All Good Children

by Catherine Austen

“No talking, Maxwell!” Mr. Thompson shouts. He continues his illustration of the digestive system, step-by-step illumination of a burger turning to shit.

  In Communications, we read fairy tales in five languages. Frogs into princes, rags into riches, sweet tongues into sharp teeth. Everything in school today is about transformation, but I’m jammed into place, same day every day, with no way out.

  Xavier takes over from Mr. Ames and expounds on the psychological necessity of heroic tales.

  Tyler interrupts him. “Why aren’t you in college, Lavigne? You look like an adult. You think like an adult. Why are you here?”

  Xavier looks around in confusion. “I need my diploma. Education is the key to freedom.”

  “Xavier is fifteen like you, Tyler,” Mr. Ames says. “But he spends his free time studying instead of fighting.”

  “That’s not fair,” I say. “Tyler studies and fights in equal amounts.”

  Everyone snickers. Tyler gives me the finger.

  “I’m serious,” I say. “There are no slackers in this school.”

  Mr. Ames snorts so hard his glasses fall off.

  “It’s true!” I shout. “We know that if we fall below seventy we’ll be sent to the school for throwaways.”

  “Trade school,” Mr. Ames corrects.

  “Trade. Royal. The trade of dismantling old technology and recycling its parts.”

  “What’s your point, Maxwell?” Mr. Ames sighs.

  “My point is that none of us is stupid and no one lets school slide. You might think we mess around, some of us, but not one student here works less than two hours a night.”

  “Two out of how many?” Mr. Ames asks. “Seven? Eight? Is that really so much homework?”

  “Are you serious?” I ask.

  He smiles. “Let’s take another look at the Big Bad Wolf.”

  “There aren’t any wolves anymore,” I mutter.

  Dallas leans over and whispers, “Who do you think would win in a fight? Red Riding Hood or Grandma?”

  In history we compare the recent Venezuelan flu to the Black Plague in the 1300s.

  “Both were times of increasing social control,” Mr. Reese says.

  Xavier gushes at the magic words social control. He leans into the aisle and leads us all astray with a comparison of our national government and the medieval papacy, neither of which had anything to do with health care. Mr. Reese is kind and neurotic—he gives Xavier a long leash.

  Brennan reaches the end of his own rope. “I understand what you’re saying, Xavier, but in the modern world, social control is necessary. It’s too easy for insane people to unleash disaster on the rest of us.”

  “Don’t tell me the Venezuelan flu was spread by terrorists,” Montgomery says with a sigh. “I am so tired of that theory.”

  Brennan lowers his eyes. “We know the California nuclear disaster was a terrorist move. What if something like that happened in a city? We have millions of environmental refugees from drought and rising sea levels. We can’t add to that burden with industrial sabotage and terrorism.”

  “We should have closed our borders years ago,” Washington says.

  “No. It’s immigration that keeps our economy strong,” Xavier says. “Our openness is what made us great.”

  “The point is,” Brennan says, “our technology has become too lethal to allow the same freedoms we used to have. Look at what happened to Freaktown, and that was just an accident.”

  “That was the Canadians,” Washington says.

  “It was our own industry,” Xavier argues.

  “It was an accident that our enemies want repeated,”

  Brennan says. “We have to limit civil liberties for our own safety.”

  “We have to limit corporate liberties for our safety,” Xavier argues.

  “What liberties are you talking about, Brennan?” Dallas asks. “We’re under surveillance on every street of this city and every room of this school.”

  “We need that in the rest of the country,” Brennan says.

  “At least they’re getting universal ids,” Montgomery says. “That’s step one.”

  “They’ll never implement that,” I say. “The southwest signed on to get their water supply back, but they’ll never enforce it. Texas barely has zoning laws.”

  Dallas laughs and says, “That’s where I’m moving.”

  “Should there be places with no surveillance?” Mr. Reese asks.

  Xavier shouts, “Yes!” and Brennan shouts, “No!”

  “Ask Connors,” Tyler says. “He knows all the places with no surveillance.”

  I smile. “I like knowing that someone is keeping an eye on other people, but when they start monitoring my every move, it could be a problem.”

  “Who are they?” Mr. Reese asks.

  “Chemrose,” Tyler says. “And the government, the cops, the school, you.”

  Mr. Reese gasps. “Me?”

  Tyler leans back in his chair, bites his yellow fingernails, bitterly surveys the class. He points at Brennan. “So are you. Quarterback. Ultimate. President of This and That. Of course you want more control.” He points at Dallas. “Your daddy runs the school board, doesn’t he?” He turns to me. “You’d like to be one of them, wouldn’t you, Connors? But you just don’t fit in.”

  “We’re all them,” Pepper says. “You too, Tyler. Compared to the rest of the world. Even compared to the rest of the country. Look at us. We have everything.”

  “Just because we’re privileged doesn’t mean we control anyone,” I say. “Or want to control them.”

  “You’re not all that privileged, Max,” Dallas says with a smile. “And you can’t be one of them if you’re sneaking around behind their backs, can you?”

  “I’m not the one who sabotages the surveillance and hacks out of the communications network,” I say with a glance at Xavier. “But even if I was, I wouldn’t be dangerous. I wouldn’t need to be controlled.”

  Brennan raises his brow and shrugs.

  “People always find ways around social controls,” Xavier says. “Good people or bad people. That’s the problem— there’s no end to it. Governments and corporations will set up more and more controls for as long as we let them, until we’re all living in a prison.”

  “Prison might be better than a carpark,” I say.

  “It’s not funny,” Xavier says. “One by one, our rights are being stripped. Freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom of organization. You don’t care because you’re where you want to be. But one day they’ll control us in a way that matters to you, Max. Then you’ll have to choose if you’re going to go along with them or fight back.”

  Tyler laughs almost hysterically, shaking his head in disbelief. “What are you, insane? They are never going to give us a choice, unit.”

  Dallas comes over Friday for the Freakshow elimination. “No!” he groans when Tiger lands in the bottom again.

  Tiger talks about the recent death of his daughters. The host grimaces—she doesn’t consider it a significant loss since they were conjoined twins.

  “He’s too young to have kids,” Dallas says. “He’s three years older than us.”

  I shrug. “Not much else to do in Freaktown.”

  Zipperhead, who was a conjoined twin himself, hauls his massive head toward the mike and says, “I’m really sorry for you losing your baby girls, Tiger. People don’t know how much pain and suffering these malformations cause us. The toxins are still poisoning our city and—”

  The host whips the mike away and turns her back on Zipperhead.

  Dallas laughs. “I bet he was supposed to say, ‘We’ve all lost loved ones, but it’s their memory that keeps us going.’” That’s the line every contestant uses when asked about the dead.

  Mom gets home with Ally just before they announce the loser. “We had a parent-teacher meeting, and I lost my front tooth!” Ally shouts. She giggles through the gap in her smile. “I’m going to take my picture.”

  “Did you
get some supper, Dallas?” Mom asks. “We have chicken, lab-grown, fully humane.” Her voice is heavy and slow. Her head hangs with fatigue.

  “No, thank you,” Dallas says. “I’ll just stay for the end of the show.” He leans forward to hear every word.

  “One of you will move on to next week’s show,” the host announces. “The other will go back to Freaktown and spend the rest of his life as a social outcast, scraping a living by begging or thieving.”

  The camera closes in on the two faces, now full of shame and dread on top of their freakishness. Tiger’s eyes look plastic to me. But Squid’s eyes almost pop out of their sockets. He has three arms that end at the elbows, a curved spine, a huge forehead, and he can barely string three words together. He deserves another week.

  “After eighty million votes,” the host says, “the contestant who will be staying with us next week is…Squid!”

  Squid’s inky black smile is so disgusting that even the host winces. Tiger hangs his head. His ears twitch.

  “Shit,” Dallas says. “Sorry, Mrs. Connors. But, shit. I love that guy. Now he has to be a beggar.”

  “Thief,” I say.

  “You think so? What’s worth stealing in Freaktown?”

  The four contestants staying another week line up onstage.

  “Please turn it off now,” Mom says. “It’s so sad.”

  “It gives them a chance to win money,” I say.

  “We’ve had this talk before, Max. Turn it off.”

  “I should go,” Dallas says. “Austin has college entry exams coming up and I said I’d test him tonight.”

  “This early in the year?” Mom asks.

  Dallas nods. “If they don’t make it, they need time to apply to the state schools. Bye, Mrs. Connors. Bye, Ally!”

  Ally’s voice sings from the bathroom, “Goodbye, goodbye, good Dallas, goodbye!”

  He smiles. “See you later, Max.”

  The moment the door closes, Mom launches into a lecture about the messy house, forgotten chores, unfinished homework.

  “I’m saving it for Sunday after cross-country. That’s when the teenage brain is at optimal performance level.”

  She doesn’t even smile.

  I follow her into the kitchen. “Are you okay? I can do the dishes.”

  She shakes her head, sighs, pulls a paper document from her handbag. “Ally has to go to another school.”

  The hair on my neck stands up and squirms. “What?”

  “She’s been transferred.”

  “To the school for throwaways?”

  “Don’t call them that.”

  “But is that the school you mean?”

  “That’s the only other school there is.”

  I sink into the counter. “I should have helped her more with homework.”

  Mom runs her hand over my hair. “It wouldn’t have mattered, Max. She can’t keep up. A hundred grade ones are together with one teacher now, and the new curriculum is just too hard.”

  “Where is the school for throwaways? How will she even get there?”

  She moves her hand under my chin and forces me to meet her eyes. “You have to stop calling them that. It’s a trade school. They’re children.” She keeps her hand there until I nod. “It’s near the core, less than a mile from here, where the interactive carnival used to be. She’ll walk with some other children in the building. I have a list of names. Your old friend Lucas is on it.”

  I groan with guilt. I passed time with Lucas when we first moved to the complex, but he’s feeble and in a different social tier, so I dropped him. Hard.

  “I’ll call his parents tonight to make sure she can walk with him,” Mom says. “Their school starts at eight and runs till four.”

  I bang my head on the counter, grinding my forehead into a mess of toast crumbs. I picture Ally training eight hours a day from the age of six to recycle copper wire and disentangle plastic from food waste. “Does she know?”

  Mom nods. “They told us at the meeting. They made it sound like fun. Maybe it’s fun.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t.”

  I bite my tongue.

  SIX

  Ally wakes me early on Saturday morning, so I take her to the park before coaching. Summer vanished in the night, chased by a cruel cold front. We shiver in sweaters while the wind blows all the color off the trees.

  “Fall was Daddy’s favorite season,” she says. I don’t know how she remembers that.

  Zachary and Melbourne are at the park with their mothers. They swing and slide carefully, speak pleasantly to each other, smile for their proud parents. Zach’s mom says, “Time to go, sweetheart,” and her little brat walks right over and takes her hand.

  “I don’t like it here today,” Ally says.

  “Do you want to go home?”

  She shrugs.

  “Do you want to decide with a rhyme?” I ask. “If it lands on me, we stay. If it lands on you, we go.”

  She points back and forth, whispering, “One, two, three, the bumblebee. Stung my nose and away he goes.” She’s pointing at herself.

  I smile. “Let’s go.”

  She hangs her head.

  I bend down and kiss her cheek. It’s wet. “Ally, are you crying?”

  She pulls a handful of sunflower seeds from her pocket.

  “Hey hey, we don’t have to go. Do you want to feed Peanut?”

  She sniffles and wipes her eyes. “Yes, please.” She takes my hand and leads me past zombie Melbourne to the oak tree.

  “You only had to say so,” I tell her.

  She shakes her head. “It’s not good to speak out.”

  At the middle school, half the kids I’m coaching are not right. All the seventh graders seem altered, though I can’t pinpoint the change. It feels like they’re falling behind the grade eights, but they run just as fast, hit as hard, follow plays as closely. It’s as if there’s a cushion around their thoughts. Their arrogance is gone, and it’s hard to see what’s left.

  There’s a muddy dip near the end zone where the water ran when they washed my painting off the conservatory wall. The eighth graders sidestep the puddle. Frankie and Chicago squelch through. When a small kid fumbles the ball, Frankie shouts, “Try again!” When a big kid limps off the field, Chicago apologizes for his rough tackle.

  “What’s going on with the younger kids?” I ask Mr. Hendricks.

  He smiles. “Nesting. New Education Support Treatment. It’s the future, kid. The foundation of motivational leadership. It’ll take our community where it needs to go. Take the whole country where it needs to go.”

  Saffron cartwheels after a touchdown. Eighth graders pound her shoulder in joy. Seventh graders clap like they’re at an assembly.

  “Did you see that drawing on the conservatory wall last week?” Mr. Hendricks asks. “There’ll be no more of that. We don’t have resources to waste cleaning up after troublemakers.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I say.

  “I know you didn’t do it. But whoever did won’t be doing it again. We’ve gone too far treating children like they’re precious when actually there are billions of them in the world and most of them are good for nothing. We need to educate them to work harder at whatever work is available.”

  “Hey, Max, why don’t you do some coaching today?” Dallas shouts. He’s across the field, setting up lawn chairs with Austin. They wear leather coats and cowboy boots that make them look even taller. “Xavier told me he met some girls here. I’m hoping they come back.”

  “Pick it up, defense!” Austin shouts.

  The older kids give him the finger. The younger ones don’t give him a glance.

  Mr. Hendricks squints. “Is that Arlington Richmond’s oldest?” He heads over to shake Austin’s hand.

  “What about the practice?” I yell.

  Dallas helps me divide the team in two for a practice game. “Who would you rather fight?” he asks. “The big guard or that girl?”

  I watch Chi
cago clap for Saffron’s touchdown. He keeps a beat with all the other youngsters, Clap-clap-clap, pause, clap-clap-clap. “Neither,” I say. “I wouldn’t go near any of them.”

  On Monday morning, Mom leaves a note for Ally on the kitchen screen: Have fun at your new school. We love you. There’s a picture of us waving, with Peanut pasted in.

  Ally spills her cereal and juice in her excitement. “I have to get out all my giggles,” she says. “They’re not allowed in school.” I tickle her to get them out, but they just keep coming, slipping through the gap of her missing tooth.

  Lucas arrives at the door with another white boy my age. They wear gray polyester uniforms, paler and less stylish than mine—shapeless pants that bag at the knee, jackets with round metal buttons fastened to the neck. I feel like they should lead me on a tour of some museum.

  “Hello, Maxwell,” Lucas says. “We’re here to take Alexandra to school.” His voice is young and sincere, with no trace of a grudge.

  “Thanks, Lucas. Get your bag, Ally.”

  Ally squares her shoulders. “I hope I like it there.”

  “You will if you take an interest,” Lucas says.

  She smiles. “I’m interested in animals.”

  “Good,” Lucas says. “The school trains for trades in pest control.”

  “She likes animals,” I say. “She couldn’t stomach pest control.”

  He blinks repeatedly, disapproving. “There are detentions for being late. You should meet us in the lobby from now on.”

  I kiss Ally’s cheek. She wraps her arms around my neck and says, “I’m going to like my new school.”

  “Yes, you will,” Lucas says, butting into our goodbye. “Children who have trouble at academic school belong in trade school. You’ll graduate earlier, ready to work in your field.”

  “I’m going to miss you so much,” I whisper.

  “Shh,” Ally whispers back.

  She steps lightly out the door and walks toward the stairwell. She looks tiny in the greasy hallway, with her red rubber boots and backpack, her hair a mess of short braids all around her head. She’s six years old and already a throwaway. I just want to cry.

  Lucas reaches out to shake my hand. I pull back instinctively. “We are not throwaways,” he says as if he read my mind. “Our school has a higher job placement rate than yours. We’re lucky to be there.”