The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,118
car. When I’m old and have money, I’m going to find some poor kid who’s in high school and still has to ride the bus and give him a car.”
“A car-lorship,” I say, making room for him.
“That’s right. A car-lorship.” He takes off his hat, his curly hair springing out from under it. He has a red scarf, a hat, and mittens, but that’s it. All winter long, he has gone without a coat. I can’t tell if it’s because he thinks coats are stupid or because he doesn’t have one.
Through the windows, we watch Adele Peterson’s red Honda Prelude pull out of the parking lot, Traci Carmichael in the passenger seat. Adele Peterson is a junior, and she lives next door to Traci and across the street from Libby in another brick house with too many windows. Adele got this car for her sixteenth birthday. I know this because Traci talked in a loud voice in geometry about how she was there when Adele first saw the car. Her father had parked it in the driveway the night before, and tied a white ribbon around it while Adele was inside sleeping like the little princess she is, her last night of being fifteen. And when she came out in the morning for school, there it was.
“She came outside,” Traci said, talking just to Brad Browning, really, but loud enough for everyone to hear, “and she was like, ‘Oh my God.’”
Adele gives rides to both Traci and Libby now, and they pass us on the bus when the road goes to four lanes on McPhee Street. They look like the Go-Go’s in a music video, the radio playing loud, the windows rolled down even when it’s cold out. Traci sits in the passenger seat every day, no matter what. Libby is taller than Traci, but she sits in the back. She has to put her feet up on the seat so her chin rests on her knees, and when they go past the bus, she looks up at us from the backseat like she is looking up out of a basement.
“You notice it’s a red car,” I say, nudging Travis, and this makes him smile. We have expanded on our joke that Traci Carmichael is actually the Devil, sent down in the form of a fifteen-year-old girl to challenge good with evil. We have taken note that she wears colored contacts now: some days her eyes are blue; some days her eyes are brown. Travis says that at night, when no one is looking, her eyes turn red, and if you look directly into them, even in the daytime, you can go blind or crazy. This, Travis says, is how she won student president.
“You know Deena wants a pair of colored contacts?” he asks me, pointing at his own eyes. “She wanted blue ones for Christmas.” He shivers, making a face. “They creep me out. Your eyes should be the color of your eyes.”
I nod in agreement, although if I could make my eyes look different, not so sleepy-looking, I probably would. “Have you talked to her?” I ask. “She’s really sick.”
“Yeah, she’s real sick. She was healthy all through break, you notice.”
I think of Deena, wrapped in her quilt and coughing. I know she really is sick this time, but I don’t say this to Travis. She has faked being sick other times, and this is really the point. “She says you haven’t gone to see her.”
“Not true. I went over there three days ago. If she even is sick, she’s probably contagious, right? I’ll get whatever she’s got.” He rolls his eyes. “I’ll catch laziness.”
I say nothing. He picks at the green covering of the back of the seat in front of us. “She has to understand that I can’t just sit around with her all the time.” He puts one of his mittened hands over his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Are you guys in a fight?”
“No. No. But you know I’ve been talking to Goldman. I’ve been thinking about stuff, stuff I want to do.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” He reaches over me and slides open the window. “I want to go to fucking Australia.”
“I hear it’s a wonderful town,” I say.
He smiles again, the second time on just this bus ride, because of something I’ve said. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s just weird. I just keep thinking that this is always how it is. People try to drag you down.”