Free The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty Page A

mine for just an instant. I am the only one who followed directions, and this is turning out to be the most important thing of all. There’s a chance I could win, and it’s like something sweet almost touching my tongue. Eileen says if you want something very much you can pray for it, and that gets God on your side, which helps a lot.
    So I do. Please, God, let me be the one to go to Topeka. Please. I imagine God sitting in front of a computer with blinking lights, putting on headphones when my voice comes in like a radio frequency from far away. He turns dials, adjusts the headphones, watching words flash on a screen: Bucknow, Evelyn. Kerrville, Kansas, U.S. Fourth Grade. Science Fair.
    “Many of you showed wonderful creativity and imagination with your projects. But I’m afraid many of you let your parents do most of the work.” She looks at Brad Browning. “I’m going to send Evelyn Bucknow to represent our school in Topeka, because her work is clearly her own, and because she followed the rules.”
    I am silent, knowing this is probably the best thing to be right now. But in my head I say thank you to God. I imagine him taking off his headphones, chuckling to himself. No problem, Evelyn. No problem.
    Traci raises her hand.
    “Traci?”
    “It’s not fair,” she says, lowering her hand.
    “Traci’s is the best,” Libby agrees. I stay facing forward. But I can see other people are nodding, looking at Traci’s triptych by the window, standing almost four feet high on its own. Ray Watley stomps his foot, and the seismograph records it.
    Traci crosses her arms and leans back in her chair. She is steady, calm, but I can see tears in her blue-gray eyes. “My parents didn’t do all the work, if that’s what you’re saying. My dad helped me with the wood, but it was my idea. I worked hard on that. I worked really hard.”
    Ms. Fairchild shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Traci. The rules for the contest are very specific.”
    “It’s not fair,” she says again. Ray glares at me and gives me the finger from under his desk.
    I say nothing. It is fair, of course.
    Ms. Fairchild says she wants us to leave our projects by the window for all of next week, and then we can take them home. She takes a Polaroid camera out of her desk drawer and takes pictures of each of our projects, but she takes several pictures of mine, getting a close-up of each plant.
    Before lunch, she goes to her desk and pulls out an envelope, handing it to me with a smile. Inside is a crisp, new twenty-dollar bill. This is good enough, plenty, but then she reaches into her desk again and pulls out a trophy, brassy gold with a small gold statue of a woman holding a bowling ball at the top, SCIENCE FAIR WINNER taped across the bottom. When she gives it to me, she acts like people should clap, but no one does.

    But when Randy, the bus driver, sees the trophy, he’s impressed. “Hey, hey, hey, what have we got here?” he asks, swinging open the doors. “Looks like somebody won an Oscar.”
    “Science fair,” I tell him.
    Randy is the nicest bus driver our route has ever had—he is much better than Stella from the year before. Stella had bright yellow hair with a black strip across the top, and she kept a broom behind her seat. If we got too noisy, or if someone stood up before the bus came to a complete stop, she would stop the bus quickly and bang the top of the broomstick against the metal ceiling and yell that if we didn’t shut up, she would wreck the bus on purpose, and break all of our little necks, and then she would be the only one laughing, ha ha ha. But then Traci Carmichael told her mother about Stella, and the next day, Stella was gone.
    Randy is a big improvement. He brought little paper cups of candy corn for us on Halloween, handing them out one by one as we stepped on the bus. He gave out candy canes at Christmas. He plays country music on the radio, and he sings along to the words, his voice low and deep. Sometimes when we