by Linda Urban
“I’m thirsty,” she says again.
“Carter-Ann, just—just, you’ll have to wait.”
She always has to wait. That’s her whole life. People telling her to wait. Or to hurry up. The only time anybody hurries up for her is when she has to go to the bathroom.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she says. And it’s true. She didn’t have to a second ago, but now that she has said it out loud, she has to. Bad.
“Now? Oh, Carter-Ann, can it wait just one minute?”
Sometimes if Carter-Ann has to pee really bad, she crosses her legs and it is better, so she crosses her legs, but it is not better. “I have to go now,” she says. She makes the word now really long, so her mom will understand. Nooooooooooow.
“Ruby?” her mother says. She has to say it twice, because Cousin Ruby is thinking about something. “Ruby? I’m sorry. Carter-Ann has to go to the bathroom.”
“It’s okay,” Cousin Ruby says. Cousin Ruby is always good and never gets in trouble. At restaurants she can go to the bathroom by herself. Nobody has to go with her.
“Willow? Willow, honey, you’re going to have to come with me,” Mom says.
Willow looks mad. “I’m going to miss some candy.”
Carter-Ann had not thought about missing some candy. “I don’t have to go,” she says, but her legs are almost double-crossed now.
“We’re going,” Mom says. “Wish Ruby good luck.”
Ruby doesn’t need good luck. She already has good luck. She is big and can stay behind where the candies are. But Willow says good luck and Carter-Ann doesn’t want to look like a baby. “Wish,” she says, and then her mom is tugging her away from the parade, telling her, like always, to hurry up.
What Did You Think Would Happen?
If you were Bunning Day Essay Girl or Boy, you would likely have rehearsed this moment in your head many times. You would have imagined Bunning Elementary School librarian Ms. Kemp-Davie hopping out of the pickup truck and hurrying to the back of the trailer on which the model schoolhouse was secured. You would have seen her place the step stool next to the trailer, seen her climb up onto it, seen her reach in the schoolhouse window to grab the microphone and flip on the amplification system. And you would have seen yourself there too, stepping one-two-three up the step stool (if you were Effie Stefanopolis, Essay Girl in 2007, you would have even practiced going up and down a ladder at home a few times) and listening as Ms. Kemp-Davie said what she always did. That for her, the highlight of every Bunning Day was this moment, when the winner of the Bunning Day Essay Contest joined her here in front of this symbol of education to which Captain Bunning was so dearly dedicated. Here, to read her winning essay, was—and you would have imagined hearing Ms. Kemp-Davie say your name.
Which is why Ruby is surprised when the pickup truck door opens and it is not Ms. Kemp-Davie who exits but a tall, thin man with wide glasses and a beard.
Suddenly, Patsy Whelk is at Ruby’s side. “Okay, kid. Your turn.”
It is her turn.
Up on the trailer, the thin man has switched on the mike.
“Hello,” he says into it.
Most of the kids in the crowd say hello back.
“I’m, um, the new middle school librarian, Paul Yellich, and this is my first Bunning Day, and, um, it’s really great.” Paul Yellich squints at a note card in his hand and realizes he is wearing the wrong glasses. He needs his reading glasses. The words on his card are squiggles. “So, you all know what comes next. The essay contest winner . . .” He is supposed to say something else, but he cannot remember it. He does, however, remember the girl’s name. “I’m very proud to introduce Ruthie Pepper, who is going to come on up here and do what you’ve all been waiting for.”
This is not going right, thinks Mr. Yellich.
Nothing is going right, thinks Ruby as she steps up onto the trailer.
How can her wish be about to come true when Ms. Kemp-Davie isn’t here? When this man can’t even get her name right?
“Ruthie Pepper, everybody!” The man holds the microphone out, and Ruby takes it.
“Thank you,” she says, even though she would rather say her name is not Ruthie, it is Ruby. Thank you is what she says. Just like she is supposed to.
Ruby looks down at her note cards. At the chocolate swirl that is Willow’s fingerprint. Some say it was destiny.
That, of course, is what Ms. Kemp-Davie would have expected to hear. But Ms. Kemp-Davie is, at this very moment, in Greece, viewing one of Callimachus’s favorite hangouts.
The only other people who have any idea what is written on those cards are not near enough to hear Ruby either. Her mom and dad are just now pulling into the rec center parking lot. Aunt Rachel is holding the door of a porta-potty closed for Carter-Ann.
Nobody knows what Ruby is supposed to say.
And for a moment, Ruby is not sure either.
“Listen,” Gigi had told her.
That’s it! That is what she is supposed to do!
“I’m listening,” Ruby says.
What Ruby Does
Twenty seconds can be quick if you are on the phone with a friend or spinning around on the Christmas Carousel at Santa’s Village or holding the hand of someone you love.
But if you are holding your breath, twenty seconds can be a long time.
And if you are standing on the sidewalk of a parade route and the girl on the float in front of you is not doing anything, twenty seconds can be a really, really long time.
And if you are a brand-new librarian and you feel responsible for the fact that this girl on the float—this Ruthie—is holding a microphone and not speaking at all, twenty seconds can feel like your whole entire life.
Which is why, in your kindest voice, you might say her name. “Ruthie?”
And you might even be relieved to hear her speak into the microphone. “I have a minute,” you might hear her say. “I’d like it to be a minute of silence. For my grandmother Genevieve Pepperdine, who loved this parade and this town so much.”
Not Pepper. Pepperdine, you might think. In fact, that is all you might think for the next forty seconds. Pepperdine. Pepperdine. And how you looked like such an idiot and what a brilliant way to start off in a new town, messing up the name of the essay kid, and how you wish you could open up the door to the model schoolhouse and hide inside.
Which is why you would not notice that in front of you, the essay kid is leaning forward, stretching forward, looking like she is straining to hear through the silence.
“I’m listening,” Ruby had said out loud. And in her head she says it again. I’m listening. I’m listening, Gigi. I am sorry, I am so sorry I didn’t listen before. I was scared. Maybe. I didn’t know.
You weren’t supposed to die, Gigi. Everybody said it. You weren’t that old. And you had such life. I didn’t know what to do. I did what I thought I was supposed to do.
Poke, poke, poke. Ruby feels the poking in her chest.
The pricking in her eyes.
Is it Gigi? Is it Gigi zipping back along whatever radius line she has found, coming to make things okay again?
Silence.
That is what Ruby needs. She has been talking—even if it was only in her head—when all this time she was supposed to be listening! Isn’t that what Gigi said? “Listen”?
All around, Ruby hears the sounds of the town. The grownups—at least the ones who had heard and were paying attention—are quiet. A few of the kids are too, and one boy salutes like he did at the funeral of his uncle who died in Afghanistan. But some people are chatting and some are scolding their children. Some are singing along with the banjo band that can still be heard from the far side of Cornelius Circle.
Shut up! Ruby tells them in her head. She tries to push the banjo sounds away, but they grow louder. Shut up! I am listening for Gigi. Or time or things getting fixed or whatever it is I’m supposed to hear. Whatever Gigi wanted me to know.
Boom! A Civil War cannon goes off somewhere do
wn the route and babies bawl. Ruby tries to push those sounds away too, but more noise fills in. The motor of the pickup truck, the horn of a Shriner car, the ting-ting-ting of something metal tapping against the bronze shoe of the Bunning statue. A distant crack—maybe Lucy splitting boards with Okeda Martial Arts. And—is it possible?—the sizzle of donuts at the Delish tent, where Nero is. Every small impossible sound crowds in the way of what she is supposed to hear.
No! Ruby thinks. Be quiet! I’m supposed to be listening. I need to listen. I need—
Ruby feels Mr. Yellich’s hand on her shoulder.
“Time’s up, Ruthie.”
The End
Aunt Rachel is not near the circle in the square when Ruby returns to it. Neither is Willow or Carter-Ann or Baby Amelia. Ruby has been on the schoolhouse float for only a minute and a half. It takes longer than a minute and a half to find a bathroom on Bunning Day.
The parade continues on its path.
Nothing has changed.
Whatever it was that she was supposed to have done is still undone. Whatever was supposed to have happened to make things okay didn’t happen. None of the things that Ruby imagined—seeing Gigi’s smiling face or hearing whatever it was that Gigi had wanted to say or traveling back in time (which, okay, she didn’t really think would happen, except maybe, but not really really)—none of it happened.
What happened was that Ruby had stood on the steps of the schoolhouse float and didn’t even read her stupid essay. Which was probably what she was really supposed to have done. And now she couldn’t. Not ever. Things were never going to be like they were supposed to.
“Ruby! Ruby!” Carter-Ann has broken away from her mother. She is pulling at Ruby’s wrist. “I almost fell in!”
“The porta-potty was an adventure,” Aunt Rachel tells Ruby.
“Did we miss any candy?” asks Willow, pushing her way past Ruby to reclaim her spot at the curb. A clown from the hospital tosses a shower of SweeTarts, which sends Carter-Ann and Willow diving.
“Out of the street! Out of the street!” Aunt Rachel says. “How did it go? Ouch! Amelia, we don’t bite!”
HOONK! HOOONNNK!
Red lights flash and Baby Amelia bursts into tears.
“It’s the fire trucks!” shouts Carter-Ann.
“That means it’s the end,” says Willow. “Isn’t it, Ruby?”
Ruby nods. It is the end.
What Makes You Safe
Willow and Carter-Ann shoot invisible Spider-Man Donut webs all the way home. “Gotcha, Ruby!” they say. “You’re stuck.”
Eventually, Aunt Rachel’s driveway fills with cars, and parents and aunts and uncles and cousins fill the picnic table and lawn chairs and shaded spots on the backyard grass. They heap paper plates with burgers and hot dogs and ribs—except for Cousin Fiona, who decided this afternoon after seeing the baby cows in the Fairmont Farms part of the parade that she will become a vegetarian. Her plate is heaped with fruit salad and macaroni salad and garden salad. She is pretending she does not know that the brown bits in the garden salad are bacon. There is no apple crisp.
Every plate is full and everyone is eating, except for Willow and Carter-Ann and a half dozen of Ruby’s younger cousins, who are chasing one another around the yard, catching each other in invisible webs.
“Ruby is safe!” yells Willow as she dashes, panting, up to Ruby’s chair. “You can’t web me now.”
“I can too,” says Cousin Louie.
“Nuh-uh. That’s the rule,” Willow says. “Ruby is safe. Aren’t you?”
“Are you safe?” Louie looks skeptical.
Willow’s face is pink and her hair is curled with sweat. Her eyes plead.
“Of course,” says Ruby.
“Okay. Ruby is safe,” concedes Louie. “But you can only stay at safe for sixty seconds, and then you have to run again. That’s the rule too.”
Willow nods. “Thanks, Ruby.”
Ruby pushes a tomato slice around her paper plate.
She thinks about rules.
About supposed to.
About not supposed to.
And about a third possibility. One she has been trying not to think about ever since Gigi died. One that makes her feel as small and lost as she does in her dream. As she did the first time Gigi told her about the swirling centerless space. But now there is no Gigi to find her in it.
What if there is no such thing as supposed to?
Getting There
Every year, after the cookout, Ruby’s family heads for The Hole Shebang. Every year they pack blankets and folding chairs and a cooler of soda and a thermos of hot cocoa for Aunt Lynn, who gets chilly sitting on the ground. Every year Ruby’s dad says, “Let’s take the scenic route.” And then, every year, they avoid the traffic of downtown Bunning and drive the quieter roads along the edge of town, Ruby’s parents in the front seat, Gigi and Ruby buckled up in back, singing Sweet Adelines tunes.
Except this year, of course.
This year Ruby is buckled in her seat, but there is no singing. Ruby leans her head against the window. What if there is no supposed to? What if there is no one way things are meant to be? What if it is all just random and spinny and wild?
They drive past her old school. Past her new school. Past New Hampshire Bank and Trust. Past the cemetery.
Her parents have the radio on WNHB. “The first literary description of something that might be considered donut-like appears in the work of the Ancient Greeks,” explains a pinched-sounding woman.
“That’s enough of that.” Ruby’s mother turns off the radio. “I heard what you did in the parade,” she says to Ruby. “The silence? For Gigi? That was a nice gesture, sweetie.”
“But nobody got to hear your essay,” says Ruby’s dad.
“That’s okay.”
Ruby sees her parents glance at each other. “Do you have it with you?” her dad asks. “You could read it to us.”
Her essay cards are folded into her shorts pocket, but Ruby does not feel like reading them. “I’ll get carsick,” she says. It is one of her parents’ greatest fears that someone will throw up in a Pepperdine Motors vehicle.
“I’ll read it, then.” Mom sticks her hand over the seat, palm open, and Ruby drops her cards into it.
Ruby’s mother clears her throat. “‘Some say it was destiny,’” she reads, sounding a little like the pinched woman from the radio. “‘A brave sea captain, a freak storm, and a platter of puffy dough balls.’”
Dad chuckles. “Puffy dough balls.”
“‘Donut holes made him famous, but being a sailor’ . . . ‘just a big field’ . . . Um? Ruby? I think your cards are out of order?” Mom hands the cards back for Ruby to sort out. “Just read it, honey. You won’t get sick. —How long does it take to read — a minute, right? That’s not very long.”
Ruby shuffles the cards around to their proper places.
“Go on,” says Ruby’s dad. “We’re listening.”
“‘Some say it was destiny,’” Ruby reads.
***
Some say it was destiny. A brave sea captain, a freak storm, and a platter of puffy dough balls.
Donut holes made him famous, but being a sailor was what Captain Bunning loved. When he and his ship grew too old to sail, he didn’t know what to do. He dry-docked Evangeline and moved from city to city, looking for a place to settle. He thought he’d never find a home on land.
Then he came here. It was just a big field and some woods and not many people, but he was tired of drifting around. He decided to stay. Rather than use trees from the woods, he salvaged beams from his beloved Evangeline and built a school.
Then he went traveling again—this time telling everyone he met about the school, the place, and what it would become. People listened and people came and a real town grew.
Maybe it was destiny. Maybe not.
All I know is that Captain Bunning didn’t just invent the donut hole, he created a “hole” community.
And I’m gl
ad he did.
***
There is a sniffle from the front seat. “Mom? You okay?”
“I’m fine,” says Mom. “Your dad’s the crybaby.” It would have sounded like an insult if she hadn’t said it so gently.
“Aw, Ruby, you remind me of my mother.” Dad makes a teary smile at her in the rearview mirror. “It’s like having a little bit of Gigi there in the back seat.”
It is so weird to see her dad cry. He did on the day Gigi died and at the funeral, but since then he has seemed like exactly the same dad he was before. Busier at work, maybe, but otherwise the same.
“I miss her a lot, Dad,” Ruby says.
“You do, Rubes?” He sounds genuinely surprised. “I thought I was the only one. My brothers and sisters, everybody seems normal and busy—but, yeah. I miss her every day. She left a hole . . .” Dad’s voice skips in the middle of the word, and Ruby’s mom rests a soft hand on his shoulder. “I’m okay, Ruby. Don’t worry,” he says.
“I’m not worried.” In fact, Ruby feels better than she has in a while.
The turn signal clicks on, and Ruby’s dad pulls into the rec center parking lot. He rolls down his window and waves to a Boy Scout with an orange flag. “Where do you want us?” he asks. His voice has returned to normal; Mom’s hand has left his shoulder. It is like the past three minutes never happened. But Ruby knows they did.
The Boy Scout waves their car toward another Scout, who waves them toward another, who, by luck or fate or chance or whatever, is standing just two spots away from where Lucy is helping her dads take lawn chairs out of the back of the Okeda Martial Arts pickup truck.
Ruby’s dad shuts off the car and unlocks the doors. “Hey, Rubes,” he says. “Maybe later this week we can go to the cemetery together? I’m sure I can sneak away from the show room for a bit.”