The Center of Everything (17 page)

“Did you see that?” Travis asks. His hand is on my arm.

I open my mouth, but I can’t speak. Mr. Torvik told us that shooting stars are not really stars at all but meteorites, burning their way through our atmosphere, sometimes landing in the oceans and in the middle of farms. He said you could make wishes on them if you like, but they are really just pieces of rock falling down from the sky, and they could land on your head and kill you just as you look up to make a wish. Really, they’re just rocks. They don’t care about your wishes at all.

But still. It’s too much of a coincidence, to see a sign like that in the sky, just as I was asking for what I want the most. It was over before I knew what I was seeing, but now I know that, again, I’ve been blessed, quick as a wink from above.

When summer comes, there is a new girl in Unit A, Deena Schultz, from Lincoln, Nebraska, and she is also going into eighth grade. She came here to live with her grandmother because her mother went to follow the Grateful Dead for a while and didn’t think it would be a good idea if Deena came too. It was only supposed to be for the summer, but it’s August now, and her mother still isn’t back.

The first time I go over to Deena’s, she shows me a picture of her mother, looking happy and tan, with blond hair down to her waist. She is holding a tambourine in one hand and a Mountain Dew in the other. On the back of the picture it says
I LOVE MY BABY
in swirling, purple letters. Deena says that her mother has done so many drugs that she says she can hear smells and see sounds.

“I don’t know,” Deena says, shrugging. “Maybe she can.”

Deena is nice, but really, the first thing you notice about her is that she’s pretty. She has the face of someone in the movies. She tries to act like she doesn’t, walking stoop-shouldered so it looks like we are the same height, and wearing large sweatshirts with sleeves that are too long so just her fingers show. But it doesn’t matter. Even with the sweatshirt, you can see she is tall and long-limbed like a ballerina, with a ballerina’s face to match. She has large dark eyes that always look a little wet, her eyebrows two half moons high above them.

She says her father is Filipino, and this is where she gets her dark hair. It hangs down to her shoulders like one piece of smooth ribbon, and she could be in a magazine with this hair, selling shampoo, even though she is only fourteen and that’s just the way it grows out of her head.

When I tell my mother about Deena’s mother, she gets so mad she almost puts Samuel down. “What is this with people up and leaving their kids behind?” she says. “What is the
deal
?” She looks at Samuel and then at me, as if one of us might know the answer. He stares up at the glitter hat.

When my mother meets Deena, she is further outraged.

“My God,” she says, after Deena has left, “she’s such a beautiful girl. How could you want to leave such a beautiful kid?”

“I know,” I say. “It’s so much easier to leave an ugly one.”

My mother frowns. “Evelyn. You know what I mean.”

Deena’s grandmother’s apartment is very clean, with wooden crosses in every room, and a picture of a crying Mary. The rooms smell faintly of bleach, and there are framed brown-and-white photographs of unsmiling people in uncomfortable-looking clothes set on a lace runner on top of a table in the hallway. Her grandmother speaks mostly German, and even when she does speak English, I don’t understand her. It’s fine though, because she’s usually asleep in bed by the time I come over. It’s like Deena lives by herself, except she has to whisper and play music on her headphones instead of out loud.

“Grandma’s okay,” Deena says. “She just needs to sleep a lot. She’s almost seventy.”

Their apartment has the same layout as ours, but it looks completely different because it is so dark and quiet, heavy drapes over the windows, so many creaking chairs and tables that you have to zigzag to walk across the room. But Deena’s room is the opposite: pink everywhere. Pink bedspread, pink pillows, even a pink throw rug. There are two lamps with pink lightbulbs in them. Deena says plain white lightbulbs make everything ugly, and she has to have a lot of light in her room or she gets depressed.

She has bought copies of
Tiger Beat
magazine and taped up pictures from it on her walls, boys without shirts looking out thoughtfully, the flash of the camera reflected as a glint in their eyes. Deena has seen
The Outsiders
seven times, and has pictures of all of the stars: C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio. She knows their names from the movie: Sodapop, Ponyboy, Johnny. She memorized the poem that Ponyboy says at the end when he’s dying, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and she recites it for me, looking up at the posters. She wrote the cast of
The Outsiders
letters, and some of them wrote back, sending her more photos of themselves with their real signatures on the bottom. She has taped these up as well.

“Are you going to send them pictures of you?” I ask. “It seems fair.”

She laughs, and her laugh is the opposite of what you would think it would be for someone so pretty. She makes loud, wheezing sounds, her mouth open wide. “You’re a nut.”

We go to her house at night to do homework. “Because it’s
quiet
there,” I tell my mother. “You can actually
think
.” But really, I am the only one who does homework. Deena reads
Tiger Beat
, or paints her fingernails, or her toenails, or my toenails. Sometimes she gets out a book and looks at the pages, but she plays her Madonna tape in her Walkman loud enough so I can hear it, moving her lips to the words of the songs, not the words on the page.

She does not do well in school. The teachers are nice to her, smiling at her even when she doesn’t say anything, and when they hand back quizzes and tests, they have to fold hers in half so no one can see her grade. I don’t know if she really isn’t smart, or if she just doesn’t try very hard. Or maybe she doesn’t try very hard because she knows she isn’t very smart so what’s the point. She doesn’t seem worried about it. “Madonna didn’t go to college,” she says.

“Neither did my mother,” I say, and we both know what this means. Deena likes my mother, but no one would want to be like her, on food stamps with a retarded baby, always changing diapers and wearing her robe, even in the middle of the day, so it is too embarrassing for Deena to come to my house and that is why we always come here. My mother is the opposite of Madonna.

“But I hate school,” Deena says, lying back on her bed. “I really, really hate it.” She rolls her essay up into a sort of telescope, looks at me through it, and then back up at the posters on her wall.

So we are not the same, but still it is wonderful, having a friend like this. Travis is my friend, but he is not always around, and lately I am so nervous about what I say around him that sometimes I can’t say anything at all. I don’t want to say anything dumb. But with Deena, I can say anything, and she’ll just laugh.

They’ve built a McDonald’s across the highway in the field next to the Kwikshop, where I used to see the deer. Deena and I watch its construction with anticipation, realizing that once its doors open, we will have somewhere to go, somewhere to be besides where the school bus takes us. But I am also worried about the frogs and the white-tailed deer and stray cats, where they will go now, what they will do.

“They’ll just go somewhere else,” Deena says. “They’ll be fine.”

And it is nice, once the McDonald’s opens, only two months after the bulldozers first started digging holes in the ground. Neither Deena nor I can afford to go out to dinner every night, but we’re happy enough to just sit in a booth in the warmth and bright lights, doing our homework, looking up to watch people come in from off the highway, jingling car keys in their lucky hands. Trish, the dining-room attendant, calls this loitering, and doesn’t think it’s okay.

“This isn’t a library, girls,” she says, her voice loud, embarrassing us on purpose. Trish’s face is a little frightening, and easy to make fun of when she turns around. She has lost her real eyebrows, by her own fault or by accident, and drawn new ones on in a strange color of orange, much higher on her forehead than real eyebrows could ever be. This gives her the look of always being wide awake, even slightly alarmed. So when she says anything to us, anything at all, we turn away quickly and laugh.

We have learned, over time, how to stall Trish, how to make it more difficult for her to kick us out. “We aren’t done with our pops yet, see?” we say. And then Trish says, “Well, hurry along now. We’ve got paying customers.” And we say “Okay,” and then sit there for another hour, until there isn’t even ice left in our cups and we’ve chewed our straws into little pieces of plastic.

The truck drivers who stop in off the highway sometimes ask us if they can buy us anything, always looking at Deena.

“No,” she says quickly, not even thinking it over. “No thanks.”

They are older than Eileen, some of them, but they sit in booths across from us, sipping coffee, watching her, not even caring if she can tell.

“Gross,” she whispers. “Grossorito.” She has a long pink pen twisted into a heart on one end, and she uses it to write something on a napkin.

Two o’clock. Grandpa Joe wants you to sit on his lap.

When I look up at the man, Grandpa Joe, it’s clear that he is looking at Deena, and that she is the one he wants to sit on his lap. But this is the way Deena says things. Men are looking at us. Trish is just jealous because we are young and pretty, and still have our real eyebrows. We both know this isn’t altogether true. I still have my eyebrows of course, and am still young. But I’m accepting slowly, a little more every day, that I am not pretty, at least not beautiful the way Deena is. I still look sleepy, even unhappy, all the time. There is nothing I can do about this but try to keep my eyes wide, like I’m surprised or very awake, and then I just end up looking like Trish.

Deena says blue eyeshadow will help. She has some that sparkles like there is glitter in it, and she looks pretty when she has it on, but she also looks pretty when she doesn’t wear any at all. She applies it carefully to my eyes in her pink room, holding my chin firmly with one hand. “There now,” she says, stepping aside so I can see my reflection in the mirror. “If you wear it to school, I will too. And everyone will fall in love with us.”

We both look in the mirror, frowning. It doesn’t look the same on me as it does on her. She scratches her head, coming toward me again. “Let me try to rub it in.”

I tell myself I will be a late bloomer. It will be like one of those stories that movie stars tell.
Really, when I was a kid, I was ugly. I was hideous. People made fun of me.
Morgan Fairchild said this to the man interviewing her on television. They had shown a picture of her as a child, and really she had been ugly, with big thick glasses, and just look at her now. She can sit and joke about how ugly she used to be because really, the whole time she had been beautiful. It had been hidden inside, waiting to come out.

I have to think this same thing will happen to me, because it’s too terrible to think that it won’t, that I might have to go through my whole life being ugly. It would be like somebody telling me I was going to be poor my whole life, no matter what I did. It would be a hard thing, going through your whole life ugly, and I don’t think God would do that to me. But looking around, I can see it happens to other people all the time.

My mother says the thing about Deena is, she really is just as sweet as she looks.

She likes Deena because Deena likes babies, and even though Samuel is two now, he is still like a baby in almost every way. He’s just bigger. When Deena comes over, she asks my mother if she can hold him, and although he usually cries when my mother isn’t the one holding him, with Deena, he doesn’t.

“You’re a natural,” my mother says. She looks strange to me, my mother, standing there with nothing in her arms. I am used to seeing her carrying Samuel, and without him, she looks almost naked, or even like she is missing a limb. She stands there awkwardly, rubbing the small of her back.

“I love babies,” Deena says, kissing Samuel on his pale, soft cheek. “I had a lot of little cousins in Nebraska. I got to take care of them all the time.”

Deena does not get tired of putting things on her head for Samuel so he will make his screeching sound, and she would do this the entire time she was over if I let her. She waits until later, when we are back in my room by ourselves, to ask me if there is anything wrong.

“He’s retarded,” I tell her. “He was born premature, and it messed up his brain.”

“Oh,” she says. “That’s sad.” She is lying on my bed, her dark hair wrapped up underneath her head like a pillow. We are supposed to be studying, but she did not bring any of her books. “How come you don’t have any posters on your walls?”

“I do,” I say, pointing to the star chart on my ceiling.
CONSTELLATIONS IN THE SUMMER SKY: A MAP OF THE HEAVENS
. Eileen got it for me for Christmas.

“No, like boy posters,” she says. “I have extra. Tell me who you like, and I’ll give you some.”

I make a face. “I like real boys.”

“Ahhhh.” She smiles, rolling over so she is lying on her stomach, her hair falling back around her shoulders. “Like who?”

I wait, unsure of what to say next. I have never told anyone else that I know I am destined for Travis Rowley, that he is destined for me. I still know this is true, especially now, because of the shooting star.

“Who?” she says again, sitting up on her knees. “Tell me.” I can already see by her face that she will be hurt if I don’t tell her, maybe even mad.

“Travis Rowley. He lives in Unit B.” I point out my window at his. There. I’ve done it.

“Does he go to our school?”

I shake my head. “He’s in ninth grade. And he gets rides from a friend, so he’s not on the bus. I don’t know if you’ve seen him.”

“Look at you turn red.” She narrows her eyes. “What does he look like?”

Beautiful
, I want to tell her.
The most beautiful boy in the world
. But I know if I say this I will sound dumb. “He’s got brown curly hair and green eyes. He’s a little taller than I am.”