All Good Children (29 page)

Mom hands me a large black wallet. “This is Cheyenne Connors, your new half-brother.”

A sixteen-year-old boy with long black bangs and big blue eyes scowls from a passport. He's six-foot-two, one-hundred-and-seventy pounds. I know the kid—he's a footballer from New Middletown Southeast Secondary School, home of the Blue Mountain Devils.

“He doesn't look much like Dallas,” I say.

Mom snatches the passport from my hands. “They're the same height, same weight. We can ask Celeste to make up Dallas's nose and mouth.”

“And the birth certificate? Can we put Dad's name on it?”

“I don't have a birth certificate. It wasn't in his wallet. We'll have to take Daddy's passport and death certificate and be prepared to lie.”

I'm in suspended isolation for the next two days. No one posts anything anymore—no journals, gossip, news, snapshots, nothing but school announcements. I don't want to return to classes but I hate being disconnected. Dallas won't answer my coded messages. We're supposed to leave on Saturday.

I'm unsettled in the apartment by myself. I hear noises in the hallway, creaks and murmurs when no one is out there. Yesterday a woman laughed so loud I thought she was in the kitchen. She stood across the hall rummaging in her handbag for a key. I watched her through the peephole. Middle-aged and sagging, with dyed blond hair and a black suit she must have bought when she was thinner. She spoke to a younger woman projected on the wall. “Oh my god, what a bugger!” she yelled, indifferent to the camera and my eyes. “No kidding. They're all the same.”

I've looked and listened for her today. I don't know why.

I check out the
Freakshow
tryouts, but there's no one who interests me. I wish they'd bring back Zipperhead.

I do homework and lift weights until I'm bored senseless. I work up the nerve to visit Xavier.

He answers the door himself.

“Xavier? I almost didn't recognize you.”

His hair is cut short. He wears white jeans and a blue shirt with a Western motif down the chest. He looks twenty years old, serious, handsome, clean-cut and well rested.

“Hey, Max!” Celeste calls from the living room. She sits on a couch covered in throw blankets, a RIG in her hand. “It's so nice to see you. I'm in a meeting, but come and keep us company.”

Xavier steps aside to let me pass. He smells like cheap hand soap, a dusting of baby powder over lye. “It's good to see you,” I tell him.

“Thank you.” His eyes zoom in on me. He doesn't smile, doesn't sparkle.

“You know who I am, right?”

“Yes, of course. You're Maxwell Connors.”

“Good. Royal. You're doing all right? You look healthier.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“You cut your hair.”

“A man should wear short hair.”

I smile. “You're sixteen, Xavier.”

“Yes. I had a birthday recently.”

I nod. “Mine's on Saturday.”

He couldn't care less. “I need to do my homework now,” he says. He leaves me on my own, sits at a little white desk in the corner, posture perfect on a tall pine chair.

“Xavier's going back to academic school after the holidays!” Celeste shouts over her RIG. “His body chemistry just needed time to harmonize. Thank god. We were so worried. But the new patch works great.”

I lean on the sagging back of the couch and look over her shoulder. A color wheel and four faces float above her RIG. “What's your meeting?”

“College yearbook club.” She points at me. “You could help with the design! You're such a good artist.”

I straighten up, unsure if she's serious, unsure if she's been treated. She gabs to her friends about the color of stars and spirals in the yearbook sidebars. I stand there, awkward and ignored, hands in my pockets, smiling for no reason.

The room is furnished with odds and ends—glass coffee table, pine end tables, black plastic cabinet in the corner. An abstract art print hangs, black and pink, on one wall beside a huge brown Leonardo in an ornate frame. The place smells like bacon grease and disinfectant. It's crazy, like their family.

Xavier's eyes and fingers whip across his screen twice as fast as a normal person's.

“What are you working on?” I ask.

He stiffens, unhappy with my interruption. “It's a translation.”

“He translated a whole book last week from English to Russian,” Celeste boasts. “Now he's doing it in Spanish. It's his new obsession.”

“What book?” I ask. “Can I see?”

Xavier sighs.

I hover over his shoulder. When he looks around, I hop to his other side just to bug him. I lean into his RIG. “I never knew you read poetry.”

He shifts his chair away from me. “It's an English poem from a Sumerian text. I'm translating it into Spanish.”

“
Gilgamesh
?”

He's surprised I know it. He looks from me to the screen and back.

I shrug. “How many Sumerian poems are there?”

“There are many Sumerian poems.”

I laugh. “I didn't know that. But
Gilgamesh
is famous. Pepper rewrote it in Communications last year. What part are you at?”

“I'm half finished.”

“What part in the story?”

“It's a poem.”

“Is his friend dead yet? I liked his friend better than him.” I read the English half of Xavier's screen. “Oh, this part. This is sad.” Gilgamesh is in a tunnel, without a friend in the world, and he has to crawl for hours in total darkness to get to the other side. He's lonely and scared and he wants to give up. I sigh, shake my head, mutter, “I've been there.”

“No you haven't,” Xavier says. “It's from the Middle East.”

I smile. “Yeah, but we've all been there.”

He squirms on his chair. “No, we haven't.”

“Don't agitate him!” Celeste hisses at me.

“Sorry. It's a metaphor.”

Xavier shakes his head, furrows his brow, frowns at me with the exact expression Ally uses now, like I'm defective. “It's a poem,” he snaps.

I don't like his haircut. I don't like his face with his new haircut. He looks like he was made in a factory. I don't know why he ever reminded me of anything else. “I have to go,” I say.

He nods and turns back to his busy-work.

“Oh, hey,” Celeste says, glancing away from her yearbook buddies. “Can you take your tent with you? I know it was a gift and everything, but Mom says we don't have room for it and it kind of smells.”

I think for a second that she's joking. “You're giving me back my painting?”

“We really like it, Max, but we don't have anywhere to put it so it's kind of a waste.”

I look at Xavier. “You don't want your birthday present?”

“It smells funny,” he says without bothering to look at me.

Celeste laughs. “It really does.”

I hope they're all zombified, the whole Lavigne family. I hate their dirty house and their shiny hair and their poor-but-authentic line of crap. Mostly I hate how much I miss Xavier. I don't bother smiling. “Sure, I'll take it.”

As I drag my metaphor down the peeling hallway, I feel angrier but happier at the same time. I saved my tent from being stuffed in a closet full of thrift-store clothing and stacks of useless petitions, from a future folded in on itself until there's no memory of what it ever meant to anyone. To me. This tent is my work, the finest work of my life, and it belongs to me. Besides, I might have to live in it soon.

FIFTEEN

It's Friday, December 23, the last day of school before the holidays. Dallas is heading inside when I arrive at the high school. He holds his id card under his chin and stares straight ahead. I take my place in line, quiet and cold like the world around me.

I sit behind him in Communications, still waiting my turn. Mr. Ames hands out holiday assignments on “persuasive nonfiction.” Our syllabus used to list epic poetry for this term, but zombies don't care about fallen comrades.
Mail
delivery from ancient to modern times
is a brain we can sink our teeth into.

“Yum,” I say to Dallas as I read the list of topics.

He doesn't hear.

“Bring something of yourselves to this piece,” Mr. Ames says. “Any questions?”

We stare blankly.

He sighs. “You children are not what you used to be.”

I try Dallas again at lunch. I shuffle behind him in the lineup and say, “My mother watched a movie about zombies last night. They ate people's brains.”

He doesn't look at me. His eyes follow the cheesy macaroni spreading across his plate in a yellow ooze. His eyelids are purple with fatigue, black against the bridge of his nose.

I tap his shoulder. “Did you see that movie?”

He turns to me like he just realized I exist. No smile behind his eyes. No chewing. No clue. “I used to watch movies,” he says.

“I don't watch them anymore. I don't know why.” He grabs his tray and sits at the nearest empty chair between two strangers.

Brennan nudges my spine. “Shake it off,” he whispers without moving his lips.

I'm not aware of ordering lunch. I'm sitting at the end of a long table beside Brennan, staring at a tray of food I don't want to eat—mushy vegetable soup, cold bread, bitter grapes.

Across the room, Dallas chews and chews but never seems to swallow. Eventually he rises and stacks his plates on the trolley. His jacket stretches tight across his shoulders but his pants barely hang on to his ass. He's skinnier than he was three days ago.

“Stop staring,” Brennan whispers. He has a natural talent for ventriloquism. “Eat your food.”

I suck a spoonful of gelatin back and forth between my teeth until it liquefies with a red squeak.

History is excruciating. We study industrial catastrophes through the ages. We leave out the suffering and death, skip who's to blame and focus on the bouncing-back techniques, every nose to a grindstone, getting the job done right.

Mr. Reese doesn't participate. He shows a documentary, assigns a reading, points to questions on the screen, goes about his duties like a secretary to his former self. I hate him and all that he withstands. I hate him like I hate my mother, whom I love and wish I didn't hate but I can't help it. I hate every adult who feels bad about what they're doing and does it anyway, sighing with every breath, clinging to the notion that they're good people in bad times. I hate them for not standing up for me. I hate them for not helping me stand up for myself. I hate them for not teaching me to care about all the people they mowed down before they got around to us. I hope they choke on all their coffee-talk and tissues.

Mr. Reese squeezes down the aisles, inspecting our progress. I stick my foot out, and he stumbles, shocked and outraged but too scared to tell. I continue my work.

I'm no good at history anymore. I can't separate the past from the future.

I harass Dallas at the lockers before gym class, stand too close and whisper, “Did you know that zombies eat brains?”

“No.” He reaches around me for his water bottle.

I'm right behind him at the gymnasium doors.

Coach Emery lays a hand on my shoulder and keeps it there.

“You look tired, Connors. Do you need to sit on a bench?”

I realize I'm staring after Dallas like a kid watching his daddy leave the daycare. I take a deep breath and relax the muscles of my face.

“There's more to health than exercise,” the coach says. “Did you get a proper sleep?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You're all right to participate?”

“Yes, sir.”

He pats my shoulder. “Good boy. You don't want to be sick for the holidays.”

“No, sir.”

We start with laps. I can't tell if I'm imagining things or if Dallas speeds up whenever I close in on him.

“Stay as a group! This is not a race!” Coach Emery shouts.

We form small circles for basketball drills, passing and stealing the ball. Dallas stands directly across from me, next to Brennan. His T-shirt drapes over his ribs. The veins of his arms snake along his pale flesh like a topographical map. His eyes drift over me as they follow the ball. I fumble on purpose, but he doesn't react.

“Pick it up and try again,” the coach says.

I slam it straight at Dallas. Brennan ducks in reflex. Dallas catches the ball half an inch from his nose without flinching and bounces it over to Bay.

“Careful how you throw!” Coach Emery shouts. “You must remain aware of your situation and those around you.”

Every time I get the ball I slam it at Dallas. He never tires of it.

Coach Emery finally grabs the ball from my hands and shouts in my face, “Spit that gum out of your mouth, Connors! You know there's no chewing gum in my gym!”

“I don't have any gum, sir.”

He frowns. “What the hell are you chewing then?”