All Good Children (30 page)

“I don't know, sir.”

He puts his hand on my forehead, like I might be coming down with something. “Go sit on the bench.”

I sit out the rest of class. I close my eyes, take shallow breaths, listen to the ball bounce off the gym floor.
Boom,
boom, boom
.

The coach kicks my foot as he walks by, and I realize I'm muttering to myself and pulling all the hairs from my thighs.

I sit on my hands, stare at the ropes that hang off the far wall, multiply numbers in my head. Two times two is four times two is eight times two is sixteen, and on and on until the trillions jumble in my head and I have to start over and over and finally the bell rings.

Panic grips me in the shower. I can't accept the fact that Dallas has been treated just before we leave. I cannot live with that.

I adjust the water temperature. The drops hit me like a thousand needles, freezing then scalding then freezing. The stench of chlorine fills my nose and lungs. I hear murmuring beneath the hiss of water and slap of feet. I jerk my head around, ready for a trap, but all I see are silent boys draped in towels, walking away to dress or waiting their turn in the water.

I watch Dallas from the corner of my eye, not caring if I come off gay. He faces the showerhead, moves slowly but efficiently like all the others. He rinses and towels off and walks away without looking at me once.

“Get dressed, Connors! You're lagging behind!” Coach Emery shouts from the door. I haven't even soaped yet, but I don't bother. I shut off the taps and cover myself.

The coach stops Dallas from leaving the room. “Somebody,” he announces to the half-naked class, “I'm not saying who, but somebody left a water bottle on the football field, and you all know how I like a clean field. I want two volunteers to walk the yards and check for litter.” He points at Dallas, then across the room at me. “I want to see you two march like soldiers up and down that field. Pick up any garbage you find. Make sure you check around the trailer. The rest of you are free to go. Merry Christmas.”

I dress hurriedly, not caring that my socks are inside out. As I tie my shoes, I notice that my hands are trembling.

Brennan drops his shoes on the floor at my feet and sits beside me on the bench. He lowers his head and whispers, “Don't ask any questions till you're away from the cameras.” He wriggles his foot into his shoe and leans down to tie it tight. “Don't give yourself away to him, just in case. Let us know what you find out.”

He stands up and passes me a swift sympathetic glance. As he reaches down for his dirty sweats, he adds, “Then get out, Max. With or without him.”

When Brennan leaves, I'm all that's left in the change room. I like it here. It's smelly but it smells like kids. Whatever the treatment did to them, it didn't improve their stink.

Coach Emery sticks his head around the corner. “Time is ticking.”

Dallas and I drop our packs at the trailer and walk to the field in silence. I should have worn my coat, but it's stuffed in my bag and I'm not thinking straight. I button my uniform, turn up my collar, shove my hands in my pockets. Dallas walks tall beside me, zipped and hooded. I can barely see his face.

The field is an expanse of dead grass fringed with skeletal trees in the west. They reach into a monotonous sky of the palest gray. The sun is a bright disk behind the clouds, already sinking at three thirty in the afternoon.

It's strange to walk this field in shoes instead of cleats. The ground is hard beneath me, the blades of grass stiff and slippery.

“We should separate and begin at opposite ends,” Dallas says.

“No. We should walk together.”

“It's more efficient to separate.”

“Four eyes are better than two.”

“No,” he says. “Two eyes—”

“We're walking together.”

Sixty thousand is a lot of square feet when you're walking it with a zombie. Fifty paces take us to the sideline, where we square off and head back like we're mowing a lawn. The school looks formidable in the winter light, six units of ambition stretching into the distance, a place where futures are decided behind black glass.

The students are probably walking out the front doors now, or already gone home for the holidays. The teachers are still here—I see their bikes and Mr. Graham's car in the lot— but they don't show any sign of life. It feels like we're alone.

We reach the sideline, square off, head west again. Dallas lowers his eyes but keeps his chin up, so it looks like he's staring down his nose. I imitate him, but he doesn't notice. He doesn't care.

“What did you do after the library last night?” I ask.

“Small talk distracts us from our work.”

I want to swat him. “What did you do?” I repeat.

He stops and stares at me like I'm defective. Then he furrows his brow. “I don't remember.” He shivers and walks on, staring down his nose.

“Did you watch a show? Did you do homework? Did you take any medicine?”

“You should look at the football field, not at me.”

“There's nothing on the football field! I can see the whole thing from here. It's clean. There is no one left in our school who would even think of throwing garbage on this field.” I stumble into him on purpose, banging his shoulder. “No one except you and me.”

He stops walking. “I would never throw garbage on the football field. That's wrong! Why would you throw garbage on the football field? We're lucky to have a football field. We should take care of what we have.”

I want to take his head off. I want to rip out his larynx. I want to knee his testicles into a useless pulp. My cheeks burn as I stare up into his eyes. God, I wish I was taller. I could kick his ass when we were small. He tapped out every time. Now he could hold me off at arm's length while he picked his nose.

There's outrage in his expression, but it's the outrage of Lucas and Ally and all the other tattler zombies.

I can't stand to think of him telling on me. He never told when I broke his dad's headlight last summer, or when I loosened the lid on Coach Emery's thermos in grade nine so he scalded himself and had to go to the hospital. He never told when I ran away after Dad died and hid in our empty house overnight, or when I forgot Ally in the yard when she was two and we found her in the core an hour later. He never told on a single wrong thing I did in the past fifteen years. But now we're almost grown and he'd turn me in for a piece of garbage.

The fact that there is no one in this world who cares about me except my mother is just too much truth to bear. My face starts to tingle like I'm going to cry or throw up. I can't talk anymore. The field is under surveillance and my tongue is too heavy to move.

For ten more minutes we walk in silence side by side, searching the field and bleachers for garbage nobody believes is there. I pretend the kid beside me is someone else, some new kid whose name I don't know.

“It's clean,” Dallas announces when we reach the end of the bleachers.

I have to bite my tongue to keep from crying, I'm so exhausted. My blood washes warm against my teeth.

“Now we'll check the trailer,” he says.

I don't go inside with him. I stare at the ground because I don't want my grief-stricken face on camera. When I reach the back of the trailer, out of view, I start to shake. I bite my lips and wipe my nose and groan and hyperventilate and stomp the ground and do everything I can to keep from crying like a baby. I bang my face on the trailer wall and I like the feel of it, firm but with a little give, so I do it harder and harder, in the dead center of my forehead, and it feels like nirvana is just one knock away. But it's not a typical zombie move, so when I see Dallas at the corner, watching me in confusion, I know I'm wrecked. He's going to rat me out.

“What the hell do you want?” I say, sniffing my weakness up my nose.

He stares blankly, silhouetted by the winter sun.

“Come here,” I tell him.

“I am here.”

“Closer.”

He hesitates, but then he takes one step, out of view of the cameras.

I grab on to his winter coat and slam him against the trailer.

“Ow!” he says. “Stop this. I want you to stop.”

“I don't care what you want.”

He frowns and tries to pry my fingers off his clothing.

“We're supposed to meet tomorrow at my apartment,” I say. “You'll tell your father you're at the library, but you'll come to my place instead. You told me to come and get you if you don't show up. Do you remember that?”

He pulls on my thumb but otherwise ignores me.

I shake him, rattling his shoulders into the wall. “Do you remember that?”

“I remember that, but it was wrong. It's wrong to force someone to do something they don't want to do.” He gives up on my hands. He unzips his coat and pulls his arms out of it, leaving it empty in my grasp.

He's walking away, and I can't accept that. I plow into his back and tackle him to the ground. He tries to roll me off, but I slam my knee into his spine and force his head into the dirt, my elbow jammed in his temple.

“You come over tomorrow morning,” I say. “Or I'll come to your house and haul you out of it.”

He lies there, unresisting.

“You hear me?”

No response.

I worry that I might have hurt him. If he takes medications I don't know about, I might have rattled his brain into a seizure. “Dallas? Dallas, are you all right?” I get off him, turn him over, stare into his vacant eyes.

He blinks. He sits up and wipes the dead grass and dirt off his cheek. He rises to his feet and brushes off his uniform.

“Are you all right?” I repeat.

“I'm fine.” He picks up his coat and turns to leave.

“No!” I shout, pulling him back. “No way! You're not leaving till you promise to come over in the morning.”

He shakes his head. “I have work to do in the morning.”

“No, you don't.” I grab the gray lapels of his uniform and pull him closer. “I'm taking you with me.”

He brushes at my fingers. “That would be wrong.”

“I'm not leaving you here!” I scream those words, and I can't stop screaming them. I shove him hard into the wall, over and over, stabbing my knuckles into his ribs. “I'm not leaving you here! I'm not leaving you here!”

“Stop!” He peels my hands off him and holds them in his fists.

“There is something wrong with you. You need to see a doctor.”

Suddenly I'm fighting tears again. All my tension—hours and days and weeks of it—starts to leak out of me. “I'm not leaving you here,” I whisper and choke. “I'm the only person who cares who you are. I'm the only friend you've got.”

He smiles and lets go of my hands. “All our schoolmates are my friends.”

I smack his head.

His eyes darken and he gathers himself, tight and tense. “I have to go.” His voice rumbles deep and low. It's an awful sound because it's almost real and my hope rises to the bait.

“Dallas?” I try to catch his eye, but he stares at my hands where they cling to him.

He clenches his jaw. “Let go of me.” He leans into me, wraps his hands around mine, crushes my fingers.

I wince but I can take it. “Dallas? Is that you?”

He wrenches my hands from his uniform and pushes me away.

“No!” I hurl him around and slam him into the wall.

I shove my forearm into his throat and press on his windpipe.

“Where do you have to go? Are you going to tell a teacher?”

He doesn't move, doesn't look me in the eye, doesn't answer. But he's shaking. He's angry, he's losing it, I can feel him start to burn.

“If you were one of them, you'd tell a teacher,” I say.

He breathes deeply, blinks, says, “I don't want to hurt you. You're too damaged already. We should be kind to those less fortunate than ourselves.”

I step back and slap him across the face. His head swings against the wall and my handprint blooms pink on his pale cheek. “You are not one of them!”

He shakes his head and snorts. “You're having mental health troubles. You need to see a doctor.” There's nothing in his eyes, no sparkle, no hidden message. He's angry because I'm in his way. I'm disobedient. I'm history.

“You're not one of them!” I shout. “You're not! You're not!” I slap his face over and over until I'm out of energy and his cheek is flaming red and I'm just sort of patting him and bawling my eyes out, begging, “You can't be, man. You can't be one of them. You can't be.”

“What have we here?” Mr. Graham stands at the corner of the trailer, smiling at me, round and shiny as a big white ball.

SIXTEEN

I shiver with cold and fear. I'm finished.

Dallas straightens up, takes my hands off his uniform, places them at my sides. “Max is unwell, sir. He needs to go home.”