The Center of Everything (6 page)

Willow corrects them both. “He's just a kid. Real-life racers have helmets.”

That is why we love you
, Lucy had said. Because she was Ruby Pepperdine
through and through.
But what if she wasn't the Ruby they knew? What if Lucy and Aunt Rachel and everybody else found out she had an Inner Ruby who had totally messed up? Then what would they think of her?

When her parents are at Pepperdine Motors, Ruby goes to Aunt Rachel's to help out with the girls. Aunt Rachel keeps a laptop on a desk in the living room, and sometimes Ruby uses it to play games. Willow usually watches, and sometimes Carter-Ann does too.
How come that guy with the mustache won't let you get the banana?
Carter-Ann might say, and Ruby will explain.
Well, how come you can't touch the oranges?
Willow will ask, and Ruby will explain that, too. All through the game, questions and explanations. It keeps her cousins out of Aunt Rachel's hair, but it is not the best way to win a game.

It turns out that it is not the best way to learn about a torus, either.

“That's a donut.” Carter-Ann points to a drawing on the computer. Ruby has opened a wiki page, and the screen is covered in blue things and red things and long definitions and a few diagrams, like the one that Carter-Ann has spotted.

“An old-fashioned,” Willow says in the know-it-all voice that Carter-Ann hates. “The kind that tastes like cake.”

“Actually, it's a torus,” Ruby says.

“Does it taste like cake?” Carter-Ann asks.

“It's a shape. It doesn't taste like anything.”

Carter-Ann folds her arms in disgust. “It should. Everything should taste like something.”

“Air doesn't taste like anything,” says Willow.

“It does too,” snaps Carter-Ann. “It tastes like snow.”

“Does not!” says Willow.

Carter-Ann reasserts that it does too, and Willow counters with her belief that it does not. This continues long enough for Ruby to read the torus definition on the screen. She reads that the plural of
torus
is actually
tori
, and that tori look like donuts or tires, which she already knows. She also reads that a torus is a topological space, and has to click on
topological
to find out what that is.

Topological
has a lot of definitions, one of which is “the study of a given place, especially its history as indicated by its topography.” This is not particularly helpful.

Another definition, a mathematical one, says: “The study of properties of geometric figures or solids that are not changed by homeomorphisms, such as stretching or bending.” Ruby is tempted to find out what
homeomorphisms
are but decides that all this clicking is distracting her from the task at hand, and returns to the torus page.

“I want pictures,” says Carter-Ann, squeezing into Ruby's lap. “That's just words. I can't read words.”

“I can,” boasts Willow. “There's a
the
and there's a
the
and that's
the
, too. Go downer, Ruby, so I can find another
the
.”

“You guys, I need to concentrate,” Ruby says, but Carter-Ann is pushing the
DOWN
key, sending the words scrolling past. Willow yanks Carter-Ann's hand from the keyboard, and the screen goes still again.

“What's that?” asks Carter-Ann, pointing.

The screen is covered in long formulas with squiggles and symbols all over the place. “That's math,” Ruby says.

Willow shakes her head. “No, it isn't. That's got letters. Math is numbers.”

Ruby likes the kind of math that Mr. Cipielewski teaches. You start with numbers or even a story with some numbers in it, and you do what you're supposed to do and you get the answer, the one right answer. But she has no idea what you're supposed to do with math that looks like this. “It's calculus,” she tells her cousins. “Or trigonometry or something.”

“See?” Willow says to Carter-Ann. “Not math.”

Ruby continues past a few more complicated-looking squiggles until the screen shows some diagrams that look like donuts with webbing on them.

“Look!” squeals Carter-Ann. “A Spider-Man Donut!”

“Spider-Man Donut saves the day!” Willow jumps onto the couch and shoots an imaginary web at her sister.

“Hey!
I'm
Spider-Man Donut,” says Carter-Ann.

“Nuh-uh, I am. You're the villain—you're Bran Flakes Man.” Willow is not a fan of breakfast cereal.

“
I'm
Spider-Man Donut, right, Ruby? I saw it first!”

Ruby closes the laptop. There is no way she is going to be able to concentrate here. Besides, the stuff on the Internet is so hard. Maybe she could skip Lucy's rehearsal today and go to the library in town. Maybe in the children's room she can find a torus book without such hard math in it.

Who knows? Maybe she is
supposed
to go to the library.

A pillow zings across the room to bonk Ruby on the head. “I webbed you!” Willow hollers.

She is definitely supposed to go to the library.

It would be possible, if you were standing in the circle in the square or sitting on a cushioned milk crate or resting near the statue of Captain Bunning and wishing you had remembered to bring a hat, not to give a single thought to how this parade came to be.

But a parade doesn't organize itself.

There are volunteers who sell ads for the commemorative program or hand out water bottles at the rec center or decide the order in which the parade entries will march down the route. In Bunning, that last job falls to Patsy Whelk.

Six miles north of the circle in the square is a small apartment building with four units, one of which is an airy studio rented by Patsy. You might notice the skylight first. Or Patsy's bright orange couch. Or maybe even the framed posters that lean against one another in the foyer, making it difficult for you to actually enter the studio. But once you had made it inside, you could not help but notice the sticky notes that snake along the circumference of Patsy's studio walls. There are eighty-six of them, exactly as many entries as are in this year's Bunning Day Parade. There are blue stickies for the musical acts, and pink ones for the floats. There are purple stickies for each of the town dignitaries, and yellow for the entries that need to be followed by a “pooper patrol.”

Over the years, Pasty has learned to space out the bands so their music doesn't clash. She has learned that the cute factor of preschoolers is magnified when they follow a group of senior citizens. People turn thoughtful when the VFW marches by in their uniforms, and even more thoughtful if you put the local Scout troop after that.

She has also learned that she can't always predict what will make folks happy or sad or reverent. While the Night Owls in their constellation formations might make most people smile, others might turn wistful, or even wishful, seeing all those stars.

For weeks Patsy has been arranging and rearranging the stickies on her wall. She walks slowly along the Post-it parade, imagining how it will look on Bunning Day. Some days she switches a few things, remembering how often bagpipes are played at funerals and how that might not set exactly the right mood for Grannies for Groceries. Or how freaked out the barefoot karate people might be if they have to follow the girls from Kennilworth Stables. She switches. She adjusts. A new parade goes by.

On the day before she is required to turn in the final list, she makes one last change, swapping Head-Over-Heels Gymnastics and the Bunning Historical Society, moving the latter closer to the schoolhouse float.

Patsy walks the circumference of the apartment.

This is it. This feels right.

This is her parade.

The children's room of the Bunning Free Library has large windows, beanbag chairs, and a cluster of round tables at which, on weekdays, homeschool kids sometimes daydream about passing notes and eating lunches on trays. One of them, Daisy Rangotta, is considering setting up an online business that sells school uniforms and lunch trays and stuff like that—just for homeschool kids like herself.

This being summer, however, there are no homeschoolers at the tables when Ruby arrives. There is a pair of twins attempting to play Connect 4 and a group of intense-looking kids who say things like “Orc-lord” and “hit points” and “You forget, Panoptocles, that I am a fourth-level mage—prepare to meet your fate.”

Was that a sign? That boy saying “fate” when she walked in the room? Maybe she was fated to come to the library today. Maybe this is where she'll really understand tori or homeomorphism or whatever it is that she needs to make her wish work right.

A cardboard grandfather clock on the circulation desk announces that the librarian will be back in fifteen minutes.
That's okay
, Ruby thinks. Torus stuff has to be in either Math or Science, and she can find those sections by herself. Quickly, Ruby heads for the nonfiction section.

“Hey, Ruby Tuesday,” says a voice.

“Ruby Tuesday” is the title of an old song she knows from hanging around with the Adelines, but the voice did not sound like it belonged to an Adeline. It sounded like a boy's voice. Ruby peeks around the History shelf to see Nero DeNiro sitting at a small round table.

“Hey,” Ruby says back. Dang! She doesn't have time for Nero. Aunt Rachel had said she could go to the library instead of Lucy's rehearsal, but only for a half hour. Still, just saying “Hey” and walking away seems sort of rude.

“
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
,” she says, peeking at the cover of the book he is reading. There. That wasn't rude. Now Nero can say
Yes
and Ruby can say
That's nice
and then she can move on to the Math section and look for torus stuff.

Instead, Nero shakes his dark hair out of his eyes and makes a raspberry sound. “Says who?”

“What do you mean? Says the author.”

The raspberry returns. “She's just writing about the wonders. Somebody else decided to call them that.”

Ruby should move on to the math books. She really should. But she can't help but be a little curious. “Who decided?”

“Nobody knows for sure. That's what bugs me. Some medieval guys discovered this list and said it was based on a bunch of other lists from some ancient guys, including . . .” Nero flips to the introduction. “Including a historian dude called Herodotus and another guy named Callimachus, but nobody knows who
really
decided what the Seven Wonders are. So how come we're all supposed to just say, ‘Yeah, okay. Those are the Seven Wonders.' What if there was something else around that Callimachus just didn't like? Some kind of awesome tomb or statue or something that was made by one of his enemies, so he left it off the list?”

This is exactly the kind of question that gets Nero DeNiro in so much trouble at school—the kind of question that teachers can't answer. A couple of teachers liked Nero for it. Mr. Cipielewski, in particular, thought Nero's questions showed an active and creative mind, but even he had to keep Nero in line, because otherwise they would never get through all the day's materials, and then when it was time for the assessment tests, it would look like his students hadn't learned anything, even though they had learned many amazing nonassessable things.

“Also,” says Nero, “how come nobody gets named Callimachus anymore?”

Ruby can't help laughing. “Would you want to be named Callimachus?”

“I don't want to be named Nero,” says Nero. “That's the trouble with names. You don't get to decide your own. Somebody else picks them.”

Ruby likes her name. She is Ruby Giselle Pepperdine. The Ruby part has pep and the Giselle has elegance. When she goes to college, she thinks, she might ask people to call her Giselle. Until then, she's fine with Ruby.

“Maybe superheroes,” says Nero. “Maybe superheroes get to choose their own names. And villains. I mean, what parent is going to name his kid the Green Goblin?”

“They named him Norman,” says Ruby, who saw a lot of superhero movies during Uncle Dave's shifts watching Gigi.

Nero grins. “I never know what to expect from you, Ruby Tuesday.”

Is he joking? She and Nero aren't friends or anything, but they have been in class together for three years in a row. Everyone knows what to expect from her. That's why people always pick her to bring notes to the office or to help take care of little kids. They expect her to do what she's supposed to do. Everybody says so. Her parents. All her teachers. Lucy.

“Are you making fun of me?” Ruby asks.

“Blue color-wheel paper. Essay Girl. Norman Goblin. All unexpected,” Nero says. “I was giving you a compliment. Now you say thank you.”

He
is
making fun of me
, Ruby thinks, and she gives him a raspberry, which makes him laugh. “See what I mean?”

There is a ringing sound, like an old-fashioned alarm clock, and Nero pulls a phone from his pocket. “Break's over,” he says. “I have to be at Delish with my mom most days, but she lets me play Frisbee in the park or come here for an hour in the afternoon. She says she does not want me gallivanting around town.”

Ruby nods. “I guess I understand that.”

“You understand that? Ruby, I have never gallivanted. Have you gallivanted?”

“I don't think I'm the gallivanting type,” she says.

“Nobody is. It's just a thing that moms say. Why do they say that?”

“I don't know. I've never thought about it before,” Ruby admits.

Nero leaves the
Seven Wonders
book on the table but picks up a novel,
The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs
, from a
YOU MUST READ THIS
display. “Maybe I'll see you here tomorrow?”