The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,22
is already standing by the window next to a cookie sheet covered with aluminum foil and a mound of something that looks like dried mud.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s a volcano. I’m going to make it explode.” She doesn’t have a triptych, not even a regular poster. Star is always getting in trouble, getting sent to the office for saying “fuck” like it’s just a regular word you can say. She came to Kerrville from Florida last year because a hurricane blew down her family’s house, and they had to move to Kansas to live with her aunt and uncle. She has long blond hair, and she wears Dr. Scholl’s sandals and earrings that make it look like she has pierced ears even though she doesn’t. They are just tiny magnets, one on each side of her earlobes, strong enough to stick to each other through the skin. She let me wear them once, for an hour.
Star mostly spends her time with boys, because the girls in our class don’t like her. She makes things up, and you have to be listening carefully, or you won’t know. She said her cousin had been killed by a poisonous butterfly, right here in Kansas; she said she once saw a man lick an envelope and get such a bad paper cut on his tongue that it actually rolled right out of his mouth and landed on the floor, and that on the floor, it looked like a large strawberry, one you could pick up and eat; she said when they lived in Florida her dad had killed the most dangerous kind of snake in the world, the dreaded Monty Python, which could kill you just by looking at you long enough to make you look back. Patty Pollo and I are the only two girls in the class who will still talk to Star, and Patty doesn’t really count because she will talk to anyone because she says God loves everyone, even liars.
Brad Browning walks in, carrying a small flat board with a battery, wires, and a tiny lightbulb taped to it. He’s wearing a new OP sweatshirt, a purple one.
“What’s this?” Ms. Fairchild asks.
“It’s a circuit.” He looks up at her, blinking quickly. “My dad helped me.”
“Where’s your triptych?”
He blinks again. “My what?”
She frowns. More people come in, and the ledge by the window slowly fills up with projects. No one else has made a triptych, but they are good projects, some of them, better than mine. Stephen Maefield made an aluminum-can crusher. He says it can be used to crush aluminum cans, but also many other things. Vera Miles has a prism. She takes it out of her pocket and holds it up to the light, and a lovely rainbow appears on the floor, red blurring into orange blurring into yellow blurring into short bands of green, blue, and purple. I think it’s beautiful, but I can see Ms. Fairchild is getting mad because no one has a triptych.
Ray Watley has a piece of cardboard with dead bugs pinned to it with colored thumbtacks. They are labeled underneath, but they are not even the real names of the bugs. They say things like BUG FOUND IN DRAIN OF BATHTUB and MOTH KILLED WITH SPRAY. There are at least thirty bugs pinned to the cardboard, and when he shows it to Ms. Fairchild, she makes a face and says, “Just put it by the window.”
Libby Masterson shows up after all, carrying a small velvet bag with a yellow string around the top. It is full of rocks, she says, special rocks, and Ms. Fairchild asks her to take them out of the bag and spread them out on the shelf. Libby doesn’t have a triptych either, but the rocks are beautiful. Some are blue and glossy, smooth to hold. Some look like normal ugly rocks on the outside, but they’ve been sliced open like oranges, and inside they are lovely, full of lavender crystals that sparkle in the light.
Ms. Fairchild shakes her head. “Libby, did you just go out and buy these rocks? Did you get these at the mall?”
Libby looks down at her shoes, so many friendship pins on them you can hardly see the laces. “Yes, ma’am.”
“What’s your hypothesis?”
Libby frowns, looking at the rocks. “Traci’s on her way in,” she says. “Her mom gave us a ride. She’s helping her carry her thing in.” She doesn’t notice that I’m still holding one of the smooth blue rocks. I slip