Free The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty Page B

have to stop for a train, he turns off the radio and sings “This Train Is Bound for Glory,” and everyone stops talking and just listens.
    He points at my trophy. “For the plants you had with you this morning?”
    I nod.
    He smiles. He’s missing teeth, but it’s okay, because he’s nice. “Congratulations, honey.”
    Traci and Libby are sitting in the front, and when I walk by, they stop talking and watch me, their mouths flat and small. Travis Rowley is already sitting in the very back seat, reading a comic book, his shoes sticking out into the aisle. One of his shoes says DARK along the toe, and the other one says AVENGER . He does not look up when I sit down.
    Victor Veltkamp asks if he can hold the trophy. He is only a first grader, with a nose that always runs, but he is a little scary because already he knows the names of different kinds of machine guns, and he talks about them and pretends he is holding them, even when he is just sitting in his seat by himself, when no one is listening. “Man!” he says, picking up the trophy by its base, swinging it slowly, like he is a batter, warming up. “This thing is heavy. You could really clock somebody with this thing. I mean, you could just…” He swings it again, “Bam!”
    I am about to take the trophy back from him when I feel someone staring at me, the way you can feel someone staring even before you look. You don’t see them, you don’t hear them, but you know they’re there. I look up and see that Traci has moved to the seat in front of me. She has been sitting there for a while, watching me with her blue-gray eyes, her small, pointed chin resting on the back of the seat.
    Already I can feel my heart starting to pound, my fingers twitching. “What?”
    She is very calm, her eyes even on mine. “It’s not fair that you won,” she says. She looks at the trophy that Victor Veltkamp is still swinging in his arms and then back at me. “Yours was nothing compared to mine. She made you the winner because she felt sorry for you. Anyone can see that.” She is almost smiling now. If I do anything, look away only for a moment, she will think I believe her.
    Victor aims the trophy at her like it’s a gun for him to shoot her with. “She won and you lost,” he says. “Too bad.”
    But Traci ignores him, looking only at me. “All the teachers know you don’t have a dad,” she says. “They feel sorry for you. They know your mom works in a factory making dog food and that your poster was the most you could afford. They know you don’t have anyone to help you.” She shrugs her shoulders. She is wearing her OP sweatshirt today, the blue one, palm trees on the front. “That’s sad, fine. But that doesn’t make you the winner.”
    Everyone is watching. I don’t know how she knows I don’t have a dad, but now she is saying that everyone knows this. I wonder if this is something I should have been more careful about keeping a secret. I think about her seismograph, so amazing, detecting every tremor in the room.
    “I won because I followed directions,” I say, but I can hear the shakiness in my own voice. I don’t even know if this is true. I am very aware of Travis now, of everyone, all of them listening to this, to Traci telling me I am someone to feel sorry for. The bus stops at a railroad crossing even though there isn’t a train, Randy singing “Kansas City, Kansas City, here I come.”
    She shakes her head. “I think it’s okay for teachers to feel bad for you, but it’s not fair when poor people get more than they should just because somebody feels sorry for them.”
    Victor Veltkamp wipes his nose with his hand and looks at me. “Hit her,” he says. “You need to hit her for saying that.”
    And now, the moment he says this, I know I will hit her. I feel the electricity moving up and down my arms, my fingers twitching, my hand rising up to her face. My hand hits her cheek, and I’m surprised at how much it hurts my hand, how her cheek