The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,116

done anything to you since then. And I’m sorry. I said I was sorry.”

I am open-mouthed, almost laughing at her nerve, her evil, Traci Carmichael nerve. “I’m not going to vote for you, Traci.”

She shakes her head. “That’s not what this is about.”

“Of course it isn’t.”

Her small, even features freeze, and I think for a moment she is going to start really crying, right there in the gym. But she doesn’t. Maybe she can’t pull it off. When it’s her turn, she does her sit-ups without complaint, me holding her feet and counting. Mr. Leubbe blows the whistle, and we go back to the locker room to shower and change.

I come home from school to see my mother still in her bathrobe, sitting with Samuel at the kitchen table, in the exact same position they were in when I left in the morning. The only difference is that now there is oatmeal everywhere. There are clumps of oatmeal in her hair, in his hair, drying on the wall, on the table. A carton of vanilla ice cream, half melted, sits on the floor, held steady between my mother’s bare feet. Samuel is writhing and screaming, his face red with anger, pointing at a bowl of ice cream just out of his reach.

She nods to me when I come in, but that’s all. No smile. Samuel thrashes in his chair, his good arm swinging in my mother’s direction. The cats are all under the table, licking oatmeal off the carpet with their quick little tongues. I set my backpack on the counter. “What’s going on?”

She picks up his thick-handled spoon, pushing it into his hand. “C’mon, baby, show Evelyn what you can do,” she says. Her voice is hoarse, almost gone. “You almost did it just now. Do it again.” He screams again, rocking so hard in his chair that my mother has to put one of her legs behind it so he won’t tip over. He reaches for the ice cream, his fingers almost touching the sides of the bowl.

I put my hands over my ears. “Why won’t you just give him some?”

“If he wants ice cream, he has to use a spoon.”

Samuel groans and lets his head fall over the back of his chair. He is worn out. I can see the pulse in his neck, thumping beneath his pale skin. “That’s mean, Mom. What if he can’t? What if he’s hungry?”

She shakes her head. “He’s had lunch. I’ll feed him if he wants more carrots and oatmeal, and he knows it. But if he wants ice cream, he has to get it himself.”

I step away, watching her face. A combination of many factors—the oatmeal in her hair, the look in her eyes, and the way she is speaking—makes me nervous. I have seen her be crazy before—that day she laid down on the sidewalk when I was little—but this, what I am seeing in her now, looks like an entirely different kind of crazy. She looks like an entirely different kind of person.

“He almost did it,” she says. “Just before you came in.” She closes his fingers around the spoon. Samuel yells, throwing the spoon on the ground. She picks it up again, sets it by his hand.

“Mom, I don’t think—I think he needs a rest.” I wait. “I think you need a rest.”

Samuel’s chin is shiny with drool, but she cups it in her hand, turning his head toward hers. “Listen,” she says. “You can have all the ice cream you want. But you have to use the spoon. Okay?”

“I’m going to my room,” I say, no one listening to me. Even down the hall, even with my door shut, I can hear him howling, his fist banging on the table. I turn on the radio, lie down on my bed. Madonna is singing, “Open your heart.” Deena has this song on tape, and she has been saying she will make me a copy, but it’s two months now that she’s been saying this, and she hasn’t yet.

I look up at my wall, at all I have tacked up on it over the years to cover up the bad walls of my room, the peeling paint, the corners water-stained from the apartment above us. I still have the star chart Eileen gave me tacked to my ceiling, the ends of it curling up and almost over the red thumbtacks. I bought a calendar, The Ends of the Earth, 1987: Postcard Pictures from Around the World, and I