Excerpt from The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The man at the garage says a new clutch is going to cost three hundred and fifty dollars, and that is just the beginning. There’s also the transmission. At home, she sits at the kitchen table, making long lists of numbers on yellow notebook paper, subtracting and adding, rubbing her eyes.

"Why don’t you ask Eileen for money?" I ask. "She’ll give it to you."

She looks at me, and now there is nothing funny about her face. She tells me no one ever just gives anyone anything. She tells me to go to bed.



The next time Eileen comes over, she brings a strawberry jelly roll, so buttery and sugary I tell her I am going to pass out from happiness when I take a bite. I pretend to faint, and lie down on the floor, shaking for a moment and then lying still. Eileen thinks this is funny, but my mother is too worried about the three hundred and fifty dollars, and has not laughed at anything all day.

Eileen is almost out the door when my mother finally asks. Instead of answering yes or no she comes back in and sits down at the table across from my mother, her arms folded in her lap.

"He sees my checkbook, Tina."

"Can’t you just make something up?"

Eileen stares at my mother for a moment, like she is waiting for my mother to laugh or at least smile. When she doesn’t, Eileen looks down at her hands and shakes her head. "If you want his money, you’re going to have to come see him. That’s reasonable. That’s fair."

They’re talking about my grandfather. He doesn’t visit us. I’ve never met him. My mother takes her plate to the sink and turns on the water. Eileen stares and stares, but still my mother won’t say anything else. It’s mean to do this, to pretend someone isn’t there when they are.

"You know, Tina, most people don’t go giving money to daughters who don’t talk to them."

My mother comes back over to the table to get my plate, not looking at Eileen.

"You going to ask her father for the money, Tina?" Eileen tilts her head at me. "Do you even know where he is?"

My mother says nothing to this either, and she gets a very serious look on her face. She bends down and looks under the table, then up at the ceiling. She peers into the hallway. "No. Now that you mention it . . . ," she says, scratching her head. She looks at me. "Oh my God, where is he?"

Finally, for the first time all night, she is smiling. It’s just a joke. The sad-eyed man who was my father left two months before I was even born. There’s no way he’s under the table. I laugh, but this time Eileen doesn’t. She stands up to leave again, picking up her keys.

"He’ll give you the money, Tina," she says. "You just have to ask."



The only good thing about Treeline Colonies is the flat roof. There’s a stairway in the back of the building and a door that opens to the roof, but my mother says this door is for maintenance men who know what they’re doing and not ten-year-old girls who don’t know what it’s like to fall three stories off a roof and have their heads go splat on the pavement. But I like to go up there in the evening, watching the sky turn from blue to pink to violet, seeing the first twinkling stars of night.

I just did a report on Venus at school, so I know where it is in the sky. It’s the closest planet, made up mostly of vaporous gases. Ms. Fairchild says that no one could live on Venus. It’s covered with clouds, but the clouds are poisonous, and the poison would kill you as soon as you breathed it, and anyway it’s too hot. The stars are balls of hydrogen and helium and fire, just like our sun, and no one could live there either.

Ms. Fairchild says people used to think the Earth was flat, with an edge you could fall off of. They thought the sky was just a big dome, and that the sun moved across it every day, pulled by a man with a chariot. It’s easy to look back now and say, "Oh, you dummies," but when I’m up on the roof, watching the sun disappear behind the fields on the other side of the highway, I can see how they would think that. If everybody I ever met told me the Earth was flat and that somebody pulled the sun across the sky with a chariot and nobody told me anything else, I would have believed them. Or, if no one would have told me anything, and I had to come up with an idea myself, I would have thought that the sun went into a giant slot in the Earth at night, like bread into a toaster.