All Good Children

by Catherine Austen

  “Hey, what’s that?” I pick up a slim black RIG that had been hiding under the pillow. “Xavier’s. And it’s connected.”

  Dallas hoots and clicks his heels together.

  Over the next two hours, we break up couples, match up singles, fire all the teachers in our school, tell a dozen old ladies they won the lottery, and book three days of hairdressing appointments with my chatty stylist.

  We’re almost peeing our pants laughing when Mom walks in. She can tell we’re up to no good, but our joy is contagious. “You guys are crazy,” she says.

  We send one last message to Mr. Graham to let him know he’s New Middletown’s Principal of the Decade.

  “That’s enough!” Mom shouts from the kitchen. “Where’s your sister?”

  “In bed.”

  “Is this chili?”

  “Dallas ordered it.”

  “Help yourself,” Dallas says. “I have to head home.”

  “Do you want to take it with you?” Mom asks.

  He smiles, lowers his eyes, shakes his head. He knows our money is tight but he can’t imagine money being tight enough to worry over a tub of leftovers.

  Five seconds after he leaves, he’s back at the door.

  “You can’t have it. I already ate it,” I lie.

  He smiles. “Thanks for waiting for me, Max. At school, I mean. I didn’t want to go home.”

  “I wouldn’t want to go to your home either,” I tell him.

  None of our teachers show up for class on Monday morning, but there’s a big sign at the front office congratulating Mr. Graham on his supreme accomplishment as Principal of the Decade. People believe anything they’re told.

  FIVE

  I raise my hand during Communications.

  “Yes, Maxwell?” Mr. Ames draws out my name like I’ve been annoying him all afternoon.

  “Is there a new principal at the elementary school?”

  He lifts his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. He shakes his head, rolls his eyes at me, replaces his glasses.

  I raise my hand again.

  He sighs so hard his lip flops in the breeze. “What is it now, Maxwell?”

  “The kids at the elementary school are different than they used to be.”

  “That’s because new children enter the school system every year.”

  “Ha ha, good one. That’s not what I meant. They act different. They don’t play. They’re neat and quiet.”

  “Ah.” A smile crawls over his face. “Nesting. It’s a new direction in class management. They use motivational leadership.”

  I picture group chanting, sweat lodges, shunning— there has to be more than a sticker chart keeping those brats in line.

  In the front row Montgomery raises his hand.

  “Yes, Monty?” Mr. Ames chirps.

  Montgomery swings his legs into the aisle and takes in the whole room with his gaze. “It even works at home,” he tells us. “There’s a third grader in my neighborhood who used to bother me and my friends. She’s toxic with jealousy. I think she’s a freebie. But now she stays in her room all day and does her work.”

  “You don’t think that’s damaged?” I ask.

  He slaps me a hard look. “I wish everyone was like her.”

  Mr. Ames nods like that’s what he wants to hear.

  “But you’re not like her,” I tell Montgomery. “You can’t walk down the hall without skipping.”

  Montgomery holds up his hands like he’s staging a stinging comeback, but I continue. “And that’s fit. That’s who you are. You play music and make up cheers. You don’t sit in your room doing schoolwork all day. Nobody does that. Why is it good for that girl?”

  He laughs. “Because she was annoying!”

  “Half the school finds you annoying,” I remind him.

  Across the room, Washington snickers. Tyler stares at me so hard I think his eyeballs might bleed.

  “I don’t find you annoying,” Dallas tells Montgomery with a smile.

  Saturday morning, I withstand on the middle school soccer field watching seventh graders in oversized pads do laps. They have no muscle, no hormones, no anger. The field is equally ill-equipped—no benches, no goalposts, not even a trailer to store the ball. The yardage is marked with pylons. It’s like a game of midget dress-up.

  The sun has barely risen, but Mr. Hendricks, the gym teacher, sweats through his third cup of coffee. “Everybody in!” he shouts.

  As the midgets trot toward me, I realize I should call them something else because the expensive ones are taller than me.

  Hendricks hurries them through the rules of football. He teaches them basics by shouting insults. Then he splits them into practice teams and lets the big kids demolish the infants. “What is wrong with these children?” he asks me.

  “They’re twelve.”

  There’s only one player who shines—Saffron, an eighth grade girl who throws harder and runs faster than any of the boys. No one can catch her. She reminds me of me at that age.

  Frankie and Chicago, two hulking seventh grade ulti-mates, refuse to let Saffron have the ball. They ignore the plays and leave her open, slap hands when she’s tackled. They can’t bear their inferiority to a black girl.

  Hendricks mutters, “I can’t wait till Nesting next week.”

  “Nesting?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Next week. You can’t run a school these days any other way. We’re losing to the competition. We need motivational leadership.”

  I look toward the conservatory where two snappy white girls, older teens, bounce a ball against the wall. “I know what you need,” I say.

  I swagger over to the girls. “Would you ladies watch the football practice for a while? It’s a new team and they need motivation.”

  The blond snorts at me. I think I`ve seen her on the high school grounds but I can’t be sure. She looks like a million others: long hair, short clothes, pink makeup, plump flesh. “Do we look like cheerleaders?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  She rolls her eyes. “We walked my baby brother here. We didn’t come to cheer him on.”

  “You don’t have to cheer. Just watch for a few minutes.”

  She puts me under a microscope, examines my shoes and haircut, decides what I’m worth.

  “Like we’re judging them?” her friend asks. She’s small and slippery, with spiky black hair, green eyes and clothes like lingerie. My hands could meet around her waist.

  “Sure,” I say. “Judge them.”

  They stare from me to the soccer field. They shrug, smile, follow me over.

  Immediately, the football players try to fill out their uniforms. Even Saffron toughens up under the new surveillance.

  The girls flaunt their power by shouting praise and insults. “Hit him harder!” the blond likes to say. The elfish one hops and claps.

  I’m starting to enjoy myself when Xavier appears at my side, shirtless and sweaty. “Hi, Max. Your mom said you were here. Do you want to run cross-country when your practice is over?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Once the girls catch sight of Xavier, they couldn’t care less about midget football. They flank him, brushing up close, not even faking nonchalance. Their voices slide from their mouths, their giggles flutter like lashes. They whisper questions and lick their lips.

  “Bye, Max!” Xavier shouts thirty seconds later. “I have to cancel our run. I’m going for ice cream!” The girls laugh as they pull him away.

  Mr. Hendricks checks his watch. “Oh, boy. I have to pick up a vehicle at ten. Just run them through fumble drills before you send them home, all right? Put the balls and pylons in the storage room. Make sure it locks, would you? Thanks, kid.”

  This is my Saturday morning.

  I end the practice ten minutes later. “Premium work,” I tell Saffron. To Chicago and Frankie, the hulks who hogged the ball, I say, “Not so premium for you guys. Stick to the plays next time and let everyone do their jobs.”

  “Yeah, whatever
, midget,” Chicago says. Frankie laughs.

  “Here, Coach.” A tiny blond boy holds out the pylons he collected from the field. He’s the most timid player on the team, a seventh grader drowning in his aquamarine jersey. He’s feeble, but I like the way he called me Coach. “Do you know where my sister went?” he asks.

  “Sorry, kid. I think she left.”

  He looks around, nodding. “Okay. Thanks.”

  There’s no trailer and the gymnasium’s locked, so the kids walk home in their uniforms and cleats, helmets dangling from their fingers.

  I tuck the pylons and balls in the storage room. It’s crammed with maintenance tools, gym gear and school supplies: hula hoops, soccer balls, ladders, light bulbs, garbage bags, gardening tools, cleaning solutions, rolls of tape, bottles of glue and ink, buckets of storage chips, stacks of paper and cardboard, and a stunning spectrum of paint that leaves me breathless.

  Ever since I flipped open my first box of sixty-four crayons at the age of three, art supplies have made my heart race. Paint, ink, my mother’s nail polish, even the juxtaposition of wet and dry concrete makes me tremble. My mind reels around tonal variation, the sheer number of blues you can lay side by side.

  The paints in the storeroom are impossibly numerous, a rainbow sliced and dehydrated into tempera cakes stacked in knee-high columns on the floor. And on a shelf above them, dozens of aerosol cans in banner red, regal blue, ivory, glossy black, aluminum.

  It’s too much. I can’t help myself.

  I toss a basketball from hand to hand, trying to look casual. I throw it higher each time. I let it get away from me twice before I hurl it against the wall and—oops—smash the surveillance camera above the door. Bang, crash, thunk. I stuff two garbage bags with paint cakes and cans, so excited my tongue hangs out. I don’t take it all, but I take a lot.

  I spend the next three hours spraying the back wall of the middle school conservatory. I fill the background quickly, choking on vapor, then take my time with my subject. I make a premium end-to-end piece: two baby white boys who look like Frankie and Chicago pick their noses in shitty blue diapers and jerseys while eleven supreme black females jog past them in spotless red uniforms, helmets tucked under their rippling arms. The lead player has Saffron’s face: powerful, focused, deadly serious. She looks like she’s off to war.

  I keep it simple—blue sky, green field, brown and beige bodies. I restrict the red to uniforms and a wee dab on Chicago’s snot. I swipe with a paper bag and dig in with my sleeves and fingertips before it dries. It takes me into the afternoon, leaves my hands and face stained, my clothes a mess, my mind shining free.

  When I get home with the burgled paint cakes thunking at my side, Mom is napping and Xavier is in my living room watching a movie with Ally.

  “Did those little kids paint you?” he asks.

  “No. Did those big girls paint you?”

  “They were very physical.”

  “I’ll bet. What are you watching?”

  “Stepford Wives.”

  “Looks damaged.”

  “It’s about a town of men who build robots that look exactly like their wives and then they kill the real wives and replace them with the robots.”

  “Why don’t they just keep the robots and get divorced?”

  “It’s a metaphor.” He doesn’t hesitate this time.

  I have to laugh.

  I pause on the sidewalk outside the elementary school and reach out to Ally for a hug. Her arms hang limp at her sides. “Give me a hug!” I tell her.

  She extends her arms obediently.

  I kneel down and hold her to me.

  “I have to act like the other kids,” she whispers.

  I glance over her shoulder and through the fence. A thousand zombies line up at the entrance to her school. “They’re pretty scary, aren’t they?”

  She nods slowly.

  One supervisor hangs out by the monkey bars, gabbing into her RIG. She sees me watching her and takes a photo of me and my sister.

  “You do whatever you have to,” I tell Ally. “Stay on their good side.”

  She joins the line of zombies facing front. I can’t tell her apart from the rest of them.

  “Hey, Connors!” Tyler Wilkins struts up the street, smoking a cigarette. He waves at me with a stained hand. “I saw you at the middle school this weekend.”

  I nod self-importantly. “I coach their football team.”

  He snickers. “That’s not all you do. I passed by at lunchtime and saw you making some art. I never knew you could paint like that. You should go to a special school.”

  “Funny, I always said the same about you.”

  He butts his cigarette and holds his RIG up to my face.

  I try not to breathe him in as I watch a movie of myself defacing the middle school conservatory. All I can think is, Am I really that short?

  “You’re bright enough to pick the wall with no surveillance,” he says. “But not bright enough to look over your shoulder once in a while. I must have been there twenty minutes.”

  I sigh. “What do you want, Tyler?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are you going to do with the recording? Are you posting it?”

  “I don’t know. I just took it.”

  “If you’re going to get me suspended for graffiti, I might as well beat the crap out of you first.”

  He spits on the concrete, leaves a brownish yellow splatter by my feet. “Why do you have to say that? You think I’d run to the principal with your picture?”

  “Then why are you showing me? Are you trying to blackmail me?”

  “What have you got that’s worth taking, asshole?” He scowls and shakes his head. “You don’t know anything about me. I don’t want to talk to you, unit.” He walks away flexing his fists.

  He hunches and sways, sad and slow, like a crooked little man, and I suddenly realize that he was trying to compliment me. Someone like Tyler never gets to be anybody else. I want to shout, “Sorry!” but I don’t have the balls, and he’s too far away. The word sits inside me like a stone.

  I convince Xavier to hack the school surveillance system and take one wall of tenth grade lockers offline. He does it happily—he likes breaking rules he doesn’t believe in. At lunchtime I zoom in on my RIG and watch Montgomery punch in his locker code. Two minutes later, I watch Washington punch in his.

  While everyone’s in the cafeteria, Dallas and I open the lockers and transfer their contents. Washington’s beloved photo of a naked woman with a python snaked around her hips now hangs on Montgomery’s door. Montgomery’s construction workers and chorus line cover the inside of Washington’s locker.

  We hover nearby when the boys get back from lunch. Dallas records Montgomery shaking and flapping his hands like he’s been assaulted. “Where’s my jacket?” he shrieks. “What’s all this?” He looks at the locker numbers around him, then back at his own. He removes a blue sweatshirt and holds it between two fingers like it’s covered in waste. He sniffs it, cringes, drops it on the tile floor. Then he marches off to find an authority figure.

  Washington trips in with Tyler and Jersey, bragging about fourteen-year-old throwaways they’ve molested. The boasting stops when Washington opens his locker. Jersey laughs and says, “That’s some damaged action you’re into.”

  A few bystanders peek over their shoulders. Washington burns crimson as their laughter snowballs and more students gather round the handsome carpenter and chorus line. “That’s not mine!” he shouts.

  “You have the same jacket as Montgomery?” Jersey cries.

  I have to hide around the corner, I’m laughing so hard.

  Dallas maintains his composure and keeps recording.

  Washington throws everything from his locker onto the floor, shaking and shouting, “This is not mine!”

  Dallas zooms in on a vein throbbing in his forehead.

  The principal marches over with Montgomery, who gasps and falls to his knees beside his bel
ongings. He seizes a photo of a chorus girl like it’s his dead mother.

  “Pick those clothes up,” Mr. Graham tells Washington.

  “What were they doing in my locker?” Washington shouts.

  Montgomery huffs to his own locker and throws the rest of Washington’s belongings on the floor. He stomps on the snake girl.

  “Hey! There’s my stuff!” Washington yells. His eyes light up like he’s made a fantastic discovery. It takes him another five minutes to comprehend that he and Montgomery are victims of a prank.

  Tyler crosses his arms and stares across the hall at me and Dallas, smirking.

  Mr. Graham shouts, “Whoever did this, I know you’re watching! Let me warn you that your antics have been recorded.” He points to the disabled camera above his head. “This is the last time you’ll be enjoying yourself at someone else’s expense.”

  Expense. What a feeb. Like twenty minutes of confusion is such a cost.

  “I know it was you,” Pepper whispers in geography class. “The locker switch? Don’t ever pull that joke on me.”

  “So I should take my football gear out of your dance locker?”

  She laughs, throws her head back and stretches her neck like an invitation. “I’m picturing you catching a ball in my dance clothes.”

  “I dream of it.”

  She nudges her shoulder into mine. “There might not be many days left for pranks.”

  “You think retinal scans are coming this year?”

  “I don’t know what’s coming.” She looks me in the eye and whispers, “My parents are talking about moving away.”

  “No way! Where?”

  She shrugs.

  Ms. Reynolds calls us to attention and describes the adolescent initiation practices of extinct indigenous cultures.

  It could provide good fodder for jokes, but now I’m too depressed to bother.

  “Did Pepper tell you she’s moving?” Dallas asks in science class.

  “She told you too?” I whine.