All Good Children (7 page)

Brennan tries not to laugh.

Washington Anderson swears from the desk in front of them. He's Tyler's ugliest goon, a rabid homophobe and racist who's stuck playing his own damaged personality this morning. “You reeking hemorrhage, Richmond,” Washington mutters. “Get back to your desk.”

Dallas sticks a mint between his teeth and pulls back his lips. He leans close to Washington, daring him to take it.

Washington leaps to his feet and raises a fist.

The substitute teacher screams.

Dallas lifts himself off Brennan's desk and stands up to his height of six feet two inches, transforming instantly from a happy fag into a serious fighter. He crushes the mint between his teeth.

Tyler hurdles a desk to hover beside Washington. I hop beside Dallas, smiling at the opportunity to kick Tyler's ass again. Brennan stands up next to me with Bay, the biggest, blackest boy on the football team. “You don't want to do anything rash,” Brennan tells Washington. The room is silent and tense.

The sub looks from us to the surveillance camera to the door, too scared to say a word.

Dallas smiles at Washington. “Do you have a problem with my mints? Not your favorite flavor?”

Washington snorts and swears, clenching his fists. His eyes gleam with fury. But his grades are borderline and a suspension might get him sent to throwaway school, so he backs off with a muttered, “Outside.” The sub resumes her lecture on climate change in the twenty-first century. She stutters so quietly I can barely understand her.

“I'm wasting face time on this?” Kayla asks.

“It's worse than a virtual tutor,” Montgomery agrees.

The tension slowly fades, and we pick up our alternate personalities where we dropped them. Brennan sketches, I dance, Montgomery calls a huddle, Dallas and Pepper cheer.

In the hallway, everyone pats my back in thanks for livening up the lecture. I feel supreme—I need successes like this to raise my standing, especially given my height.

“See you at practice,” Brennan shouts as he walks down the hall with Kayla—quarterback and cheerleader, the love story that never grows old, just more expensive.

Sage Turner, Pepper's best friend, leers after them. “Do you think Brennan's the best-looking guy in school?” she asks.

Pepper glances at Dallas for a moment too long before she says, “I don't know.”

Dallas doesn't rub my nose in it. He says, “No way. You know who the best-looking guy in school is?”

Pepper smiles at me and we all shout at once, “Xavier!”

Dallas, Pepper and I sneak to the skate park up the road for lunch. It's empty except for a few kids our age, probably throwaways skipping class. Four boys skate around a bowl while two girls watch them, leaning against a railing, sipping on sodas.

Pepper keeps one eye on the boys while she calls her father. “Did Mom find a place for those people we spoke of?” Her parents help relocate New Yorkers whose homes are sinking into the sea. They're an unusually close family. My mother never talks to me about her patients. Dallas's father can't talk to anyone without shouting.

Dallas falls back on his standard topic. “Who do you think would win in a fight? The guy in the black shirt or the Asian kid?”

The Asian throwaway skates up the bowl and somersaults into the air. He lands in a crouch and zooms back down. The white kid dressed in black tries to copy him but chickens out on the somersault.

“Is the fight on skates or shoes?” I ask.

“Skates.”

“Maybe the Asian, if the other three don't gang up on him.”

Dallas swats my arm and points across the park. “Look!”

Tyler Wilkins is leaning over the railing near the girls, watching the throwaways skate. Washington Anderson steps up beside him, fury still gleaming in his eyes.

The Asian kid and the white kid zoom down opposite sides of the bowl toward each other. They link arms in the center, jerk hard and spin madly before they let go and zoom away laughing. The Asian boy flies up the concrete and flips in the air, lands on his wheels at the top. The girls clap as he takes a bow.

Washington nudges Tyler. He's found an outlet for his rage.

There's a reeking backlash against China these days. The news says it's a result of drought and famine and inflating food values, but that's crap. Guys like Tyler and Washington always brim with hatred, and right now they're taking it out on Asians because blacks and Latinos have had enough.

Tyler shouts something at the Asian kid—I can't make out the words, but the meaning is clear. The boy's smile disappears. He looks around the park to assess his situation.

“Shit,” Dallas mutters.

“I have to go,” Pepper says into her RIG. The three of us rise to our feet.

“What do we do?” Dallas asks.

I shrug. “He has three friends.”

“I'm not so sure,” Pepper says.

The Asian boy skates to the bottom of the bowl where the others stare up at Tyler and Washington. Then the three white kids step away, leaving the Asian kid to stand alone.

“What do we do?” Dallas repeats.

“There's a time to fight and there's a time to walk away,” Pepper says.

“Yeah, but which time is this?” Dallas asks. “What do you want to do, Max?”

Last year we would have slunk away, posting the news and photos. But once you stand up to someone, you're expected to keep standing.

I roll my eyes and sigh. I do not want to do what I'm about to do.

I toss my pizza crust into the compost and walk to the edge of the concrete bowl. Dallas moves to my side. It's a shining gesture but it only makes me look short in comparison.

“What do you faggots want?” Washington shouts.

Everyone looks our way. The girls step back from the railing and whisper. The skaters block the sun with their hands and look up at us. I feel like I should be wearing a cape.

The Asian boy picks up his bag while everyone's distracted. He speeds up and over the edge of the bowl, past us, down the sidewalk, out of the park.

Dallas laughs. “I guess this is the time for flight.” He turns to Washington and shouts, “We want to learn to skate like that kid!”

Washington looks around the park, shakes his head and swears, checks his watch.

Tyler rubs his hand up and down the railing and says something rude to the girls. Then he mutters to Washington and they walk away.

The skaters keep their eyes on me and Dallas. The girls wait for something to happen.

“We should get to school,” Pepper says.

Dallas puts his arm around her. “What would happen if you got caught off grounds?”

I pull her out of Dallas's embrace. “Imagine the shame,” I say.

Pepper walks away from both of us. “I don't like trouble.”

Dallas and I hustle to catch up with her. I don't remember when this competition began. Our other contests are clear— who's fastest, who's tallest, who played better in the last game. But with Pepper, we're both convinced we're winning.

A guard awaits us at the school gates, no doubt tipped off by Tyler. Pepper slips behind a shrub and glides into school unseen while Dallas and I crawl to the principal's office. Coach Emery is there with Mr. Graham. “I need these boys at practice,” he says. Instead of detention, we're assigned hall duty during the afternoon break.

It's humiliating. We wear striped yellow vests and peer around corners for loiterers and contraband. All the kids who clapped my back after history class now laugh in my face.

High school is a fickle arena.

“Dad's upset with you for missing two weeks of practice,” Brennan warns me in the football trailer.

“And our first game,” Bay adds. “Which we lost.”

“I know,” I say. “He called me a pig-dog and a lamebrain.”

Coach Emery sticks his head inside and shrieks, “Get your midget ass out here, Connors!” He makes me fill the water bottles and carry out the benches. Traditionally that's the job of ninth graders. I was looking forward to lording it over them this year. Instead, they survey me with ridicule.

Brennan grabs one end of the bench I'm dragging, but his dad shouts, “No helping! He didn't help you at the last game, did he? Let him do this by himself.”

The coach pretends he's tough, but I know he loves me. His exact words to my mother at the end of last season were, “Don't worry. He'll turn out fine.”

Unfortunately, he doesn't show me the love at practice. First he makes me sprint, drop and do push-ups up and down the field. Then he lines us up for chute drills and pairs me with Bay. After beating on trees all summer, I was looking forward to slamming into humans today. But with Bay, there's not much difference. I'm in a sweet sort of agony by the time we split into practice teams.

Mr. Reid, the assistant coach, leads my team. We used to have two assistant coaches, but Bay's father found a job and no one else volunteered. I've seen Xavier's old movies about small-town high school football with stadium seating and floodlights and uniforms that match, where half the town comes out to watch the games, girls drop their panties for all the players, and coaches review plays in screening rooms after hours. That is not New Middletown football.

Maybe that still goes on in public schools in open cities, or maybe it only happens in movies, but it doesn't happen here. We don't have the money anymore, and if we did, we'd upgrade the chemistry lab. We are the academic elite of a crumbling empire. There may be fifteen-year-olds beyond the walls who risk their ligaments for sport, but we will never meet them—although Dallas will invent the vehicles that carry the lucky few to their games, and I'll design the factories and prisons to house the rest of them. We're not sloughing off brain cells for a long shot we don't require.

As a consequence, the New Middletown Northeast Secondary junior football team really bleeds. We're called the Scorpions but we have no sting. No one comes out to watch our games, the only panty offering we've had was from Montgomery, and assistant coaching is a straw too short to pick your teeth with. We have thirty-six players this year, but half of them don't know the rules of football. They're here because two physical activities are mandatory, and cross-country running fills up fast. The only real players are Brennan, the quarterback, and Dallas, a receiver. They both have football-crazed fathers who suited them up at age seven. Since we only play other academic schools, we usually win. Brennan throws to Dallas for the touchdown over and over until the opposition catches on, at which point Brennan hands the ball to me and I run it to the end zone with Bay blocking. We call Sarah Havelock off the bench when we need a kicker. That's our entire playbook.

Running is the reason I'm on this team—that and my fondness for inflicting and suffering pain and violence. Coach Emery says I run like the devil's chasing me. I told him that when I look at a field, I don't see the players so much as the space between them, like negative space in a work of art. He told me to shut my mouth and run.

Today I run faster and shiftier than ever. Mr. Reid asks if I'm on speed meds.

“Fighting strengthened your game,” Brennan says as we clear the field.

Dallas agrees. “You're not a coward anymore.”

Coach Emery jogs up and asks, “How do you go so fast on midget legs?”

I explain the mathematics of leg length and pendulum swing, but he doesn't appreciate it.

“You're assigned to the middle school team on Saturdays,” he tells me. “They requested an assistant coach and I'm giving them you.”

“Are you serious? Grade sevens and eights? They're five feet tall.”

“Then you'll fit right in.” Coach Emery walks away, leaving everyone laughing except me.