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

I watch the cars on the highway, their red taillights getting brighter as the sky grows dark. Two deer move quickly through the corn, just their ears showing over the green stalks. There are more deer out, now that it’s spring. Sometimes they try to cross the highway. I saw one get hit by a car last year. The police came and took the body away, and Eileen said they were going to sell it to people who would eat it. A dark line of blood stayed on the road until it rained.

I hear my mother’s voice from below. "I know you’re up there, Evelyn. You’ve got two minutes to get back in here. Two minutes."

When I get down, I find her back in her bedroom, lying on her stomach, reading a book. She used to just watch television after dinner, falling asleep on the green couch and then waking up again to ask me what time it was, but now she says she is tired of watching television and letting her brain turn to mush. Last week, she went to the library and checked out a stack of books, and now she falls asleep while she is reading. She is still on the first one, The Grapes of Wrath, and she says it isn’t nearly as bad as it was when she had to read it in high school, but of course, then she was busy getting pregnant. She had all the wrath she needed, ha ha.

"I don’t want you on the roof," she says. "How many times do I have to tell you?"

"Okay."

"You could really hurt yourself. You go up there again and I’ll ground you. No TV. No radio."

"Okay." I say this in a mean way. She’s bugging me.

"Okay then. Do you want to get your homework and bring it in here?"

"I did it at school."

She rolls her eyes. "Of course you did."

I crawl up on the bed next to her. I am not supposed to read over her shoulder because I read more quickly than she does, and it makes her mad when I get to the end of the page and look up and hum, waiting for her to turn it.

"Mom?"

"Yes."

"Are we going to be able to fix the car?"

She squints, but does not look up from the book. "I don’t know."

"Are we going to Wichita to get the money from your dad?" I am kicking my feet up and down on the bed. She crosses her leg over mine, makes me stop.

"I don’t know," she says.

"What happened to Eileen’s mouth?"

"She married my father," she says, quickly, half smiling, like it’s a joke she just made up. But even as she says it her voice trails off, catches at the end. She looks up from her book, her eyes on mine.

"He hit her?" She nods.

"A long time ago. Yes." "Why?"

"I’m not sure. I wasn’t there."

She shuts the book with her finger inside it to mark the place, waiting, and I know this means I can ask whatever else I want. I know I want to know something, but I can’t think of how to ask it. I know you’d have to hit someone pretty hard to do that to somebody’s mouth. You’d have to be really mad.

I’ve been that mad. I wanted to hit Brad Browning last week. He was standing right in front of me, smiling, and he wouldn’t stop saying mean things, and I could feel my hand ball up in a fist. It was like electricity, lifting my arm up for me. And then Ms. Fairchild was behind us, calling us in from recess.

Maybe it was like this. Maybe Eileen was saying something bad to my grandfather over and over again, and no one was standing behind him, telling him it was time to go back in.
End of Chapter One