All Good Children (8 page)

“Why are you watching a movie when your homework is unfinished?” Mom asks when she gets home with groceries. She's always in a bad mood after spending money.

“Did you never relax after school when you were a kid?” I ask.

“I did my homework first, unless I forgot it.”

I can't imagine carrying books and papers back and forth to school. I'd forget them every time. Then Mom would have something concrete to flay me with instead of intangible things like “going that extra mile,” which is a damaged metaphor now that fuel is so expensive. Going an extra mile is unjustifiable.

“I'll get to it after dinner,” I say.

“Show me what you have.”
Crack
goes the whip.

I scroll through the day's homework. “The human organism—an anatomical diagram with system descriptions. A law review—three pages, I did it in class. Two chapters of North American history—Xavier says it's all a lie. A translation of some psycho religious text—I did that in math class. Trigonometry—piece of cake. And I should plan my art exhibit in case I'm selected.”

Mom whistles. “School is so demanding these days.”

“Only academic school. Throwaways just read and count.”

“Don't call them that. They're children just like you and Ally.”

She opens the day's announcements on Blackboard and reads:
Students in grade four will receive Hepatitis vaccinations
next week. Nurses are needed to administer needles. An honorarium
will be paid to volunteers.
She messages back with her cv, seizing the chance to make a dollar in exchange for a few hours of sleep.

“You can't come to my school,” I say.

“It's not your school. It's Ally's school.”

“But whenever they get to my school, you can't do shots there.”

“Why not?”

I shudder. “School nurses are not good, Mom. They're dregs who work for minimum wage. You can't associate me with that.”

When she speaks, her voice is icy. “Are you calling me a dreg?”

“No. But you'd look like a dreg if you came to my school.” She stares at me, eyes black as coal, but I persist. “It doesn't matter what kind of people we are, Mom. It matters what kind of people we appear to be. You can't do shots at my school. It would kill me.”

Thankfully, Dallas calls at that moment and asks me over to work on science. I run to the door and Mom shoves me out. Finally we agree on something.

I jog to my old neighborhood and greet Dr. Richmond with a shining smile. He grunts and opens the door just wide enough for my shoulders to pass.

Austin jumps off the couch and towers over me with his fist raised. His father snickers in my ear. As the fist heads toward my jaw, I duck, so Austin punches his father in the throat. Dr. Richmond explodes in coughing and profanity.

I flee to Dallas's room, smiling all the way.

“Hi, Max. Did you do your drawings?” Dallas sits behind a massive metal desk, diagrams lit up before him, preparing for a future of leadership and advancement. He shows me his progress on the respiratory system, and I open what I have on circulation.

Austin is kicked out of the living room, so he loiters outside Dallas's door, calling us faggots. I can't concentrate through his idiocy.

“You should augment your memory,” Dallas says.

“No way. It wastes the adolescent brain. Kids in the trials are recalls now. Even the meds are dangerous. Remember when you tried them?”

He laughs. “Remember my dad?” He duplicates his father's scowl and wags his finger. “‘There's always an adjustment period. This behavior is perfectly normal.'”

“I thought you were going to die,” I say. “You were demented. You wouldn't shut up about your hallucinations.”

He shakes his head at the memory. “Thank god Mom let me stop.”

“You don't need meds, Dallas. Your brain is supreme.”

“Yours too, Max.”

“Parents always make you do more than you have to. I pull nineties with moderate effort, but that's not good enough for Mom. I should exhaust myself for hundreds.”

“No kidding. Dad would do anything to make me more employable. He won't stop pushing until I break.”

“It bleeds,” I say. “It's not natural. We shouldn't have to try harder.”

Austin pounds on the bedroom door. “Help, guys!” he shouts. “I'm stuck!”

Dallas opens his door to his giant brother, who's bending over with his pants down, laughing maniacally.

“Then again,” I say, “maybe some of us are not trying hard enough.”

It's raining as Ally and I walk to school. She hangs her head and looks for drowning worms. She's happy, but it saddens me. She's at the mercy of a merciless world. If she had to cross a river and a crocodile said, “Step on me. I'm a log,” she'd say, “Really? You look like a crocodile.” “No, no,” he'd say, “I'm a log. Step on me and you'll see.” And off she'd go, never to be seen again.

I keep her company outside the school, holding her umbrella while she saves one last worm.

I don't carry an umbrella for myself. I'll take my hood down when I get near school because hoods are not fit, but I wear it on the road to protect my hair.

Unfortunately, it blocks my peripheral vision so I don't see Tyler Wilkins and his goons sneak up behind me. They grab me tight, Washington on one arm and some grade nine beast on the other. I drop Ally's umbrella. I'm so startled I barely have time to exhale before Tyler hits me in the gut.

I come up fast and furious. Instead of struggling away, like they expect, I lean into Washington to get some leeway for my arm, then I elbow him in the throat. He lets go fast, freeing my hand to grab the head of the grade nine goon and jerk it forward into the spot where Tyler's next punch is aimed.
Kapow.
I'm like a movie star. Then Ally's umbrella trips me up so I take another shot from Tyler.

That makes me mad. I kick Tyler's kneecap as hard as I can, twice. He squeals and falls forward. I ram my knee into his jaw. His head cracks back with a sound that cuts through my frenzy.

Ally screams.

I grab Tyler's throat, partly to be tough but mostly to make sure his head doesn't fall off in front of my little sister. I look him in the eye and say, “There's not going to be a next time. If you need more than two guys to take me down, it's time to give up.” From the regurgitated crap of Xavier's damaged movies come the words, “There's no honor in this for you.”

Tyler's goons stand back. Washington holds his throat, and the other boy staunches a nosebleed.

I shake the rain from my face and pull Tyler to his feet.
“I don't want to fight you again,” I say. “You're nothing to
me now.”

He eyes me intently for a few seconds. I can't tell if
he's going to knife me or confess that he's in love with me. He nods and spits on the ground—but nowhere near me or Ally because I'd take his head off if he did that. He wipes his face and glances at the school to see how many first graders have witnessed his humiliation. “Jesus Christ,” he whispers.

I look over too. Washington and the other goon look over. Ally looks over. We all stand there speechless, staring at the schoolyard.

There are no faces glued to the fence watching our fight. Nobody watches from the play structures. Nobody pauses in a puddle, points an umbrella or strains for a better view. Nobody.

The schoolyard is a silent field of concrete. Twelve hundred children stand before the closed doors, holding umbrellas over their heads and identity cards below their chins, waiting for admittance. They're thirty feet away from us, but not one head turns in our direction. They stand in long straight lines in the pouring rain, eyes forward, mouths closed, feet exactly the same distance apart, like gravestones.

One supervisor stands beneath the eaves and stares at us like she wishes we were dead. She digs up a fake smile and shouts, “Alexandra Connors! Come join your schoolmates!”

Ally walks through the gate with her face in the rain, dragging her busted umbrella. She doesn't even say goodbye.

FOUR

“Let's do surveillance on the middle school.”

Dallas throws me a scornful look. He chases a fourth slice of pizza with a second carton of milk and grows another half inch taller. “Why?”

“I want to see if it's like Ally's school.”

He shakes his head, mystified, but he follows me.

Everything about the middle school is short and squat, like the kids who go here. “I always hated this place,” I mutter.

A thousand students in grades five through eight are crammed into three flat-roofed concrete units only three stories high. A single-story addition serves as a music conservatory. Music floating across the barren grounds would be glorious, but the conservatory is soundproof. They wouldn't want to accidentally inspire a mind.

“You got in so much trouble here,” Dallas says, smiling.

I was nearly expelled in eighth grade after my third graffiti conviction. The principal didn't understand what bare white walls could do to a kid like me. The third time I was suspended, my mother cried and my father raced to the school to see my piece before they pressure-washed it.

“It's too hot,” Dallas complains, sniffing his armpits. “Everything looks smaller than I remember. This driveway was miles longer. Who was the kid who always hid in the ditch?”

“Wheaton Smithwick,” I say.

“Wheaton. Yeah. I haven't seen him since the first week of school.”

“Maybe he was downgraded.”

Dallas points to the conservatory. “We climbed that roof to fetch him down once, remember? It looked a lot higher then. And that soccer field was farther away.”

We walk toward the conservatory behind two eighth graders. One of them is taller than me, skinny, with cropped hair and too much makeup. She pushes her short friend into the ditch.

“Some things never change,” I say.

Dallas smiles and shoves me over, inches from the drop. We block the path of three fifth graders who wear their ties tight at the collar. “I was never that little,” Dallas says.

“Excuse me,” I tell the tiny white kids. “We're taking a survey.”

They walk right by me.

I grab the last one's arm, flimsy as a toilet-paper roll beneath his gray uniform. I give him a pat and a smile. “Can I ask some questions?”

He shakes his blond head. “I don't talk to strangers.”

Dallas rests a hand on the boy's shoulder. “Just a few questions, kid.”

The boy makes eye contact with Dallas's ribcage. He looks back and forth between us and shrieks, “Help! You don't belong here!”

We shrink away from him.

The boy's friends turn on us and yell, “Help! You don't belong here!” A little black girl up the driveway shouts, “Help! You don't belong here!”

The eighth graders snicker. “You're in for it now!”

The blond boy stares up at Dallas with eyes glazed over like a doll's. “Help! You don't belong here!” he yells again. This time a dozen fifth graders join in. Their shrill voices ring off the concrete and burrow into the ditch.

“Let's get out of here,” Dallas says.

We sprint up the driveway and keep running till we're at our school.

“That was damaged,” Dallas says. “I should have recorded it.”

“They must be teaching kids differently this year.”

“Yeah. Maybe it's part of the drama program.”

“That reminds me,” I say. “You owe me ten bucks for the
Freakshow
elimination. Juice is history.”

The football team gets off at lunch on Friday to prepare for the afternoon game. We rub our classmates' noses in the announcement. They boo us as we leave. This is New Middletown school spirit.

The primary colors are blazing outside—clear blue sky, severe yellow sun, blood red leaves on the distant maples. It's dry and dusty and difficult to breathe. The field is hard as concrete and prickly with dead grass.