The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty

Author:Laura Moriarty
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Girls, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Fiction, Romance, Modern fiction, First loves, Kansas, Multigenerational, Fiction - General, Single mothers, Girls & Women, Juvenile Fiction, Gifted, American First Novelists, Gifted children, Literary, Special Education, Children of single parents, Family, Contemporary, Grandmothers, General, General & Literary Fiction, Mothers and daughters, Education
ISBN: 9780786888450
Publisher: Hyperion (2004年7月14日)
Published: 2004-07-14T09:02:45.875000+00:00

We do not just drive around for a while in Ed Schwebbe’s blue-and-white van. He drives straight to a snow-covered field less than a mile away, parking behind a burned-out barn, and takes out a bag of marijuana from a case for sunglasses clipped onto the visor. I know it is marijuana because a police officer came to health class only a month before and showed us some. “Don’t do this,” he had told us, waving the bag around. “Don’t ever do this.” He played a video for us of Nancy Reagan in a red dress telling us to “Just Say No.”

“You know that’s illegal?” I ask. Ed Schwebbe looks at me, and then back at Travis. Travis and Deena are sitting together on a small couch in the back of the van, his hand resting on her knee.

Travis leans up and touches me on the arm. “Evelyn, you need to relax a little bit, okay? We’re out here in the middle of nowhere. It’s fine. And if you don’t want to have any, you don’t have to.”

I cross my arms. The police officer warned us about this exact kind of scene, someone offering us drugs. Marijuana is the beginning of the end, he told us, a slippery slope. You start smoking it and the next thing you know you’ll be doing cocaine and maybe trying to kill your own parents because you’ll be addicted and willing to do whatever you can to get your next fix. He’d seen it a thousand times. We are supposed to just say no, but Deena, her hand resting on Travis’s arm, hasn’t said anything yet.

“She gonna be okay?” Ed asks, looking at Travis, like I speak a funny language that only Travis can translate.

“She’s fine, Ed. Really.”

Ed taps out a bit of the marijuana from the bag onto a small white paper, rolling it into a tight cylinder. He hands it back to Travis and makes another one for himself, lighting the tip with a match as he inhales from the other end, his eyes closed. I can see the fiery tip shriveling up, disappearing.

“You know that’s really bad for you?” I ask. “It kills your brain cells, and if you get caught, you’ll never get financial aid in college.”

Ed laughs at this, three short exhales, smoke coming out of his nostrils. “Okay,” he says. “What’s your name again?”

“Evelyn.” I don’t see what’s so funny.

He nods and smiles. “Okay, Evelyn, you need to relax.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Just say it. Just try. Come on. It’s alllllllll goooooooood.”

I hear Deena coughing in the back, and when I turn around, I see Travis holding her shoulder, offering her a sip from his Coke. “It’s okay,” he’s saying. “It’ll get better.”

The police officer and Nancy Reagan told us that if someone ever offered us drugs, we should say no and leave immediately. Call your parents if you have to, Nancy Reagan said. Call anyone. But there is no way to call my mother or Nancy Reagan out here in Ed Schwebbe’s van, and it’s too far to walk in the cold.

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