Read Online The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Laura Moriarty
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Fiction - General, Romance, Contemporary, Family, Juvenile Fiction, Girls, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Modern fiction, Education, First loves, Girls & Women, Multigenerational, General & Literary Fiction, Grandmothers, Mothers and daughters, American First Novelists, Single mothers, Kansas, Gifted, Gifted children, Special Education, Children of single parents
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better by praying for them. But I don’t know if it works the other way.
I’m surprised by how much I like Ms. Fairchild, because she is old, and not pretty and her breath always smells like coffee. She has been teaching at Free State Elementary for twenty-nine years, which is longer than even my mother has been alive, and she has one dress for every day of the week, a Monday dress, a Tuesday dress, a Wednesday dress, and so on. She never mixes up the order. Star Sweeny makes fun of her for this, but I like it.
The first time I saw her, though, I thought, Oh no. I wished I would have gotten into Mrs. Blake’s class, the other fourth-grade teacher, young and pretty, with straight blond hair that curves under her chin. She got married just last year, and some of the fourth graders from last year got to sing “Going to the Chapel” in her wedding. She wears high heels and bright sweaters and gold earrings shaped like little suns or little snowflakes, depending on the weather.
Ms. Fairchild, my teacher, has big eyebrows and short black hair cut like a pilgrim’s. Her hair never moves, even in the breeze, and she does not wear earrings. When I first saw Mrs. Blake and Ms. Fairchild standing next to each other on the playground the first day of school, it was easy to think that Ms. Fairchild was unlucky.
But it turns out that Mrs. Blake is a screamer. We can hear her from our room, her shrill voice saying Stop that! Stop that this instant! When this happens, Ms. Fairchild walks across the room in her flat, soundless shoes to shut the door. She does not yell, and if we are good, she tells stories at the end of class about people who can turn into trees whenever they want, and pets that talk when their owners aren’t home. Sometimes she reads out of a book, and sometimes she doesn’t have to.
Today she is wearing a green dress with white buttons, the Friday dress. She looks at me carrying in my triptych poster and my box of plants, and she smiles. She tells me to put them on the shelf by the window. Star 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
I’m surprised by how much I like Ms. Fairchild, because she is old, and not pretty and her breath always smells like coffee. She has been teaching at Free State Elementary for twenty-nine years, which is longer than even my mother has been alive, and she has one dress for every day of the week, a Monday dress, a Tuesday dress, a Wednesday dress, and so on. She never mixes up the order. Star Sweeny makes fun of her for this, but I like it.
The first time I saw her, though, I thought, Oh no. I wished I would have gotten into Mrs. Blake’s class, the other fourth-grade teacher, young and pretty, with straight blond hair that curves under her chin. She got married just last year, and some of the fourth graders from last year got to sing “Going to the Chapel” in her wedding. She wears high heels and bright sweaters and gold earrings shaped like little suns or little snowflakes, depending on the weather.
Ms. Fairchild, my teacher, has big eyebrows and short black hair cut like a pilgrim’s. Her hair never moves, even in the breeze, and she does not wear earrings. When I first saw Mrs. Blake and Ms. Fairchild standing next to each other on the playground the first day of school, it was easy to think that Ms. Fairchild was unlucky.
But it turns out that Mrs. Blake is a screamer. We can hear her from our room, her shrill voice saying Stop that! Stop that this instant! When this happens, Ms. Fairchild walks across the room in her flat, soundless shoes to shut the door. She does not yell, and if we are good, she tells stories at the end of class about people who can turn into trees whenever they want, and pets that talk when their owners aren’t home. Sometimes she reads out of a book, and sometimes she doesn’t have to.
Today she is wearing a green dress with white buttons, the Friday dress. She looks at me carrying in my triptych poster and my box of plants, and she smiles. She tells me to put them on the shelf by the window. Star 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
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