The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,117

cut the pictures off the top, hanging each of them up on my wall like posters, faraway places that look nothing like here. In these pictures, there are people who do not know us, people who have never heard of Kerrville, Kansas, wearing berets and carrying bread; there is a beach in Mexico, palm trees shading the sand; there is a castle in front of a blue lake in Switzerland, mountains towering high above. I close my eyes, imagine myself walking alongside the lake in Switzerland. If you are good at imagining something, it can be almost like it is happening. In a way, there is no difference at all.

But just as I am thinking this, the door swings open, and now I know I am not in Switzerland but in my room, looking up at my mother, her eyes wide, chocolate syrup on her cheek.

“What?” I say. “What is it?”

“Evelyn. Evelyn.” She leans down and grabs my arm, pulling me up off my bed.

“What? Is he hurt?”

We run down the hallway together. Samuel is not hurt. He is sitting in his chair, his mouth covered with ice cream and chocolate syrup. It’s dripping off his chin, onto the napkin tied around his neck. He gazes out the window, his spoon moving down to the bowl of ice cream in front of him on the table, slow and steady.

He brings the spoon back to his face. It hits his cheek first, then finds his mouth.

“Oh my God,” I whisper, not even thinking, and my mother touches my hand.

His spoon moves down to the bowl again and back to his mouth. He groans, eyelids fluttering. I can hear my mother breathing next to me, smell the oatmeal in her hair.

“You were right,” I say, still watching him. “You were right.”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I was.”

He keeps going, the spoon trembling in his hand. He spills more than he swallows, but my mother and I stand perfectly still, not talking, not doing anything. We watch until we hear him scrape the bottom of the bowl. He starts to cry, pounding the spoon against the table.

“You want more, baby?” my mother asks, moving toward him. “You can have all you want.”

His napkin is soaked, sticking to his shirt. Globs of chocolate syrup hang down off his chin, his hair, even his ears. There is ice cream and chocolate syrup on the carpet, and it will be difficult to clean. But I say nothing. I know this is amazing, what I am seeing before me. It is just a small thing, him feeding himself, just a little something he has learned, something she has taught him.

But if she could teach him this, then there is no telling what else is there, wrapped up inside him like a present, and outside of him as well.

sixteen

CHRISTMAS BREAK COMES AND GOES, but for Deena, it just stays. She gets sick on the first day of January and misses the entire first week back at school. Travis says she is faking.

When I stop by to give her her copy of Lord of the Flies for English, her grandmother answers the door, fully awake but squinty-eyed, wearing a dress with a zipper that goes from the hem at her knees to her throat. “Deena sick,” she says, shaking her head. “No play.”

But Deena comes out of her room, pale and coughing, wearing one of Travis’s sweatshirts. “I’m so sick,” she tells me. “I feel like crap.”

Her grandmother says something sharply to her in German. Deena apologizes.

“Maybe it’s mono?” I ask. If it is, she won’t be able to come to school for weeks, maybe months.

“Just the flu.” She swallows, looking pained. “Have you seen Travis?”

“Not really. In class, I mean, and on the bus. But that’s it.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“Not really.” This is a lie. Travis and I got to work as partners in geometry today, taking a timed test. We beat Traci Carmichael and Brad Browning by five minutes, and high-fived each other on the way out the door.

“Me neither,” she says, coughing again. “I’m here dying, and he doesn’t even care.”

She’s sick again the next day, and again, it’s just me and Travis on the bus. He’s the oldest person on the bus now, the only junior, and also the tallest. When he walks down the aisle, the yarny ball on top of his ski hat skids along the metal brackets of the ceiling. “Someday…,” he says, sliding in next to me. “Someday I’ll have a