“Melissa must be sick,” Mom says.
“No.” I point to the entrance doors. They won’t open for another eight minutes, but hundreds of uniformed children wait there with id badges in hand. “Isn’t that Melissa near the door? With the yellow pack?”
Mom nods. “Her whole class is lined up. I wonder if Ally missed something important last week.”
“Oh yeah. Xavier said she missed a math assessment and a vaccination.”
“How would Xavier know what goes on in grade one?”
“He knows everything.”
“Was it a flu vaccine?”
“I don’t know. Ask him.”
She rolls her eyes like I ought to be on top of my little sister’s immunization record.
The high school is a five-minute drive down the road. It’s larger and more stylish than the elementary and middle schools, with six black glass-and-concrete units—ambitious architecture for this part of town and so spacious it’s unsettling. There’s only one academic high school in each of New Middletown’s quadrants. Three-quarters of the city’s children go to trade schools. Academics cost more and they require a B average right from grade one. It’s always competitive, but kindergarten is dog-eat-dog. Once you’re recommended for trade school, there’s no coming back.
I’m in Secondary Two, which means tenth grade. We’re not allowed in the buildings reserved for grades eleven and twelve. The higher the grade, the fewer the students still maintaining a B standing, the more space and attention each student receives. And they need it because once they graduate they’ll have to compete with foreign students and private-studies graduates. There’s no point paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for twelve years of academic school if you fall behind when you finally get out. You might as well educate yourself online for free.
Tuition is bleeding us dry, but Mom never mentions it. She pulls up to the school gates and smiles like there’s nowhere else she’d rather see me. “First day of grade ten,” she says proudly.
“And I’m already a week behind,” I add.
My principal, Mr. Graham, rushes outside to greet us. He must have seen the car and assumed we were premium people. Confusion spreads across his face when I step out from the passenger seat. Sweat rolls down his temples into his shirt collar. He’s another fat bald white man who can’t take the heat. The army should enlist them all, stick them in their own division somewhere temperate. They wouldn’t need uniforms because they already look identical. An armed battalion of fat bald white men would scare the crap out of any enemy. Just one of them gives me the shivers.
I lean on the hood with my hands clasped, while my mother tells my principal what a good boy I am. “Max knows how fortunate he is to be in academic school. He assured me he won’t skip class or get into any fights.”
“I’ll try not to,” I say. “But if someone starts a fight, I’m going to protect myself.”
They stare at me like I’m a recall.
“My grades are premium,” I remind them.
Mom sighs. “He’ll do his best to stay out of trouble.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Connors,” Mr. Graham says.
“Everything will be fine once our support system gets up and running. What I’m more concerned about is that we didn’t see you on the parent board last Friday. Did you watch from home?”
She shakes her head. “I completely forgot about it.”
“I hope you’ll come out for the fundraiser at the end of the month,” he says.
She shrugs. Mom never quite lies. She just avoids answering.
Mr. Graham frowns. “I’m sure you’re doing your best under the circumstances.” He looks down his nose at me and the car, memorizes the license plate so he’ll never again mistake us for someone he cares about.
“Told you he was a beast,” I say after he leaves. “He pretends to be nice so he can use you, then he feeds you to the sharks.”
“There are no sharks anymore,” Mom says.
“He has his own private shark pond. He dangles me over it when I skip detention.”
She smiles and tells me she loves me. “Have a good day.”
I search for Dallas among five hundred uniformed ninth and tenth graders milling the grounds. They clump near the fence, gab in groups, take photos, message madly. Once we’re inside, all RIG use is prohibited except for Blackboard, the school network, so everyone stays out until the final bell. I see my football team huddled around the picnic tables, reviewing plays I missed in last week’s game. Brennan Emery, the coach’s son, shouts, “Nice to see you back, Max! Sorry about your aunt.”
“Hey!” I reply. I can never think of anything fit to say to Brennan. He outclasses me in every way. He’s tall, unselfish, a winning quarterback, an elected president of the Students of Color Association. He has what people call natural leadership ability—but since he’s an ultimate, it’s not entirely natural.
Dallas jumps up from the picnic bench and slams my shoulder. His jacket strains at the armpits and his pants hover above his shoes. We ordered our uniforms in August and he’s already outgrown his. Life is not fair. “Did you hear about that poor Chinese kid who was beaten to death with a fencepost?” he asks. “Disgusting.”
“Yeah, I saw that. What a bunch of freaks.”
“What would you rather be beaten with? Fencepost or barbed wire?”
“Fencepost,” I say.
“Me too.”
Xavier stands alone across the grounds, waving. The sun shines off his hair like a halo, rippling as he makes his way over to us. He’s three sentences into his speech before he’s within earshot.
Tyler Wilkins rushes in and trips Xavier, who crumples into the pavement. The crowd parts to ensure him a painful landing. Tyler laughs and shouts, “Walk much, unit?”
Tyler is a funhouse mirror image of Xavier. He’s six foot and blond, but skeletal and homely. He reeks of deli meats and cigarettes. One day he’ll slash Xavier’s face out of jealousy. We all know it, every one of us, but we’ll be sure to act surprised.
Tyler’s goons leap over Xavier’s legs, giggling. Tyler puts a foot on his back to stop him from getting up.
It’s like watching the planets align.
I strut over to Tyler and throw a right hook that staggers him. The crowd steps back to form an arena. Xavier commando-crawls to the edge of it.
Tyler swears at me and rubs his jaw. “You’re dead, Connors.”
Somewhere in my brain I wonder if I should be nervous. Nah. I spent two hundred and twenty hours of summer preparing for this moment. I’m zesty.
I let Tyler take a shot. I block it easily with my left forearm and wallop him in the gut with my right fist. I knock the wind out of him and follow with an elbow to the cheek. A hoot of excitement escapes my lips. The crowd starts buzzing.
I bounce on my toes and laugh. Tyler is bleeding and shocked. He knows I’m going to win this fight. But he’s a scrapper, nerve-deadened and self-important. Backing down is not an option for a kid like him. He wipes his cheek on his sleeve and comes at me, spitting.
I pummel him in the face—hook, jab, elbow strike. Pow, pow, pow. When he returns the blow, I grab his arm and twist it behind his back. I force him to his knees and kick him into the ground, much harder than I intend to. I hear groans from the watching girls and giggles from the gay boys.
Tyler drags himself up and tries to hit me, but he’s angry and embarrassed, and I can read his moves before he makes them. I dodge his blows, hopping away so he has to come at me; then I rush in and trip him. He slams into the pavement, just like Xavier did five minutes ago. The crowd gasps, laughs, narrates their recordings.
I’m ready to beat Tyler Wilkins to a pulp of sodden flesh, but Mr. Graham steps between us with his arms outstretched. Tyler shoves him aside to get at me. I laugh—shoving the principal won’t go over well—and take him down hard with a wrist lock.
Two security guards pull us apart. Bystanders start yelling. “Tyler started it!” “Max started it!”<
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The principal is shaking, he’s so mad. It turns his stomach to be in a crowd of teenagers. “You are both suspended for the week,” he says through gritted teeth. “Wait outside the front doors until your parents collect you.” He walks away, probably to wash his hands.
So I’m stuck at the front of the school with two security guards and the kid I hate most in the world, waiting to tell my grieving mother about my latest wreckage. My heart thumps. My hands throb. Yet I feel absolutely premium.
They say violence is wrong and such and such, but I have never felt as happy in my life as I do now. I’ve shaken off a future of swallowing Tyler Wilkins’s waste. I have cleared my road with my fists and feet. I can walk wherever I want to now.
True, Tyler and his friends might take out my eyeballs with a spoon tomorrow, but right now he’s bleeding and I can’t get the smile off my face. It widens every time he glances at me, his nose swollen and his eyes miserable.
“When did you learn to fight?” he asks.
I snort and bare my teeth.
He shakes his head and wipes his bloody lip. “I must be out of practice.”
I hope he’ll practice up on me. I could squeeze a beating into my Monday schedule: pack lunch, walk Ally to school, beat the crap out of Tyler Wilkins, get suspended.
My happiness plateaus when my mother trudges up the school driveway. “I just signed in the car when I got the call from your principal,” she says.
I hang my head and hope it looks repentant.
“Is someone coming for you?” she asks Tyler. He shrugs.
The tallest guard steps up to Mom and says, “He has to leave with his own guardian.”
She nods. She knows the guards will regret that rule after they pass the entire school day sitting on the front steps waiting for Tyler’s parents to show. “Okay, Max, let’s go. Goodbye, Tyler.”
“Bye.” It surprises me when he adds, “Bye, Max.” Like we’re friends, like we got into trouble for skipping class together.
“I’ll see you,” I say. I don’t mean it to be menacing, but after I say it, I like the way it sounds.
Mom doesn’t speak on the walk home.
“I can get my assignments off Blackboard,” I say. She doesn’t glance at me. “I was defending Xavier,” I add. She just sighs.
When we get to our building, I want to race up the flights of stairs, but I slow myself down for Mom’s sake. She yawns and says, “I haven’t slept since Saturday night.”
“Technically, it was Sunday morning.”
She stares at me like I’m the biggest ass in the world. And maybe I am. But as I review the fight in my mind—I add an announcer in the background, cameras on the side—the crowd goes wild.
I thought I’d spend my suspension exercising and watching Freakshow, but Mom puts an end to that dream when she wakes up in the afternoon. Instead of making me a sandwich, she makes me a list of chores: dishes, dusting, laundry, clean Ally’s room, supervise Ally’s homework. When I add wipe Ally’s ass to the list, she is not amused.
“Okay. I’ll do chores,” I say. Then I continue watching Freakshow until she stares me down.
I work my way to the bottom of the list by six o’clock. I help Ally with her homework while Mom makes supper. I am not a premium teacher. It frustrates me when Ally doesn’t understand her work. It makes me think she’s a recall, and I hate that thought because I love her so much.
Her spelling words are strange but simple: duty, job, joy, love, power, help, hurt, good, bad, boy, girl. That’s a damaged mix of words, but they’re phonetic—except love, which is irregular in every way.
“No!” I say for the fourth time. “It’s h-u-r-t, not h-e-r-t!”
“I’ll take over, Max. You set the table,” Mom says. She smiles at Ally. “Remember that U can get hurt. Not E.”
Ally laughs. “An E can’t get hurt, can it?”
I arrange knives and forks and feel like a creep.
“There’s something wrong with the kids at my school,” Ally says when she dissolves her screen. “I think they’re sick.”
Terror fills Mom’s eyes. Four million kids died in the Venezuelan flu epidemic. “Are they coughing?”
Ally shakes her head. “Not sick like that. Sick like their heads are cloudy.”
“Are they slurring their words? Losing their balance?”
“No. They’re just not right. They’re all slowed down.”
Mom looks at me as though I might be able to elucidate.
I shrug and say, “I’ll look around when I take her to school tomorrow.”
I’m ready for Tyler when I leave the apartment in the morning. I have a steak knife in my jacket pocket but no idea how to wield it. Fortunately, he’s sleeping in, as all suspended children should be.
Ally chatters about rodents the whole way to school, a stream of useless facts like, “Mice have poor eyesight,” and “Chipmunks nest underground.” She shuts up as we approach her school, pushes me away when I hug her goodbye.
I linger by the fence and chat with the eight-year-olds who rush up to me, make faces, tattle on their friends, ask who I am.
“Hello, Max,” Xavier pants. He towers at my side, half-naked, as if he teleported from a gymnasium. He smells like raspberry crumble. “I ran five miles cross-country and now I’m sprinting to school. Will you run with me?”
“I’m not allowed at school this week,” I remind him. He looks confused. I raise my swollen hands. “Remember how Tyler tried to waste you and I beat him down yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“I got suspended for that.”
Four high school girls fall silent as they approach. They gawk at Xavier, who’s wearing a pair of shorts that reach his knees, a pair of sneakers that reach his ankles, and nothing else except a sheen of sweat.
I give the girls a wink. They giggle and walk on, whispering and glancing back.
“You should get to class,” I tell Xavier. I smile like it’s premium fun being suspended, then turn back to Ally’s schoolyard.
The first graders line up early again. Their ranks have swollen with a few dozen grade twos. Melissa stands near the front, staring at the closed doors. A supervisor walks the line, watching me where I lurk outside the fence. I wave and say, “Hey!” She doesn’t wave back.
The older kids play on the jungle gyms, run across the concrete, throw balls at the fence and try to scare me. When the bell rings, the sour-faced supervisor calls in the stragglers. “I can’t wait till next week!” she shouts to another supervisor across the concrete. Ally looks my way but doesn’t return my wave. The supervisors yell at her to get in line.
Where the youngest children wait near the doors, the lines are royally neat. No jostling, no hopping, not even pairs of girls holding hands. The line snakes out as it lengthens. The fourth graders at the back are toxic, switching places, yapping, pushing each other down. The supervisors yank on their arms to no effect.
Eventually everyone slithers inside, and I’m left standing with my fingers threaded through the fence, staring at silent concrete. Xavier jogs on the spot beside me. “What are you still doing here?” I ask him. “You’re going to be late for class.”
“Will you run with me?” he repeats.
I laugh. “I have to go home, Xavier. I’m suspended for saving your life.”
Xavier can deconstruct my personal mythology faster than I can fabricate it. “I don’t like you to fight,” he says. “I like you when you’re nice.”
Sometimes Xavier reminds me of Ally because he’s kind and innocent. But once in a while when he’s not speed-talking— because he looks so old and white and serious— he reminds me of my father. It saddens me and I don’t know why.
“Go to school before you’re late,” I tell him. “I can’t run with you today.”
“Okay. Bye, Max.” He sprints away, supremely fast and strong, out of sight in thirty seconds. If he could manage relationships and violence, I’d recruit him into football.
St
ray children rush past me, trying to get to school on time. Older teens and adults ride to work on bikes. I watch them for a while. Then I have to admit that I have nowhere to go but home.
“You forgot to put the garbage out,” Mom says when she wakes at two o’clock.
I look up from my RIG. “Sorry.”
“We’ll have too much next week, Max. They raised the fine to forty dollars.”
I shrug. “I could dump it in the park.”
“That’s wrong.”
“It keeps people employed.”
She digs up a half smile. “Did you do anything at all today?”
“Nah. The only kids online are throwaways and Tyler Wilkins.”
“I meant anything useful.”
“Oh.” I look around the kitchen. My cereal bowl sticks to the counter, the flakes bloated and gummy in the bottom. My pasta bowl sits beside it, crusty with dried tomato. Mom opens the microwave and gasps like someone’s bunny exploded in there, when really it’s just a bit of spaghetti splatter. “I guess I could clean up,” I say.
She heats a cup of water in the dirty microwave and scoops in a spoon of coffee. She taps her foot as she stirs. “You only have a few minutes before you have to get Ally, so you might want to start cleaning now.” Tap, tap, tap. She cracks the whip, this mother of mine.
Mom is gone when I bring Ally home from school. The kitchen screen reads, Called in to work early. Be good.
“Want to go to the park?” I ask.
Ally runs to the cupboard and grabs a handful of sunflower seeds for Peanut, her squirrel friend. Mom used to feed peanuts to the squirrels when she was young and lived in the country. She has a lot of animal stories. Ally’s favorite is how one fall a bear and two cubs came into our grandparents’ orchard and ate apples off the ground. They swallowed three bushels in ten minutes, then had a snooze beneath a tree, the little ones flopped across the mama’s big belly. Eventually, when they awoke to eat more apples, my grandfather scared them away with a shotgun. The mama bear nudged her cubs, and they all loped off back to wherever they came from.
All Good Children Page 3
