All Good Children (25 page)

I'm called to the office at two o'clock. My name blasts over the intercom. Dallas stiffens in the row beside me. I plan to make a run for it.

Mr. Reese looks up at the speaker and back to me with a worried frown. His face relaxes when he checks his watch. “It's time to take your work to the art exhibit, Max.”

Two girls wait in the backseat of the principal's car, clutching black leather portfolio cases. I lean my rolled-up tent against the trunk.

“What on earth is that thing?” Mr. Graham asks me.

“It's my exhibit.”

He stares at me, scowling, but eventually he opens the trunk.

I sit in the front seat, empty-handed and open to scrutiny.

I stare out the passenger window as we drive south along the city spine. It's so efficient, New Middletown's core of office towers and hospital wards and agricultural warehouses. Nothing's ever wasted here, not a drop of water or a moment of time. It's beautiful in its way, and I know I'll miss it if I get the chance to leave, but for the first time in my life I feel like this is not my town.

Every moment I'm in this car, my tent seems more ridiculous. I can almost feel the weight of it behind us. It was a mistake, painting it the way I did. I should have submitted a small still life—fruit in a bowl or some naked beauty.

Mr. Graham drops us at the pedestrian conveyor closest to City Hall and drives away to park underground. I consider running home, but the tent's too heavy to carry far, and there's no way I'd leave it here. I step onto the conveyor and let it take me forward.

I raise my eyes to the shining columns of colored glass that reach into the sky. It's still the most premium building I've seen in my life. But I understand what that taxi driver meant when he called it cold as ice.

I drag my tent across the threshold.

A man rushes up and asks my name. “Connors. Yes. I expected a sculpture.” He frowns at me and leads me to my station.

“Excuse me?” I ask the kid unfolding an easel across from me. “When you're done there could you give me a hand with this?”

“Yes. Certainly. I'd be pleased to.”

He doesn't ask any questions, just follows my directions, holds the tent poles while I wrench the canvas overtop. I hang two flashlights from the ceiling and turn them on. The kid looks at the dim walls and says, “It's stuffy in here.” He walks back to his still life—red tulips in a glass vase.

It's a long afternoon. People arrive at three thirty—parents, teachers, judges, citizens. They walk through the exhibit with polite curiosity, making small talk with the artists, nodding and smiling. I sweat beside my military surplus.

They stare at my tent, baffled. They open their mouths to speak but close them again before anything comes out, walk away shaking their heads.

I think I might get through this with embarrassment as my only damage, but at four fifteen a big black woman in a floral dress brushes open a tent flap and sticks her head inside my metaphor. “Oh my god,” she whispers, catching a few ears. She grabs a flashlight and lights up the walls. She snaps photos, leaning in and backing up. She nods her head, smiles, frowns, gasps, mutters, “Amazing.” Other adults peer through the windows or stick their necks through the front flaps but they don't enter. They take one glance and step away, like unwitting performance artists.

“Marvelous work,” the flowery woman says when she emerges. She smiles and pats my shoulder. “You have an exciting career ahead of you.”

The principal hurries over to shake her hand.

“I'm Rosemary Seawell,” she says.

“From the
New Middletown Monitor
?” Mr. Graham asks.

She laughs. “No, sir. I'm up from Pittsburgh.”

I want to call Xavier and tell him the free media is in town, but I don't know if he'd still care.

“Pittsburgh!” Mr. Graham scoffs. “Why would you cover an event like this?”

She smiles. “Great artists are discovered at events like this.”

Mr. Graham stares at my work, revolted. “Stand with what?” he asks.

“Withstand,” Rosemary corrects him. “Have you been inside?”

He cautiously nudges the tent flaps apart, but he doesn't pass through. He lingers in the doorway, canvas draped over his bald white girth.

“Use a flashlight,” Rosemary says. She turns to me and smiles. “They're a nice touch.”

Mr. Graham backs out without bothering. He walks up to me, stands far too close, and stares down into my eyes. “When did you make this, Connors?”

“I don't remember, sir.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“It doesn't make any sense to me. Does it make sense to you, boy?”

“Nothing makes sense to me, sir.”

He nods like that's a good answer. “Pack it up, and I'll take you home.”

THIRTEEN

Mom fries hamburgers at the stove while I sit at the kitchen table and lose my appetite. I have four hours of homework to suffer through, simple but repetitive: conjugate a hundred Spanish verbs, describe the probability of a hundred random events. They like to drive a point home, these teachers of the new economy.

Ally sits across from me, her nose half an inch from the table, her tongue poking between her teeth. Lucas came by with her homework—a set of intricate black and white designs on paper with numbers in every white space. Each number corresponds to a color, and Ally has to fill in each space appropriately. She starts out well in blue and brown, but then she thinks of Peanut and starts to cry, smearing her work.

Mom sets ketchup and milk in front of us. “I have a patient named Connors whose grandson visits every few weeks. He lives in town. He's sixteen or seventeen, tall like Dallas, with black hair and blue eyes. I could get his id for Dallas to use in Atlanta. We could say he's your half-brother, Daddy's child from another marriage.”

“The fingerprints won't match,” I say.

“They never check those unless you're arrested.”

“The kid would report a lost id. We'd get caught the first place we flashed it. You need to get his passport instead. He won't notice that's missing. If you can get his birth certificate, too, we could put Dad's name as his father.”

“Good idea. We could use them to get Dallas a new id in Atlanta.”

I shoot down her dream. “We'll never get an id with a stolen passport. But we might get into Canada with it.”

“I don't want to leave the country, Max!” she shouts.

“I don't even want to leave this city.”

“We have no choice!”

“What on earth are we going to do in Canada? It's freezing there. If we have to live in a car, I'd rather park it in Atlanta.”

Ally carefully picks up her pencils and takes her work to the living room. “I wish you'd put the tent back up!” she yells.

I take a breath and swallow all the sarcastic backtalk that rises up inside me. “At least you have a niece there. You don't have anybody left in Atlanta.”

Mom swats the air. “I haven't seen Rebecca since she was your age. I don't even know her. And I don't know anything about Canada. Not anything good anyway. How am I supposed to get a job there? What makes you think they'll let us in?”

“They take anyone with a trade. Their economy's weak and their population is even older than ours. They need nurses. They'll probably pay us to move there.” I smile, but she doesn't find it amusing. “They'll let you in, Mom, and you'll find work. We'll be fine. And we can hide Dallas there. We just have to leave before January first or they won't let him out.”

“
We
can leave whenever we like.”

“No, we can't! They'll give me another shot when the holiday's over. We have to leave by Christmas. You said you'd take Dallas, and you're not backing out. So get that kid's passport and birth certificate to use at the border.”

She holds her hands over her face. “Oh my god, Max, what on earth are we heading into?”

The trade school calls after supper—Ally must return to school tomorrow or supply a doctor's note confirming her illness. When Mom tells her, Ally bursts into tears. She runs to the living room and stares out the window, crying for her dead squirrel.

“I don't want to send either of you to school tomorrow,” Mom says.

I dissolve my homework with a sigh. “The police will take us if we don't go. It's been on the news. Zero tolerance for truancy.” Another news story about a bear attack in the national forest gets me thinking about Mom's orchard memories. I lead her into the living room and ask nonchalantly, “Did you tell Ally about the squirrel I saw today when the principal drove me home?”

“What squirrel?” Ally asks through her tears.

“You know that squirrel we saw in the park? The dead one we thought was Peanut?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't know if that was really Peanut. On my way home today I saw a squirrel heading toward the forest that looked exactly like her.”

Her eyes widen and her mouth hangs open, disbelieving.

“I think she was following the roads out of town,” I say. “Away from the poison.”

Mom stares at me warily, waiting to see where this goes.

Ally wipes her nose. “You saw a real squirrel? You think it was Peanut?”

“It looked like her. And that one by the tree didn't look like her at all, did it?”

“No, it didn't.”

“You know how smart Peanut was. She probably knew there was poison on the ground so she hid in her nest until it was safe to come down. Now she's running away to find a better home.”

Ally sniffles and sighs. “Did you really see a squirrel?”

“Yeah. Not far from here. It looked just like Peanut. I told you that, didn't I, Mom?”

“Yes, dear. It slipped my mind.”

Ally stares suspiciously at Mom, who avoids her eyes.

“So you know what that means,” I say.

Ally shakes her head.

“It's really sad,” I warn her.

She shrinks back.

“It means you'll probably never see Peanut again. She's so smart, she won't come back here because of the poison. She'll stay in the forest in an oak tree. You know what comes from oak trees?”

“Acorns,” she whispers.

“She'll have time to collect them before it snows,” Mom says.

Ally leans over the back of the chair, looks out the window down to the ground. “She's gone,” she whispers. “Poor Peanut. She'll miss me.” She stares down the back of the chair for a bit. Then she wiggles it away from the wall.

A spider has spun its web in the corner of the living room. It's plain, brown, half an inch long, scared of the light.

“Watch out,” I say. “Spiders can bite if you bother them.”

“What do you think he eats?” she asks.

“Flies.”

“We never have flies. He must be hungry.”

“Put the chair back, honey,” Mom says. “You're scaring him.”

Ally wiggles the chair back, but not as close to the wall as it was before. She leans over the upholstery and smiles. “I'm calling him Fred.”

“You're a good brother,” Mom tells me after Ally's in bed.

I shrug. “She wasn't going to make it through tomorrow without a lie.”

“You make it through too, Max.” She sits on the couch with her hands folded in her lap. “I'm sorry I yelled at you. I'm just scared.”

“We'll be okay.”

She pats my hand. “Sure we will. I looked up some things about Canada. Did you know that parts of it aren't much colder than here?”

I laugh. “That's the part we'll head to.”

She smiles. “They have a nursing shortage. That's hopeful, right? And we can keep our citizenship so we could come back eventually.”

“Great.”

She nods. “I'm sorry I got so mad, Max. I'm supposed to lead you kids out of trouble, not the other way around.”

“It's all right. So we're really going?”