The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,110

permission slip from your parents saying it’s okay. If it isn’t okay, you can just sign up for an extra hour of study hall or gym. This way, Dr. Queen says, everybody can be happy for a change.

But no one is happy. Both sides have people standing in front of the post office and grocery stores, handing out petitions.

“It’s better than nothing,” Eileen says. She is finishing the hem of a skirt she made for me, and she keeps the pins she isn’t using clamped in the good side of her mouth, pushing me in slow circles in front of the mirror in my mother’s room. The skirt is very pretty, dark red with purple flowers hand-embroidered at the knee. “At least they can’t force that Jenkins woman down your throats.”

My mother looks at me but says nothing. She does not smirk, or even smile, and I am grateful for this. She signed the permission slip I brought home last week.

Eileen says what they should really do, if they want to be fair about it, is offer a Bible study class for credit, and let us take that instead of sitting an extra hour in study hall, twiddling our so-called opposable thumbs. But she doesn’t think the school is interested in being fair at all. She says you can take one look at that Jenkins woman and know that her idea of fair would be for us to be fed to lions in the middle of the Colosseum.

“I just hope her monkeys are there to save her at her moment of judgment,” Eileen says, but she says this in a way so you know that, really, she hopes they aren’t.

It’s summer again, and Oliver North is on television all the time now, wearing his Marine uniform, getting yelled at by senators, his eyes filling up with tears when he talks about how much he loves America. They have canceled a lot of the daytime soap operas so we can see this, but my mother says really Iran-Contra is just another soap opera, going on and on and on, only this one doesn’t have any women in it unless you count Fawn Hall and the mothers in Nicaragua with their arms chopped off.

But she can’t stop watching it. She folds the laundry in front of the television, throws balled-up socks and underwear at the screen when Oliver North says something she doesn’t like, which is pretty much every time he opens his mouth.

But not everyone is mad the way she is. Just from walking around I know that someone, somewhere, is making T-shirts that say GOD BLESS OLIVER NORTH, and a lot of people are wearing them.

We have renamed one of the cats Ollie, because he is on the television all the time too, sitting on top of it, his fluffy orange tail hanging over the screen. Sometimes my mother moves him off so we can see the real Ollie, but then Samuel starts screaming. Just like he likes us to have different things on our heads, he likes the cat up on top of the television set. We don’t know why. Not too much has changed with him. His eyes are still a glassy, brilliant shade of blue, and he still doesn’t look at us with them. We know he can see, because when the television is on, he stares at it, and he cries when we shut it off. He makes his screeching sound when something big happens on television, cars exploding, guns firing, anything loud. But you can stand right next to him, waving your arms and shouting his name, and he won’t even blink. My mother says sometimes he looks at her—at her, not at the glitter hat—but I think she could be imagining it. Or it could have just been a coincidence. She could have been standing where he happened to be looking.

I know I am supposed to love my brother, but sometimes he is just like a big, limp doll, only he can scream and needs his diaper changed for real. He doesn’t talk. When he’s hungry or tired, he can scream so loud that you think that you’re the one screaming, but that’s it. No words. He’s getting bigger too, not as big as a four-year-old should be, but big enough so that my mother, after carrying him around on her hip for a full day, winces when she sets him down.

My mother has called back the women from the university. They did not