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wheel is really two circles—an outside circle and a smaller inside circle. Like a car tire. Or a donut. She traces the circumference of each with her finger. Then she traces the complementary color lines, following red to green, orange to blue. All the way across. Diameter.
    The lines all meet in the center and spoke out from there.
That’s radius
, Ruby thinks.
The line that pokes from the center to the edge.
    That is what happened to her today.
    She got poked. She was just sitting there looking at Nero DeNiro’s color wheel, and she got poked by a memory or a feeling, zipping along a radius line. Poke. Out of nowhere. Or somewhere, another speck of time. Poke. Poke. Poke.
    Ruby knows the speck that poked her too. It was the reason she still feels so sad when everyone else has moved on. She had tried to forget about it, but today it reached out and poked her.
    And she wishes there was a way she could reach back.

The Statue
    If you are ever selected Bunning Day Essay Girl—or Boy, for that matter (there have been more boys than girls, though in the past nine years the only boy to receive the honor was Connor Litigen, who later became a star football player and, later still, an accomplished shoplifter)—you stand in the circle in the square on Cornelius Circle across from Bunning Memorial Park. There is a statue in that park. You can see it clearly: Cornelius Bunning dressed in his captain’s coat, one hand fixed to the wheel of
Evangeline
(not that there’s really an
Evangeline
there, but the wheel is, and you can’t help but imagine the rest) and one hand holding aloft a donut, perfectly round against the sky.
    People come with folding chairs and blankets and ice chests to claim spots around you. Some pass through your sightline, but you can still keep an eye on the captain if you want. You can watch birds land on the wheel spokes and on the cap he wears tight on his curly bronze head. Squirrels climb up too, holding hunks of donut in their teeth. If you were closer, you could see the squirrels nibbling. If you were closer than that, you could see the details of Captain Bunning’s coat. The pipe sticking out of his pocket. The carvings on his buttons. And you might even notice tiny flecks on the donut he holds. Sprinkles, it might look like to you.
    Of course, if you were the Essay Girl—or Boy—or any kid in Bunning, you would know that those sprinkles are really failed wishes. You would know that each fleck was made by a quarter. Not just any quarter, but a 2001 quarter or a 2004 quarter or even a 1966 quarter if you are really old—a quarter from the year you were born, a quarter you had put in your pocket and carried to Bunning Circle on your birthday, a quarter you had held in that pocket until your hand was wet with sweat, until you had whispered your wish—your greatest wish—ninety times (a quarter of the number of degrees in a full circle, of course). A quarter you had held between your fingers while you squinted hard at that donut and held your breath and aimed and pitched straight like a dart or arced like a softball or spun like a skipping stone . . .
    If the quarter went through the hole in Captain Bunning’s bronze donut, your wish would come true.
    Everybody knows that.
    It is hard to whiz a quarter through the two-inch hole of a bronze donut suspended sixteen feet off the ground. Even those with the best aim usually ting their quarter against the donut edge or Captain Bunning’s cold metal fingers. And you only get one chance each birthday. You can’t stand there flinging quarter after quarter. One quarter, one chance.
    Everybody knows that, too.
    But if you did it—through luck or skill or fate or whatever—if you did it, your wish would come true before the next Bunning Day was over.
    That, Ruby knows, is why she is standing in the circle in the square on Cornelius Circle. Because on her birthday, her twelfth birthday, her