Sweeny makes fun of her for this, but I like it.

The first time I saw her, though, I thought,
Oh no.
I wished I would have gotten into Mrs. Blake’s class, the other fourth-grade teacher, young and pretty, with straight blond hair that curves under her chin. She got married just last year, and some of the fourth graders from last year got to sing “Going to the Chapel” in her wedding. She wears high heels and bright sweaters and gold earrings shaped like little suns or little snowflakes, depending on the weather.

Ms. Fairchild, my teacher, has big eyebrows and short black hair cut like a pilgrim’s. Her hair never moves, even in the breeze, and she does not wear earrings. When I first saw Mrs. Blake and Ms. Fairchild standing next to each other on the playground the first day of school, it was easy to think that Ms. Fairchild was unlucky.

But it turns out that Mrs. Blake is a screamer. We can hear her from our room, her shrill voice saying
Stop that! Stop that this instant!
When this happens, Ms. Fairchild walks across the room in her flat, soundless shoes to shut the door. She does not yell, and if we are good, she tells stories at the end of class about people who can turn into trees whenever they want, and pets that talk when their owners aren’t home. Sometimes she reads out of a book, and sometimes she doesn’t have to.

Today she is wearing a green dress with white buttons, the Friday dress. She looks at me carrying in my triptych poster and my box of plants, and she smiles. She tells me to put them on the shelf by the window. Star is already standing by the window next to a cookie sheet covered with aluminum foil and a mound of something that looks like dried mud.

“What is it?” I ask.

“It’s a volcano. I’m going to make it explode.” She doesn’t have a triptych, not even a regular poster. Star is always getting in trouble, getting sent to the office for saying “fuck” like it’s just a regular word you can say. She came to Kerrville from Florida last year because a hurricane blew down her family’s house, and they had to move to Kansas to live with her aunt and uncle. She has long blond hair, and she wears Dr. Scholl’s sandals and earrings that make it look like she has pierced ears even though she doesn’t. They are just tiny magnets, one on each side of her earlobes, strong enough to stick to each other through the skin. She let me wear them once, for an hour.

Star mostly spends her time with boys, because the girls in our class don’t like her. She makes things up, and you have to be listening carefully, or you won’t know. She said her cousin had been killed by a poisonous butterfly, right here in Kansas; she said she once saw a man lick an envelope and get such a bad paper cut on his tongue that it actually rolled right out of his mouth and landed on the floor, and that on the floor, it looked like a large strawberry, one you could pick up and eat; she said when they lived in Florida her dad had killed the most dangerous kind of snake in the world, the dreaded Monty Python, which could kill you just by looking at you long enough to make you look back. Patty Pollo and I are the only two girls in the class who will still talk to Star, and Patty doesn’t really count because she will talk to anyone because she says God loves everyone, even liars.

Brad Browning walks in, carrying a small flat board with a battery, wires, and a tiny lightbulb taped to it. He’s wearing a new OP sweatshirt, a purple one.

“What’s this?” Ms. Fairchild asks.

“It’s a circuit.” He looks up at her, blinking quickly. “My dad helped me.”

“Where’s your triptych?”

He blinks again. “My what?”

She frowns. More people come in, and the ledge by the window slowly fills up with projects. No one else has made a triptych, but they are good projects, some of them, better than mine. Stephen Maefield made an aluminum-can crusher. He says it can be used to crush aluminum cans, but also many other things. Vera Miles has a prism. She takes it out of her pocket and holds it up to the light, and a lovely rainbow appears on the floor, red blurring into orange blurring into yellow blurring into short bands of green, blue, and purple. I think it’s beautiful, but I can see Ms. Fairchild is getting mad because no one has a triptych.

Ray Watley has a piece of cardboard with dead bugs pinned to it with colored thumbtacks. They are labeled underneath, but they are not even the real names of the bugs. They say things like
BUG FOUND IN DRAIN OF BATHTUB
and
MOTH KILLED WITH SPRAY
. There are at least thirty bugs pinned to the cardboard, and when he shows it to Ms. Fairchild, she makes a face and says, “Just put it by the window.”

Libby Masterson shows up after all, carrying a small velvet bag with a yellow string around the top. It is full of rocks, she says, special rocks, and Ms. Fairchild asks her to take them out of the bag and spread them out on the shelf. Libby doesn’t have a triptych either, but the rocks are beautiful. Some are blue and glossy, smooth to hold. Some look like normal ugly rocks on the outside, but they’ve been sliced open like oranges, and inside they are lovely, full of lavender crystals that sparkle in the light.

Ms. Fairchild shakes her head. “Libby, did you just go out and buy these rocks? Did you get these at the mall?”

Libby looks down at her shoes, so many friendship pins on them you can hardly see the laces. “Yes, ma’am.”

“What’s your hypothesis?”

Libby frowns, looking at the rocks. “Traci’s on her way in,” she says. “Her mom gave us a ride. She’s helping her carry her thing in.” She doesn’t notice that I’m still holding one of the smooth blue rocks. I slip it into my pocket. There’s a knock on the door and a “Hellloooooo?” It’s Traci and Mrs. Carmichael, holding a rectangular-shaped wooden object between them. Mrs. Carmichael is wearing a sweater tied around her shoulders again, a red one that matches the belt on her pants, and she smiles at Ms. Fairchild, making a face like Traci’s project is too heavy for them to even carry. Ms. Fairchild knows Mrs. Carmichael because she’s in the PTA and because when there’s a holiday, she brings cupcakes for our class.

Ms. Fairchild moves across the room quickly and helps them stand the wooden thing on one end, and then you can see it really is a triptych, made out of wood, five or six times the size of mine, not crooked. There are actual hinges in between the panels, the kind you would see on a door. It still smells like sawdust. I try to imagine Traci working in the garage of her redbrick house, with a chain saw or some other large tool, cutting away at the wood, plastic goggles pulled down over her face.